December 6.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Massacres again
“... some spoke about having personally witnessed the effects of particular massacres...”
...Sir Charles Lilley, [Queensland's] Chief Justice, who had acted the role of Crown prosecutor in this case, was one of the very few people capable of seeing the tragic irony in the fact that the largest petition for mercy [for McNeil and Williams] a paper carrying no less than 30 000 signatures from 'people of the colony', made public use of a rather astonishing argument. It was indeed a 'confession', he noted, to the effect of saying that
as acts of aggression, of murder, and of rapine had been permitted to go on the part of the white inhabitants of these colonies, therefore the men convicted in that case had been misled, and were proper subjects for the mercy of the Crown. [1]
No less than 30 000 eligible male Queensland voters had thus printed their personal name and signature on a paper which stated that it was impossible to hang McNeil and Williams for the killing of a few blacks, because the people of Queensland and their government had for several decades allowed the shooting of blacks with impunity. Other speeches and petitions took note of the fact, throughout the same period, that this government had, as one speaker [at a large rally at Wickham Terrace in Brisbane on 20 December 1884] phrased it, 'licensed Native Police to shoot blacks indiscriminately'. Indeed, several prominent speakers acknowledged that they knew well that the shooting of blacks was still going on at the frontier, and some spoke about having personally witnessed the effects of particular massacres of up to twenty-five or more blacks. [2]
It needs to be added to put all this into some perspective, that 30 000 was almost equivalent to the entire population of Brisbane at that point in time. The population estimates for whites in Queensland in the year 1884 was just below 290 000...
...Clearly the pressure on the government to commute the death sentences was so massive that very serious political consequences might have been the result had Governor Sir Anthony Musgrave and the colony's Executive Council not given in to the demands pressed by the numerous public meetings and petitions. The death sentences were thus duly commuted to 'penal servitude for life' and both men convicted in this case were subsequently pardoned before a decade had passed. [3]
Queenslander [Q] 6 December, 1890, pp.1089d-1090a.
Brisbane Courier [BC] Dec 4, 1884, 4d; SMH 8 Dec 1884, p5a; BC Dec 161884, p51; MA 20 Dec 1884, 5b; BC 22 Dec 1884, p6b-c; MaiM 23 Dec 1884, p7c; BC Dec 24, 1884, p4 (this is just a small section of news report, that covers much more space).
BC Dec 24, 1884, p4; Q 1 Mar 1890 p393.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, pp. 30-31, n.33, n.34, n.36.
____
Causes for the marked reduction of the Aboriginal population.
There are no 1860s estimates of the original size of the Aboriginal population of the [Pioneer Valley in north Queensland], but E.M. Curr, quoting Bridgman and Bucas in 1880 as his sources, suggests that: During the eight or ten years which followed [1860], about one-half of the Aboriginal population was either shot down by the Native Mounted Police and their officers, or perished from introduced loathsome diseases before unknown. The Black troopers, however, are said to have been the chief destroyers. [1]
Curr, E.M. The Australian race: Its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia and the routes by which it spread itself over that continent, vol 3. Melbourne, 1886-87: 44.
Acknowledgment: Clive Moore, ‘Blackgin’s Leap’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 14 (1990) p. 74 n. 47.