January 14.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
‘Slaughtering whole camps’
The casualness of murder
From the early 1880s Aborigines apparently ceased to trouble pastoralists seriously except in…two areas [the Cloncurry District and Cape York Peninsula] and in some places around the Gulf of Carpentaria. [1] This left a very large area of North Queensland where conflict was still occurring and in these areas the struggle was just as intense. This was well brought out by the incident known as the Irvinebank Massacre. The murder of a group of well-known Aborigines, accepted by the colonists as inoffensive, by a detachment of Native Police led to the officer and his troopers being put on trial.
..Many northerners felt such a course of action was a threat to their freedom to solve the Aboriginal 'problem' with violence. The northern newspapers covered the trial with interest but a letter to the Palmer Chronicle seemed to reflect the situation in North Queensland so well that it was repeated as the editorial of the Herberton Advertiser with the title: 'To Shoot or Not to Shoot That is the Question'. In this article the uncompromising nature of the struggle is clearly brought out.
The Native Police ought to be allowed complete freedom, the article argued, and any indiscretions excused. Aboriginal resistance might brutalise the squatters but this was pardonable. Indeed, the writer had been invited to spend the Christmas holidays on the Upper Mitchell 'potting blacks'. [2]
Port Denison Times 22 April 1882.
Herberton Advertiser, January 1885, reprinting the letter from the Palmer Chronicle, 20 December 1884.
Acknowledgment: Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance, ANU Press, Canberra, 1982, pp.60-61, 264 n.14, n.15.
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I heard white men talk openly of the share they had taken in slaughtering whole camps, not only of men, but of women and children.
Violent reprisals seem to have become particularly intense following the wreck of the Maria on Bramble reef, when a dozen or so shipwrecked New Guinea gold-seekers were killed by the Djiri in late February 1872. Reprisal raids by Native Police, marines, local settlers, and vigilantes from Sydney continued for many months. [1] Scores of vengeance-seeking whites, many armed with new Winchester rifles, and a dozen members of the Native Police took part in the protracted onslaught. Historian, Alan Hillier, comments:
The effects...on the Rockingham Bay tribes were never recorded. Every camp fifty miles north of Cardwell was raided and destroyed. Many dispersals took place...and the death toll...must have been high. [2]
Charles Heydon, who had come north on the Governor Blackall to search for or to avenge the missing men, was sickened by what he observed. In early 1874, he wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald:
I heard white men talk openly of the share they had taken in slaughtering whole camps, not only of men, but of women and children. They said that the gins were as bad as the men, and that the picaninnies, all their tribe being killed, would die of starvation if not also put out of the way. [3]
Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 1873.
Hillier, “If You Leave Me Alone”, 156, 163-64; Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 1871.
C.G. Heydon to Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 1874.
Acknowledgment: Raymond Evans, '”Plenty Shoot 'Em”: The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier' in Moses, Genocide and Settler Society, pp.156-7, 169 n.23, n.24, n.25.