June 3.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Contrasts – rape, massacre and the Mabo decision.
Violence compounded – a rape and a massacre
[Hazel] Brown's narrative of the massacre at Cocaranup is consistent with the authenticating criteria identified by Deborah Bird Rose's informants in Northern Australia, although Scott's research fails to uncover any definitive first-hand written account. [1] Brown as elder, has status as a reliable informant; she is specific about the location, sequence of events and the names of those involved, and also refers to human remains. She begins with an account of the rape of a 13-year-old Aboriginal girl by a white settler, in the context of regular abuses of Aboriginal women. She names the victim, the alleged perpetrator and the Aboriginal man who speared him in reprisal. According to Brown, government permission was then secured to kill 17 Aboriginal people from Ravensthorpe. However alternative Indigenous sources quoted by Scott state that over 30 people were killed, including people from Hopetoun and Jerdacuttup who were visiting for meetings about initiations and marriage. Brown states that the massacre site is now fenced off and belongs to the Boy Scouts. In recounting an occasion when she and her husband were driving past the area, she introduces an element of spirituality and mourning. A thick mist arose and covered the road: 'Must've been old people crying', she reflects.
Rose 2003:129-5.
Acknowledgment: Review by Rosamund Dalziell of Kayang and Me by Kim Scott and Hazel Brown, pp. 270, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, Western Australia, 2005, in Aboriginal History, Vol. 30 (2006) pp. 220-224.
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The historic Mabo decision
On 3 June 1992, six of the seven High Court judges upheld the claim [made by Torres Strait Islander, Eddie Mabo] and ruled that the lands of this continent were not terra nullius or ‘land belonging to no-one’ when European settlement occurred, and that the Meriam people were 'entitled as against the whole world to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of (most of) the lands of the Murray Islands'.
In Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2), judgments of the High Court inserted the legal doctrine of native title into Australian law. The High Court recognised the fact that Indigenous peoples had lived in Australia for thousands of years and enjoyed rights to their land according to their own laws and customs. They had been dispossessed of their lands piece by piece as the colony grew and that very dispossession underwrote the development of Australia as a nation.
Acknowledgment: Source: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
3 June is now observed as Eddie Mabo Day.
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Reliance on Indigenous guides
Aboriginal guides accompanied almost every major expedition from Sydney before the 1820s, and continued to do so as the British pushed out from new settlement areas for much of the nineteenth century, yet few are known by name and fewer are recognised in the histories….Guides were important for the first wave of arriving settlers in the early 1820s. Most employed guides to find their way through as-yet uncharted bush to their promised grants [of land]...Some settlers who would later be prominent in violence against Aboriginal people were reliant on them at the start. Despite the prevalence of guides, there are few sources that offer any Aboriginal perspective, leaving the reasoning and motivation of guides hidden from view.
Acknowledgment: Mark Dunn, The Convict Valley, pp.80, 118.