June 12.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘Fringe camps’ and white power.
The use of torture
The role [Detective] Manning played challenged the police, the power elite. [1]… He demonstrated through careful work in taking statements from Aboriginal women and men that Constable Cooney of Turkey Creek (Warmun) had extracted ‘confessions’ under torture.
Stripping Cooney’s interrogation technique back to the bare bones, he and his trackers chained people by the neck and virtually lynched them over trees with those chains. They held pistols and rifles to their victims’ heads and threatened to shoot and burn them. [2] This was done over days, not hours, and led to false confessions. Those confessions were retracted during Manning’s investigation.
1. Edna Quilty, Nothing Prepared Me!, self-published, 1999, pp. 115-17. Bedford Downs had its own ghosts to exorcise. In 1924 the pastoralist Paddy Quilty, Edna Quilty’s father-in-law was implicated in mass killings through Aboriginal people’s oral histories.
2. Manning also exposed how Cooney tortured women.
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.81-2, 234 n.20, n.21.
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Fringe camps, sexual exploitation and harsh punishment.
Once Aborigines proved troublesome [in or near townships] they were forcibly removed to fringe camps, some distance from the towns. Strict curfews were imposed: those who defied them could expect to be whipped out of town by the local police. As Henry Reynolds explains, in Queensland the placing of blacks' camps well beyond the town boundary was not a matter of chance: “It accurately reflected the relationship between townspeople and fringe-dwellers...The fringe camp was indeed the most apt symbol of the nature of European-Aboriginal relations in the post-contact period.” [1]
One of the chief advantages to be had by the proximity of fringe camps was sexual intercourse with native women. Since white men greatly outnumbered [white] women on the frontier, this became a significant social feature of north Queensland towns. In return, fringe-dwellers received little. Apart from disease, alcohol, and opium, malnutrition was a serious problem in the camps. The outsiders, forced to scavenge, risked the indignant wrath of the townspeople. As early as 1869, the Port Denison Times editorialized that in dealing with “our black neighbours”, whites must be firm and “determined to enforce at all hazards and by any means submission to our laws”. For this reason, continued the editor, “we hold [with] the action taken by the sergeant of police, as described in our last issue...: the flogging of the gin who had stolen the child's petticoat was, though perhaps not strictly legal, quite the right thing to do under the circumstances.” [2]
Henry Reynolds, “Townspeople and Fringe-Dwellers”, in Race Relations in North Queensland, ed. Henry Reynolds (Townsville: James Cook University, 1978), p. 176.
Henry Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian Experience 1788-1939, (Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1972), p. 24 (quoting Port Denison Times, 12 June 1869).
Acknowledgment: Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915, pp.209, 257 n.16, n.17.