Out of the Silence

by Robert Foster

  The gradual migration of Europeans … from the country north of this has impressed the Aborigines with a strong belief in the truth of a philosophy they profess to have received from their old men to the effect that the white men would leave their country as suddenly as they entered it …38

  The Aborigines, he wrote, were boasting that ‘the time would come when they would retake possession of their country and drive away the last of the white fellows’.39 In a letter to the Observer in February 1852, a settler wrote that with the ‘adult male population rapidly draining away; town, hamlets, farms, and out stations almost deprived of protection and the savages openly exulting in the desolation – may not their cry soon be “up and be doing?”’40 Yet despite these fears, the most significant consequence of the labour exodus was to create a demand for Aboriginal labour. Settlers who only a few years before had been driving Aboriginal people off their pastoral stations were now offering them rations to work as shepherds. Protectors’ reports throughout the 1850s frequently noted the importance of Aboriginal labour. Of the northern districts in 1854, Sub-Protector Minchin wrote:

  It is well known by the whites, that such blacks as are employed, and receive sufficient food and clothing, are not only invaluable for their services, but indispensable at present: the work on many stations being chiefly carried out by the natives, and to a great extent among the sheep farmers.41

  In the south east in the same year it was reported that most of the shepherding was being done by Aboriginal people. As the disruption caused by the gold rushes began to subside and white labourers resumed their places, the demand for Aboriginal labour declined. Yet a beach-head of sorts had been made: it was realised that Aboriginal people could be a valuable source of labour in the pastoral industry.

  By 1851, when the conditions of pastoral leases clarified Aboriginal rights of access to land, the worst of the covert violence against Aboriginal people had significantly passed in the pastoral country south of Goyder’s line. In retrospect, this was perhaps due more to the evolving pattern of frontier relationships than to government intervention. Although colonial authorities had attempted to respond to violence on the frontiers of settlement with administrative innovations, such as the systematic distribution of rations and the establishment of a dedicated Native Police force, there was little sign that these measures had a significant effect either in diminishing Aboriginal attacks on settlers’ stock and property in times of want, or in checking settlers’ unlawful acts of punitive violence against Aboriginal people. Rather, the reduction of violence is more likely to be explained by the coincidence between the gradual establishment of a colonial infrastructure in the colony’s more southern pastoral districts and, with the exodus to the gold fields, the new demand for Aboriginal labour.

  Nonetheless, by the early 1850s, the authorities may well have felt some confidence that the frontiers of settlement had become largely ‘pacified’. The northern districts, however, were yet to expand with settlers seeking land. As these districts opened up, the same sequence of conflict would begin afresh which governmental interventions seemed powerless to prevent. Underlying this cyclical pattern of the frontier was the problem, again, that the rule of law proved inadequate to the task either of preventing Aboriginal resistance to occupation of their lands, or of protecting them as British subjects. As experience of the southern frontiers had demonstrated, and as the frontiers opening to the north would repeat over the coming decades, the legal status of Aboriginal people was defined by what they were expected to become, rather than what they were. Aboriginal people were effectively ‘provisional’ British subjects, and they had to be policed into subjecthood.

  Chapter 7

  ‘THESE WAR-LIKE PREPARATIONS’: THE MOUNTED POLICE AND THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE

  Travelling north

  George Goyder was appointed Surveyor-General in 1861, when the colony was entering a terrible drought that would last much of that decade. During the 1860s, Goyder mapped the line separating the drought-ravaged country from the region with reliable rainfalls; its ragged boundary, he found, stretched from Mount Remarkable in the north to Streaky Bay in the west. The importance of his discovery lay not in plotting the southern limits of a transitory drought, but in establishing that there was a more abiding boundary between land fit for agriculture and land ‘only fit for pastoral purposes’ – its marker was saltbush.1 The character of the country beyond Goyder’s Line determined a type of settlement that would shape the nature of relations between Aboriginal people and Europeans in the decades to follow. The carrying capacity of the land north of Goyder’s Line required Europeans to establish significantly larger runs than were characteristic of the more temperate southern districts. For Aboriginal people, at least in less drought-affected years, this meant more room to manoeuvre as European settlement spread. But in times of drought, conflict amplified as the two communities competed for scarce and diminishing resources. These conditions produced a frontier that was more permeable, and a phase of conflict that was longer-lived, than anywhere else in the colony.

  In the early 1850s, the fledging pastoral sector extending into the north was struggling to establish itself in the face of the exodus to the Victorian goldfields. Labour was hard to attract, and hard to keep. Police numbers thinned as troopers resigned the force to try their luck at the diggings. Until 1856, Melrose in the southern Flinders Ranges remained the most northerly police post, while settlement moved yet further north. The northern stations were sprawling and sparsely scattered, and their owners complained regularly to the government about the need for more police to protect them against Aboriginal attack. At the same time, the dearth of police meant that some settlers were able to pursue a sense of frontier justice in their own way.

  In 1851 brothers Thomas and Robert Brown were establishing their sheep run near Mount Arden. This was prime country on the edge of Goyder’s line, 70 kilometres north of the Mount Remarkable Police Station. The family had established a productive property south of Adelaide, and the expansion of settlement into country to the north provided an opportunity for the sons to strike out on their own. The seasons had been good and the stock was flourishing, but the labour shortage on the land produced by the goldrush continued to be felt. The parents sent their other two sons – John, their eldest, and 17 year-old James, their youngest – to help out. Less than three months later, on 19 September 1852, James Brown was killed by Aborigines and his sheep taken. His body had been ritually mutilated, his genitals cut off and stuffed into his mouth, suggestive of payback for a sexual crime that he or his companions may have committed against an Aboriginal woman.

  Neighbouring settlers responded to James’ murder decisively. Three separate parties comprising nearly twenty ‘well equipped men’ were formed to pursue the suspects and recover the stolen sheep. PC Phillips, the only policeman available in the district, accompanied one of the parties.2 On their third day out, having travelled 80 or 90 kilometres, they found the missing sheep in the hills near Lake Torrens. Afterwards, PC Phillips reported that they encountered four Aboriginal men and two boys hiding near the sheep, who pelted the Europeans with stones, calling out ‘blackfellows got no butter white fellow plenty butter. Only one white fellow tumble down’. In his deposition of what occurred next, PC Phillips claimed that he called upon the men to put down their spears and talk, but they began making threats. The settler party began firing, and two Aboriginal men were shot. In a second round of firing, the two others were killed. Benjamin Raglass, who was amongst those in the punitive party, claimed in his deposition that in the absence of sufficient police strength in the district, the Aborigines had become ‘more daring’. When they attempted to retrieve the sheep, he stated, they were met with spears and stones, and had to retreat because their only firearms were a brace of pistols. Of the depositions relating to the settler party’s actions on this day, none were signed.

  In later years, Thomas Brown left a written account of the punitive expedition against the Aborig
ines in the wake of his youngest brother’s death. ‘Almost before the first shovel full of earth had been put upon the grave’, he relates, ‘every man was in the saddle’ ready to pursue the murderers. As the party set out, an ‘old hand’ called out, ‘The government can’t hang you for what you’re going to do’. When their party caught up with the Aboriginal camp, Brown writes, the Aborigines tried to escape into the mulga scrub. A call was raised to ‘“Cut them off who can!”’, and the men on the best horses rode to the crest of the hill, cutting off the Aboriginal men ‘who lagged behind to the last to cover the retreat of the women and children’. The results of that day, Brown writes, ‘need no telling’, though he describes the ‘report and ping of the passing bullets’ from the rifles on the rocks. He does not specify any number of Aboriginal deaths or injuries; only that they received a ‘severe but necessary lesson’. ‘I feel quite clear,’ he concludes, ‘that we only fulfilled God’s command that “Whosoever shall shed man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed”. I can only say that in this case we carried out God’s decree and I can further declare and swear that not one woman or child was injured’.3

  What of the police constable who took part in this expedition? In spite of the legal status of Aboriginal people as British subjects, the role of police on the pastoral frontier was implicitly understood to be one of support for the settler. When the police rode together with aggrieved settlers into an Aboriginal camp, the events that might follow joined police and settlers in a sometimes difficult, and sometimes unholy, communion. In his account of the retaliatory raid in the wake of James’ death, Thomas Brown’s description of chasing down the Aboriginal camp casts doubt on PC Phillips’ report that the party had only shot four Aboriginal men in self-defence. Yet Brown had felt confident enough to say that ‘in all we did there was no concealment or action outside the law’ because a mounted constable was present amongst them.

  Major Warburton and the Mounted Police

  On this northern frontier, as on the colony’s earlier frontiers, entrepreneurial settlers set out first to test the capacity of the land, and police presence followed. From the 1850s a style of frontier policing evolved that was considered suitable to the isolated districts of new European settlement, and at its heart were the Mounted Police. As new pastoral frontiers opened up and Aboriginal attacks on remote settlers began, the government typically responded by posting to the region a pair of Mounted Constables, usually assisted by an Aboriginal tracker. On receiving a report of Aboriginal aggression, such as the driving off of sheep or attacks upon a settler, the Mounted Police would travel to the station and, with the assistance of station workers, set off to track down the alleged offenders. In the vast region of the north, the period of most intense conflict between Aboriginal people and settlers lasted from the early 1850s until the end of the 1860s; this period coincided with the term of the colony’s longest serving Police Commissioner, Major Peter Egerton Warburton.

  Appointed in 1853 and Commissioner of Police until 1867, Warburton had previously served in the British army in India, and he brought a distinct military flavour to the organisation of the police and the management of the frontier. He introduced reforms that would improve morale and make police service a more attractive vocation. Under his watch police numbers almost doubled and new administrative districts were created. New uniforms were introduced, regarded as more appropriate to the climate. On the grounds that the standard issue muskets and pistols were ‘clumsy antiquated articles’, he was given authority to purchase new carbines and revolvers – weapons that were lighter, more accurate and considerably more deadly. He introduced new ranks within the force, and encouraged men to seek promotion. His attitude to the status of the Mounted Police, who were now referred to as ‘troopers’, is a good indicator of his military thinking. In an 1856 report he expressed the view that a mounted officer’s ‘clothing and equipment should plainly show that he was a cavalry soldier’, and that the Mounted Police force as a whole should be regarded as a ‘military body’.4 One day, he speculated, it might form the basis of a national army.

  With regard to the role of the Mounted Police in dealing with Aboriginal people, Warburton’s surprisingly frank and sometimes bellicose letters and reports reveal the fine line he walked in trying to reconcile Aboriginal people’s legal status as British subjects with the realities of frontier warfare. Writing in 1855 with reference to the recent violence in the Port Lincoln district, Warburton observed that should the Aborigines

  show any disposition to renew their atrocities it will be both wise and merciful, I think, to put them down with a strong hand. The technicalities of British law are unsuitable to such savages, and summary justice should be dealt on the spot to those who are convicted of murder. I would not advocate the spilling of blood on account of a few sheep or bags of flour stolen; but where life has been taken, those who do not know its value should be made to feel and see how sacred we hold it.5

  Although the official view was always that the law would protect Aboriginal people as equally as Europeans, the primary role of the Mounted Police was undoubtedly to provide protection to settlers in the outlying regions. By the mid-1850s, new stations were being established in the central Flinders Ranges, in the vicinity of Beltana and Blinman, and Warburton was of the view that police protection should be provided to them. When William Borthwick wrote to the Commissioner in 1856 to request a small party of police to reside on his new run, considering an early application the ‘best and safest’ course to follow,6 Warburton was keen to comply. ‘I am most anxious to meet Mr Borthwick’s wishes,’ he wrote to Inspector Henry Holroyd. ‘I hope you will so arrange the distribution of the force under your orders as to leave one Trooper available for this duty’. The implication that Mounted Police might serve almost as a sort of private security force for individual stations was suggested by his recommendation to the Chief Secretary that, if possible, all advanced posts of settlement should receive police protection in the economic interests of the colony: ‘the purchasers of land are constantly pushing the stockowners outside the protected lines, and as the welfare of the Province is so closely connected with the prosperity of the latter class, policy alone might render it proper to embrace them all within Police ranges’.7

  Certainly, Warburton’s approach to the problems of Aboriginal resistance to European occupation in the northern districts was indicative of a culture of frontier policing which did not easily regard Aboriginal people as equal British subjects deserving of protection. In fact, the primary consequence of maintaining the official view that Aboriginal people were British subjects was that their attacks on settlers’ property would always be treated as ‘criminal’ rather than political activity. In 1856, a party of Aborigines killed James Mitchell, a shepherd working at an outstation of Baker’s Angipena property. The Mounted Police went in pursuit of the alleged murders and in late December captured Putaba Bob, one of the alleged ringleaders, after severely wounding him. The Police transported the prisoner to Mount Remarkable where he died of his wounds. The Bishop of Adelaide, when on a missionary tour of the North, heard details of this event and wrote to the press complaining of Putaba Bob’s treatment: he claimed that despite ‘receiving two pistol-shots and three swords cuts’, which were left ‘undressed and fly-blown’, he was marched in chains 240 kilometres south to Melrose where ‘death released the poor wretch from his misery’.8 Warburton responded to the Bishop’s criticism with outrage. In a letter forwarded to the press, he informed the Bishop that the ‘poor wretch’ was an ‘atrocious ruthless ruffian; he had murdered an Englishman, and would have killed two police officers had they not been armed’. The police, he added, required fortitude in their role; he often found himself censuring officers for being too ‘soft-hearted’.9

  In 1858, the Attorney-General initiated an inquiry into police use of deadly force after two Aboriginal men had been shot and killed in response to an attack on John Jacob’s station at Mount Serle in June. Aboriginal men had come to th
e shepherd’s hut and thrown stones at the three stockmen there. While rock throwing may seem trivial, it was commonly used in the region of the Flinders Ranges where the landscape was strewn with rocks that had been weathered away from the surrounding ranges; some settlers referred to it as the ‘stone country’. The Aborigines had retreated after being fired upon, but concerned that they would return one of the stockmen was despatched to a nearby station to get help. While he was away, the attackers returned, rushing the hut and spearing both of the men before throwing a firestick onto the thatched roof. The hut burned down, but the men survived their wounds and managed to escape and report the attack. Corporal Burtt, Police Trooper Simpson, an Aboriginal tracker and four station workers went in search of the assailants, eventually tracking them to Arkaroola Creek. In his report, Corporal Burtt stated that he called upon them to stand, but when they responded with more rock throwing, the Europeans fired upon them, killing two men. Receiving this report, the Attorney-General observed that such cases ‘must be expected from time to time to occur in the remote districts’, but he nonetheless questioned the necessity of using deadly force.10

  Major Warburton was asked for a copy of the instructions he had issued to police in September 1857 regarding the use of ‘deadly force’. Those instructions are absent from the Commissioner of Police’s General Order books and their wording unrecoverable; but the Chief Secretary’s response made it clear that they were overly military in intent, and legally unacceptable. The police, he wrote, ‘were not an army to be used against enemies who are to be put out of the way, or deprived of the power of resistance’; they were a ‘Civil Body’, ‘employed to preserve the peace by preventing violence, when possible, and to protect life & property by such means as may secure the legal punishment of offenders’: