September 3.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
Destructive violence
In Queensland mass destructive processes ground inexorably on.
The Queensland frontier was arguably one of the most violent places on earth during the global spread of Western capitalism in the nineteenth century. Many thousands in total of Aboriginal, European, Asian, and Melanesian people were killed and wounded in the process,* but amongst the biggest casualties were veracity and justice. Behind a veneer of dismissive euphemisms, mass destructive processes ground inexorably on. Despite all the slaughter, the rapes, the child theft, the floggings, and the general brutality that occurred, no Queenslander was successfully prosecuted for any crime against an Aboriginal person until 1883 when a lone Townsville man, Edward Camm, was sentenced to life for the rape of an Aboriginal child, Rosie, under ten years of age. Camm was the first European to be punished for any crime against an Aborigine in the Queensland region since 1850, nine years prior to Separation, when a soldier at Moreton Bay named William Cairns was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for wounding an Aboriginal man during a military assault on an encampment at York's Hollow. This sentence was then reduced to six months, due to Cairns's "tender age". [1] Otherwise, the tragic events of a period variously described by contemporaries as "the Great Fear", "the Wild Time", "the red, shocking years", and "a war of sad ingloriousness" unfolded, challenged but unabated. [2]
G. Highland, "Aborigines, Europeans and the Criminal Law: Two Trials at the Northern Supreme Court, Townsville in April 1888," unpublished paper, Peripheral Visions Conference, Townsville, 1989, 29; The Queensland Law Journal, July 2, 1883, 136-137; Queensland Figaro, 14 April 1883, 241. For the comparative story of Aborigines' treatment before the law, see M. Finane and J. McGuire, "The uses of punishment and exile: Aborigines in Colonial Australia", Punishment and Society (2001), 279-98: R. Evans and C. Ferrier, eds., Radical Brisbane. An Unruly History (Melbourne, 2004), 40; For instance, almost 85 percent of those executed for rape in Queensland between 1850 and 1899 were Aboriginal men. Prior to 1850, a detainer at the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, the convict John Smith (Agamemnon, 1819), was flogged for "contracting venereal disease and communicating to a black native girl (also a child)" in September 1835. see Moreton May Book of Trials, 3 September 1835, Oxley Memorial Library.
D. Denholm, The Colonial Australians (Harmondsworth, 1979), 38-39, 40-42, 44-45; French, Conflict on the Condamine, 104; Dymock, Nicholson River, 44; Watson, Frontier Land, 89; and Palmer, Colonial Genocide, 133.
Acknowledgment: Raymond Evans, “Plenty Shoot 'Em” The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier, pp. 167-168, 173 n.86, n.87.
* For comment on the fatality statistics amongst Aborigines in Queensland frontier conflicts, see the entry for 25 February.
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Destructive violence also in Western Australia
…Jandamarra no doubt became aware of the carnage wrought by the police and settlers following the armed Bunuba rebellion. News of the blood-letting at Danggu (Geikie Gorge), where in separate attacks, McDermott and Pilmer reported killing twenty-four Bunuba and Gooniyandi people, must have surely reached him. He would have heard also of Drewery’s party attacking a large Bunuba assembly at Miluwundi, where nine were officially reported killed…Besides Lawrence’s campaign, troopers Spong and Anderson went on a rampage at Oobagooma Station, shooting dead twenty Worrorra people. The total number of Aboriginal deaths by police bullets will never be known. Official police records record that eighty-four were shot dead during the period of ‘discretionary powers’ between November 1894 and March 1895…Unquestionably, the figure was a fraction of the number who died.
The police offensive in the aftermath of Jandamarra’s inspired rebellion was the most sustained slaughter of Aboriginal people in Western Australia’s history.
Acknowledgment: Howard Pedersen & Banjo Woorunmurra, Jandamarra & the Bunuba Resistance, pp. 154-5