February 20.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Aborigines had “prior ownership”
William Cooper’s powerful critique.
Old William Cooper despaired of seeing changes for the good. Legislation in Western Australia horrified him...Comparisons between Australia's treatment of Aborigines and [contemporary] German treatment of Jews began to appear in his writing...Dividing people genetically, the NSW government treated Aborigines as though they were 'an enemy people', to be placed in concentration camps. [1]
By the time war broke out again in 1939, Cooper felt even more disenchanted and alienated. One of his sons had died in World War I. This was Cooper's comment on [Jack] Patten's proposal that there be an Aboriginal regiment in World War II.
I am a father of a soldier who gave his life for his king on the battlefield and thousands of coloured men enlisted in the AIF. They will doubtless do so again, though on their return last time, that is those who survived, were pushed back to the bush to resume the status of Aboriginals.
The Aboriginal now has no status, no right, no land...he has no country and nothing to fight for but the privilege of defending the land which was taken from him by the white race without compensation or even kindness. We submit that to put us in the trenches, until we have something to fight for, is not right. [2]
W. Cooper to the Premier of NSW, 20 February, 1939, cited in Andrew Markus, Blood from a Stone: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines' League, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 17
W. Cooper to the Minister for the Interior, 3 January 1939, cited in Markus, p.196.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp.631-2, 683 n. 82, n. 83.
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Racist public pressure.
[In October 1885, a detachment commanded by Sub-Inspector William Nichols and Cadet Roland Garraway killed at least six Aboriginal people at Irvinebank, inland from Cairns. A European witness saw ‘the blacks scatter in all directions’ after the troopers arrived. One ‘blackfellow’, handcuffed to a fence, ‘was screaming out loud’ before the troopers ‘led him away fastened between two horses’. He and the others were never seen alive again, but their half-burned bodies were seen by many Europeans. According to the Brisbane Courier of 14 November 1884 ‘over fifty persons had seen the bodies’ at a camp near the town. Several residents said the Native Police had burnt the bodies.*
...However, seeing evidence of racial violence and gaining a conviction were two different things. As one regional paper had written ten years before, ‘You will never get a jury to bring in a verdict of murder for the killing a black’. [1] Nichols, dismissed from the force, was charged with ‘being an accessory before the fact to the Irvine Bank murders’, but the Crown did not proceed with the case. One police officer remarked before the preliminary hearing that local prejudice would obstruct further proceedings in the matter, saying ‘If tried in Cooktown justice might be defeated owing to hatred of aboriginals’. [2] He was correct…Nichols (was) discharged. The public applauded. Five troopers, tried in Townsville in April 1885 for ‘having feloniously and wilfully killed and murdered at Irvine Bank’, were discharged in October and transferred south. Historian Geof Genever’s work on the killings, Failure of Justice: The story of the Irvinebank Massacre...[writes that] ‘Colonial Queensland’s policy was inarguably a policy primarily based on collective punishment without trial: one that was not only illegal, but morally bankrupt’. [3]
Editorial, ‘Aboriginal people and the justice system’, Brisbane Courier (5 November 1875), 2.
Detective John Barry to ‘Officer in Command of Detectives’ (17 January 1885), Police Staff File, William Austin Nichols, A/40104.
Geof Genever, Failure of Justice (Eacham: Eacham Historical Society, 1996), 16.
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 pp.33-34, 272 n. 40, n.41, n.42
* Burning the evidence was a hallmark of the secret war – Richards, pp. 32-3.