December 13.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Skirmishes
“...make a severe example of that tribe.”
One portentous event in December 1790 illustrated essential features of the relationship between settlers and Aborigines as they were to develop right across the continent. On the evening of the ninth [December, 1790] a small party set out from the settlement on a hunting expedition. Early in the morning they were attacked and a convict called McEntire, known as the [G]overnor's gamekeeper, was speared in the chest. He was carried back to the settlement badly wounded. Two days later the [G]overnor issued what was known as a general order, which read:
Several tribes of the natives still continuing to throw spears at any man they meet unarmed, by which several have been killed or dangerously wounded, the Governor, in order to deter the natives from such practices in future, has ordered out a party to search for the man who wounded the convict in so dangerous a manner...and to make a severe example of that tribe. [1]
Extract from the General Orders of 13 December, 1790, HRA, vol. 1, p. 293.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, pp. 55, 259 n. 3.
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“Aborigines who were suspected of spearing cattle were hunted relentlessly.”
The [Lutheran] missionaries preceded the frontier by only two years. In 1877, when they arrived, there were three other white establishments in the region – the telegraph station at Alice Springs, then known as Stuart, and two cattle stations far to the east. In two short years, the land surrounding the mission lease was fully occupied by graziers. The relationship between the missionaries and the graziers was tense from the outset, almost all of them objecting to the presence of the mission.
By 1883, frontier violence had flared in central Australia. Aborigines who were suspected of spearing cattle were hunted relentlessly. After a number of Aboriginal people were mercilessly shot down, many fled to the mission for safety. [Pastor W. F.] Schwarz wrote in 1884:
At the present time there are many...here for fear of the police, who had shot a number of natives around the neighbouring cattle stations. In recent weeks the police also visited Hermannsburg on numerous occasions and took four of them away. As a result of our mediation one was returned, but the others have been shot. [1]
By 1885 [Pastor A. H.] Kempe believed that what they were observing amounted to genocide. Hermannsburg became a kind of haven, but in the extensive region occupied by the Aranda and surrounding groups there was continued and widespread violence.
Schwarz, December 1884, in Lohe, 1977: 17.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 394, 451 n.37.
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Two different worlds of Law
“One of the richest experiences in my entire life was when I camped with Pitjandjara people during six months filming at Uluru...Elders taught me to see beyond the obvious – I was in that camp with law men and women who held within them an encyclopedia of their complex law, and they wanted to teach me as part of an inter-cultural experience. There was deep integrity to that life. Elders told me they were treated as outsiders, their culture was under threat and they were invisible in their own country – respectful attention was rare.” - Juno Gemes
Acknowledgment: Interview with photographer Juno Gemes by Candida Baker in the Sydney Morning Herald – Spectrum, May 5-6, 2018, p. 4.