June 10.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The Myall Creek massacre 1838
This excerpt contains graphic descriptions of historical events that may be disturbing to some readers.
On Saturday afternoon, 9 June [1838], William Mace and Thomas Foster, overseers of Keriengobeldie and Tainoga stations...arrived at Myall Creek [station] hoping to hire some Wirrayaraay men to cut bark. Foster, the only other free overseer in the region, admired the Wirrayaraay and with Mace, contracted ten of the men, led by King Sandy, to do the work. The party set off for Tainoga at ten o'clock the following morning, Sunday 10 June.
About three o'clock that afternoon, the remaining Wirrayaraay, including 'Big Daddy', probably the oldest in the group, were already camped for the night and Anderson, Kilmeister, Yinyantin and Kuiminga were in their hut a few metres away, sharing a smoke. Suddenly they heard the thud of horses' hooves from the south and then men's shouts. Eleven heavily armed men on horseback swung into view and then divided and galloped towards the camp from different directions. As they approached most of the Wirrayaraay ran for protection into Anderson's hut. Everyone knew why the horsemen had come.
As they dismounted, Anderson immediately recognised the leader, settler John Fleming, overseer at Mungie Bundie station, further west down the Gwydir, and his offsider, former convict John Russell, overseer at Archibald Bell's station, Bengari. When Russell began to uncoil a long tether rope from his horse's neck, Anderson asked what they were going to do with 'the blacks' and he replied, 'We are going to take them over the back of the range, to frighten them'. Fleming and Russell went inside the hut and shut the door and Fleming's young assistant, Ned Foley, stood on guard outside with his pistol drawn. Inside the hut, the Wirrayaraay men, women and children called out to Anderson and Kilmeister for help. But they knew they were outnumbered...Fleming called to Anderson to fetch his men a drink of milk from the storehouse some distance away. When he returned he saw that most of the Wirrayaraay women and children were outside the hut and tied together by their wrists to Russell's long tether rope.
Fleming ordered the stockmen to remount and drive the victims towards the road. At this point Kilmeister saddled his horse and joined the killers...As the stockmen drove the Wirrayaraay before them, two very old [Aboriginal] men, Joey and Daddy, remained untied because they made no resistance and followed the others, tears streaming down their faces. According to Anderson, the Wirrayaraay were 'moaning the same as a mother and children would cry'. The children upset Anderson most. He would later recall that there were two or three little ones unable to walk, and 'the women carried them on their backs in opossum skins'. Toddlers who were not tied followed their mothers; 'they were crying, in and out of the hut, till they got out of my hearing'. He saved one little child by stopping it at the hut door. To appease Anderson, and perhaps, also, to compromise him, one of the confederates untied 'a good-looking gin' and gave her to him...To keep Yintayintin quiet they allowed him to keep the woman of his choice. These two women, the small child, and two young boys who had hidden in the creek when the party arrived were the only Aboriginal people to escape the roundup.
The stockmen drove the Wirrayaraay from front and behind towards the setting sun, leaving footprints and hoofprints in the mud. About 15 minutes later Anderson heard two shots in rapid succession and then saw smoke. Yintayintin followed the party at a safe distance and remained hidden behind a tree until dusk when the killers, including Kilmeister, rode off, taking a Wirrayaraay woman with them. Yintayintin then approached the site and saw piles of bodies lying in pools of blood with many of them decapitated, including most of the children. Some heads were thrown far from the bodies and all were dreadfully slashed by sword and cutlass. One man was killed by being held down on a log fire. Yintayintin then returned to the Myall Creek huts and told Anderson all he had seen.
...That night the killers camped on the creek between Myall Creek and Tainoga stations, while they took it in turns to rape the Wirrayaraay woman. A little after sunrise, they galloped into Tainoga looking for the Wirrayaraay warriors. The overseer, Thomas Foster, received them stonily, refusing Fleming any information...
The following morning, Tuesday 12 June, Anderson asked Russell whether he was going to bury the bodies and he replied that 'he would bury them with a good fire'. Fleming, Russell and Kilmeister then took firesticks from the hut and rode to the site with the others, leaving Ned Foley to stop Anderson from seeing them at work. While Foley 'entertained' him by exhibiting his bloodied sword, Yimtayintin again crept behind a tree and saw the others drag great logs down to the site. Once the fire was lit they returned to the hut and...Fleming ordered Kilmeister to go back to the site and 'put the logs together, and to be sure that all was consumed'. Kilmeister remained there all day trying to burn the rotting flesh...
Early next morning, Wednesday 13 June, the killers took Kuimunga as hostage and threatened to kill him unless he showed them a quick way over the ranges to Byron Plains. Promising him two Wirrayaraay women for his efforts, they galloped off leaving behind a broken sword.
The Wirrayaraay men had arrived at Byron Plains on Monday afternoon and told Eaton that 'soldiers' had massacred their people. On Wednesday morning they heard horsemen in the bush and Eaton, alone and powerless against so many, directed them to hide in the ranges. But the assassins, including Kilmeister, went after them and shot a little boy and up to 12 men, and recaptured some of the women. Afterwards Eaton helped King Sandy to bury the little boy, probably the child that Anderson had saved a few days before.
On Thursday the party dispersed, well satisfied with their work...Late the previous day, returning from Ponds Creek, Hobbs had called first at Keriengobeldie and then Tainoga and heard about the massacre from Mace and Foster. That evening he and Foster discussed what would be 'the best method of making the circumstances known to the authorities'. Early Thursday morning, Hobbs returned to Myall Creek and immediately questioned Anderson, who reluctantly told him all he knew. But he was too frightened to divulge any names and was reluctant to take him to the site. Yintayintin took over and led him on the half-mile walk to the crime scene.
Arriving at the spot, Hobbs was visibly shaken by the sight and stench of mangled and half-burnt bodies, which had already been distrubed by native dogs, with hawks, eagles and other birds of prey circling overhead. Fighting waves of nausea, he saw 'a great number of bodies and among that of a very large black whom I am satisfied in my own mind I had left at the station when I went away he used to be called “Daddy” and was the Doctor of the tribe'. He tried several times to count the decapitated bodies and heads and eventually decided that there were ten or 12 children and that in all, 28 Wirrayaraay had been massacred.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, “'A very bad business' – Henry Dangar and the Myall Creek massacre 1838” in Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre, Jane Lydon and Lyndall Ryan eds, NewSouth, Sydney, 2018, p. 50 pp.20-25
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For a study of the trial see Mark Tedeschi, Murder at Myall Creek, - The trial that defined a nation. As Tedeschi notes:
'The press and public reactions to the hangings of the seven stockmen for the murders at Myall Creek were in the main overtly hostile to the prosecutor, John Hubert Plunkett, who was looked upon as the perpetrator of a crime worse than what had occurred at Myall Creek.' [1]
Meanwhile, the ringleader John Fleming was never charged in a court of law. '
The ringleader, John Henry Fleming…had the advantage that, unlike the eleven convict or ex-convict stockmen...he had unlimited freedom of movement and extensive family support not just in New South Wales but also in the settlement at Moreton Bay (Brisbane)…Fleming hid on a property at Surat, 300 miles west of the Moreton Bay settlement, where his brother, Joseph, and brother-in-law, Thomas Simpson Hall, owned a large property.'
...The most common view...among whites of every class and status was that no white person should ever hang for the murder of a black. [2]
John Moloney, The Native Born: The first white Australians, Melbourne University Press, 2000, p. 146.
'Even if Fleming had been arrested and charged, his legal counsel would have ensured that no jury convicted him...[T]he execution of a free-born squatter for 'the mere crime of killing blacks' would have been unthinkable.' - citing John Moloney, The Native Born p. 168 - Patsy Withycombe, “The twelfth man – John Henry Fleming and the Myall Creek Massacre” in Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre, Jane Lydon and Lyndall Ryan eds, p. 50.
Acknowledgment: Mark Tedeschi, Murder at Myall Creek, - The trial that defined a nation, Simon & Schuster, Cammeray, 2016, p. 185.