January 26.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Imperial Invasion
Statement at Aborigines' Conference – Day of Mourning
We, representing the Aborigines of Australia, assembled in conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January, 1938, this being the 150th Anniversary of the white man's seizure of our country, hereby make protest against the callous treatment of our people by the white men during the past 150 years, and we appeal to the Australian nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, and we ask for a new policy which will raise our people to full citizen status and equality within the community. [1]
- Aboriginal Resolution, 26 January, 1938
Jack Horner, Vote Ferguson for Freedom, ANZ Book Co., Sydney, 1974:63-64.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, p.630, 683 n.77.
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Raising a flag and claiming the country
In an act of symbolism, on 26 January 1988, [Aboriginal] activist Burnam Burnam stood on a beach in Dover, England, and hoisted an Aboriginal flag. Thus, following Imperial precedent, he claimed the land to be no longer Crown land but Australian Aboriginal land.
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Attitudes in England in 1787
…the impeachment of Warren Hastings, lately Governor of Bengal…was mainly an attempt to expose the chartered greed of the East India Company, and its invasion of the ‘rights, laws, and liberties’ of the people of India. Hastings’ impeachment was launched during the spring of 1786, while Ministers were moving towards agreement on Botany Bay, and the speeches in prosecution were due to begin when Parliament reassembled early in 1787. Edmund Burke was the prime mover. [1]
In many ways the cause of the New Hollanders was very like that of the people of India. There was every chance that, like the Indians — the quotations are from Burke — ‘Their blood, their opinions, and the soil of their country make one consistent piece, admitting no mixture, no adulteration, no improvement’; and as with the Indians, this ancient harmony could not survive ‘the avarice of. . . English dominion’. [2] One writer on Botany Bay almost echoed Burke when he said of the Aborigines that they were a people ‘who are content with the spot nature has allotted them . . . and whose virtue, perhaps, exceeds our capacity of thinking’. [3]
Mitchell, L.G. Charles James Fox and the disintegration of the Whig party 1782-1 794. Oxford, 1971, 104-117.
Burke, Edmund. ‘Speeches in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, esquire, late Governor-General of Bengal. Speech in opening. February, 1788’, in The works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 9. London, [1788] 1887:329-395.
Morning Chronicle, 16 October, 1786 cited by Alan Atkinson, p.88
Acknowledgment: Alan Atkinson, ‘The ethics of conquest’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 6 (1982) p. 84, n. 13, n.14.
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The Waterloo Creek Massacre – 26 January, 1838.
A more convincing if still incomplete account of what really happened was provided by [Sergeant John] Lee. From what he said a follow-up raid of the kind described by [Lieutenant George] Cobban indeed occurred, but with one major difference: the whites did not wait ‘for an hour or two’ to refresh their horses…but kept straight on after the fleeing blacks. As Lee put it. ‘There was no remission in the pursuit from the time of firing began until it ceased altogether’. In other words, it was one long uninterrupted action from the moment of initial contact at the head of the lagoon, which was itself evidently much more violent and protracted than either [Major James] Nunn or Cobban revealed. The troopers were ‘very much exasperated’ when [Corporal Patrick] Hannan was speared, Lee said, ‘and after that it was impossible to restrain the firing’ which, contrary to Cobban’s assertion that it lasted only a few minutes, ‘continued for some time’. Then, said Lee, ‘the blacks fled from their camp and we pursued them’.
He was vague and contradictory about how long the pursuit took and where it ended. At first he said the Aborigines ‘were overtaken in an hour’, but then stated that ‘we followed them about a mile and a half from where it began’ – an extremely short distance for such a time…The men had ‘spread out so much’ that it was impossible for them to act as a body or for ‘any one person’ to put a stop to the shooting at once. ‘I could not see all that was done’, he said, but ‘from what I saw myself I should say that from forty to fifty blacks were killed when the second firing took place’. [1]
There is no reason to believe he was overstating the figure. Indeed, from various other references and allusions the opposite was almost certainly the case. In a sensational turn to a debate in the Legislative Council a decade later, it was claimed that a group of ‘gentlemen’ who visited the scene soon after the event saw the bodies of sixty to seventy blacks, some of them ‘shot like crows in the trees’. [2]…But according to reports picked up by [Rev’d] Lancelot Threlkeld, the tally was even greater.
Writing in September 1838, the missionary spoke of:
‘the late severe destruction of human life under the command of Major Nunn, against whom, it is said, the blacks stood battle and upwards of 120 were destroyed by the police in a swamp where they were surrounded, or into which they were driven’…he added ‘when the tribe was driven into a swamp…and fired at until destroyed and where it is said the stench is intolerable from the carcasses of the slain, the number must be considerable and but known to those engaged in the slaughter. [3]
…Though Lee said the blacks were overtaken only a mile and a half…from where the encounter began, had the chase lasted an hour as he also said, it would have extended over a much greater distance, particularly if the women and children had fled as soon as the troopers appeared while the warriors stood their ground against them…it would thus appear to be [at Snodgrass Lagoon] that the whites caught up with the main body of the blacks and delivered the coup de grace…Under such circumstances the carnage would have been horrendous….
If we may believe one strand of Cobban’s fable, ‘it was nearly dark when this affray terminated’, [4] having commenced around noon. It had been a hard day’s work on Waterloo Creek that Great Australian Diamond Jubilee.
Lee, deposition at Merton 17.5.1839, HRA, XX pp. 251-2.
G.R. Nichols, LC 29. 6. 1849, quoted in Herald 30.6.1849.
Threlkeld to [Judge William] Burton 7.2.1839, Vol. II p. 278.
Cobban, Deposition at Merton 17.5.1839, HRA, XX pp. 256
Acknowledgment: Roger Milliss, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British conquest of New South Wales, McPhee Gribble (Penguin), Ringwood, 1992, pp. 188-190, 810 n.69, n.70, n.74, n.77.