June 8.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Fear, ignorance, racism and massacre.
The Native Police
The Native Police was a force that gained an infamous reputation for violence towards Aborigines, but was only one part of the violence on the colonial frontier. The actions of the Native Police are worth examining in detail, but the force's activities must be considered within a broader context of fear, ignorance and racism. The official reason for the establishment of the Native Police on the Macintyre River was the killing of Aborigines by whites. In June 1848 Governor Fitzroy approved the setting aside of £1,000 to be used for the establishment of a small Corps of Native Police. The Legislative Council heard that the force was needed because:
Circumstances have recently been brought under the Governor's notice, in respect to certain collisions which have taken place, in parts beyond the Settled Districts, between the white inhabitants and the Aborigines, which appear to him to require that immediate steps should be taken for their repression. [1]
However, the Moreton Bay Courier actively supported the deployment of the force, arguing that the Native Police would 'afford a more probable chance of repressing Aboriginal violence than any plan hitherto proposed'. [2]
More telling is the correspondence between the Colonial Secretary and the Commandant of the Native Police, Frederick Walker. In October 1848, before the force arrived at the Macintyre, squatter E.D. Thomson wrote to the New South Wales Colonial Secretary about 'certain murders having been recently perpetrated by the whites on the Aborigines at the Macintyre River'. [3]
There is no evidence of Walker or the Native Police ever attempting to apprehend any white person suspected of murdering Aborigines on the Macintrye River. Any perception of the Native Police as 'police' in the sense of being an impartial body that delivered 'justice' is erroneous. The Native Police force was an armed instrument of colonial government.
New South Wales Legislative Council, Votes and Proceedings, 8 June 1848, p.315.
Moreton Bay Courier, 1 July 1848.
Colonial Secretary to Commandant of Native police, 4 October 1848, New South Wales State Archives, 4/3860, reel 2818.
Acknowledgment: Mark Copland, Jonathan Richards and Andrew Walker, One Hour More Daylight, pp. 38-39 n.103, n.104, n.105.
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BENTINCK ISLAND MASSACRE
The massacre recounted below occurred around 1918, in conjunction with the only European attempt to occupy Bentinck Island itself. The Kaiadilt tradition does not identify the murderer, and no contemporary record of the massacre exists. Safely beyond the reach of a law that was in any case indifferent to the taking of Aboriginal lives, the murderer’s untrammelled excesses went untried and unpunished. The European party almost certainly included one McKenzie, remembered by the wife of an early Mornington Missionary as ‘a physically big man, an elderly rugged individual’ [1] He had obtained a Government lease to occupy Sweers Island and part of Bentinck Island. Arriving in 1911 ‘with some sheep and an Aboriginal woman, probably a mainlander from Burketown way’, [2] he built a hut near the mouth of the Kurumbali estuary on BentinckIsland. During his short time on Bentinck Island, McKenzie systematically tried to eliminate the Kaiadilt, riding across the island on horseback, and shooting down everyone but the girls he intended to rape. Tindale, who has compiled a detailed genealogy from oral sources, estimates that eleven people were killed [3] —about 10% of the Kaiadilt population.
Tindale, N.B. ‘Geographical knowledge of the Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island’, Records o f the South Australian Museum, 14, 1962:266.
Memmott, P. ‘The South Wellesley Islands and the Kaiadilt. A history and an analysis of the land and its people’. MS,1982. 33
Tindale, 305.
Acknowledgment: Roma Kelly and Nicholas Evans, 'The McKenzie Massacre on Bentinck Island, Aboriginal History, Vol. 9 (1985) p. 45.