January 27.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Terrorising of Aboriginal people
The shooting and terrorising of Aboriginal people
In 1921, stockman Harry Annear was speared on Bedford Downs Station, the reason, an Aboriginal witness said, was that he was stealing young women. [1] The police responded when one policeman, a ‘volunteer’...John Wilson and five native assistants, proceeded to shoot and terrorise Aboriginal people at Mt Barnett to such an extent that they sought sanctuary in the Forrest River mission. This episode prompted Ernest Gribble to write the first of many letters to Chief Protector of Aborigines A.O. Neville alerting authorities to what was happening.
The native trackers [pursuing Annear’s killers]...after making themselves friendly to a large camp of natives, had suddenly shot them all in a ravine difficult to escape from. They further state no white police were there only ‘police boys’ [native assistants]...[2]
In 1924 Constable [John Franklin] Flinders, who worked out of Broome, Halls Creek and Turkey Creek, was investigated after reports that his native assistants had shot Aboriginal people on a two-month bush patrol (over 740 miles; 1191 kilometres) to capture and kill outlaw ‘Willie’. [3] Flinders had such a fearsome reputation that Aboriginal people had an ‘absolute horror’ of him. [4]
1. WAPD, ‘Statement by Lightberi Alias Kitty’, SROWA, Cons. 430, File 7871/1921, quoted in N. Green, The Forrest River Massacres, Fremantle Art Centre Press, 1995 p. 75.
2. WAPD, ‘Gribble to Chief Protector of Aborigines’, SROWA, Cons. 430, File 7871/1921. See also Department of the North West, ‘From Rev. Gribble: Re alleged shooting of natives by Police boys,””Quartpot” and “Long Billy”, near Durack River’, SROWA, Cons. 653, File 655/1922.
3. ‘End of Man-Hunt, Wild Native Killed’, Western Argus, 30 October 1923, p.27; WAPD, ‘Shooting of Native “Willie” and other Natives by Police trackers in Charge of Constable Flinders, SROWA, Cons. 653, File 103/1924; WAPD, ‘Alleged Cruelty to Natives by Constable J. F. Flinders, Halls creek’, SROWA, Cons. 430, File 46/1924.
4. Quoted in N. Green, The Forrest River Massacres, p. 81.
Acknowledgment: Chris Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’ – Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882-1905, UWA Publishing, Perth, 2016,pp. 439-440, 594 n.72, n.73, n.74.
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...a sharing* of what was due to [the] original landowners.
Aboriginal people developed strategies of non-cooperation to deal with settlers. In 1843 Father Raymond Vaccari, a Passionist missionary at Moreton Bay, claimed Gabi Gabi people exhibited..sloth and laziness… fickleness...are deceitful and cunning...and if possible will sleep both day and night' [1] Similar comments were made about Indigenous people and slaves in other places who proved uncooperative and resistant to the European work ethic. Aboriginal people felt no shame in asking for food without working for it, which to them was not begging, but a sharing* of what was due to original landowners.
Woolmington, Aborigines in Colonial Society, p. 102.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians – A History Since 1788, pp. 71, 386 n. 42.
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* Sharing was a distinct feature of another community, namely the earliest Christians:
“...they had all things in common...and...distributed...to all as any had need.”
Acts 2:44-45