June 26.
...starvation...and civilisation
A cow killed and Aboriginal lives paid the price.
In 1915 Mick Rhatigan, who had stayed in the Kimberley and continued to work as a telegraph linesman working out of Turkey Creek station, was implicated in a massacre at Mistake Creek near Turkey Creek. [1]
Constable John Franklin Flinders reported that Rhatigan and his two native workers, Nipper and Wyne, ‘shot and burned five or six Aborigines’. The ‘charred remains’ of two bodies were found at Mistake Creek and the bodies of five others named ‘Hopples, Nellie, Mona, Gypsy and Nittie’* were found some distance away. [2] This was supposedly in reprisal for allegedly killing Rhatigan’s cow. [3]
1. For Mistake Creek see WAPD, ‘Aboriginal Native Tracker “Nipper”. From C. of P.’. SROWA, Cons 430, Item 1854/1915. H. ross (ed.) and E. Bray (trans.), Impact Stories of the East Kimberley, East Kimberley Working Paper no.28, East Kimberly Impact Assessment Project,, 1989, pp.73-75; see also ’Sensational Charges, Broome Police Report, Natives Shot and Burnt’, Western Mail, 2 April 1915, p.18.
2. See also ‘Murderous Natives, Victims Shot and Burnt’, The Advertiser, 2 April 1915, p.8.
3. WAPD, ‘Aboriginal Native Tracker “Nipper”. From C. of P.’ SROWA, AN 5/2, Cons. 430, File 1854/1915.
* The names listed suggest that most, if not all, were women.
** See entry for 5 April: The deadly legacy left by Police Constable Mick Rhatigan.
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Instances of starvation
The picture [of destitution] was similar in other parts of the country. In 1856 W. Wiseman saw a group of blacks on the banks of the Fitzroy River who appeared to be desperately hungry. They kept striking their bellies and crying out in broken English 'Plower, Plower'. He concluded that they were 'very probably starved' as fear had pinched them into an isolated and barren corner of their territory. [1] In 1877 a correspondent of the Queenslander wrote of the fate of the blacks on the Palmer River. The country, he explained, was infertile and poorly stocked with game and the Europeans had occupied all the watercourses with the result that the local clans were half-starved. [2] In 1882 a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald spent a day with a small group of blacks in the coastal rainforest near Cairns. They complained that they found it 'very difficult to get food' and because the whites had taken all the good country 'they had to go to the mountains or rocky places on the coast, where the fish was not plentiful'. [3] Near the Gulf of Carpentaria the blacks were driven away from the cattle stations and 'sent to starve along the coast or in the ranges'. 'The few I saw', wrote a correspondent to the Queenslander in 1886, 'are really being starved to death'. [4]
W.H. Wiseman to Chief commissioner, Crown Lands, 7 January 1857, NSW Col. Sec., 796 of 1857.
8 December 1877.
J.E. Tenison-Woods, 'a Day with the Myalls', 13 January 1882.
T.S.B., 'The Niggers Again', 26 June 1886.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 93, 179 n.60, 61, 62, 63.
Although [Archdeacon John Ramsden] Wollaston (1791-1856) [in Western Australia] hoped that Christianisation would solve the problems arising from colonial occupation, he was only too well aware of the unfortunate immediate consequences of frontier contact. He wrote in May 1853:
I sadly fear very many of these natives have been shot, not merely in self defence, but wantonly & lawlessly. – In these parts the ‘Warrang’ greatly abounds what is a kind of yam, & when roasted sweet, pleasant, & nourishing food – this grows where the best feed for stock is found. Hence the usurpation of the Ground & the secret destruction of the poor Aborigines. Is it to be wondered then that they should retaliate upon the flocks & herds! – The abundance of the Warrang & the paucity of animals, may account for the greater concentration of these tribes. Such doings are very shocking, perpetuated under the mask of civilization & Xianity but alas! the well known consequence of Colonization among savages in all parts of the Globe. [1]
Helen Walker Mann editor of The Wollaston Journals. Volume 3: 1845–1856, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 2006 p. 311 (see also p. 345)
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey