February 8.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Acts of extreme violence
“Jonathon (‘Jack’) Watson was involved in slaughtering unknown numbers of tribespeople”.
Much of the violence meted out by Europeans in the Northern Territory was based on the precedent of white Queenslanders' behaviour. The Northern Territory Times commenting in 1875 about a retribution party to the Roper River felt sure they should:
...save themselves the trouble of bringing their prisoners such a distance to serve no sensible purpose. The only things that have hitherto proved of any value in bringing the niggers [sic] to their senses have been dogs and the revolvers; and we trust the party now gone will not be afraid to use them. The Queenslanders have been taken to task several times for their mode of dealing with them; but our eastern neighbours have dearly bought their experience; and it would be unwise of us not to profit by it. [1]
And learn they did, with teachers like Frank Hann, who went into partnership with Edward Edkins [2] to re-establish Lawn Hill Station in 1875. Along with Jonathon Harold ('Jack') Watson, stockman/manager, they committed acts of extreme violence against the local Waanyi, Nguburinji and other Aboriginal people.
In February 1883, 22-year-old Caroline 'Carrie' Creaghe and her husband Harry (who was absent for the last six weeks of her stay), spent three months at Francis Shadforth's Lilydale Station (later Riversleigh), about 64 kilometres south of Lawn Hill. From the Shadforth women Carrie learnt that 'Mr Watson had forty pairs of blacks' ears nailed around the walls collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks'. [3] Watson was a man who had been educated at Melbourne Grammar and came from a prominent horse-racing family. In 1896 he moved on to Victoria River Downs in the Territory, [4] where he was involved in slaughtering unknown numbers of tribespeople. He again demonstrated an extreme streak of sadism, when he punished 'an Aboriginal man, possibly for stealing, by impaling both hands on a tall sapling that had been sharpened to a point at the top'. [5] Similarly, he kept the skull of an Aboriginal man, with whom he had once worked, as a spittoon. [6] An old Gulf prospector, John Tim Swann, wrote in December 1891:
I seen Hann chain up a gin on a tree one leg on each side of the tree then [a] pair of handcuffs on her ancles [sic] for being too long out looking for horses. I went and looked at her the ants were running all over her person and his favourite gin pleaded for her release...after two hours she was liberated. [7]
Hann noted in his diary on 11 October 1895 that 'Dora would not do as I wished so I chained her up'. [8]
Northern Territory Times, 17 July 1875.
Shropshire-born Edkins (1840-1905) and his brother ran a boiling-down works for the Scottish Australian Co. Ltd. at Burketown in 1866. For further information on Edward Edkins see Timothy Bottoms p. 240-241 n.21 and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, ADB Online.
P. Monteath (ed), The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe, Explorer, Corkwood Press, North Adelaide, 2004, Diary Entry 8 February 1883. Carrie Creaghe was the first white female to be involved in an exploration party across the Gulf region when she and her husband joined Ernest Favenc.
See D B Rose, 'Aboriginal life and death in Australian settler nationhood', Aboriginal History 25 (2001).
Roberts, 'The Brutal Truth', The Monthly, November, 2009, Endnote 52, p.22.
Rose, 'Aboriginal life and death...' 2001, p.156.
J T Swann letter, 21 December 1891, Queensland State Archives Col/71392/12790.
Donaldson & Elliot (eds), Do Not Yield to Despair, 1998, p.6.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 160-161, 240 n.20, n.21, p. 241 n.22, n.23, n.24, n.25, n.26.