November 15.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Subversion and separation
“...a total subversion of the law.”
[The squatter Charles] Dutton warned the [Queensland] government that the behaviour of [Lieutenant] Patrick [commander of the Native Police detachment] was a serious threat to the peace of the district. And his foreboding was prophetic. At the end of the year [1861] nineteen members of the Wills family and their workers were killed on Cullinlaringoe station. Insistent calls for indiscriminate and massive revenge rang through the colony. Dutton was brave enough to write to the press complaining that the rampaging punitive expeditions were creating a situation where there was 'a total subversion of the law'. [1] He related the attack on Cullinlaringoe to the understandable if not excusable desire for revenge for Patrick's earlier bloody foray. There are some, he wrote, who believe it is unnecessary to ask why a black has committed a murder. 'The cause', they argued, 'was sufficiently accounted for by his savage and bloodthirsty nature'. [2]
Two months later Dutton returned to the subject with a more general, and more telling attack, on the Native Police. He began by referring to a recent incident in his district when the police had deliberately ridden down and trampled a young Aboriginal woman who was shepherding sheep on a neighbouring station, 'bruising and lacerating her dreadfully'.
North Australian, 15 November 1861.
ibid. 13 December 1861.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. 95-96, 259 n.5, n.6.
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The separation of children from parents.
...the missionaries mounted an intellectual challenge to Aboriginal society and culture far more deliberate, and consistent, than any other group of Europeans in colonial Australia. It was most apparent in the separation of children and parents by the establishment of dormitories which became common on Australian missions established during the late C19th and early C20th. Developments at Yarrabah during the 1890s illustrated a common trend. [Ernest] Gribble summed up his objectives in a number of reports written in the middle of the decade. In the first one of September 1895 he explained that the dormitory was nearing completion, an event eagerly awaited because the Europeans would 'then have the children more under control'. By having them 'under lock and key at night' the mission staff would be able to 'prevent camp natives taking them off at all hours for corroborees etc'. [1] The old people objected strongly to the incarceration of the children, complaining that the boys and girls were 'getting too much like white fellow'. [2]
Gribble described an incident which took place a few months after the opening of the dormitory. He was travelling in the bush with two black guides...The party approached a camp on a creek bank...The local men came up to the visitors and interrogated the two guides. Gribble described the following exchange:
...Presently one man asked Harry who I was, and on his saying quietly the one word “Missionary”, the effect was wonderful to behold, the women gave me one look full of fear, then clasping their children tightly, vanished; the men stood their ground, but looked as if they would like the ground to swallow either me or themselves. [3]
Missionary Notes, 15 November 1895, p.72.
ibid., 15 December 1895, p.104.
ibid., 22 June 1896, p.44.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp.158, 187, n.47, n.48, n.49.