September 23.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
Civilising violence
The Way We Civilize
The most powerful attack on the Native Police came not from professed humanitarians like [Alfred] Davidson but from the leading weekly newspaper, the Queenslander – commissioned, but not written, by editor-owner Gresley Lukin. Under the heading The Way We Civilize the paper ran thirteen editorials between 1 May and 17 July 1880 and opened up the columns to contributors, 27 of whose letters were published between May and September. The whole collection was then issued as a pamphlet and distributed widely. In this second form The Way We Civilize became one of the most influential tracts in Australian history. [1] The anonymous author of the editorials subsequently explained that both he and Lukin acted in the hope of arousing the conscience of the Queensland public to 'induce them to adopt a more humane method of behaviour with the Aborigines'. The sought to force the government into calling a Royal Commission into the Native Police. Every statement made was rigorously tested to ensure its accuracy and the cases chosen to illustrate the state of race relations were selected because they were thought to be supportable before the hoped-for commission. The author himself had no illusions. Eleven years in Queensland as a journalist allowed him to know as well as he knew his 'own existence, that murder, rape and violence of all sort are habitually committed by the whites of the frontier district on the blacks'. The Native Police existed to repress the natives, to 'scourge the blacks by wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter into passive submission'.
Lukin and his journalist knew they would enrage many of the country readers of the Queenslander. While the perpetrators of brutal acts were a minority public opinion in the outback was 'feeble in its condemnation of these deeds, and strong in its condemnation of the idea of punishing them'. The attempt to force the government to a Royal Commission failed.
The Way We Civilize, Brisbane, 1880.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering In Our Hearts, pp. 108-109, 269 n.1.
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A reminder of the violent history of Northern Australia
On 23 September 2003, the senior members of the Warlpiri community, with the assistance of the Central Land Council, erected a simple memorial to the Coniston massacre * near Brooks Soak on Mount Denison station. As an historical counterpart to the Barrow Creek memorial in Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery, ** it is a reminder that the violent history of Central Australia has even a living memory, which all witnesses of the memorial are charged to acknowledge.
Acknowledgment: Amanda Nettlebeck & Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law – William Wilshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier, p. 182.
* On the Coniston massacre, see entry for 13 August.
** Note entry for 4 January on the Barrow Creek memorial, noting those named and those unnamed.
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“...a wholesale system of murder is being carried on...”
In August 1846, months after the arrival of a permanent police presence in the region, [local magistrate Evelyn Sturt] reported the deaths of five Aboriginal men at settlers’ hands, all in separate incidents. He expressed his belief that ‘a wholesale system of murder is being carried on, which it is most difficult to obtain any evidence of’. The culture of secrecy around violence against Aboriginal people, he added, made it ‘almost impossible to get at the truth’. [1] He related how one amongst the ‘nest of ruffians’ in the district, Owen Curran, had an Aboriginal man’s head ‘hung on a nail in his hut’. He advised against Curran being granted a depasturing licence, especially in a part of the colony [in South Australia] ‘so remote as this, where a man has so much power to do evil’. [2]
Government Record Group 24/6/1846/1096, State Records Office of South Australia [SRSA].
Ibid.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence, pp. 81, 198 n.14, n.15.