December 5.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Guns and dawn raids
Frontier districts in Queensland bristled with guns
Frontier districts in Queensland bristled with guns, and their accuracy, range and reliability improved greatly as the frontier moved deeper and deeper into the tropics. Men were commonly armed with revolvers and rifles as they worked or while they travelled. They were kept loaded in huts and tents and placed within reach at night, feverishly grasped if anxious sleepers were woken by any unexplained noise. Men took them up again when they ventured out in the morning. Such routines were kept up for years in many places. A squatter told a large meeting in Rockhampton in 1865 that he and his men had 'lived five years constantly in arms' because the blacks would 'take his life if they could'. [1] A member of Leichhardt's expedition, which travelled through southern Queensland in the 1840s, spent the night at a remote cattle station. He found that one armed sentry kept watch all night while there were 'nearly a dozen guns in the corner of [the] hut within reach, ready for use'. [2] Farmer and businessman AC Grant recalled in later life that at his parents' station in Central Queensland every room had a couple of freshly loaded guns hanging in convenient places in case of a surprise attack. [3]
...And it wasn't just among small parties of Europeans living on huge pastoral runs that anxiety led to the acquisition of guns. Small farmers on the closely settled Herbert River carried guns about with them and kept them within reach at night. [4] Miners on the Morinish goldfield in Central Queensland felt aggrieved because they had to 'hump a heavy revolver with them coming to [t]own as protection against the blacks'. [5] Fear of Aboriginal attack on the Palmer River goldfield led many men to buy guns and learn how to use them, the editor of the Cooktown Courier observing:
Now every man travels well-armed and a carrier's camp at eventide is a regular 'school of musketry' – no man goes looking for his cattle in the morning unless he has his rifle ready for use and revolver by his side. [6]
'The Blacks', Rockhampton Bulletin, 5 August 1865.
JF Mann, Eight Months With Dr Leichhardt, Turner & Henderson, Sydney, 1885, p. 13
AC Grant, 'Early station life in Queensland', ML, A 858, p. 95.
Cooktown Courier, 11 April 1877.
'Rockhampton', Queenslander, 29 June 1867.
Cooktown Courier, 5 December 1874.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, pp. 75-76, 261 n.39, n.40, n.41, n.45, n.46, n.47.
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A dawn raid by the British military.
On 6 December 1828, following the killing of settler Adam Wood and two stock-keepers in the Eastern Marshes by a small group of Oyster Bay men, a party of nine soldiers from the 40th Regiment and two police constables, John Danvers and William Holmes, surrounded the Aborigines' camp at Tooms Lake at daybreak. Danvers reported that: 'One of them getting up from a small fire to a large one, discovered us and gave alarm to the rest, and the whole of them jumpt [sic] up immediately and attempted to take up their spears in defence, and seeing that, we immediately fired and repeated it because we saw they were on the defensive part they were about twenty in number'. The Hobart Town Courier said that ten Aborigines were killed and a woman and her boy were captured. [1]
Danvers to Anstey, 9 Dec. 1828, TAHO CSO 1/320, 22; Hobart Town Courier 13 Dec. 1828
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 108, 370 n. 6.