February 15.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Pastoralist companies and their killings
“Aboriginal resistance to the intrusion of settlers into their country was widespread and persistent.”
Almost twenty years later [1879] the concerns were the same, although their focus had shifted to the tropical north. The Queenslander observing that:
During the last four or five years the human life and property destroyed by the Aboriginals in the North totals up to a serious amount...Settlement on the land, and the development of the mineral and other resources of the country, have been in a great degree prohibited by the hostility of the blacks, which still continues with undiminished spirit... [1]
The evidence is bountiful and it is clear. Aboriginal resistance to the intrusion of settlers into their country was widespread and persistent. It was common to almost every part of Australia and continued for well over a century. It was one of the most enduring features of the nation's history. It was apparent whatever the economic activity undertaken by the settlers – pastoralism, agriculture, mining or pearl fishing. The resistance was put down everywhere sooner or later, often with great brutality and loss of life.
'A new way with the northern blacks', Queenslander, 15 February 1879.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, pp. 111, 264 n.70.
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Gangs of men...employed to hunt out all Aboriginal inhabitants and shoot them on sight.
In 1879, herds of cattle began to be driven into the Roper River region, where [the Church Missionary Society] would establish its first mission nearly thirty years later. The many Aboriginal 'tribes' [1] of the region gained a reputation for their strong resistance to the pastoral invasion of their lands. Most of the leases in the region proved difficult to stock and were abandoned in the 1890s. There were economic problems which may have partly accounted for their failure, but the pastoralists generally blamed the local Aboriginal people for spearing their cattle. [2]
It may well have seemed to the Roper River people that their resistance had succeeded. White people with their cattle had invaded and now the invaders had been driven out. Any such sense of success, however, was to be short-lived. In four years from 1899 to 1903, all of the unleased and abandoned land of the region was acquired by the massive London-based Eastern and African Cold Storage Company, which also purchased several stocked and viable stations just outside the region, including Elsey Station.
In 1903, any hypothetical chance there may have been for the preservation of the traditional pattern of interlocking Aboriginal communities drastically ended. Having no intention of allowing Aboriginal resistance to prevent them from carving out their huge pastoral empire, the company determined to exterminate all Aboriginal people of the region. [3]
Gangs of ten to fourteen men were employed to hunt out all Aboriginal inhabitants and shoot them on sight. A leader of one of these gangs, George Conway, was still alive in 1957 when Fred Bauer interviewed him in Mataranka. Conway described how he had been hired to lead hunting expeditions to Arnhem Land in 1905 or 1906. He said that his party alone had killed dozens of Aborigines. [4]
The word 'tribe' is generally regarded as an inaccurate term to describe Aboriginal organisation, but I will employ it in this book to designate distinct Aboriginal groups. - John Harris.
J. Harris, One Blood, p. 695.
F. H. Bauer, Historical Geography of White Settlement in Part of Northern Territory, Australia.
F. Merlan, 'Making people quiet in the pastoral north: reminiscences of Elsey Station', Aboriginal History, 2 (1978) 70-106.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, We Wish We'd Done More – Ninety Years of CMS and Aboriginal Issues in North Australia, Open Book Publishers, Adelaide, 1998, pp. 2, 14 n.7, n.8, n.9, n.10.