December 20.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Sharing or Shooting
Possible ways of sharing the land and the waters.
There were Aboriginal groups which sought a political solution to their white problem, a middle way between the stark alternatives of staying out or going in. The desire for a negotiated settlement may have been far more widespread that the available evidence will ever suggest yet there are...relevant examples widely separated in time and place. At the height of conflict on the Hawkesbury River in 1804 Governor King met three local blacks who said they objected to the ever increasing spread of settlement along the valley. They were determined to hang on to the few places left on the river bank and told King that 'if they could retain some places on the lower part of the river they would be satisfied and would not trouble the white man'. King thought the request so 'just and equitable' that he assured the blacks that no further settlements would be made lower down the river. [1] Forty years later in Northern New South Wales the pioneer settler E.O. Ogilvie came across a group of local blacks living in hostile seclusion in the mountains following a period of conflict with the whites. A limited knowledge of the local dialect helped him exchange views on the existing state of relations between indigenes and settlers. The blacks told Ogilvie to return to his station in the valley. 'You have the river', they said,
and the open country, and you ought to be content, and leave the mountains to the black people. Go back – keep the plains and leave us the hills.*
Ogilvie claimed that he wished to live in peace and wanted nothing in their territory except the grass. An understanding was reached which continued to exert a beneficial effect on race relations in the district. [2] [A.W.] Howitt related an even more interesting story. He was returning from an expedition in central Australia and travelling towards the settled districts of South Australia. While at Lake Hope near Coopers Creek he met a celebrated Dieri called Jelinapiramurana who asked him if he would:
tell the white men who were coming up to his country, according to the information sent him by tribes further down, that they should 'sit down on the one side of (Lake Hope) and the (local clans) would sit down on the other, so that they would not be likely to quarrel'. [3]
King to Hobart, 20 December 1804, HRA, 1, 5, pp. 166-167.
Sydney Morning Herald, 8 July 1842.
A.W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, London, 1904, p. 299.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 94-95, 179 n.66, n.67, n.68.
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* As this volume overwhelmingly indicates, by and large, many white Colonisers did not countenance sharing the land at all, let alone equitably, with its traditional and original Indigenous occupants and owners. - RB.
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“Thousands of blacks had been sent ignominiously to their graves...”
A fellow squatter and conservative, John Malbon Thomson (1830-1908) spoke briefly, saying that he personally regretted the fact that many Aboriginals, who ‘had a right to be treated as men’ had none the less been shot down at the frontier, as if they were ‘wild beasts’. He ‘did not think it was right to shoot them, or, as had happened, he stated, to ‘take away their means of subsistence’. [Fellow conservative and squatter Willian Henry] Walsh entirely agreed, saying, amongst other things (my highlights): ‘Thousands of blacks had been sent ignominiously to their graves, who had they been properly treated, would now be alive and useful citizens.’ [1] ...no one objected to his estimate.
Queensland Parliamentary Debates – Legislative Assembly July 21 1875 (as per Brisbane Courier July 22 185, p.3.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History revisited, pp. 172-173, n. 304