December 25.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
‘The pits...were full ...’
“The pits themselves were full of dead blackfellows, of all ages and both sexes.”
It rather appears that many outside settlers, seeing the Native Police as their only means of protection, were quite willing to assist in covering up such [killing of Aborigines] when an occasional troublesome individual demanded an inquiry into the matter. No doubt at other times because they had themselves been personally involved, as the Norwegian scientific explorer, Carl Lumholtz (1851-1912), discovered during his visit to North Queensland in the early 1880s. One unnamed settler he met at lower Herbert 'boasted that he had cremated some blacks whom he had shot. He looked upon this as a most excellent precautionary measure, for it made proof against him impossible.' [1]
Another example appears in George Carrington's book 'Colonial adventure and experiences by a University Man' printed shortly after his return to England in 1871. At one time, Carrington recalled how he had 'seen two large pits, covered with branches and brush, secured by a few stones, and the pits themselves were full of dead blackfellows, of all ages and both sexes.' On another occasion he was travelling, 'I was travelling on a road where, for more than a quarter of a mile, the air was tainted with the putrefaction of corpses, which lay all along the ridges, just as they had fallen.' In the latter case, it was the result of retaliation for the alleged 'murder of five shepherds, on one station in a week'. He then added that he found the 'wholesale and indiscriminate vengeance...rather disproportionate'. [2]
In an article in the Queenslander's Sketcher in December 1875, one digger recalled the Palmer rush two years earlier. One morning he and his party had, he told,
...passed 'Battle camp'... It was here the blacks of the interior first received their 'baptism of fire;' where they first became acquainted with the death-dealing properties of the mysterious weapon of the white man;...Here and there a skull, bleached to the whiteness of snow, with a round bullet-hole to show the cause of its present location... [3]
Carl Sophus Lumholtz, 'Among Cannibals – account of four years travels in Australia and of camp life with the aborigines of Queensland' London, 1889. p. 373.
Carrington, G.; Colonial adventure and experiences by a University Man, London, 1871, p. 53.
Queenslander, 25 December 1875, p. 12a.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, pp. 72-73, n.133, n.134, n.135.
____
Harried we were, and spent,
Broken and falling,
Ere as the cranes we went,
Crying and calling.
Summer shall see the bird
Backward returning;
Never shall there be heard
Us, who went yearning.
Emptied of us the land;
Ghostly our going;
Fallen, like spears the hand
Dropped in the throwing.
We are the lost who went,
Like the cranes, crying;
Hunted, lonely and spent
Broken and dying.
Acknowledgment: Mary Gilmore, 'The Waradgery Tribe' in Jennifer Strauss ed., The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore, Vol. 2 1930-1962, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2005, p. 305.