June 22.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Aboriginal women and girls
Alienation of the land was unthinkable to Indigenous people.
For a while the original inhabitants of the land expected the whites and their sheep would just go as they came. It took time for them to learn that their land was lost to them. Only then did resistance intensify. Henry Reynolds wrote:
While conflict was ubiquitous in traditional societies territorial conquest was virtually unknown. Alienation of land was not only unthinkable, it was literally impossible. If blacks often did not react to the initial invasion of their country it was because they were not aware that it had taken place. They certainly did not believe that their land had suddenly ceased to belong to them and they to their land. The mere presence of Europeans, no matter how threatening, could not uproot certainties so deeply implanted in Aboriginal custom and consciousness. [1]
Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, p. 53.
Acknowledgment: David Marr, Killing For Country – A family story, Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, pp. 47-48.
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The abuse of Aboriginal women
The abuse of Aboriginal women was rife across the whole continent. Whalers, sealers, and other seafarers abducted coastal women who were never seen again. Constable TC Thorpe of the Northern Territory Police wrote in 1898 that Aboriginal women on the cattle stations ‘were run down by station blackguards on horseback and taken to the stations for licentious purposes and there kept more like slaves than anything else. [1] Renowned north Australian author, Xavier Herbert, said that ‘they had to be there; without available women men would refuse to work on remote stations’. [2] Another NT author, Ernestine Hill, could write as recently as 1938 that black women were available, white men had the right of the conqueror and, in any case, black women were devoid of morality. [3] Willshire believed that God meant Aboriginal women to be used by white men ‘as he had placed them wherever the pioneers go’. [4]
Thorpe to Govt. Resident, NT, 5 March 1898, GRS 790/1898, SASA.
Herbert cited in McGrath 1984: 234.
Hill 1938: 231.
Willshire 1896: 18
Acknowledgment: John Harris,’ Hiding the bodies: the myth of the humane colonisation of Aboriginal Australia’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 27 (2003) p.95 n.93, n.94, n.95, n.96
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Abuse of Aboriginal girls in North Australia
It was the sexual abuse of young Aboriginal girls by white settlers, and the resulting horrifying incidence of venereal diseases, which caused the missionaries [at the Church Missionary Society mission at Wellington] most anguish. There was scarcely a settler's hut in the district where white men, whether 'master, overseer or convict', did not retain Aboriginal women. [1] An eight-year-old girl who came to the mission suffering from venereal disease was one of four such children kept by one stockman. [2]
Watson to Jowitt, 17 January 1837, AJCP,M215, NLA.
Watson Dairy, 5 March 1833, 18 August 1833 etc., AJCP,M233, NLA.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp.58, 82 n.146, n.147.