December 3.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
No colonist charged….
No colonist was ever charged in Van Diemen's Land, let alone committed for trial, for assaulting or killing an Aborigine.
In early December 1823, the Hobart Town Gazette reported that a couple of weeks earlier, Musquito and the Tasmanian Aborigine Black Jack had led one of the tame mobs in the murder of two stock-keepers and the wounding of another at Grindstone Bay on the east coast. A fourth stockman had managed to run to his master's house and raise the alarm. The incident aroused widespread panic and was widely discussed in the press, although the reprisal massacre that Constable Adam Amos recorded in his diary was not mentioned. Four months later, in March 1824, the same mob was reported to have killed two more stock-keepers, one at the Blue Hills and the other at Salt Pan Plains on the edge of the Eastern Marshes. In July it was reported to have killed another stock-keeper at Little Swanport on the east coast. [1] A month later Musquito and Black Jack were captured with other members of the mob near Little Swanport River and charged with murder.
This time Musquito stood trial, because the colonial authorities now took the view that Aborigines did understand English law, although they were not permitted to give evidence in their own defence. At their trial in December, Musquito and Black Jack pleaded not guilty. They were convicted by a military jury and they were hanged in February, 1825. [2] No colonist was ever charged in Van Diemen's Land, let alone committed for trial, for assaulting or killing an Aborigine.
HTG, 3 Dec. 1823, 26 March, 2 April, 23 July 1824; for a detailed account of the incident at Grindstone Bay, see Calder, Some Account of the wars, Extirpation,
Habits, etc, 48-51; for an account of reprisal settler massacre, see TAHO NS 323/1, 16-20 Nov. 1823.
HTG, 29 Oct. 1824; Melville, The History of Van Diemen's Land, 38-40.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Syan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp.77-78, 368 n. 6, n.7.
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”all there participate in, and have a share of, Natures gifts.”
Thomas Mitchell pondered on the problem of the Aboriginal response to white society when he returned to the settled districts after his Queensland expedition and was required to consider what should happen to the guides who had accompanied him into the interior. He appreciated the importance of equality in traditional society – 'all there participate in, and have a share of, Natures gifts. These, scanty though they be, are open to all'. But among Europeans the 'half clad native finds himself in a degraded position...a mere outcast'. Experience in Australia and elsewhere, he argued, had shown the 'absurdity of expecting that any men' would leave their woods purely from choice 'unless they can do so on terms of the most perfect equality'. [1] Drawing on his experience of white-Aboriginal relations in South Australia, Richard Penny concluded that if the black was:
to accept the terms of civilization that we offer him, everything would conduce him to keep him in the lowest scale of society, he would be constantly subject to all sorts of oppression, and would make but a bad exchange for his native independence. [2]
Journal of an Expedition, pp. 416-417.
The Examiner, 3 December 1842.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 125, 183, n.87, n.88.