June 11.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The Myall Creek massacre 1838
Extracts from a speech given by Mark Tedeschi at the opening of the Myall Creek Massacre Memorial on Sunday 11 June 2017.
Although we have come here today to recall the horrific murder of 28 men, women and children in the valley below us on the 10 June 1838, this memorial has in fact come to represent the multitude of massacres that occurred all over Australia during a period of more than 120 years. This is because we know more today about the murders at Myall Creek than any of the hundreds of other massacres of Indigenous people that occurred all around Australia. We know so much today about this largely because of the investigation and the two trials of the perpetrators that were conducted in 1838.
The man who successfully prosecuted the two trials of those responsible for the massacre was the then Attorney General of New South Wales, John Hubert Plunkett...He faced massive difficulties in overcoming bigotry and vested interests...His biggest hurdle was that despite the fact that there had been an eyewitness to the massacre – the Indigenous station hand Yintayintin (known as Davy) – the law at that time prevented him [as an Aborigine] from giving evidence in court...
There is no doubt that the trials failed to stop the attempts to annihilate Aboriginal people. The hangings of seven of the perpetrators of the massacre merely served to drive future murderous acts underground, so that more surreptitious means, such as poisonings, were used instead of the brutal, bloody slayings by sword or bullet or herding over cliffs into swamps...
In my view, the two trials in 1838 were more akin to modern-day war-crimes trials than to domestic murder trials, even though the concept of war crimes lay more than 100 years in the future. There was undoubtedly an ongoing, internal frontier war at the time, albeit rather one-sided, between the white settlers and the Indigenous inhabitants, whom the former were attempting to displace and disperse. The war against the Indigenous population involved a systemic policy, often approved or acquiesced in by the white authorities, of unlawfully exterminating those Aboriginal people who stood in the way of the expansion of the English settlement or posed a threat to the white pastoralists and their farming activities.
Acknowledgment: Mark Tedeschi, 'Afterword' in Jane Lydon and Lyndall Ryan, Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre, pp. 161-164.
____
A half century later white men acquitted. ‘ No Cooktown jury will convict”
[Some 54 years later in June 1892 one finds] two aborted murder cases against two Anglo-Saxons. [1] One was James Underwood who was charged in Cooktown with murderously shooting a 'black-boy' at Howick Island in April. The Police Magistrate of Cooktown, Henry Majoribanks Chester, noted in a telegraphic message to the Colonial Secretary, Horace Tozer, that it would be 'useless to try case here as no Cooktown jury will convict' and the case was seemingly abandoned. The other was the mariner William Fitzharding of the ship Resolute in Cairns, who was remanded for the murder of an Aborigine in early June, but was discharged by the court in July. [2]
'The one and only execution in colonial Queensland somewhat resembling the scenario of a white man paying the ultimate price for the murder of a black, was passed on the 42 years old Chilean mariner, William Leonardo Moncado. Moncado was convicted in Cooktown on 23 September and hanged in Brisbane on 24 October 1892 for having, on board the brigand Sketty Belle at Thursday Island on the 23 July, murdered 'Bob' a 'Port Darwin Aboriginal'...As a Hispanic, Moncado was certainly not universally accepted as a truly 'white' man. -Orsted-Jensen pp. 31-32.
Case against Underwood Q 11 Jun 1892 p.1152: Q18 June 1892 p.1200; Q 2 Jul 1892 p.48; Q 9 Jul 1892 p.96; QSA COL/A703/92/8170 re 10 Jul 1892. Case of William Fitzharding of see Q 8 Jun 1892 p.1200 & Q 25 Jun 1892 p. 1248. The execution is registered in the index to BDM as 'Leonardo Moncado' 24 Oct 1892, 1892/B025436.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, p. 32, n.38.