September 26.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
A war of attrition
The British war of attrition against the nations in the Settled Districts in Tasmania.
Put together with accounts in settler diaries, memoirs, correspondence and oral histories collected by a later generation of historians, the cumulative information indicates that in the spring of 1829, the British war of attrition against the nations in the Settled Districts was proving very successful in reducing their numbers. In August the Hobart Town Courier reported that a 'party' sent out after the Aborigines had killed at least one of them and wounded several others. In early September, John Batman led a dawn attack on a camp of Ben Lomond people. He estimated that fifteen had died of wounds and he executed two others, he said, to put them out of their misery. In response, the Ben Lomond people killed a shepherd at the Macquarie River by fracturing his skull with a well-aimed stone and then killed a settler at Great Swanport and horribly mutilated his body. A month later they killed another servant at Waterloo Point. [1] But many more Ben Lomond [Aboriginal] people must have been killed after these incidents, because after that, they were rarely seen again.
The main theatres of war were now located in the territories of the Big River and Oyster Bay nations, with particular focus on the Clyde, Oatlands and Richmond police districts. In September the Big River people speared and killed an assigned servant at the River Ouse and then in early October they plundered a stock-keeper's hut near Hamilton and mortally wounded the occupant, Robert Watts. On this occasion, 'an expedition [of retaliation] was fitted out in the night and a terrible slaughter took place'. [2]
Hobart Town Courier, 15, 29 Aug., 9 Sept. 1829; Batman to Anstey, 7 Sep., 1829, TAHO CSO 320; Launceston Advertiser, 7 Sept. 1829.
Hobart Town Courier, 26 Sept., 17 Oct. 1829; Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, 66.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 116, 371, n.28, n.29
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In 1995, [Tasmanian] Premier evoked Risdon Cove as a site of recent ceremonies commemorating soldiers and Aborigines who had clashed fatally in 1804...Premier Jim Bacon in 1999 referred to Risdon Cove, Oyster Cove and Wybalenna as 'sacred sites' in the memories of Tasmania's Aborigines. [1] By invoking a narrative of violence and dispossession, Tasmania's negotiators innovated in the rationales for Aboriginal title. The government narrative of conquest and resistance added Aboriginal themes to older 'convict' heritage themes, while borrowing and augmenting the mainland Aboriginal idea of 'sacred site'.
Tasmania PD, 18 March 1999, http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/ParliamentSearch/isyquery/3079b7d0-e6eb-4fca-b19d-df29ba0b6cf6/2/doc/H18MAR2.htm
Acknowledgment: Tim Rowse, Indigenous And Other Australians Since 1901, pp. 304, n.32, n.33.
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Chained Aboriginal prisoners in South Australia and West Australia
The sheer monotony of reports concerning escaped Aboriginal prisoners during the 1850s and 1860s drove [SA Police] Commissioner to distraction...After the prisoners escaped from [Police Trooper] Cooper’s custody at Salt Creek, Warburton made the following suggestions to Inspector Holroyd:
I should request your attention to the modes of securing native prisoners – the ordinary handcuffs are almost useless for such a purpose, unless used as fetters, but as an additional precaution I think a chain should be passed round their necks being secured to each man’s throat with a pair of handcuffs; when any number of prisoners have to be secured for the night, they should be linked together hand to hand, the outer hands of the two end prisoners being so fastened to fixtures as to prevent any one getting both his hands together. [1]
Government Record Group 5/2/1855/431 n.d., State Records Office of South Australia [SRSA].
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence, pp. 107, 201 n.17.
On neck chains being attached to Aboriginal prisoners until 1958 note Chris Owen,“How Western Australia’s ‘unofficial’ use of neck chains on Indigenous people lasted 80 years.”
The Guardian, Sunday, 7 March, 2021.