September 24.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
Cruel attitudes & practices
Extermination sentiment
In Hobart, the atmosphere was little different [from Launceston]. The Colonial Times reported that 'more than a few are now burning with impatience to signalize themselves, to immortalise their names by the trophies they mean to bring home'. [1] The meaning of 'trophies' had been revealed three weeks earlier, when it was reported that 'one of the humane ticket-of-leave men who are about being sent into the bush, in search of the Aborigines, congratulates himself that...he can at any time obtain five guineas for each scull [sic] of the blacks, with which he expects to return loaded'. [2]
Extermination sentiment was certainly common among frontier convicts, but it was not exclusive to them. On 22 September 1830, 400 of Hobart's respectable inhabitants assembled in the courthouse to discuss the establishment of a town guard, but it quickly turned into a debate about the object of the operation. One-time Attorney-General, Joseph Gellibrand, felt certain that colonists were 'about to enter upon a war of extermination, for such I apprehend is the intended object of the present operations. [3] Gellibrand decried such an outcome, but most believed it was now necessary. Dr Adam Turnbull insisted that '[t]he war must be a war of extermination...the present warfare of the stock-keepers is infinitely more one of extermination than the present one will be'. Even Solicitor-General Alfred Stephen declared: 'If you cannot [capture them]...I say boldly and broadly, exterminate!' [4] Notwithstanding the bombast of the town meeting, it remained to be seen whether the forces were really willing to kill blacks against official orders.
Colonial Times, 8 October 1830.
Colonial Times, 17 September 1830. Substantial sums could be made selling native skulls.
Tasmanian, 24 September 1830.
Ibid.
Acknowledgment: Nicholas Clements, Black War, pp. 142, 244 n.83, n.84, n.85, n.86.
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Half a century later - “Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away, entirely at the caprice of the white men.”
The campaign [in the 1 May 1880 edition of the Queenslander entitled The Way We Civilize] opened with a reference to the 'brutal war of races' that was being fought in the outlying regions of the colony and a hope that the government would at last adopt policies which reflected less disgrace on the community. Following that prelude the Queenslander spoke with a fierce honesty:
It is necessary to make the majority of the community understand the urgent necessity for reform, to dispense with apologetic paraphrases. This, in plain language, is how we deal with the Aborigines: On occupying new territory the Aboriginal inhabitants are treated in exactly the same way as the wild beasts and birds the settlers may find there. Their lives and their property, the nets, canoes, and weapons which represent as much labour to them as the stock and buildings of the white settler, are held by the Europeans as being at their absolute disposal. Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away, entirely at the caprice of the white men. The least show of resistance is answered by a rifle bullet; in fact, the first introduction between blacks and whites is often marked by the unprovoked murder of some of the former – in order to make a commencement of the work of 'civilising' them. Little difference is made between the treatment of blacks at first disposed to be friendly and those who from the very outset assume a hostile attitude. As a rule the blacks have been friendly at first, and the longer they have endured provocation without retaliating the worse they have fared, for the more ferocious savages have inspired some fear, and have therefore been comparatively unmolested. [1]
The Way We Civilize, Brisbane, 1880, p.3
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering In Our Hearts, pp. 109-110, 260 n.3.