February 2.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Australia’s past violence
An assortment of pictures of violence in Australia’s past.
[William] Knight's death prompted a horrible revenge. Soon afterwards, the Hobart Colonial Times reported that ‘The people over the second Western Tier have killed an immense quantity of the blacks this last week, in consequence of their having murdered Mr Simpson's stock-keeper. They were surrounded whilst sitting round their fires, when the soldiers and others fired at them when about thirty yards distant. They report that there must be about sixty of them killed and wounded'.'[1]
Why was William Knight killed? There is one very specific reason for the killing. An informant called Punch told Robinson that Knight deserved to be killed because he 'used to kill the natives for sport." [2] …[W]e can discern at least two other specific reasons for the Pallittorre attack on Knight's hut: to 'plunder' the hut, taking some of the contents and destroying others; and to scare Hurling away. So the Pallittorre had very specific reasons for the ritual killing of Knight.
Hobart Colonial Times, 6 July 1827.
Plomley 1966, p. 219; In 1830, information about black-white relations in the Deloraine district was given to the diarist G.A. Robinson by a stock-keeper called Punch.
Acknowledgment: Shayne Breen, ‘Human agency, historical inevitability and moral culpability: Rewriting black-white history in the wake of Native Title’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 20 (1996) p. 114 n.10, n.11.
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From the mid to late 1860s, the tide of European invasion continued its earlier efforts from the east and south-east of central Queensland and west of Blackall (1868). In April 1866, John Ellis took up Portland Downs, followed nine months later in January 1867 by Charles Lumley Hill, who established Isis Downs roughly 20 kilometres to the south. [1] Conflict arose between the local Kuungkari and John Fanning, who was part-owner and manager of Isis Downs. He was fatally speared later in the year, and Lumley Hill signed Fanning's death certificate. [2] Some 30 years later under the heading 'Taming the Niggers', an 'old pioneer' calling himself 'H7H' (the cattle brand for Isis Downs) wrote to the Townsville Herald (2 February 1907) describing two attacks on a large group of Kuungkari, who it was presumed were responsible for station-owner Fanning's death. 'H7H' brags of his involvement in the first retaliatory expedition:
It was estimated that over 150 myalls ['wild' Aboriginals] 'bit the dust' that morning, and unfortunately many women and children shared the same fate. In that wild, yelling, rushing mob it was hard to avoid shooting the women and babies, and there were men in that mob of whites who would ruthlessly destroy anything possessing a black hide.
Apparently named after the upper reaches of the Thames River, back home in England. queenslandplaces.com.au/isisford-and-isisford-shire
Personal communication with Jocelyn Avery, local Isisford historian, email 27 June 2010.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 170-171, 242 n.61, n.62.
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Like [novelist Kate] Grenville and [historian Inga] Clendinnen, [historian Grace] Karskens aims to look unflinchingly at the violence of the past. But whereas Grenville's goal in The Secret River is primarily to dramatise the violence – so that the reader may experience it – the burden of the historian is to try to explain it in broader terms. 'How do we explain such brutality?' asks Karskens. 'Is it possible to explain it? Is there any logical explanation, any way of grasping it, making it part of the “known”? Or are sickening acts like this somehow beyond the pale, hanging repellent, unexplainable, in a separate dimension to history?' She argues, with Glendinnen, that it is possible to 'stare the Medusa down' by historicising the murders of the frontier, 'not in order to justify or excuse them, but to understand how such a thing could have happened'. In doing so, atrocities might be recognised as more than acts of personal evil, as symptoms of social and cultural history. [1]
Karskens, The Colony, pp. 461-2.
Acknowledgment: Tom Griffiths, The Art of Time Travel – Historians and Their Craft, Black Inc, Carlton, 2016, pp. 268, 360 n.68.