June 25.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Humanitarian concern
A Tasmanian Governor shocked at the treatment of Aborigines.
On 4 February 1813, Van Diemen's Land greeted its second governor, [Colonel Thomas] Davey. An officer of Marines who had fought at Trafalgar...The Aborigines, he found, were “giving trouble”. He inquired the cause and was shocked to learn that it was because their children had been stolen. No doubt as yet unfamiliar with colonial standards, he thought this reason enough for any demonstration, and on 25 June 1814, he issued a proclamation:
It having been intimated to the Lieutenant Governor that a very marked and decided hostility has lately been evinced by the natives in the neighbourhood of the Coal River, in the attack they made upon the herds grazing in that district, he has felt it his duty to inquire into the probable causes which may have induced them to adopt their offensive line of conduct; and it is not without the most extreme concern he has learnt that the resentment of these poor uncultivated beings, has been justly excited by a most barbarous and inhuman mode of proceeding acted upon towards them, viz., the robbery of their children. Had not the Lieutenant Governor the most positive and distinct proofs of such barbarous crimes having been committed, he could not have believed that a British subject would so ignominiously have stained the honour of his country and of himself; but the facts are too clear, and it therefore becomes the indispensable bounden duty of the Lieutenant Governor thus publicly to express his utter indignation and abhorrence thereof.
Davey was probably sincerely shocked. Other people were too busy with their own interests to be much concerned about his abhorrence.
Acknowledgment: Clive Turnbull, Black War, pp. 46-47.
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In Queensland 50 years later, violent police action and humanitarian protest.
Humanitarian-inclined squatters were not alone in their disgust with the Native Police. Residents of pioneer townships were often sharply aware of the force's bloody work. They saw the troopers riding to and from their hinterland patrols and occasionally raids were made of camps near or even in the towns themselves. A Rockhampton resident wrote to the Brisbane Courier in 1861 highly critical of the 'mismanaged and most disgraceful force'. Only gross cowardice or culpable blindness to the facts could allow people to argue in its favour. 'This very town', he explained, had witnessed scenes in its neighbourhood 'which one hardly dare relate'. He instanced 'the bloodiest of murders' committed upon the innocent natives followed up by the greatest solicitude upon the part of those who saw the deeds that they should not be talked about. The town had witnessed:
… a drunken officer too beastly almost to sit upon his horse, ride forth with the avowed and inflamed intention of 'shooting down the wretches' and in very few hours afterwards its inhabitants have been very busy again in shielding the miscreant from his proper doom.
The correspondent called on every father, mother, sister and brother in Queensland to join in a 'holy cry' to do away with the force, which was 'fast demoralizing the whole community and turning Christians into abject and wicked apologists of men'. [1]
It was a common concern of the humanitarians. Six years later another Rockhampton resident expressed grave concern that news of frontier atrocities was so easily accepted, when in any part of Britain they would elicit 'universal indignation'. He feared that the whole community was becoming brutalised:
Already the evil leaven has begun to work. I have frequently felt grieved and indignant at the levity with which many of the colonial youth speak of these outrages upon the blacks. [2]
'One Who Has Seen Too Much of the Native Police', Rockhampton Native Police, Brisbane Courier, 2 April 1861.
Rockhampton Bulletin, 25 June 1867.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in our Hearts, pp. 98-99, 259 n.17, n.18.