June 19.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Resistance and community grief
Guerilla warfare, massacres and corpses.
Although there has never been a complete appreciation of the magnitude of Aboriginal resistance to the taking over of their lands by the intruders, European entry into almost every district in the country in the country was followed by a period of open hostility in which camps and homesteads were frequently attacked, burnt and abandoned. A recent study of the resistance likens it to the guerilla movement, which has become an effective weapon in the hands of many local inhabitants throughout the world threatened by the domination of a superior power...
The situation at the frontier was one of pressure and response more than open warfare as a contemporary report in the 1890's clearly shows:
In North Queensland the blacks are never allowed within the township. The whites hold possession of the valley and when the hungry black descends from the range in quest of food – perchance to spear a horse or bullock – he is shot. What is happening in Queensland soon happened every day in New South Wales. [1]
But brutality was not the sole preserve of the settlers; it continued within the arms of the law:
There is hardly a man in North Queensland whose motto is not 'see a nigger [sic] and “pot” him'. The blacks have been murdered by the thousands...(there is) wholesale massacre of human beings; a relentless violation of women. (I have) seen the brains of an infant dashed out against a tree after the mother had been murdered. This is not fiction but the statement of one who, not three years ago saw in a Queensland scrub the sunburnt corpses of men, women and children who had been murdered by the officers of 'justice' and left for the crows. [2]
Bulletin, Sydney, 19 June 1880.
Ibid.
Acknowledgment: Frank Stevens, Black Australia, pp. 7, 48 n.21, n.22.
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“...a dismal Dirge of grief for the slain...”
That numerous Aborigines never resolved their grief is obvious. It begs the question, what happened to the survivors in such situations? Family members cared for orphaned children but everyone was affected. Grief was a major part of their daily experience, but did their unresolved grief affect subsequent generations? Could that be a major part of what still needs to be reconciled? Similar unresolved grief still affects many Jews and Irish, and it almost certainly affects many living Indigenous Australians.* That thought is horrible, but the nineteenth-century reality was worse as William Telfer Jnr's memoirs reveal.
In 1860 Telfer was on the western slopes of the Grafton Ranges when he:
…got no sleep with the howling of the Aboriginal dogs and the Crying of themselves for their friends who had been shot by the native police it was like a dismal Dirge of grief for the slain...a blackfellow's life was not of much value those days shoot them down and let them lay there was the treatment they Received in the interior a few years before this time. [1]
William Telfer Jnr, Roger Milliss ed., The Wallabdah Manuscript: Recollections of the Early Days of William Telfer Jnr, New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1980. Telfer wrote his “Recollections” ca. 1900.
Acknowledgment: Patrick Collins, Goodbye Bussamarai – The Mandanjani Land War, Southern Queensland 1842-1852, pp. 29, 233 n.75.
* In contemporary Australia, one can think of the grief over the deaths of Aboriginal prisoners in custody, and grief amongst Aboriginal communities over the inordinate rate of suicide amongst Indigenous youth. RB.