February 25.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Three snapshots
Statistics about deaths.
The Indigenous death and wounding rate can only be guessed at. Contemporaries usually adopted a ten to one ratio, but Archibald Meston, who would interview members of sixty to seventy tribes, suggested in 1889 that it would have been as much as fifty to one. [1] The Reverend J.E. Tenison Woods believed in 1882 that: “Ten lives for one would, I think, be very much below the truth.” [2] Several years later, ethnologist Edward Curr suggested that “fifteen to five and twenty percent” of Aborigines, Australia-wide had “fallen by the rifle” based upon a questionnaire circulated among pastoralists. If even that lower percentage were applied to the Queensland Aboriginal population, the number of violent deaths at incomer hands would easily exceed the twenty thousand assessed by Henry Reynolds for the entire Australian frontier. A vast primary databank presently being compiled at Griffith University in Brisbane now claims to trace around ten thousand violent Aboriginal frontier deaths in Queensland with supportive documentation. That is, these deaths are no longer a matter of mathematical projection or speculation. They can be known of, it is suggested, as most things in history are known, with contingent certitude. Yet what can also be projected from this new knowledge base is that the real death rate was possibly double this number, given the impenetrable secrecy surrounding many such happenings, the frustrating bashfulness of most white sources in providing precise figures and, most significantly, the virtual absence of an Aboriginal database of contemporary witnesses that matches the European one in its detail, depth and amplitude. [3]
“Every white man murdered by blacks is represented by at least fifty blacks killed by whites.” See A. Meston, “Report of the Government Scientific Expedition to the Bellenden-Ker Range (Wooroonooran) North Queensland,” Queensland Votes and Proceedings, 1889, II, 4, 1,213. See also, Dymock, Nicholson River, 46. The Hon. Boyd Morehead, a future Queensland Premier, claimed in 1880 a death ratio of ten to one. See Queensland Parliamentary Debates xxxii (1880), 666.
Queenslander, 25 February 1882.
E. Curr, The Australian Race: Its Origins, Language, Customs, vol. 1 (Melbourne 1886-1887), 209.
Acknowledgment: Raymond Evans, “Plenty shoot ‘em”, The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies Along the Queensland Frontier, pp. 167, 173 n.83, n.84, n.85.
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...the most disastrous decision in Australia’s history.
[According to High Court] Justice Isaac Isaacs asserted in 1913 that: ‘we start with the unquestionable position that when Governor phillip received his first commission from King George III on 12th October 1786, the whole of the lands of Australia were already in law the property of the King of England’. [1]
It is hard to know where to begin. The expropriation of about 400 million hectares of land over half a continent was an act of theft on a truly heroic scale...Experience in Australia rapidly undermined the moral and legal case for the action of the Crown...[Yet] the law was impervious to change. It remained frozen in that moment of expropriation, still guiding Australian judges 200 years after the arrival of the First Fleet. And it mattered every moment of those two centuries...The original act of expropriation was by any measure the most disastrous decision in Australia’s history.
Conflict over land began with the British arrival..[That] conflict...was an irresistible accompaniment of Australian colonisation from the late 18th to the early 20th century.
Williams v The Attorney-General of NSW (1913), 16 Commonwealth Law Reports, 404, at 439, Original italics.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 49-50, 251 n.2.
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Who then were the ‘fringe dwellers’?
Who then were the ‘fringe dwellers’? The first homesteads and hamlets often occupied the fringes of Aboriginal water sources and the fringes of Aboriginal base camps. Thus European settlements might be classed as ‘fringe camps’.
Acknowledgment: Ray Kerkhove, “Aboriginal camps as urban foundations? Evidence from southern Queensland”, Aboriginal History, Vol. 42 (2018) p. 164.