January 15.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Loss of country...and poisonings
In many cases the resident Aboriginal clans were being driven off the land.
...one theme that can be traced throughout [George] Robinson's Port Phillip decade was his concern for land rights, his belief that the Aborigines should be provided with a 'reasonable share in the soil of their Fatherland'. [1] On this question he was both persistent and consistent.
He arrived in the middle of the squatting rush when pastoralists from both New South Wales and Tasmania were occupying vast areas of open grassland and stocking them with sheep and cattle. In many cases the resident Aboriginal clans were being driven off the land. Robinson soon became aware of what he called 'a Complete System of Expulsion and Extermination'. The first squatters arriving in a district drove the Aborigines away as did those who followed the pioneers and 'then on ad infinitum' until they were 'driven onto hostile tribes who destroy them'. [2] After travelling into the bush and seeing the frontier situation at first-hand he jotted down in his journal:
...3 individuals own 200 miles of country between them - and they think it is a hardship if a native appears on their run imagining that a licence gives them a legal right to Expel the black. [3]
While staying overnight with squatters he learnt of the prevailing attitudes. He recorded a breakfast-time conversation with a Mr H-. Robinson broached the subject of the rights of the natives to the soil. His host would hear none of it, saying he would 'not give in to that' because it was never intended that 'a few miserable savages were to have this fine country'. Robinson observed that H-. ran 7000 sheep and paid £70 per annum to the government and for that trifle he held 'half an English county'. [4]
As he travelled through the countryside Robinson made contact with parties of Aborigines, heard their grievances and sympathised with their desperate situation. One morning in June 1841 in the Western District a local clan group camp up to his camp at dawn. Robinson asked them where their land was. They beat the ground and then 'in a dejected tone bewailed the loss of their country'. [5] Five years later when travelling along the Murray into South Australia he met an Aboriginal man who stamped on the ground making it clear that the land was his. He vehemently exclaimed 'belonging to me, belonging to me, my country'. [6]
Robinson, Annual Report, 1848, GAR Papers, vol. 61, ML, MSS, A7082.
Robinson Journal, 3 May 1839, GAR Papers, vol. 14, ML, MSS, A7035
Robinson Journal, 15 Jan. 1840, GAR Papers, vol. 14, ML, MSS, A7038.
ibid., vol. 15, ML, A7036, p.90.
Robinson Journal, 19 June. 1841, GAR Papers, vol. 26, ML, MSS, A7047.
Report on an Expedition to the Aboriginal tribes in the Interior, Mar.-Aug. 1846, GAR
Papers, vol. 29, ML MSS. A7050
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1998, pp.49-50, 256 n.7,8, 9,10,11,12.
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A decade later in South Australia...
In May 1849 the deaths of five ‘natives’ were reported: Karakundere and Yurdlarir (boys of ten or thirteen), Puyultu and Ngamania (husband and wife), and Pirrapa (an infant), all of whom had eaten arsenic-poisoned flour stolen by an Aboriginal youth called Illeri from a hut on William R. Mortlock’s station near Yeelanna. The person responsible was the hut-keeper, Patrick Dwyer, who was later arrested by Inspector Alexander Tolmer, charged with murder but then released by Charles J. Driver, the Government Resident in Port Lincoln. Dwyer left South Australia shortly after for the United States. This episode may be the source of a number of local legends about similar poisonings elsewhere in the colony and may have precipitated the payback murder of Captain James Rigby Beevor on 3 May 1849 and that of Anne Easton on 7 May 1949.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory, Wakefield press, Mile End, 2017, p. 47.