November 8.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The effect of firearms.
No consultation - “It was thought necessary to show them the effect of firearms.”
When Port Phillip formally became a settlement in 1836, Aboriginal people of the region had already learnt to be in fear of Europeans. White people had been in the area since at least 1802, although the first permanent settlers, apart from the notorious escaped convict, William Buckley, were Tasmanian pastoralists in the early 1830s.
In 1803 there was an abortive attempt to settle Port Phillip under Lieutenant Colonel David Collins, who abandoned the site after four months and went to Tasmania instead. William Pascoe Crook's description of their first encounter with Aboriginal people speaks for itself:
When we first came into the harbour Capt. Mertho went with a few people into a lagoon that is in the north-west part of the harbour to examine it. Here, as they approached the shore, they perceived a native on the beach with a shield and spear, brandishing his weapon as if to prevent their landing. A musket was fired over his head, when he ran, and was joined by others out of the bushes...The party landed, went into a hut, where they found fire. They brought away a dark basket with them, and threw about the fire in such a manner that it communicated to the hut and burnt it.
What impression this first visit made on the savages I leave you, sir, to judge. A party has been out twice for several days together, and have explored the whole harbour. They saw natives in several places...At one place they assembled in great numbers when the parties separated, and alarmed them so that the other party arriving at the time were called on to fire, which they did, and wounded some and made them all fly. It was thought necessary to show them the effect of firearms; therefore one native, who had sat for some time under a tree, but who was following after the rest, was fired at by three persons at the same time and killed. The sailors stripped him, and brought away his ornaments and weapons. [1]
William Crook to Joseph Hardcastle (L MS), 8 November 1803, HRA, I, v. p.254.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 117-118, 142, n. 134.
____“...this fails to fully explain why white violence was so indiscriminate.”
At night it was not easy for [white] ambush parties to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. '[T]he difficulty of securing the leader without injury to some of his less guilty companions' was first raised by Captain Clark of Bothwell in 1826. However, this fails to fully explain why white violence was so indiscriminate. There is no evidence that colonists ever attempted to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. [1] In view of this, it is both a curious fact and a staggering hypocrisy that colonists complained so stridently about the indiscriminate nature of black violence.
[Captain] Clark to [Governor] Arthur, 8 November 1826, SLNSW, ML, A1771, vol. 28, p.20.
Acknowledgment: Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Sex & Resistance in Tasmania, pp. 50, 228 n.40.
— ———————————
Frontier cruelty in West Australia
Jack Barry of Birrindudu, a man described even by his own as a ‘cunt [sic] of thing’ who had a ‘stud’, an Aboriginal woman (or women) who was held in camp and used for sex and general labour. When one woman ‘cleared out and ended up at Turner [Station]… Barry went across and flogged her back with the whip… on horseback...she died when she got back’. [1]
1. Pamela A. Smith, ‘Sturt Street Massacre: Report on the History Archaeological Survey and Forensic Investigation’, Flinders University, 2010, citing a taped interview with Derek Smith reporting a conversation with Stan Jones, the manager of Gordon Downs.
Acknowledgment: Kate Auty, O’Leary Of The Underworld – The Untold Story of the Forrest River Massacre, La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, pp. 13, 230 n.8.