June 7.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Conflict and Protection.
Casualties among the Darug people
The Darug raiding during May 1795 was so intense that Grose's successor, Lieutenant-Governor William Paterson, feared that the Hawkesbury settlement would have to be abandoned. Unwilling to lose this fertile farm land, he ordered a detachment of the New South Wales Corps to go to the Hawkesbury and kill any Darug they found and hang their bodies from gibbets as a warning to the rest. While gruesome, this was a common British practice – the bodies of executed convicts were placed on gibbets at Pinchgut (now Fort Denison) in Sydney Harbour. On 7 June 1795 two officers, and sixty-six other ranks, with three drummer boys keeping the beat, marched from Parramatta along the rough track to the river. On their arrival, the detachment forced a boy to reveal the location of a Darug group, probably members of the Bediagal. That night the soldiers made contact with the Darug in the forest not far from the farms. The roar of muskets filled the night air, followed by the screams of the wounded and dying. The soldiers saw seven or eight Darug fall down in the undergrowth, but when they went out the next morning to find the bodies and string them up, they found the Darug had carried away their comrades' bodies during the night. The detachment captured a man, five women and some children. One of the captured women had a baby at her breast when she had been shot in the shoulder, wounding both her and the baby. The prisoners were taken to Sydney and held at a hut near the hospital in the Rocks. The wounded baby died, and the women and other children were held for a short time before they were released. The Darug man had been one of the warriors taking part in the attacks, but by pretending to be a cripple he managed to put his captors off guard. When the chance offered itself, he escaped by diving into the water and, swimming under where the Sydney Harbour Bridge now spans, made it safely to the north shore. [1]
Diary – Atkins, 7 June 1795. NLA mfm G2198; letter – Reverend Fyshe Palmer to Dr John Disney, May 1795, quoted in J. Brook & J. I. Kohen, The Parramatta Native institution and the Black Town: A History, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1991, p. 15; Collins, An Account, I:348-49, II: 7; letters – Lieutenant-Governor William Paterson to Henry Dundas. British Colonial Secretary, 15 June 1795, Duke of Portland, British Colonial Secretary, to John Hunter, NSW Governor, 8 June 1796, HRA, I: 499, 572.
Acknowledgment: John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-1838, pp. 38-39, 134 n.6.
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No explanation for a ‘hostile disposition’
On the 7 June [1865] [Lieutenant Otto Paschen] was joined by 'Sub-Inspector Blakeney with nine troopers' and there were four detachments operating in the district when they located and rushed yet another Aboriginal camp 'in the Expedition Range' in the 'morning of the 10 June'. Paschen added that he considered that 'the blacks' had by then 'left the district for a time, but they will no doubt return to the Expedition Range; and in the Lower Dawson district they are very numerous, and of a hostile disposition towards the Europeans'. He believed that the settlers in the latter district were in urgent need of 'immediate and permanent police protection' but he regretted to state that 'several squatters' here 'continue to admit the blacks into their stations, and harbour and protect them against the police'. [1] As in most cases we are left guessing at the ratio. [2]
Brisbane Courier, 26 June 1865, p. 1 (s) e.
See entry for 10 February on 'ratios' of killings of Aboriginals and Europeans.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, pp. 50-51, n. 84.