December 8.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
The human cost
“...he heard a man boasting about how many blacks he had killed on his land.”
Philanthropic individuals arriving from Britain were often confronted by the brutality of language and sentiment employed in relation to the Aborigines. The missionary Lancelot Threlkeld was astonished, soon after he landed in New South Wales, when he heard a man boasting about how many blacks he had killed on his land. [1] A Congregational minister wrote home to England in 1840 about a member of the church from Liverpool who since arriving in Australia had adopted the opinion of the 'other Overland Desperadoes who glory in shooting the blacks'. He had breakfast in an Adelaide boarding house with a settler recently arrived overland from New South Wales who had said that he had thanked God that he had shot the 'first Blackfellow on their journey'. [2] The Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip, George Augustus Robinson, noted in his journal, after travelling on the troubled fringes of settlement, that when the settlers went into the wilds of Australia they 'at length become cruel'. [3] The British naval captain J. L. Stokes, after a sojourn in Australia, wrote that a portion of the colonists could not conceive how anyone could 'sympathize with the black race as their fellow man'. In theory and practice they regarded them as 'wild beasts who it is lawful to extirpate'. [4]
Second Annual Report of Aborigines Protection Society, London, 1839, p.14.
R. W. Newland to J. J. Freeman, 8 December 1840, Anti-Slavery Papers, Rhodes House, Oxford, MSS. S.18/C159, hereafter ASS.
G. A. Robinson, Journal, 18 Jan.-2 Feb. 1840, ML, MSS. A/7036/1, p.64.
J. L. Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, 2 vols, London, 1846, 2, p.459.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in our Hearts, pp. 11-12, n.11, n.12, n.13, n.14.
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Indigenous resistance but its human cost…
Blacks in the mining areas were often forced into resistance from the earliest period of European intrusion. Violence did not escalate slowly out of personal vendetta as in many districts of older settlement; in many places it was open and indiscriminate from the start. The local clans developed tactics to deal with the specific problems of the mining frontier. They made frequent attacks on the bullock teams supplying the remote mine fields, choosing night time for raids at known staging points along the dray roads and they speared large numbers of horses both to immobilize the Europeans and to eat their large animals. Sudden, well organized raids were launched against prospecting parties in the remoter parts of the mineral fields...But despite their spirited resistance mining pushed the Aborigines to the edge of starvation more rapidly than any other European activity giving their attacks a desperation not often matched in other parts of the continent. 'The white men occupy their only hunting grounds', wrote a Palm River resident in 1877:
and in default of the fish, roots and game of the waterholes and creek bottoms, they are in a manner compelled to eat horses and bullocks. [1]
Aborigines presented:
a very emaciated appearance, as a rule. They appeared to be in very great distress and were, in many cases, starving. [2]
Queenslander, 8 December 1877.
A. C. Haldane, Mining Warden, Etheridge, QVP, 3, 1888.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 154, 187 n.35, n.36.