June 24.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Most violent organisation in Australian history
“…newspaper language strips Aboriginal people of their humanity…”
To contemplate the overwhelming evidence of the brutality of the frontier that accompanied the Palmer River gold rush (in north Queensland) challenges our ability to understand what occurred. The newspaper language strips Aboriginal people of their humanity, reducing them to obstacles or ‘pests’, inferior beings who are merely acted upon. The reports of the killing, particularly,’the mundanity and casual parsimony’ of the language as [Noel] Pearson has reflected, remain profoundly disturbing. [1] Yet while the language clearly reflects the racial ideology of those who wrote the words, it disguises as much as it reveals, and it often seems difficult to reach the many encounters in which violence was not involved. Noel Loos, one of the first historians to grapple seriously with the brutality of the north Queensland frontier, estimated that almost twice as many people were reported killed by Aborigines in the Cooktown-Palmer district than in any other mining field in the far north. While the toll of aboriginal dead, he concluded, was far greater, he also argued that disease, alcohol, opium, displacement and the continued denial of Aboriginal people’s humanity under the guise of ‘protection’ (from 1897 in Queensland) were even more significant contributing factors than violence in explaining population decline. [2] The thundering racism of the era, in which Aboriginal people were condemned to a future-less existence on the margins of settler society, continued the destruction of their society at the same time as it undoubtedly tended to hide the many examples of accommodation and cooperation that ensured their survival, such as working as stockmen and domestic servants.
...What began as the meeting of separate cultures gradually evolved into a murky entanglement in which the power relationship nonetheless remained starkly unequal, the unjust and inhumane policies of colonial and later state governments seeking to control every aspect of Aboriginal people’s lives. No matter how much our present-day sensibilities might wish to ‘move on’ from histories of violence and oppression, it remains a perpetual obligation to remember the way in which the land was conquered.
...Long after the most intense period of killing had subsided, Aboriginal men [and women] told missionaries their people had been ‘killed by tribal enemies, or they were shot by policemen or whites’. [3]… As a young man, Noel Pearson learnt from his elders at Hope Vale about the massacres that had destroyed so many of their people, including memories of Aboriginal stockmen further north at Cape Melville in the 1950s ‘finding the bones of their people littering the landscape’. [4]
1. Noel Pearson, ‘A Rightful place: Race, Recognition and a More Complete Commonwealth’, Quarterly Essay, 55, 2014, p. 28.
2. Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier 1861-1897, ANU Press, Canberra, 1982, pp. 82-4.
3. WGR Poland, Loose Leaves: Reminiscences of a Pioneer North Queensland Missionary, Lutheran Publishing, Adelaide, 1988, p.38.
4. Noel Pearson, 1994 bHancock Lecture, p. 117,http://www.humanities.org.au/Portals/0/documents/Events/Lectures/Hancock/txt/Hancock1994.pdf
Mark McKenna, From The edge – Australia’s Lost Histories, The Miegunyah Press, 2017,pp. 175-177, 236 n.48, n.49, n.53, n.55. ______________________________
Henry Reynolds correctly describes the Queensland Native Police as 'the most violent organisation in Australian history’. [1] It operated more like a unit of a defence force than a police force, patrolling recently settled areas 'pacifying' and 'dispersing' Aborigines, euphemisms for exterminating whole tribes.
H. Reynolds in the Weekend Australian, 11-12 March 1989.
Acknowledgment: Clive Moore, ‘Blackgin’s Leap’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 14 (1990) p. 68 n. 25.
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In April 1841 an overland party led by Henry Field and Henry Inman was attacked by a Maraura group near Lake Bonney [in South Australia]: the overlanders shot dead at least one Maraura man in fending off the attack, but five thousand sheep and eight hundred head of cattle had been dispersed. [1] The death of an Aboriginal man registered little mention; the loss of stock which represented a valuable import into the colony, caused wide consternation.
Deposition of Henry Inman, Papers Relative to South Australia (PRSA) No. 87/Encl. 1.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence, pp.35, 192 n.68