June 27.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Statistics in one place...a massacre in another
Eden-Monaro was not settled 'peacefully'...violent conflict was part of the story of 'settlement'.
Current research suggests there were 4000-5000 Aboriginal people living on the Monaro and the far south coast in the late eighteenth century. These estimates are both conservative and speculative. Population density on the coast was almost twice that of the Monaro. After the first settlers arrived in the area in the 1830s, census records and blanket distribution records indicated an Aboriginal population on the coast of just over 500, and 120 on the Monaro. By the 1890s, this figure had dropped to approximately forty-three on the coast and forty on the Monaro. As unreliable as these figures are, it is clear that between 1788 and 1850, the Aboriginal population in Eden-Monaro declined rapidly – from 4000-5000 in 1788 to less than 700 by 1850.
We will never know exactly how many Aboriginal people lost their lives in violent conflict with those who invaded their lands. Many died from smallpox, influenza and venereal disease, and many died on the fringes of the fledgling settler encampments after they were displaced from their homelands. But it is also true that significant numbers died in sporadic warfare, on rare occasions in massacres, and sometimes from poisoning. Eden-Monaro was not settled 'peacefully'. Like many other areas of Australia, violent conflict was part of the story of 'settlement'.
Reading the recollections of the pioneers, and the existing oral history interviews with long-time residents that have been recorded by several local historians in Eden-Monaro, it is possible to understand how history is much more than something that can be reduced to facts and numbers. The weight of the past can sometimes be felt, revealing itself as an underlying truth which successive generations have kept alive. This 'geology of fable' carries a profound moral truth. The stories in settler and Aboriginal cultures concerning frontier violence have 'taken root' because they tell the stories that have been frequently denied in the formal historical record of Australian public culture – subversive stories that time has preserved.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas' Point, pp. 44-45.
____
A massacre in the colonial settlement of Queensland.
…in 1865, while managing his brother [Vincent’s Thargomindah] Station John Dowling…was beaten to death with a waddy while sleeping beside his campfire. His ‘tame black boy’ ‘Pimpilly’, had sought revenge for a beating he received from Dowling for not promptly bringing water to his ‘master’ and his horse when so ordered. A Kooma descendant, Hazel McKellar, recalled: … (the reprisal party) found the tribe camped on the eastern side of the river, chased them towards the hills…shooting them down as they ran’. [1] …E O Hobkirk was in Vincent Dowling’s white posse that went in search of the alleged perpetrator. He described how they corralled a camp of Kullilli, and Dowling had demanded to know who had killed his brother, but the Kullilli confessed that they knew nothing about the murder, to which Dowling responded:
‘If you do not tell me I will shoot the lot of yous’. Still they remained silent. Mr Dowling and the others then set to work and put an end to many of them, not tuching [sic] the lubras and young fry. This I know to be true as I helped first to burn the bodies and then to bury them. A most unpleasant undertaking! But I was only a ‘Jackaroo’ on Chestnut station at the time, I had to do what I was told. Later in the day the party went to another Camp of blacks, about 20 miles down the river and there again shot about the same number. [2]
Dowling continued to terrorise the Aboriginal population to avenge his brother’s murder.
H McKellar, Matya-Mundu, A History of the Aboriginal People of South West Queensland, Cunnamulla Australian Native Welfare Association, 1984, p.57.
E O Hobkirk, Queensland historical manuscripts – Vol. 2 ‘Original Reminiscences of South West Queensland’, NLA MS3460 (1922), pp.3-4. Chestnut Station is located 20 kilometres south-west of Taro, or c.100 kilometres west of Dalby.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence – Queensland's Frontier Killing Times, pp.63, 220 n.14, n.15.