November 23.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Chaining or killing
‘...he has killed and will kill blacks.’
Immediate experience of the frontier provided missionaries and protectors with first-hand knowledge of white hostility to black. George Augustus Robinson met a party of stockmen who had arrived with sheep from New South Wales. He fell into conversation with them but didn't let them know that he was the Chief Protector of Aborigines. They talked openly to him as they would with any other traveller. Robinson concluded that the general feeling towards the Aborigines was fierce and hostile. The men openly asserted that they would not hesitate to 'get rid' of the blacks provided they could do so without detection. It was, Robinson wrote later in his journal, 'the most cruel that could be'. The overlanders wished them 'to be burnt-hung-drowned – by any means they wished them got rid of'. [1] In a subsequent letter to the Superintendent of Port Phillip, C. J. La Trobe, Robinson reported that the 'ruthless stockman vaunts that he has killed and will kill blacks'. And even the gentlemen squatters were implicated. Those 'from whom better things ought to be looked...openly avow that if the blacks steal from them they will destroy them..'. [2] He had heard intelligent and respectable persons state:
Well, Mr. Robinson I admit their situation is a hard one and I should be sorry to see them injured but then Sir really I do think under all circumstances the sooner they are got rid of the better. [3]
Robinson Journal, April-July 1839, GAR Papers, vol. 14, ML. A7038.
Robinson to La Trobe, 14 Nov. 1840 GAR Papers, vol. 25, ML. A7046.
Robinson annual report, 1846, GAR Papers, vol. 61, ML. A7082.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp.34-35, 255 n.38, n.39, n.40.
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The chaining of indigenous prisoners.
But protection of property was paramount, as the police well knew. Indeed, for long periods in the 1880s and early 1890s, the Esperance police charge book records show that sheep stealing by Aboriginal people - Noongars, Ngadju and, occasionally, Miming - was virtually the only 'crime' to come before the Esperance magistrates…'Dakin', aged 25, (Ngadju), was sentenced by G. H. Bostock, JP, on 31 July 1892 to 18 months hard labour on Rottnest for stealing three sheep at Fraser Range. [1] The hard labour actually began long before they reached Rottnest, as 'Benjamin', a Miming man convicted of sheep stealing, told the 1883 Royal Commission into the treatment of Aboriginal prisoners of the Crown:
I walked from Eyre Sand Patch to Albany [about 1,000 km.] naked, with a chain on my neck. My neck was sore from chain. I knocked up from the long walk. Policeman Truslove no good. He hit me for knocking up. ... I came with a bullock chain around my neck from Eyre Sand Patch to Albany. When it rained my neck was very sore from the chain... I had no clothes given to me from Eyre Sand Patch to Albany. [2]
The police were well aware why such breaches of the law occurred. Constable James Sherry reported in 1892 that 'in this district [i.e Esperance, north to Fraser Range and east to the S[outh] A[ustralian]. border] they are mostly driven to sheep stealing from starvation' [3] while McGlade had informed Inspector Rowe in Albany the previous year that:
it would be almost impossible for them [‘bush’ natives] to subsist owing to the absence of game & the scarcity of kangaroos which are being fast exterminated [sic] in this locality… [4]
Esperance PS charge book 1889-1897.
Appendix I, RC report, 1883. AN 1/1, Acc. 495, Box 1.
Sherry to Sgt J. Farley, 16 August 1892, Esperance PS letter and report books 1879-1893.
McGlade to Insp. T. Rowe, ? February 1892, ibid
Acknowledgment: Peter Gifford, “Murder and ‘The Execution of the Law’ on the Nullarbor, Aboriginal History, Vol. 18 (1994) pp. 114-115, n.63, n.64, n.65, n.66.