June 6.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Heavy casualties
This extract continued from Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 171, cited on 5 June
The heavy casualties among the Pallitorre people
When some Pallittorre men complained to James Cubit about shooting their kangaroos, he brazenly shot at them. A few days later about 160 Pallittorre men surrounded his hut and threw spears at him. He was saved by his partner Dolly Dalrymple Briggs, who was the daughter of Wottecowiddyer and sealer George Briggs. She fought them off with a shotgun, killing fourteen of them. [1]. Six months later, Cubit told Henry Hellyer, the Van Diemen's Land Company's chief surveyor, that on another occasion he had been obliged 'to drop 4 or 5 of them', and in a similar skirmish reported in September 1826 more were reported as 'severely wounded if not slain'. [2]
In January 1827 the Pallittorre returned to the Western Marshes to hunt kangaroo and remained there for the next six months, harassing the twenty or so stockmen stationed in huts in the area. The stockmen had no hesitation in firing back but by June they had had enough. After a group of Pallittorre men ransacked David Gibson's stock hut at Dairy Plains on 12 June and tried to spear the overseer, Thomas Baker, Gibson and the other stockmen in the region, with the assistance of a local constable and two corporals from the 40th Regiment, exacted revenge. Over the next eighteen days they slaughtered about 100 Pallittorre in four separate night-time raids on their camps. [3]
HTG, 6 Jan. 1826
TAHO VDL, 341, 6 June 1826; TAHO CSO 1/316, 15-37.
Ryan, 'Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania', 492-3.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 171, 374 n.19, n.20, n. 21.
In June 1827, at the Western Marshes, 70 kilometres west of Launceston, the colonists mounted a campaign against the Pallittorre clan from the North nation. The region comprised large cattle runs leased by absentee landlords in Hobart and Launceston and managed by experienced stockmen, who were armed and on horseback. Some of them had Aboriginal women as their sexual partners and all of them had interaction of some kind with the Pallittorre. [1] Violent conflict had broken out between the two groups in December 1825, and by June 1827 it was known that more than thirty Pallittorre men had been killed in at least four incidents but that no stockman had lost his life. [2]
See Ryan, 'Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania', 488-90.
HTG, 6 Jan. 1826; TAHO VDL, 341, 6 June 1826; see also TAHO CSO 1/316, 15-37.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 93, 369 n.20, n.21.
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A tombstone or lack thereof.
In 1908 the Royal Commission to Inquire into the Treatment of Natives by the Canning Exploration Party concluded that shackling Aboriginal people, galloping them into the ground and depriving them of water in the desert were all acceptable. [1] Alfred Canning’s entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography says he led the survey party with ‘mild courtesy’ and ‘resolute example’ in a ‘herculean’ task.
He went equipped. Before he left Perth, he sent a telegram to the Wiluna police station to arrange the loan of an ‘ordinary chain...for natives and also [of] handcuffs’. The royal commissioner described Canning’s methods as ‘the wise precautions of preceding explorers’…
In 1911 it was unremarkable that Constable (later Inspector and then [Police] Commissioner William) Douglas, Sergeant Pilmer (a former Boer war veteran) and a party of whites ‘cleaned out the country’ along the Canning Stock Route in retaliation for the spearing death of [Michael] Tobin, one of Canning’s party. They killed at least six Aboriginal people. Tobin has a tombstone; the Aboriginal people who were shot do not.
1. The royal commission was conducted from 15 January to 5 February 1908 in Perth.
Acknowledgment: Kate Auty, O’Leary Of The Underworld – The Untold Story of the Forrest River Massacre, La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, pp. 25, 28 n.5.