Out of the Silence

by Robert Foster

  Your Excellency will also learn from other Despatches, which, if they can be prepared in time, shall be forwarded by this opportunity, that the natives of the river Murray near its junction with the Darling have assumed a more hostile attitude than the natives of this Continent have ever previously done, so that full occupation would be found in this quarter alone for a larger Police Force than this province is able to maintain. The Town and the other districts have been left for the last five weeks in a totally unprotected state.86

  Governor Gipps directed a company of 80 men from the 96th Regiment based in Van Diemen’s Land to be despatched to South Australia. Twelve men and a non-commissioned officer arrived at Moorundie in October, soon after the arrival of new Resident Magistrate and Protector Edward Eyre.87

  During his three years at Moorundie, Eyre undertook three expeditions to the area of the Rufus River, and on each occasion travelled only with a few Mounted Police and Aboriginal guides rather than with the infantry company that had been sent to support him. The report of the first expedition, undertaken in January 1842, provides a fairly clear insight as to why the district was quiet. He estimated that there were approximately 700 Aboriginal people between his post at Moorundie and the Rufus and of that number he believed that no more than 200 were ‘grown up men’:

  Whilst in the neighbourhood of the Rufus, I observed many women in deep mourning for their husbands, who had been shot in some of the conflicts with the Europeans. Many children were pointed out to me as being fatherless from the same cause; and I have no doubt the loss of lives in these districts has been considerable from such affrays.88

  The violence inflicted upon the Maraura by the overlanding parties, and by the police expedition sent to assist them, had devastated the population and had evidently had the desired punitive effect. Although Eyre proposed that a military post might be established at the Rufus, Grey declined to act on the suggestion, evidently satisfied that the crisis had passed. Writing of the event years later, colonist Henry Melville no doubt expressed the view of many of his contemporaries when he wrote: ‘I am satisfied that the terror that the whites inspired amongst the tribes east of the Murray and the terrible lesson given them on the upper Murray was the means and I believe the only means of making the overland routes safe to travel’.89

  The events over 1840 and 1841 indicated the degree to which Aborigines’ status as British subjects had been exposed as a legal fiction in the minds of many colonists, if indeed it had ever been digested at all. For colonial officials, the principle that Aboriginal people were to be protected as British subjects had been tested and had failed in practice, readily suspended when the loss of European lives and property were at stake. Although Governors Gawler and Grey may well have hoped that these cases could be considered as exceptions to the rule, the years to come would demonstrate that they were far from exceptional.

  Chapter 3

  ‘OUR DECLARED ENEMIES’

  Imagining invasion

  In early October 1840, a year before his posting to Moorundie, Edward Eyre was camped at Port Lincoln preparing for his expedition to King George’s Sound in Western Australia. The small harbour town had been established in March of the previous year when Captain Frank Hawson landed the first official settlers there.1 The settlement grew slowly, and by the beginning of 1840 it had a population of 220 souls and about ‘30 houses, either finished or in the course of completion’.2 The town was located at the bottom of what would eventually be named Eyre Peninsula, after the explorer himself. On the afternoon of 6 October, Eyre learnt that a 12 year-old boy, Frank Hawson, had been fatally speared by Aborigines about a mile and a half from the hut on his family’s property, where he had been tending their flocks. Frank had been alone when a group of Aborigines approached requesting food. He gave them bread and rice, but when they wanted more provisions, he blocked them with a gun and sword. One of the Aboriginal children, Eyre was told, had given Frank a spear to throw, and in throwing it he had received two spears to the chest. Despite his injuries Frank fired his gun, hitting one person, and the party retreated. Hours later, Frank’s older brother found the injured boy and took him into Port Lincoln, where he died not long afterwards. His death marked the beginning of what was to become a fearful and protracted conflict between Aborigines and settlers on the colony’s western pastoral frontier.

  Noting this event in his journal, Eyre asked himself what had motivated the attack on the young boy. He knew that Aborigines had been fired upon at various stations in the district; Frank Hawson’s elder brother had fired upon a group at the station not long before, to ‘frighten them’. Without more definite information Eyre suspended judgement, but the events gave him pause to reflect on ‘the conduct of the Aborigines of Australia … towards the invaders and usurpers of their rights’. Aboriginal people, he felt, ‘have seldom been guilty of wanton or unprovoked outrages’ without ‘some strongly exciting cause’.3 What, he asked, were those causes?

  Firstly, writes Eyre, ‘our being in their country at all’ is ‘altogether an act of intrusion and aggression’ which Aboriginal people could justly imagine is for the ‘purpose of dispossessing them’. Although the Aboriginal people of a district that has been ‘unceremoniously taken possession of’ may choose to remain aloof at first, eventually they are compelled to return, ‘cautiously and fearfully approaching what is their own’. When they do, ‘often they are met by repulsion and sometimes violence’.4 In a powerful passage Eyre ponders the extremes of settler behaviour on the Australian frontier:

  Passing over the fearful scenes of horror and bloodshed, that have but too frequently been perpetrated in all the Australian colonies upon the natives of the remoter districts, by the most desperate and abandoned of our countrymen; and overlooking, also, the recklessness that too generally pervades the shepherds and stock-keepers of the interior, with regard to the coloured races, a recklessness that leads them to think as little of firing at a black, as at a bird, and which makes the number they have killed, or the atrocities that have attended the deeds, a matter for a tale, a jest or boast at pothouse revelries …5

  But what of those settlers ‘actuated by no bad intentions’ and anxious to avoid violence? Such settlers find themselves ‘alone in the wilds.’ With few men to support them and cut off from ready assistance, and schooled in accounts of the ‘ferocity’ or the ‘treachery of the savages,’ they conclude that there is less trouble and risk in keeping the Aborigines away from the station. Should Aborigines appear, threats are made and weapons produced, even if ‘no stronger measures are resorted to’. It would hardly be surprising, Eyre continues, that such displays should produce feelings of ‘a hostile and vindictive kind’ among the Aboriginal owners of the land. Is it any wonder that Aboriginal people, thus dispossessed and watching the intruders ‘revelling in plenty near them,’ choose to ‘rob those who first robbed them?’ The responses of Aboriginal people faced with such acts of ‘intrusion and aggression’, he concludes, are no different to ‘what men in a more civilized state would do under the same circumstances’:

  What they daily do under the sanction of the law of nations – a law that provides not for the safety, privileges, and protection of the Aborigines, and owners of the soil, but which merely lays down rules for the direction of the privileged robber in the distribution of the booty of any newly discovered country.6

  Eyre’s characterisation of the Australian frontier is a remarkably perceptive one. He leaves his readers in no doubt that the settlement of Australia was an invasion and that violence was a routine necessity in the process of Aboriginal dispossession. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Eyre’s account is his attempt to imagine the invasion of Aboriginal lands through the eyes, hearts and minds of the people confronting it. Such empathy is rare in the accounts of settlers; it was an emotion antithetical to the task of dispossession and the violence that inevitably accompanied it.

  Port Lincoln under siege

  By early 1842, more than a year after the fa
tal spearing of the boy Frank Hawson, Port Lincoln was a developing but still sparsely settled coastal port, more easily accessible from Adelaide by boat than by a long overland journey. Its scattered pastoral stations fanned out from the township and clustered around the coastal tip of a large, as yet unexplored inland peninsula. This was the country of the Battara people and Nauo people to the north, who vastly outnumbered the settler population. Given its distance from the administrative centre in Adelaide, colonial government at Port Lincoln was represented in the figure of the Government Resident, an occasional position assigned to outlying districts.

  Occupied by a respectable pastoralist, the role of Government Resident combined the roles of Protector of Aborigines, distributor of rations and Magistrate. Yet although the position represented the presence of colonial government, the scope of its authority was deliberately vague. When the Government Resident appointed to the south east in the early 1850s requested clarification of his instructions, the Colonial Secretary responded that ‘the duties of the Governt. Resident at that station are not permanently defined, – they are only such as may be directed – from time to time – by the Governor.’7 The instructions issued in 1841 to the new Government Resident at Port Lincoln called for a similar degree of flexibility. In particular, in the absence of a nearby court of law, discretionary decisions were acceptable with regard to ‘punishment of the Natives’. These, Grey wrote, might include the withholding of rations for minor offences such as ‘pilfering’, and corporal punishment, or whipping, which he recommended be carried out by the Aboriginal relatives of the offender, and affected ‘in the sight of the assembled Natives’. For other light crimes, the Government Resident was effectively authorised to determine any ‘such other punishment as you may see fit to award’.8

  Yet the discretionary powers of the Government Resident at Port Lincoln were inadequate to the crisis to come. In the late summer of 1842 Aboriginal hostility to settlement in the district began to increase. The Government Resident Dr Harvey described the escalating violence in his report dated 8 March 1842. On Monday 14 February there was an attempt to plunder Samuel White’s hut. On 20 February about 30 Aborigines endeavoured to steal sheep from the station and threw spears at his shepherd; two constables were sent to his station but despite their presence Aboriginal people still ‘shewed every disposition to be hostile’. On 25 February an attempt was made to rob Charles Dutton’s station and one of his fences was set alight.9 According to the Lutheran missionary Reverend Clamor Schurmann, who knew the local people and language, the aggressors were men of the Battara tribe who occupied the inland hills and valleys.

  The first settler deaths since Frank Hawson died happened in March, when pastoralist John Brown and his hutkeeper Lovelock were killed on Brown’s station. Lovelock was speared by Morldalta in the course of robbing his hut, and Brown was speared because he had earlier beaten Ngarbi with the butt end of his rifle.10 Charles Dutton wrote to the Register at the end of March detailing the spiralling violence and noting that, within days of the murders of Brown and Lovelock, his own station had been attacked again.11 Writing in his journal on 5 March, the Government Resident reported the sense of agitation in the district:

  In consequence of these depredations, Messrs White had abandoned his second station. The parties in the bush – with the exception of Mr Dutton, who is least protected of any, and 30 miles off – are very much alarmed and are sending into town, repeatedly, for men to come out on hire at high wages, merely to protect them; but no one can be found to go.12

  Shortly afterwards, the station of police sergeant McEllister was attacked by a party of 80 Aboriginal men, forcing his workers to flee.13 The attacks were not only in quick succession but were also reasonably widespread. The Aboriginal people inland of Port Lincoln, the Government Resident worried, were showing ‘altogether a strong unfriendly feeling’.14

  The townspeople petitioned the Governor for immediate aid. ‘The depredations and outrages’, they wrote, were now of ‘such magnitude’ as to make them fear ‘for the general safety of life and property’. They were afraid that the township itself might be attacked and ‘each dwelling might be destroyed in detail’. Their petition included a list of all the men resident in the district, and all they had by way of arms and ammunition. Feeling insufficiently armed for the threat facing them, they requested that a detachment of the military be sent to their aid, and that additional arms and ammunition be dispatched to them from the government store.15 Governor Grey replied that because of the serious constraints on government spending he was unable to assist them; besides which, the military detachment was so small as to be barely adequate for the region around Adelaide.

  The sense of crisis soon worsened. On 29 March, James Rolles Biddle’s Long Pond station not far from the Port Lincoln settlement was attacked. Under a barrage of spears the four people resident at the station retreated into their hut. They fired upon their attackers, killing two, but were eventually overpowered. James Biddle, Elizabeth Stubbs and James Fastings were all killed, while Elizabeth’s husband, James, who was left for dead, regained conscious after the attackers had left and was able to drag the body of his wife and companions from the hut that had been set alight.16 According to Schurmann, who spoke with Stubbs after the attack, a number of their weapons had jammed, eventually rendering them defenceless. Biddle had nearly a dozen spear wounds, Fastings twenty three, while Elizabeth Stubbs was killed with a pitchfork by Ngarbi while she tried to hide under the bed. ‘Little Jemmy’, as she knew him, was a young man already implicated in the murder of Brown.17

  To a settlement already alarmed, the attack on the Long Pond station produced an atmosphere of panic. The new Government Resident, Charles Driver, immediately raised a party of seven armed and mounted men to pursue the attackers.18 They were accompanied by Reverend Schurmann and half a dozen ‘friendly blacks’ as guides. They set out on 2 April, riding northwest until they came upon an Aboriginal camp that Schurmann believed to contain the party that attacked Biddle’s station. As they approached the Aborigines ‘fled in all directions,’ leaving only four men and a woman behind. In his account of what happened next, Schurmann writes:

  Driver ordered Stewart to shoot the native nearest to us. He repeatedly called: ‘Knock him over’. I asked Driver why he ordered the man shot when he was unarmed and could have been taken prisoner. He said that he didn’t want prisoners, since they were useless. Shots were fired at three of the fleeing natives, but none fell. However, our trackers told us that Nulta and Mulya were wounded. On the top of the hill we found a woman who was in advanced stages of pregnancy, trying to hide in the hollow of a tree, and I asked the Sergeant if he was going to shoot her.19

  Driver’s party collected up the stolen property found in the camp and, after burning all the Aboriginal belongings, they returned to town.

  Charles Driver perceived a systematic plan in the Aboriginal attacks. In less than a month, five settlers had been killed and attempts made on the lives of others. These murders, he reported to the Governor, ‘originate in no particular feeling of ill will towards the parties but are a natural termination of the game that has been playing the last year and a half’. So secure were the attackers that even after the attack on Biddle’s station, ‘they were forming a sort of winter’s encampment within 3 miles of the scene of violence’. Port Lincoln had descended into a state of ‘general panic’. The settlers, wrote Driver, ‘are excessively alarmed and have all flocked into Town with their families; agricultural operations ‘are suspended’; it was becoming difficult to retain employees at stations, even with wages ‘more than quadrupled to make or persuade them to remain at all’; ‘All the cattle stations are deserted and the Cattle running wild in the bush’. He requested that an ‘efficient force be speedily placed at my disposal for a short period to enable us to make an example of the murderers and leave a wholesome impression on the minds of the natives generally’.20

  The 96th Regiment

  This time, Govern
or Grey bowed to his petitioners’ request and ordered Lieutenant Hugonin and fifteen men of the 96th Regiment to proceed without delay to Port Lincoln ‘with a view of affording protection to the settlers, and aiding the civil power’.21 Hugonin was made a Commissioner of the Peace and magistrate, to underline the civil role his force would play and to allow him control of the police force in the district. In recognition of his rank he was also assigned a police officer to act as his orderly. His instructions were to capture the Aborigines ‘concerned in the late outrages’, if necessary to ‘apprehend all natives against whom fair ground of suspicion may lie’, and to detain them until sufficient evidence ‘can be procured against them’. The Governor suggested that he base himself at Biddle’s station, endeavour to secure horses from the local settlers ‘to mount the force under your command’, and to patrol the neighbourhood. It was again stressed that his task ‘consists solely in apprehending the natives … not in punishing them’; nonetheless they were to be ‘captured at all risks’ and if challenged ‘you must use force to oppose force’.22 Reverend Clamour Schurmann later recalled a somewhat blunter version of those instructions. Hugonin told him that he had been ordered to ‘take the whole of the Port Lincoln natives either dead or alive without discrimination’.23