February 11.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Abductions, Poisoning and Genocide
Treatment of Aboriginal women
The impression that the violence [white settlers complained about] was driven by the settlers and their employees in the first instance was already in the minds of the colonial authorities. [The Reverend Lancelot] Threlkeld reported raids on Aboriginal camps and the abduction of women through 1825 and 1826. In December 1825, he told of an overseer for a road gang in Newcastle attempting to abduct a girl ten years of age, and beating her father when he tried to stop him. Threlkeld went further in a letter to [the attorney-general] Saxe Bannister concerning the reasons for the attack on [murdered settler [John] Greig:
I have not yet had one tangible instance of assault, although I am convinced of many, and have heard the shrieks of Girls, about 8 or 9 years of age, taken by force by the vile men of Newcastle...There are now two Government stockmen, that are every night annoying the Blacks by taking their little Girls...My wonder is that more Whites are not speared than there are considering the gross provocation given. [1]
Gunston (ed.), Australian Reminiscences, p. 91.
Acknowledgment: Mark Dunn, The Convict Valley, pp. 176, 262 n.11
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Killing through poisoning
North-west of Cooktown following the massacre of Battle Camp in 1873, [1] Jack Harrigan, whose mother was only one of a handful of survivors, told how, in order to seek revenge for the deaths of troopers and others assisting them, the whites left:
…poisoned flour near known places where the mob would come to water and poisoned the water in the waterholes itself. Jack said that his mother had told him that more Normanby bama [Aboriginal people] died this way than actually being shot or killed in the actual battle of Battle Camp. [2]
On the Battle Camp massacre see Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 118-119.
Personal communication with Ray Rex, email 1 March 2011. Ray was former Manager and Co-ordinator for the Cairns TAFE Ranger Program and in 1991-92 conducted a week-long fieldtrip with Aboriginal rangers and Elders at Battle Camp.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 87, 224 n.39.
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GENOCIDE
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide of 1948 [Article II (a) to (e)] omitted cultural genocide from the final version of the drafts it considered… Important to note here is that killing is only one of five techniques of destruction, that the state is not named as the perpetrator, and that the intention to permanently cripple a group is gestured to with the wording that destroying “part” of a group can be genocidal...Article II defines genocide as
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History” in Genocide and Settler Society – Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, pp. 22-23
Further on 'genocide':
Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain – The Question of Genocide in Australia's History, Viking, Ringwood, 2001, pp. 117-137.
Pamela Lukin Watson, “PASSED AWAY? - The Fate of the Kurawali” in Genocide and Settler Society, Dirk Moses ed., Berghahn Books, New York, 2007, pp. 174-193.