January 17.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Women in deep mourning
“I observed many [Indigenous] women in deep mourning for their husbands..”
During his three years at Moorundie, [Resident Magistrate and Protector Edward] Eyre undertook three expeditions to the area of the Rufus River, and on each occasion travelled only with a few Mounted Police and Aboriginal guides rather than with the infantry company that had been sent to support him. The report of the first expedition, undertaken in January 1842, provides a fairly clear insight as to why the district was quiet. He estimated that there were approximately 700 Aboriginal people between his post at Moorundie and the Rufus and of that number he believed that no more than 200 were ‘grown up men’:
While in the neighbourhood of the Rufus, I observed many women in deep mourning for their husbands, who had been shot in some of the conflicts with the Europeans. Many children were pointed out to me as being fatherless from the same cause, and I have no doubt that loss of lives in these districts has been considerable from such affrays. [1]
The violence inflicted upon the Mataura by the overwhelming parties, and by the police expedition sent to assist them, had devastated the population and had evidently had the desired punitive effect.
...The events over 1840 and 1841 indicated the degree to which Aborigines’ status as British subjects had been exposed as a legal fiction in the minds of many colonists, if indeed it had ever been digested at all.
Eyre to Colonial Secretary, 10 January 1842. PRSA, p. 308.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettlebeck, Out of the Silence, pp. 38-39, 193 n.88
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Near obliteration
...in 1992 the High Court justices [William] Deane and [Mary] Gaudron declared that ‘the oppression and, in some areas of the continent, the obliteration or near obliteration of the Aborigines were the inevitable consequences of their being dispossessed of their traditional lands’. [1]
Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1, at p. 80.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, NewSouth, Sydney, 2021, pp. 223-224, 260 n.16.
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‘Dispersals’ and the hollow hypocrisy of government ‘law and order’
As is probably well known by now, the instructions given to the [Queensland Native Police] force didn’t change for forty years. The white officers were directed to ‘disperse’ any large gathering of Aboriginal people. There was never any definition of how many people represented a large gathering, or advice as to whether it mattered if there were men, women or children present, or even if the particular group had been involved in harassing the frontiersmen or their animals. It was an open secret that to disperse was to shoot at. In parliament in 1861, Charles Lilley observed that disperse meant ‘nothing but firing into them for that purpose’. [1] Lilley later became the chief justice of the colony. The white officers [of the Native Police] were allowed an extraordinary amount of discretion. They were able to dispense with all the normal protocols of the criminal law. They didn’t arrest suspected warriors. They rarely took prisoners, and if they did they almost always were shot while ‘trying to escape’. There were no trials and no inquests.
Queensland Guardian, 22 July, 1861.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 182, 258 n.2.