February 17.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘They all used to hide their children.’
“...The invaders wanted it all.”
It was not trespass to which Aboriginal people reacted most strongly, but the ruthless assertion by Europeans of exclusive proprietorial rights even from the first day of occupation. [1] The newcomers coveted and occupied places essential to Aboriginal life: fertile plains, valleys, rivers and creeks, springs and waterholes. Aboriginal people were often excluded from them by force. In remote parts of Australia, where white settlement was more recent, there are still elderly Aboriginal people who recall the past:
Oh terrible days we used to had: we never walked around much 'mongst the plain country or groun'. We used upla hill alla time to save our life. Our old people you know used to take us away from plain or river or billabong. Only night time they used to run down to get the lily, alla young men you know. Can't go daytime, fright [of] white people. Too many murderers went about killing native. [2]
This is part of Barnabas Roberts' description of life early in [the twentieth] century in the Roper River region of the Northern Territory...Another person who remembers is Dinah Garadji. Her lowlands group did not have rocky hills to hide in:
They all used to hide their children. The hid them underneath vines in the creek. Everybody used to hide there. The adults went out to search for food from time to time but we were all afraid of the white man...They just regarded us aboriginal people as animals. [3]
Where Aboriginal people were permitted to remain on their own land, they were often subjected to all sorts of indignities. At Roper Bar in 1884, the local people were forced to camp on the river bank opposite the sly grog shanty. They had to ask permission to cross their own river. If granted permission, they had to wear a tin plate around their neck. Anyone not wearing a permit plate was simply shot. [4]
...The invaders wanted it all. Aboriginal people were not recognized as having the kind of rights to the land that called for negotiation. The few fair-minded settlers who treated people more humanely or with more understanding than others were a small minority subjected to ridicule by their contemporaries. For most, Aboriginal people had no rights at all. They were simply evicted. 'Niggers and cattle don't mix' was the accepted wisdom of the pastoral frontier. [5] The sight of any blacks 'disturbed the cattle' wrote one Protector of Aborigines, so the blacks were 'dispersed by the stations' hands'. [6]
The term 'disperse' was perhaps the most widely used euphemism for killing Aborigines. Police Inspector Paul Foelsche defining it in 1885 as 'shooting them'. [7] A Victorian Aboriginal man described it to James Dredge in 1840:
Blackfellow by and by all gone, plenty shoot em, whitefellow – long time, plenty, plenty. [8]
Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, Penguin, Ringwood, 1982: 66.
Barnabas Roberts, quoted in L. Hercus and P. Sutton (eds) This is What Happened: Historical Narratives by Aborigines, AIAS, Canberra, 1986: 66.
Dinah Garadji, personal comment, 1983.
Searcy, 1909: 113.
Henry Reynolds, 1982, p. 158
Report of Northern Protector of Aborigines 1902 QVP, 2, 1903, PROSA.
Government resident's Correspondence, GRS 790, 1885, p. 174.
Dredge to Buntine, 17 February 1840. James Dredge Notebook, LaTrobe Library, MSS 421959, Box 16/5.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, p. 146-147, 148, 185 n.1, n.2, n.3, n.4, n 7, n. 8. n.9. n.10.