February 28.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
“Men, women and children are butchered...”
“...clear the country of them entirely.”
In March 1816 Governor Lachlan Macquarie wrote to Earl Bathurst:
'The native blacks of this country, inhabiting the distant interior parts [around Sydney], have lately broke out in open hostility against the British settlers residing on the banks of the River Nepean near the Cow Pastures, and have committed most daring acts of violence on their persons and depredations on their property, in defending which no less than five white men have been lately killed by the natives, who have not been known to act in such a ferocious sanguinary manner for many years past...It will be absolutely necessary to inflict exemplary and severe punishments on the mountain tribes...It is my intention, as soon as I shall ascertained what tribes committed the late murders and depradations, to send a strong detachment of troops to drive them to a distance from the settlements of the white men... so as to strike them with terror against committing similar acts of violence in future.
Macquarie wanted to 'drive the hostile natives across the mountains' and 'clear the country of them entirely'.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars, pp.225-226
____
“...a regular and indiscriminate slaughter…”
Lt. Colonel Godfrey Charles Mundy, who rode right up the Hastings Valley to Yarrowitch and thence over southern New England, wrote that he was:
'...more than once no less shocked than surprised to hear men of station and cultivation advocating a sweeping and indiscriminate retaliation by their subalterns and servants'.
He continued:
'It was common after an inroad of the blacks upon the sheep and cattle, for men of two or three adjoining stations to assemble for a regular and indiscriminate slaughter in which young and old were shot down...Reprisals were undertaken on a large scale – a scale which never reaches the ears of the Government...or if it reached them at all, finds them conveniently deaf...Men, women and children are butchered without distinction or stint...it becomes by practice a pleasurable excitement.
Occasionally bush gossip let out that the 'blackfellows were going to get a dose': and indeed, in more than one known instance, 'damper well focussed' with arsenic and strichnine was laid in the way of the savages, whereby many were killed.
Some attempts were made to bring justice to the perpetrators of this cowardly as well as barbarous act; but, in the bush, justice is too often deaf, dumb and lame as well as blind'. [1]
No doubt Colonel Mundy heard of the massacres of The Falls Country.
Colonel Mundy, Our Antipodes: or Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies. With a Glimpse of the Goldfields, London, 1855, Vol. 1, p.234.
Acknowledgment: Geoffrey Blomfield, Baal Belbora – The End of the Dancing, Apcol, Chippendale, 1981, pp. 80, 104 n.80.
____
On 28 February 1868 the Queensland Crown Lands Alienation Act opened up land for closer (white) settlement. There was, presumably, an unintended irony in the choice of the word Alienation in conjunction with the words Crown Lands.
____
One day wish to, hope to, dream, but some of my
grandfather’s Country back
Pay the thieves for stolen goods
Theft is a crime, receiving stolen goods is a crime
Until one day…
Acknowledgment: Claire G. Coleman “I Am the Road” in Fire Front – First Nations poetry and power today, Alison Whittaker ed., University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2020, p.119.