November 19.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
More massacres
Commentary on massacres in Queensland and Victoria
In late 1872, one correspondent for the Queensland Times reported that the blacks on the Paroo River, south-west of Charleville, had been:
...spearing cattle, and that have wounded, though not killed, some white men. Police and black troopers are after them to hunt, shoot, and otherwise destroy them. But the real truth is this, that the Government, or perhaps more correctly speaking, the [white] people themselves, are responsible and to blame for every murder of a white man which has taken place, by their utter, shameless, brutal neglect of those savages whose land they ruthlessly occupy without remuneration, and for the bad example of drunkenness and profligacy and every vice too frequently set before them. [1]
Unfortunately, between the investors and pastoralists and their greed, and the rapidity of change for the Original Australians, there was little hope left for their traditional way of life.
Ian Clark, in his survey of massacres in Western Victoria, found that most killings were in the one to three range, [2] whereas in Queensland we have so many examples of double - or even triple-figure massacres. Historian Richard Broome observes:
...the Victorian frontier was still arguably less violent than some, for at least four reasons. Gun technology on this frontier, which had closed in almost all areas by 1850, was single shot and muzzle-loading guns. The native police force, with some expeditionary exceptions, was benign compared to the force found on the northern frontiers [that is, Queensland]. Thirdly, the Port Phillip district was unique in having a serious (albeit inadequate) protective effort, which meant that settlers were more under the eye of colonial officials, with instructions from London to try and apply British justice to Aboriginal people. Fourthly, racial ideas hardened after the 1850s, due to dominant ideologies about difference, shifting from environmental to racial explanations, and also due to a loss of optimism due to the apparent fading away of Aboriginal people. [3]
Queensland Times, 19 November 1872, Timothy Bottoms' emphasis.
I. Clark, Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803-1859, Aboriginal Studies Press for AIATSIS, Canberra, 1995.
R. Broome, 'The statistics of frontier conflict', in B Attwood & S G Foster (eds), Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2003, p.7.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 188-189, 246 n.46, n.47, n.48.
____
Killing Aboriginals...'is no murder'
Many squatters were...of the opinion that they should be equipped with a martial law to protect them against prosecution whenever they attacked Aboriginals in retaliation to theft* and destruction of livestock, the most common reason behind such frontier attacks. Killing Aboriginals, as one Burnett squatter expressed it in November 1861, 'is no murder' and if ever 'a squatter was to be found guilty of murder for shooting a black the whole bush would rise against the town, and blood would be shed'. [1]
Brisbane Courier 19 November 1861, p2g. Letter signed Peak Downs, Burnett, Queensland, Nov. 14, 1861.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited pp. 26-27 and n.25.
There was, of course, no acknowledgment by such squattocracy of their much larger, and often forceful theft of land from the original inhabitants. - RB.