November 5.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
A graphic account of a massacre
‘Justice must indeed be blind’
Many accounts made light of shooting Aborigines, or at least justified such actions as being part of the brutal necessity of pioneering. In an article ‘Taming the Niggers’ [sic] published in the Townsville Herald on 2 February 1907, an old pioneer, using the nom de plume ‘H7H’, boasted of his part in a punitive expedition:
It was estimated that over 150 myalls ‘bit the dust’ that morning, and unfortunately many women and children shared the same fate. In that wild, yelling, rushing mob it was hard to avoid shooting the women and babies, and there were men in that mob of whites who would ruthlessly destroy anything possessing a black hide.
The writer went on to give an account of a second raid on a camp, following the death by spearing of a station owner. The party of Europeans crept up towards the sleeping camp, where the presumed killers of the white man were thought to be:
They slept soundly those myalls after their long march and could have had no thought of us being so close to them, for we were within revolver shot of them before our presence was discovered, and then it was too late, for muddled with sleep, sore-footed, weary and panic stricken they offered no resistance, and many of them were ‘wiped out’ before they could gain their feet. Talk of the ‘Furies of Hell’, that night’s work amongst those myalls with the white man’s rifle and tomahawk would make ‘Hell’s Furies’ blush. How those gins [sic] and kiddies shrieked when we got amongst them. The blood of the white man was up and nothing with a black hide escaped death that night...for when we had finished our work and drawn off, and in daylight came to view the white man’s work of vengeance, bucks, gins [sic] snd piccaninnies were lying dead in all directions, and not a thing in camp moved or breathed.
The writer concluded his article with an apology, an explanation of why he and his fellow frontiersmen had engaged in massacre:
The foregoing will serve in some way to give an idea of the manner in which the myalls were originally tamed and taught to obey the law of the white man. It may appear cold blooded murder to some to wipe out a whole camp for killing, perhaps a couple of bullocks, but then each member of the tribe must be held equally guilty, and therefore it would be impossible to discriminate.I do not wish to make out that the pioneer white men of this north land were in any way heroes, although they to a certain extent needed pluck to face such odds…The writer never held a man guilty who wiped out a nigger [sic].
This article was apparently written about events that had occurred some years before. There may have been an element of exaggeration and bravado in it….Reading it again now, many years later after I first discovered it, I am still shocked by the events described, the sentiments expressed, the justifications propounded. It is important, therefore, to place the article in context.. It was printed in the daily paper of a major provincial city in 1907, six years after Federation. The writer confessed to mass murder without the slightest concern about prosecution or even of social opprobrium….The evidence was surely sufficient to set the machinery of law in motion. If not, then justice must ‘indeed be blind, as well as blindfolded’.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told: A personal search for the truth about our history, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 2000, pp. 106-108