June 23.

Artwork by Glenn Loughrey

Women, ‘manliness’ and colonialism

The abuse of Aboriginal women.

The whole of the fishing industry in North Queensland was suffused with the abuse of Aboriginal women. The water police magistrate at Cooktown informed his Colonial Secretary and Premier, T. McIlwraith, that this was one of the revolting features of recruiting Aborigines along the coast of North Queensland. McIlwraith instructed shipping masters not to enter women on ship’s articles but the problem was far from solved. It was claimed that the Aboriginal men had every right to have their wives with them and would not enrol without them. [1]

Moreover they could with impunity be carried with or without the women’s wishes in defiance of government intentions. Abduction was normally only discovered by accident…Despite McIlwraith’s edict, the paternalistic concern of the Government Resident, Douglas, and Northern Protector, Roth, the callous abuse of Aboriginal women still persisted in 1900. [2]

1. B. Fahey, Water Police, Cooktown, to Col. Sec., 23 June 1882, Q.S.A. COL/A340, 3552 of 1882. See minute T.M.I. [Col. Sec. and Premier McIlwraith], 5 July, 1882.

2. ‘Annual Report of the N.P.A. for 1900’, 1901 V. & P., p. 1332; ‘Annual Report of the Govt. Res. at Thursday Island’, 1890 V. & P., Vol. III, p. 172; ‘Annual Report of the Govt. Res. at Thursday Island’, 1894 V. & P., Vol. II, p. 912, 913. see also ‘Reserves for Aboriginals, Cardwell District’, 1877 V. & P., Vol. II, pp. 1245, 1246: ‘The then Colonial Secretary directed me to prosecute the master for kidnapping, but the Attorney General, Mr Bramston, said I could only lay on information and proceed against him for assault, and there was so much delay about the matter that at last the whole thing fell through.’

Acknowledgment: Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance, pp. 134-135, 281 n.43, 281-282 n.44.

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Colonialism was a violent endeavour

Colonialism was a violent endeavour. Bound up with the construction of a market-driven, capitalist system via the tendrils of Empire, it was intimately associated with the processes of colonisation and the experiences of exploiting the land, labour and resources of the New World. [1] All too often this led to conflict, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Overt violence (the euphemistic ‘skirmishes’, ‘affrays’ and ‘collisions’ of the documentary record), clandestine violence (poisonings, forced removals, sexual exploitation and disease) and structural violence (the compartmentalisation of Aboriginal people through processes of race, governance and labour) became routinised aspects of colonialism, buttressed by structures of power, inequality, dispossession and racism. Conflict at the geographical margins of this system was made possible by the general anxieties of life at, or beyond, the boundaries of settlement, closely associated with the normalised violence attached to ideals of ‘manliness’ on the frontier. [2] 

1. Stephen Silliman, ‘Culture contact or colonialism? Challenges in the archaeology of native North America’,American Antiquity 70(1) 2005.

2. Ray Evans, ‘The blood-dimmed tide. Frontier violence and Aboriginal resistance’, in Race Relations in Colonial Queensland, Ray Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin (eds), University of Queensland Press, St Lucia:, 1993, 33; Hogg, Robert 2011, ‘“The most manly class that exists”: British gentlemen on the Queensland frontier’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 13: 65–84; Woollacott, Angela, ‘Frontier violence and settler manhood’, History Australia 6(1) 2009: 11.1–11.15.

Acknowledgment: Heather Burke, Amy Roberts, Mick Morrison, Vanessa Sullivan and the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation (RMMAC), “The space of conflict: Aboriginal/ European interactions and frontier violence on the western Central Murray, South Australia, 1830–41” Aboriginal History Vol. 40 (2016) p. 145.