December 29.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
British government’s involvement and responsibility
In 1835 [Thomas] Buxton succeeded in bringing a motion to establish a [House of] Commons Select Committee to examine every aspect of imperial relations with the Empire’s Indigenous peoples, which reported two years later. During his speech he expressed his horror at the unfolding fate of the Tasmanians, observing that a correspondent had informed him of how survivors of the war ‘complained that the white men had rooted them out of their soil’. He was almost certainly referring to a letter from the prominent Quaker James Backhouse, who was in Hobart at that stage and had spent considerable time talking with Tongerlongeter while visiting Flinders Island. Backhouse informed his influential friend that his experience in Tasmania had convinced him that Britain’s method of colonisation had proceeded
upon principles that cannot be too strongly reprobated, and which want radical reformation. Aborigines have had wholesale robbery of territory committed upon them by the government, and the settlers have become the receivers of stolen property, and have borne the curse of it in the wrath of the Aborigines, who sooner or later, have become exasperated at being briven off their rightful possessions. [1]
House of Commons Committee Report 1837.
Buxton published the Backhouse letter as an appendix to the 1837 Select Committee Report, which among many other things declared:
It might be presumed that the native inhabitants of any land have an incontrovertible right to their own soil: a plain and sacred right, however, which seems not to have been understood. Europeans have entered their borders, uninvited, and when there, have not only acted as if they were the undoubted lords of the soil, but have punished the natives as aggressors if they evinced a disposition to live in their own country. [2]
British Parliamentary Papers, 1836, vol. 7, n.. 538, p. 680.
British Parliamentary Papers, 1836, vol. 7, n.. 538, p. 516.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, Tongerlongeter – First Nations Leader and Tasmanian War Hero, NewSouth, Sydney, 2021.pp, p. 211-213, 261 n.13, n.14.
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The Bluff Creek massacre near Tenterfield
'In 1844, Edward Irvy, his neighbour Thomas Windeyer and Windeyer's two servants, Connor and Weaver, chased and then lost and then came upon, more by chance than by skill, a group of Aboriginal people, probably members of the Bundajalung or Ngarabul peoples. The Aboriginals had heard Irby's group coming and sought safety beneath the very rocks Irby and Windeyer found themselves upon. Hearing movement, Irby and Windeyer lay over the rocks and began firing into the trapped group below, knowing that their fire would bring up Connor and Weaver, who joined the slaughter. [1]
'In 1925 Thomas Keating, former manager of Bolivia, wrote a letter in response to a query by JF Thomas who was writing a local history of Tenterfield; in the letter Keating wrote about 'The Bluff Creek Massacre”, telling of the armed pursuit of a group of Aboriginals by Irby and all available station hands. Killing some Aboriginal people near a creek, he wrote, they then chased the remaining members of the group up the back of Bluff Rock and threw them off the top. [2]
E. and L. Irby, Memoirs of Edward and Leonard Irby, William Brooks & Co, Sydney, 1908, pp.77,90.
Thomas, JF (b. 1882, d. 1941) Papers. Miscellaneous Historical subjects, vol. 2, Tenterfield Microfilm CY1524 (location A2539-2540 Mitchell Library, Sydney.)
Acknowledgment: Katrina Schlunke, Bluff Rock – Autobiography of a Massacre, pp. 20-21, 250 n.2, n.3.