February 10.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Ratio of killings
Killing statistics
In his 1865 pamphlet 'Aborigines of Australia' the Maranoa Squatter, Gideon Scott Lang (1818-1880), a well known conservative politician and writer, stated that he, in a period before the Native Police arrived, had gathered information about 32 whites killed, 'in one small district, in about two years...156 blacks having been killed in the same district in the same time'. This essentially translates to a 5:1 ratio, which he clearly regarded as excessive in comparison to his earlier experiences in Victoria and in the New South Wales district of Murrumbidgee. Yet he was at the same time adamant that this ratio increased sharply in Queensland from the late 1850s until reaching proportions in the early 1860s which he classified using words like 'wholesale and indiscriminate' and 'summary extermination'. [1] There is, as we shall see, much evidence to back this impression. Indeed, several cases document a retaliation rate which by far exceeded a 20:1 ration. Rather than boosting the record, Reynolds' and Loos' 10:1 ratio thus generally comes across as moderate in the extreme.
Just prior to Queensland's first and only parliamentary inquiry into the Native Police Force in 1861 there were a number of episodes in which relatively small numbers of indigenous people were confirmed killed by the Native Police. However, in the context of the critique of the tenfold ratio it is worth noting that none of these episodes were triggered by the violent death of a settler. Indeed, the Native Police did not document any particular reason for the killing of these Aborigines. It is rather clear from the evidence that Indigenous people could be shot with impunity for no other reason than that of being discovered by a passing Native Police detachment. Moreover, one case, the massacre of a group of Gubbi Gubbis, killing a minimum of 12 and severely injuring at least 2 near Manumbar Station in the South Burnett on 10 February 1861, leaves solid evidence to the effect that the government and a majority of the squatters in parliament regarded the killing of Aborigines in retaliation for unconfirmed allegations that they may have disturbed or speared a few head of livestock as perfectly acceptable. So here we have a minimum of 12:0 ratio. [2]
G. S. Lang, Aborigines of Australia, Melbourne, 1865, pp. 40,45 & 69.
Select committee on the Native Police (Qld V&P 1861). See also Robert Ørsted-Jensen, The Foundation of a Frontier Policy. See also Prentis, M.D. (article): John Mortimer and the 1861 Native Police Inquiry in Queensland, Vol XIV no 10 Feb 1992, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, p 472-74.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited – Colonial Queensland and the 'History War', pp. 48-49, n.80, n.81.
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Oral traditions of killings
At Billiwillinga, twenty kilometres from Bathurst, a raiding party tricked a family of Wiradjuri by setting out food for them, in an apparently friendly gesture, and then shooting them down as they came to collect it. Over thirty people died. At Bella Falls Gorge another group of families in camp were surrounded by a raiding party and forced to retreat towards the deep gorge. Encircled by the troops and armed convicts, few escaped. Either they were shot or they jumped from the falls into the gorge. Most of those who died were women and children. With no records kept of these attacks, no accurate assessment can be made of how many Wiradjuri died. For the Wiradjuri any number was too many.
Acknowledgment: Iris Clayton and Alex Barlow, Wiradjuri of the Rivers and Plains, Heinemann Library, Port Melbourne, 1997, pp.60-61