April 2.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Avoid asking challenging questions
Shooting of Aboriginal people.
The Native Police force was receiving bad press and their cold-blooded violence was attracting unwanted censure...To diffuse this, the [Queensland] government established its first enquiry into the Native Police. [1] Contemporary commentators viewed it as a 'whitewash'. The committee, comprised mainly of squatters..smoothed over a series of embarrassing events. One probable reason for Captain Morisset's resignation, although he said it was because of his wife's ill-health, was because his younger brother, Rudolph Roxburgh Morisset, and his troopers, had shot more than eight Waka Waka near Manumbar (50 kilometres south-east of Murgon, and 160 kilometres north-west of Brisbane). The resulting publicity from an advertisement submitted by J and A Mortimer, whose run Morisset had done his shooting on, put his elder brother and the government in an awkward position. [2] Similarly, the publicity surrounding Lieutenant Wheeler's shooting of four men near Ipswich, one of whom was the 'tame blackboy' of a leading squatter, along with the brutal behaviour of Lieutenant [John O'Connell] Bligh, who was to take over the position of Commandant, contributed to the negative publicity. At Maryborough, Bligh, although he only had a warrant for one man, had driven a number of Badtjala [people] into the Mary River and shot many within sight of the townsfolk. [3]* Despite all the negative publicity, the government and avaricious businessmen and squatters were determined that the 1861 inquiry would avoid asking many of the obvious and challenging questions.
“The Select Committee on The Native Police Force and the Condition of the Aborigines in General” (Chairman R R Mackenzie), Queensland Parliamentary Papers, (QPP), 8 May 1861.
J Richards, The Secret War, UQP, 2008, p.249.
Moreton Bay Courier 2 & 25 April, 1861.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp 51-52, 218 n.20, n.24, n.25.
* On Lieutenant Bligh's action in Maryborough, see entry for 3 February.
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Their lives were changed irrevocably.
Ochre-drawn serpents, bats and emus watched the first white man traverse Gurindji land in 1879. Nat Buchanan, or 'Paraway', the overlander, guided his horse across black soil plains between craggy red hills and spring-fed creeks. To the keen eyes of this country's residents, the four-legged apparition appeared as a devil-spirit. The Gurindji granted Buchanan passage, but the overlander envisioned a pastoral cornucopia and returned in 1884, droving thousands of cattle from 'par-away' Queensland. The descriptions of the Gurindji's country that followed were tinged with joy and greed:
As pretty mitchell grass country as ever the eyes of man looked on – you have nothing like it about Adelaide! [1]
The authorities of that city, two thousand miles distant, issued Buchanan with a lease over country they had never seen. With the dedication of his wife's brothers and his son Gordie, Buchanan unleashed Europe's pastoral juggernaut on the Aboriginal clans of the upper Victoria River. Their lives were changed irrevocably.
C. Hemphill, Letter to the editor, 'Central Australian Exploration', The Adelaide Observer, April, 2 1891, p. 27.
Acknowledgment: Charlie Ward, A Handful Of Sand – The Gurindji Struggle, after the Walk-Off, p.1 n.1.
For further notations relating to the Gurindji, see the entry for 23 August.