June 29.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The abuse of Aboriginal women
The abuse of Aboriginal women by sealers
...There were a few people of full Aboriginal descent apart from the exiles. They were all women, mostly those who had been married to or abducted by sealers and still lived with them on the Bass Strait islands. All but a few of these women were treated cruelly. Many had been abducted as very young girls and knew no other life and set of values than those of the sealers. The last of them, Julia, wife of Edward Mansell the sealer, died in 1867. Julia and Edward Mansell's descendants are a well-known Tasmanian Aboriginal family today.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, p.98.
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The abuse of Aboriginal women by white colonisers.
Venereal disease was another unintended gift of colonialism, as Old World diseases were brought to the new...The Kulin asked the Aboriginal Protector William Thomas to treat their venereal skin eruptions with copper sulphate solution. Dr Cussen treated more radically by amputation of arms, legs – even penises. Colonial medical officers gave assistance, but always too little, too late. Several doctors around Adelaide in the 1840s gained funds for Aboriginal health but these were quickly withdrawn. [1]
Venereal diseases were made more rampant by European pastoral workers being without their own women. Aboriginal people stereotyped settlers as lustful, the lower Murray people calling them 'kringal kop' meaning 'white people whose noses come first'; that is, who nose about the camps for women. [2] Many took Aboriginal women in relations not of agreement or care, but of force, violence and rape. Some Aboriginal women were detained in huts in chains; others were bought and sold like property, abused and beaten, and discarded once infected by venereal disease. It was alleged that in this era before the discovery of the existence of germs, some [white men] knowingly tainted Aboriginal women with venereal disease in the desperate and ignorant belief that they would thus lose the infection themselves. Aboriginal women suffered discomfort, sometimes death and often infertility as a result of such diseases. Governor Bourke was so alarmed by the frequent report of these acts of barbarism against Black British subjects that in 1837 he outlawed the forced detention of Aboriginal women by whites.
R. Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005, pp. 87-9.
Cited in Berndt, From Black to White in South Australia, p.84.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians – A history since 1788, pp. 65-66, 115, 385 n.24, n.25, 390 n.54
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“You come here and take my land... [you] bring your bad sickness among us.”
…While one might speculate about unrecorded incidents of personal violence, there seems to have been, in this part of our country, an absence of the kind of barbarous massacre that occurred in some other parts of Australia. Nonetheless, the story is one of injustice and oppression. In that regard, I am reminded of some comments attributed to Nellie Hamilton, a Ngunnawal woman, at the opening of the Tharwa Bridge in 1895:
I don’t think much of your law. You come here and take my land, kill my possum, my kangaroo; leave me to starve. Only give me rotten blanket. If I take a calf or a sheep, you shoot me, or put me in jail. You bring your bad sickness among us.
Acknowledgment: Sir William Deane, Address on the occasion of the launch of Ann Jackson-Nakano’s book The Kamberri, Aboriginal History, Vol. 26 (2002) p. 212.