Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  Windradyne’s idea was like Pemulwuy’s before him—of consolidating scattered clan groups into a larger and more militant group. The Bathurst commandant was a man of tyrannous nature named James Morisset—he later became commandant on Norfolk Island—and his 1824 imprisonment of Windradyne in leg irons seems to have accelerated rather than stopped Aboriginal attacks. Aboriginal people were shot at on sight, or treated to flour laced with the arsenic dip used to cure scab in sheep. Windradyne survived a massacre over the taking of potatoes in which he saw members of his family group shot down, and became more militant still. Some Wiradjuri under his leadership attacked a hut and stockyard which had been built on a ceremonial site about which they had earlier made a protest. Three station hands were killed in the attack. The next day they killed four further hut-keepers and shepherds. These were shocking killings—every settler was haunted by the possibility of being a corpse studded with spears.

  Meanwhile, the Sydney Gazette had been appalled to hear of the killing of Aboriginal innocents, who were, after all, British subjects. The Gazette declared, ‘The adoption of the most determined measures must be speedily resorted to, to effect the suppression of such wanton and horrid murder.’

  ‘Philanthropus’, writing to the same paper on 5 August 1824, agreed: ‘I suppose the New Hollanders to be human creatures and that their maker has taught them more than the beasts of the earth. I think they have with myself, and all other men, one common ancestor . . . Hence I have been led to estimate even the least one of these, my despised and injured brethren, at more value than all the sheep and cattle on Bathurst Plains; than all the flocks and herds in the territory of New South Wales; than all the animals in the whole world!’ Another letter-writer sympathetic to the Aboriginals and appalled at the idea that they should be hunted down for the sake of sheep, nontheless argued a fine point in the same journal during the same debate, ‘They are the inhabitants, but not the proprietors of the land.’

  It was a rare settler who could disapprove of acres of land ‘reclaimed by our industry’, as a Methodist minister later put it. Even if malice did not operate, the two dreamings—Aboriginal and European—of what should be done to the earth were in conflict with each other, and there was a sense in which that was a trigger for all the tragedies.

  Morisset did send an overseer and four of his men to Sydney to stand trial for killings on the O’Connell Plains, south-east of Bathurst. They were all acquitted, and the lesson became apparent—one was unlikely to be found guilty of the murder of natives, particularly if there was provocation and no record was made. A settler named William Cox told a public meeting in Bathurst, ‘The best thing that can be done is to shoot all the blacks and manure the ground with their carcasses. That is all the good they are fit for! It is also recommended that all the women and children be shot. That is the most certain way of getting rid of the pestilent race.’

  Certainly somewhere near twenty shepherds and hut-keepers were killed, but the losses on the Wiradjuri side were probably five times that number, and increased after the governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, in August 1824 proclaimed martial law west of the mountains and sent a detachment of the 40th Regiment to Bathurst. The soldiers in Bathurst now numbered seventy-five and there were an equal number of enraged settlers willing to join them on any expedition. A group of Wiradjuri camping on the banks of the Macquarie to the north-west of Bathurst was attracted to a party of soldiers who laid out some food as bait and then shot down thirty of them. Another detachment of soldiers forced a party of Wiradjuri over the cliffs at Bells Falls. Many of these people had had no involvement with any of the attacks on the huts.

  After two months Wiradjuri society had been torn apart, and survivors had to hide in the remotest gorges of the country. Leading his family and some survivors over the Blue Mountains and down to Parramatta to surrender, Windradyne gave himself up. Some whites wrote ‘Peace’ on a sheet of cardboard, attached it to a straw hat and made Windradyne wear it. His life spared, he would be a reduced man until his death as a result of a tribal fight in 1829.

  When the Liverpool Plains, in the area surrounding present-day Gunnedah, were settled in the 1830s, the memory of how things had been done in the Bathurst area was still fresh. This time the tribe in question was the Kamilaroi. A number of young male settlers had moved into the area from other parts of New South Wales and lived the harsh slab-timber and bark-roof life of squatting with their assigned convicts. There were some four thousand Kamilaroi in the area in 1836, and the normal skirmishes took place. One posse of pastoralists, drovers and mounted police rode through the area for two weeks and executed eighty Kamilaroi people. Then, when the Kamilaroi came down the valley of the Gwydir from their winter quarters in the spring of 1837, they were horrified to see the damage done to their land by grazing animals. There were immediate retaliatory killings of livestock and conflict arose over the misuse of Aboriginal women by settlers.

  The tragedy for the Kamilaroi was that Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Snodgrass was for two months, over New Year 1838-39, the Administrator of New South Wales, awaiting the arrival of Governor Gipps. Snodgrass was a man of pastoral bent and, in answer to complaints of pastoralists about the activities of the natives, sent the commander of the New South Wales mounted police, Major James Nunn, to the Liverpool Plains with the instructions: ‘Use your utmost exertion to suppress these outrages. There are a thousand blacks there, and if they are not stopped, we may have them presently within the boundaries.’

  Major Nunn and his party of twenty-three mounted police arrived near the settlement of Manilla in early 1838 and joined up with a posse of local stockmen. At first light on a January morning, they surrounded an Aboriginal camp on the northern bank of the Namoi River. In desperation, one group of surrounded Aboriginals accused another group of being the raiders of cattle and Nunn accepted their word, taking the ‘wild’ group prisoner. One of them was shot, and the others let go. At Waterloo Creek, on the Namoi River, the captives were massacred—up to fifty Kamilaroi were shot. A similar encounter had earlier taken place at Ardgowan Plains Station. When Nunn and his party arrived at Gravesend Station, they were in triumphant mood, and grateful pastoralists put out the welcome mat for the major all the way back to Sydney. At Tamworth the hands who worked for the Australian Agricultural Company cheered him, but when he saw the new governor, George Gipps, there were no congratulations. Gipps was appalled at the licence Nunn had taken and so was the Attorney-General of New South Wales, the Irishman John Hubert Plunkett.

  Plunkett had been good friends of both Daniel O’Connell, the famed Liberator of Ireland, and of the liberal governor Richard Bourke. He and Bourke had framed legislation for Irish-style national schools in New South Wales; they had stood against any attempt to establish an official church; they believed that colonial self-rule should not be delayed. Now Plunkett and his new governor, Gipps, decided it was time, despite the difficulties, to prosecute those who took the lives of Aborigines. It was apparent to Nunn that this was the view of the Secretary for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, as well. Though he was a hero on the frontier, he was not considered one in Whitehall. But because he had operated on Snodgrass’s orders, it was decided nothing could be done about him. Nor was Snodgrass indicted.

  Henry Dangar was a long-established pastoralist of Cornish background who lived in the Upper Hunter Valley, but also had a station on Myall Creek which ran from the Gwydir River on the northern Liverpool Plains, near present-day Inverell. The people on Myall Creek were relatives of the Kamilaroi named the Kwiambal, and the Kwiambal group and the stockmen on Dangar’s property got on well together. The station was run by a man named William Hobbs with the help, amongst others, of two assigned convicts transported for life—George Anderson and Charles Kilmeister. George Anderson had a relationship with a young Kwiambal woman named Impeta, and was sympathetic to the natives, and so it appeared was Kilmeister. The stockmen would often join the Aboriginal people after work for socialising on the banks of the creek.


  When some of Dangar’s station hands went off to bring cattle in closer to the station, Hobbs followed them to guard against stragglers in the herd. The men with the main herd met a posse, led by a man named John Russell, an emancipist, and including five assigned convicts, all armed, and travelling—with their overseers’ sanction—to ‘deal’ with the natives. One of the men was a black Liverpudlian, John Johnston, and another an Irishman named Ned Foley, who had been transported for the same crime as Hugh Larkin—assaulting habitation. Russell asked the drovers if there were any Aboriginals living on the Myall Creek station. They replied that there were about twelve women, twelve children and sixteen men. They were anxious to protect the Aboriginal people by saying that they had been there for many weeks, and that therefore they could not be the blacks who had caused trouble further down the river.

  Back at Myall Creek a superintendent from a neighbouring station had arrived and commissioned ten Kwiambal men to go downstream and cut bark. So the men were absent when Russell’s posse, grown considerably in number, turned up at the station, galloping up to the homestead with every display of their intentions.

  The Aboriginal women and children ran from the creek to Anderson’s hut, believing that their white friends would protect them, while Kilmeister went out to meet the posse. He was relaxed with them, since he knew most of them. With the Kwiambal huddling around him, Anderson asked Russell what his plans were. He was going to tie them all together, he said, and take them ‘over the back of the range’ to frighten them. Russell and others forced their way past Anderson. The Aboriginals called out to Kilmeister and Anderson to save them. Kilmeister did not resist, but Anderson protested. A woman who claimed to be the spouse of Yintayintin, one of the Aboriginals who worked round the station, was left behind, and another woman was also excused in an attempt to win Anderson over. Anderson also managed to hide a child in his hut. The prisoners were led away and later two shots were heard but no more.

  Two kilometres out in the bush near a new stockyard lay a heap of twenty-eight butchered Kwiambal bodies, including Charlie, the three-year-old station favourite. Most of the children had been decapitated by swords and the adults had been hacked to death.

  The next day the killers seemed in excellent spirits as they breakfasted at Myall Creek, discussed the best features of their horses and made occasional reference to the killings. Anderson was particularly appalled to hear them speak of the pack rape of one of the younger women. When they saw Anderson’s disgust, Russell, the leader of the party, asked Ned Foley to stay with Anderson and make sure he did not do anything ‘unwise’. That day they burned the bodies, with Kilmeister accepting orders to tend the pyre.

  The Kwiambal bark-cutters had arrived meanwhile at a nearby station where the overseer, Eaton, knew that they would be in danger from the posse. He sent them and all the people from his station into the hills. A small number of them were pursued, caught by the posse and shot.

  At Myall Creek, the manager, William Hobbs, arrived back the next day. He began quizzing Anderson and Yintayintin. Kilmeister had gone off with the posse on their latest excursions, and now returned. Later that afternoon Yintayintin took Hobbs to the stockyard massacre site, which he would later describe as ‘horrible beyond description’. Hobbs did not know what to do, but at last decided he must write letters outlining what he knew of the massacre to the police magistrate at Muswellbrook and to Henry Dangar. Public opinion in pastoral areas disagreed with Hobbs’s intentions and with what he had set in motion, and Dangar would soon dismiss him, perhaps under pressure from other pastoralists.

  The Attorney-General decided that Kilmeister, John Russell, John Johnston, Ned Foley and seven others were to be charged. The men brought down to Sydney were tried in the Supreme Court for the murder of Daddy, an old man whose body had been most identifiable at the site. The senior prosecutor was Plunkett himself, and his junior was another Irishman, dapper little Roger Therry. Chief Justice Dowling gave strong instructions in favour of conviction, but it took the jury a mere fifteen minutes to acquit the men. When the verdict came in the court broke into loud applause. The Attorney-General now cut back on the number of accused and charged seven of the men with the murder of four victims including the three-year-old boy, Charlie. Many newspapers called for the release of the prisoners and the Herald attacked Gipps as a zealot.

  Henry Dangar, as he had at the first trial, paid for the defendants’ counsel. But Anderson and Hobbs were potent witnesses. The seven were found guilty of the murder of a child unknown, and Governor Gipps confirmed their sentence. The seven waiting in the condemned cell were the subject of kindnesses from various men with pastoral interests, who probably gave them the false comfort of assuring them they would not hang. And although they were willing to confess to their crime, they felt grievously unlucky, since, as they said, killing Aboriginals was a common activity on the frontier. They must have wondered why Major Nunn could kill so many, and they had to swing for a lesser number.

  Justice Burton, in sentencing them, had indeed mentioned his sympathy over their transportation and their remote placement on stations far from the improving influence of churches and the institutions of civilisation. Pastoral associations all over New South Wales angrily demanded a reprieve. The Herald pleaded, ‘Where, we ask, is the man endowed with even a modicum of reasoning powers, who will assert that this great continent was ever intended by the creator to remain an unproductive wilderness? . . . The British people found a portion of the globe in a state of waste—they took possession of it. And they had a perfect right to do so, under the Divine authority, by which man was commanded to go forth and people, and till the land.’

  The Herald also declared that there was a chance that this judgment would encourage more vengefulness against the natives, and sadly, vengefulness and secrecy now became the established mode. Plunkett’s hope had been to protect the Aborigines from molestation and intrusion upon their rights to the same extent that the emancipists were protected. Things would not turn out as well as that.

  CONTESTING THE LAND

  The idea that Australia consisted of waste lands waiting to be seized by enterprising Europeans was both in law and at the popular level a common belief in the nineteenth century. Indeed in 1819, the law officers of the British government had declared Australia to be terra nullius, land belonging to no one prior to British occupation. But there was barely a season in which the concept of terra nullius was not challenged—by Aboriginals and sympathetic Europeans. Debate over the legitimacy of the settlers’ seizure of land would emerge very early. Captain David Collins had written in the 1790s, ‘But, strange as it may appear, they [the Aboriginals] have also their real estates. Bennelong, both before he went to England, and since his return, often assured me that the island of Me-mel (called by us Goat Island), close by Sydney Cove, was his own property; that it was his father’s, and that he should give it to Bygone, his particular friend and companion. To this little spot he appeared much attached; and we have often seen him and his wife Barangaroo, feasting and enjoying themselves on it. He told us of other people who possessed this kind of hereditary property, which they retained undisturbed.’

  The debate over waste land versus native title raged over the years in the colonial press, especially following incidents such as the surrender of Windradyne and the massacre at Myall Creek. It was just as heated in the huts of the hinterland and around the fires of stockmen. In 1844, a young man named Henry Mort living on the frontiers of settlement in Queensland described to his mother and sister in England the conversation he had had with his fellow educated stockmen: ‘Had a very animated discussion on the “moral right of a nation to take forcible possession of a country inhabited by savages”. John and David McConnell argued it was morally right for a Christian nation to extirpate savages from their native soil in order that it may be peopled with a more intelligent and civilised race of human beings, etc., etc.’ Certainly even Henry Mort had no doubt that the ministers of the Church of
England should carry the sacred torch of civilisation and religion so that the ‘darkest and most remote recesses of heathen barbarism may be illuminated thereby’.

  A normal justification for settlers in moving onto Aboriginal lands was a reference to the Bible, and in particular to God’s Old Testament instruction to go forth and multiply and subdue the earth, as quoted by the Herald in the wake of the Myall Creek trials. The Aborigines had failed to subdue the earth and thus left it open to those who were willing to. Christopher Hodgson, a parson’s son who had farmed the Darling Downs west of Brisbane, wrote of his years in Australia, ‘Thus far the creator of the universe is just, in that He allows the superiority of civilisation over barbarism, of intellect over instinct or brutish reason . . . the world was made for man’s enjoyment and created not as a beautiful spectacle, or spotless design, but as a field to be improved upon.’

  The political radical Presbyterian JD Lang was inevitably attracted to this basic issue. He was sympathetic to the natives, but he had a not uncharacteristic take on the subject for a man of his period. In a speech to the meeting of the Moreton Bay Friends of the Aborigines, he was reported as saying that the settlers ‘were certainly debtors to the original Australian Aborigines, for they had seized upon their land and confiscated their territory. In doing that he did not think they had done anything wrong . . . The white man had indeed only carried out the intentions of the Creator in coming and settling down in the territory of the natives.’ Later, though, from his questioning of Aboriginals, he decided that ‘particular districts are not merely the property of particular tribes; particular sections or portions of these districts are universally recognised by the natives as the property of individual members of these tribes’. If an owner decided to burn off grass on his land, ‘which is done for the double purpose of enabling the natives to take the older animals more easily, and to provide a new crop of sweeter grass for the growing generation of the forest’, then tribes from all about would be invited in, the landowner giving his permission for all to come to the land and hunt its wild animals. ‘I have often heard natives myself tell me, in answer to my own questions on the subject, who were the Aboriginal owners of particular tracts of land now held by Europeans; and indeed this idea of property in the soil for hunting purposes is universal amongst the Aboriginals.’