February 22.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The State takes lives and land.
An item as regards the State sanctioned killing of Indigenous people by the white-led Native Police Force:
The Mortimer brothers of Manumbar station used another form of protest, placing an advertisement in the Brisbane Courier in February 1861 which ran:
To the Office in command of the Party of Native Police, who shot and wounded some Blacks on the Station of Manumbar...
Sir- If in future you should take a fancy to bring your troopers upon the station of Manumbar on a sporting excursion, we should feel obliged if you will either bag or bury the game you shoot, as it is far from pleasant for us to have the decomposing remains of four or five blackfellows lying unburied within a mile or two of our head-station. If you will do neither, please be kind enough to remove the corpses from the waterholes near the head-station, from which we sometimes use water for culinary purposes. As most of the blacks you left dead on our run were feeble old men, some of them apparently not less than eighty years of age, will you please to inform us whether these hoary sinners are the parties chiefly engaged in spearing bullocks, &c; or whether you just shoot them because the younger ones are too nimble for you. Besides the four or five you left dead on our run, you have wounded two of our station blacks, who have been in our employment during lambing, washing and shearing, and all other busy times, for the last eight or nine years, and we have never known either of them to have been charged with a crime of any kind. One of them came to the station with a bullet-wound through one of his thighs, another through one of his hands; the other had a bullet-wound through one of his arms. These blacks, being in our employment, very naturally look to us for protection from such outrages; and we are of the opinion that when you shoot and wound blacks in such an indiscriminate manner, you exceed your commission and we publish this that those who employ and pay you may have some knowledge of the way in which you perform your services.
We have, &c
T. & A. Mortimer
Manumbar, Feb.22, 1861. [1]
Reprinted in the North Australian, 19 Mar. 1861.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering In Our Hearts, pp. 92-94, 259 n.3
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A punitive police and colonists’ expedition - hundreds killed and only three escaped.
[Mary Jane] Jebb, utilising oral history from her informants who worked on the Kimberley stations, describes a notoriously cruel stockman named Jack Carey who, between 1919 and 1924, ‘threatened most Aboriginal people he met’, and shot and burnt large numbers of men, women and even children. [1] Carey once shot a man so he could take his Aboriginal wife, Mary Karraworla. There appeared no limit to his pettiness. Carey shot three stockmen dead because they had left the goat yard gate open. [2]
There was another massacre at Geegully Creek, Mowla Bluff, in 1916. This, Nyikina elder John Watson said, was a punitive expedition by police and other colonists that took place after a station manger, Georgie ‘George’ Why, was assaulted by some Mangala people over a small dispute. [3] Instead of just arresting those involved the punitive expedition wreaked havoc on men, women and children from the Nyikina Mangala people. They were rounded up, ordered to collect firewood, and then shot and their remains burnt. [4] Watson says he was told that three or four hundred were killed and only three escaped. [5]
1. Mary Jane Webb, Blood, Sweat and Welfare: a history of white bosses and Aboriginal pastoral workers, UWA Press, Nedlands, 2002, pp.121-2.
2. ibid.
3. P. Marshall (ed.), Raparapa Kularr Martuwarra: Stories from the Fitzroy River Drovers, Magdala Books, Broome, 1988, p.226.
4. Whispering in our Hearts: the Mowla Bluff massacre, dir. M. Torres, [videorecording] Australian Film Finance Corporation, 2002.
5. Marshall (ed.), Raparapa Kularr Martuwarra, p.268.
Acknowledgment: Chris Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’ – Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882-1905, UWA Publishing, Perth, 2016, pp. 438-439, 594 n.67, n.68, n.69, n.70, n.71
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Aboriginal land became Crown Land.
On 22 February 1791, James Ruse, an emancipated convict, signed the deed for the first land grant as someone from that background. He received the title to the land in April 1792. It consisted of 30 acres (12 hectares) at Rose Hill in the colony of New South Wales…
…Indigenous people in the area, despite being free, and having occupied the land for thousands of years, received no grant of land. Their land had become Crown Land, having been claimed in the name of the British monarch, King George III.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians : a History Since 1788.