January 13.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
A deadly camp raid
Aspects of slavery
On arrival in Carnarvon, [the Rev'd John] Gribble set out almost immediately on a long inspection of the condition of Aboriginal people in the inland. It did not take him long to assess the injustice and oppression. He saw much on his trip that disturbed him: Aboriginal women the assigned property of white stockmen, shocking employment conditions and inhuman disciplinary measures. The forced labour system was brutally simple provided there was solidarity between those who enforced it and those who benefited from it.
Theoretically, under the Masters and Servants Act, Aboriginal people entered into what Gribble called 'bondservice' by signing assignment papers. In a majority of cases the signing was not voluntary. Aboriginal people were 'run down' and captured. They were forced to touch the pen which marked the assignment papers, the content of which they could not read. They were then legally bound to their employers. Gribble was particularly angered that women and girls were assigned to single white men in this way.
If they ran away, the police were informed and a warrant issued for their arrest. They were then technically refugee.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp.417-18.
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A camp raid massacre
[Convict servant John] Woodbur y and [Richard] Alcorn [overseer for Captain Letheridge on the Bridgman estate at Fal Brook] claimed that the attack [by fifteen Aboriginal warriors] was unprovoked. However the ferocity of the attack [in which two convict workers Henry Cottle and Morty Kernan were killed] and its eruption soon after Alcorn arrived suggest instead retaliation for some unknown offence….[free settler and magistrate Robert] Scott, with five of the mounted police stationed at Glennie’s farm, four settlers and four Aboriginal trackers, went after the groups.
Three days later, and approximately twenty miles (32 kilometres) from Alcorn’s hut, the mounted group came upon an Aboriginal camp. From here, the accounts of what happened next [in August 1826] vary. In his general report, compiled in October 1826, Scott wrote that the party ‘came up with the murderers on the morning of the third day where a skirmish took place and one European was speared through the face, and it is supposed that two of the murderers were killed and some more wounded: as reported by a Black woman who was taken prisoner’. Captain Foley of the mounted police, who arrived at Glennie’s farm with twenty troopers as Scott was returning, reported to his superiors in Sydney that Scott had found the group with the aid of the trackers, and two of those involved in the attack on the Alcorn’s were killed and several wounded. [1]
Some weeks later, The Australian newspaper gave a more detailed and disturbing account of the event [in the Upper Hunter Valley] According to their informant, the mounted party came upon the camp in the evening, alerted to its position by the campfires. One European and one Aboriginal tracker, each armed with a musket, crept forward to reconnoitre their position but were seen and, as a cry went up from the startled Aboriginal group, the two scouts opened fire before moving behind trees to reload. A spear struck the tracker in the face, passing through his cheek and out the other… Hearing the firing, the rest of the party rushed in to join the melee, ‘A hot conflict followed, the natives maintaining their ground, and making the most dexterous use of their spears. At last they were obliged to yield, betake themselves to flight, leaving behind them about eighteen of their comrades who were numbered with the dead…The attacking party sustained no loss of life’. [2] One man and one woman were taken prisoner.
The killing of eighteen Aboriginal people in a prepared assault on a campsite by [Magistrate Robert] Scott and his party amounted to a massacre, and yet little was said on the matter beyond the report in The Australian. The incident, though remembered by Aboriginal people in the Hunter, was lost in White Australia’s colonial memory among the increasingly violent reports from Tasmania in the later 1829s and the shocking accounts from Myall Creek in 1838.
Report of Magistrates Mr Scott and Mr McLeod to Colonial Secretary, 3 October 1826, Governor’s Despatches, vol. 8, SLNSW A1197; Captain Foley to Lieutenant Condamine, 22 September 1826, Governor’s Despatches, vol. 8, SLNSW A1197.
The Australian, 23 September 1826, p. 3.
Acknowledgment: Mark Dunn, The Convict Valley, pp. 170-171, 261 n.46, n.47.