November 10.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘Slaughter had become routine’
Casualty figures – A ratio of 25:0.
A detailed description of an Aboriginal attack on Strathbogie station in early October 1863 appeared a month later in the Brisbane Courier, and what from all appearance was a regular battle between a handful of settlers and about a hundred Aboriginal warriors, took place some eighty kilometres west of Bowen. No whites were killed, whereas the report stated that it 'has been estimated that about twenty-five blacks were killed'. Nobody objected to this figure, which represents a ratio of 25:0. [1]
Brisbane Courier November 10 1863, p2g. The Blacks in the Kennedy District.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited p. 49 and n.82.
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“The country is not fertile, is poorly stocked with game, and the whites have taken possession of all the main watercourses.”
...the Aborigines' traditional sources of food had been so damaged, depleted, or rendered inaccessible that they risked the very real dangers involved in killing the invaders' animals and the subsequent reprisals. The fact that at least some had to seek refuge in inhospitable ranges and had to take food there to their dependants seems to support this. At this stage of frontier conflict, there was little opportunity for comment on the physical condition of the Aborigines, but there survive three reports which support this conclusion. In 1877, an Aboriginal employed on the Hodgkinson encountered some Aboriginal women and children west of Mt Mulligan who were emaciated and starving and scarcely able to walk. They asked him to take some of their children to save their lives and he brought one to Watsonville. A report to the Queenslander was much more specific:
Perhaps the determination they show may be the courage of despair. The country is not fertile, is poorly stocked with game, and the whites have taken possession of all the main watercourses. Native Police officers say that most of the Palmer blacks seem half-starved, and recent advice from the Hodgkinson describes the Aboriginals there as suffering from famine. The white men occupy their only hunting grounds, and in default of the fish, roots, and game of the waterholes and creek 'bottoms', they are in a manner compelled to eat horses and bullock.
Even the Police Commissioner noted in 1880, that the Aborigines on the Hodgkinson goldfield were half-starved. [1] Frontier mining fields thus seem to have posed even more immediate and urgent challenges to the Aborigines than commonly occurred on the pastoral frontier.
Herberton Mining News, 10 November 1877; Queenslander, 8 December 1877; Pol. Com. to Col.Sec., 21 October 1880, Q.S.A. COL/A311, 1506 of 1881.
Acknowledgment: Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance, pp. 73-74, 266 n.37.
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‘The slaughter of Aborigines had become routine...”
At Rutland Plains station, some 19 kilometres south to south-west of theMitchell River Mission (today's Kowanyama):
The slaughter of Aborigines had become routine to the extent that [Frank] Bowman's stockman, McIntyre, had taken to cutting off a finger from each Aborigine he killed as evidence of his deeds, a gruesome tally to demonstrate his effectiveness in dealing with 'the blacks'. [1]
Phillip Freier, “Living with Munpitch” - A History of the Mitchell River Mission”, PhD, James Cook University, Townsville, November, 1999, p.76. Source: Lofty Yam, tape-recorded interview, 12 November 1987, Kowanyama, (n.244).
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 125, 232 n.52.