January 16.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Campaign of Terror
...all the hallmarks of a massacre
The detachment sent [by Acting Governor William Paterson] [1] to the Hawkesbury went into action straightaway. Abbott, the commanding officer, was a 29 year-old career soldier with seventeen years' experience, including combat in North America. Abbott recorded that on the night after it arrived at the river, the detachment 'fired upon and pursued a large body of natives, who had concealed themselves in the neighbouring woods during the day, and at night came to a settler's farm to plunder it'. Paterson wrote that Abbott 'supposes seven or eight natives were killed, and that he was taking every measure he thought likely to deter them from appearing there again'. We can only speculate what these measures were, but some prisoners were taken, according to Collins: 'one man, five women and some children'. One of the women – with a child at her breast – was shot through the shoulder, 'and the same shot wounded the babe'...The fact that women were shot and captured certainly suggests the action was an indiscriminate surprise assault on a campsite at night, with all the hallmarks of a massacre. [2]
Note entry from Gapps p. 113.
HRNSW, vol. 2, pp. 307-308 (Paterson to Dundas, 15 June 1795); AEC, vol. 1, pp.348-49. Gapps comments on Collins' report in regard to an assault by a body of Europeans on an Aboriginal group in November 1795 in which the group 'killed four men and one woman, badly wounded a child, and took four men prisoners': 'Once more, the shooting of women and children suggests a surprise attack on a camp, ending in a massacre'. The Sydney Wars, pp. 118-119.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars, pp.114-115, 300 n.21.
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[Lieutenant] Lowe carried out a ‘campaign of terror in the upper Hunter’.
Making arrangements for renewed attacks, troops were sent to support Lowe. The lieutenant, however, did not require their services. The killings began in July. An article expressing outrage in the Australian [1826] stated: a report has reached town, of a native black having been fired at and killed, by a party of mounted police, on this side of the mountains. It is also said that the black in question had, himself, previously killed a stockman. [1]
A week later, another story surfaced of an Aboriginal man shot by the Mounted Police without provocation. Subsequent killings occurred of Indigenous inhabitants by the Mounted Police that did not find their way into the Sydney papers. Messrs Scott and Macleod, magistrates of the Hunter River region, divulged that ‘one of the Natives, who murdered Dr. Bowman’s Watchmen... was shot. Shortly after, several more Natives were taken by the Police, three of whom were shot’. [2] The death toll probably amounted to six Indigenous deaths, all while in custody. Roger Milliss asserted that Lowe ‘soon distinguished himself by the vigour with which he threw himself into the job’. [3] [Historian] John Connor agreed, stating that Lowe carried out a ‘campaign of terror in the upper Hunter’. [4]
The Australian, 29 June 1826.
Scott and Macleod to McLeay, 3 October 1826 in Watson (ed) 1971 vol 12: 611.
Milliss 1992: 55.
Connor 2002: 64. For a legal interpretation of the case see: Kercher 2001.
Acknowledgment: Kelly K Chaves, “‘A solemn judicial farce, the mere mockery of a trial’: the acquittal of Lieutenant Lowe, 1827” in Aboriginal History, Vol. 31 (2007) pp. 130-1, n. 56, n.57, n.58, n.59.