February 24.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Cheers, flag-raising and British law.
Equality (and inequality) before the law.
...Aboriginal people were anything but equal before the law. No European was convicted of murdering an Aborigine in the Port Phillip district until 1848, and even then they were sentenced to just two months imprisonment. By 1848 five Aborigines had been executed for killing Europeans. [1]
J. Roberts, Jack of Cape Grim: A Victorian Adventure, (Melbourne, Greenhouse Publications, 1986, p. 82
Acknowledgment: Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane, Van Diemen’s Land, pp. 273, 414 n. 47.
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[In South Australia] when the recently built Barrow Creek telegraph station on the new Overland Telegraph Line was attacked by a Katyetye party in February 1874 and the station master killed, Police Commissioner Hamilton considered the Aboriginal group responsible to be ‘bound by no law’. Mounted Constable Samuel Gason, who had just returned there from his Killalpannina posting, led four punitive expeditions over the coming months. Official reports indicate that perhaps eleven Aboriginal people were shot by police in the course of those expeditions; other evidence suggests the fatalities may have been as high as ninety. [1] In authorising these punitive expeditions, the Commissioner himself recommended ‘that a too close adherence to legal forms should not be insisted upon’. [2]
Gordon Reid, A Picnic with the Natives: Aboriginal-European Relations in the Northern Territory to 1910, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 62-66.
Government Record Group 5/2/1874/261, State Records Office of South Australia.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettlebeck, Out of the Silence, pp.124, 203 n.86, n.87
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[Chief Judge, Charles] Cooper...in a letter to the [South Australian] Governor in March 1847...discussed the difficulties of trying offences involving Aborigines who had no contact with Europeans ‘until the moment of the commission of their alleged offence’. [1] Under such circumstances, Cooper considered it improper to try people according to British law because they could not be ‘deemed cognizant of our assumed dominance over their country or themselves’. [2]
Government Record Group 24/1/1847/383.5, State Records Office of South Australia.
Ibid.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettlebeck, Out of the Silence, pp.58, 195 n.9, n.10
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Flag-planting and imperial rhetoric.
John McDouall Stuart began his much publicised expedition across the continent and in 1862 he successfully completed a crossing from south to north. For a colonial audience fascinated with [white] exploration, his reports provided stimulating accounts of tribulation overcome, and also of the country's potential for settlement. The region around the Finke River was, he reported, 'as fine a country as any man would wish to see'. At the continent's heart – or as close to it as the nearest peak allowed, a peak that would eventually be named after him – Stuart built a cairn and on it raised the British flag. He and his party 'then gave three hearty cheers for the flag, the emblem of civil and religious liberty, and may it be a sign to the natives that the dawn of liberty, civilisation and Christianity is about to break upon them'. [1]
John McDouall Stuart, Explorations in Australia: The Journals of John McDouall Stuart, Saunders, Otley & Co., London, 1865, p. 165.
Acknowledgment: Amanda Nettlebeck & Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law – William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier, pp. 10, 186 n.16.