February 9.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Aspects of deaths of Aboriginal persons
Lack of any interest in reporting the deaths of Aboriginal persons.
The death of an Aboriginal person was simply not classified as something that warranted proper reporting or enquiry. It mattered very little if this Aboriginal person was killed while serving as an assistant to the white settlers or if he was killed while resisting colonisation, or was for some other reason killed by the settlers on the soil to which he belonged. Reports of Aboriginal assistants killed by local tribes as uninvited intruders thus appears predominately only as, what may be termed, indirect intelligence in newspapers, reminiscences and similar sources.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited – Colonial Queensland and the ‘History War', p.18.
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Killing of Indigenous people carried out by shepherds employed by the Van Diemen’s Land company.
...the Van Diemen's Land Company...which obtained a land grant of more than 200,000 hectares in 1825 to graze sheep, had the greatest impact on the North West nations. The company represented the last phase of pastoral expansion in the colony in the 1820s and occupied key Aboriginal kangaroo hunting grounds at Circular Head and Cape Grim in 1826. [1] When the Peerapper clan from West Point visited Cape Grim in November 1827 in search of mutton-bird eggs and seals it found shepherds tending a large flock of sheep. The shepherds immediately tried to entice some Peerapper women into a hut, and, when the men objected, in the resulting skirmish one of the shepherds, Thomas John, was speared in the thigh and several Peerapper men including a chief were shot. In retribution on 31 December the Peerapper, probably led by Wymurrick, returned to Cape Grim and destroyed 118 ewes from the company's stock, spearing some and driving the remainder into the sea.
A month later [January, 1828] four shepherds, Charles Chamberlain, William Gunshannon, Richard Nicholson and John Weavis and Richard Frederick, the master of one of the company's ships, Fanny, searched for the Peerapper clan at its nearby camp at night and killed twelve of its members. A few days later, on 9 February [1829], the same four shepherds surprised and trapped a party of Peerapper men, women and children at what is now known as Suicide Bay as they were feasting on mutton-birds that the women had caught at the nearby Doughboy Islands. Some of the Peerapper rushed into the sea, others scrambled round the cliff and the rest were 'put to death' by the shepherds. Others who had sought shelter in the cleft of the rock the shepherds forced 'to the brink of an awful precipice, massacred them all and threw their bodies down the precipice, many of them perhaps but slightly wounded'. After that the Pennemukeer called the white people at Cape Grim Nowhummoe, the devil, and when they heard the report of a gun they said that Nowhummoe had shot 'another tribe of blacks'. The Pennemukeer afterwards avoided the settlement of Cape Grim but plundered remote huts to obtain provisions. [2]
McFarlane, Beyond Awakening, 65-88.
McFarlane, 'NJB Plomley's contribution'; Plomley, Friendly Mission, 206-7, 215-17, 266-7 n. 103.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines – A history since 1803, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2012, pp. 166-167, 374 n.10, n.11.