by Mark Mckenna
After two days’ travelling, McRae’s land party met with Withnell’s cutter at Hearson’s Cove on the south-east edge of Murujuga. Neither party had sighted any of the men they were seeking. After agreeing to meet again at King Bay on the opposite side of the peninsula the following day, McRae’s Aboriginal guide noticed ‘a number of native tracks leading to the west’ and they headed off in quick pursuit. At nightfall, they spotted fires on the beach near the southern side of King Bay. McRae decided to make camp and surprise the ‘natives’ early the following morning, assuming without any evidence that this group was ‘likely to contain many of the men [he] wanted’. They started ‘before daylight’ on the seventeenth and soon came upon their prey. ‘They were camped on a clear sandy beach.’ But before they could surround their quarry, the men bolted into the mangroves and hills. Giving chase, McRae managed to ‘cut some of them off’ but ‘they would not stop to be arrested’. At this point, McRae claimed that he had ‘no alternative but to fire upon them’. ‘One of the murderers’ was shot dead, and ‘several others wounded’. It was no good, he insisted, allowing them to ‘escape without a lesson’ because this would only lead to ‘further outrages against the settlers’. McRae did not state exactly how many of the ‘wounded’ died. But every shot he and his men fired into the backs of those trying to escape was designed to instil fear into the hearts of Aboriginal people. Capturing those responsible for Griffis’s death was only part of the equation. Their motives were far more basic: revenge, intimidation and silencing ‘the natives’.27
In the blazing sun, McRae continued hunting the escapees for the next few hours, scrambling ‘over the high rocky hills’ in a ‘fruitless’ search. Every time he caught sight of someone, they ‘just as quickly disappeared into the rocks’. He soon gave up and returned to his camp, claiming to have found ‘a Crimean shirt and hat belonging to Griffis [and] Peter’s red cap’ in the Yaburara’s possession. Later the next day he learnt that some of the ‘natives’ had gone north towards Flying Foam Passage, the narrow stretch of water between Dolphin and Angel islands. Withnell had returned from there to King Bay and told him that he had captured two men the previous evening, one of whom, ‘Mulligang’, was allegedly one of the murderers. But having ‘no chains or handcuffs’ (a curious omission for ‘special constables’ apparently appointed to apprehend the murderers) he was unable to stop them from slipping overboard. On the morning of the eighteenth, the two men swam ashore to an island only ‘a short distance off’ and hid in the mangroves. Withnell ‘gave orders to fire upon them’ because, as he argued later, if he had attempted to ‘retake them, they would probably have escaped’.
Beach on the east coast of Angel Island, Flying Foam Passage, 2015
The next morning Withnell conveyed McRae’s party to Dolphin Island where they ‘found the natives had crossed to some of the islands in Flying Foam harbour’. Catching sight of several men ‘crossing the bay in canoes’, they gave ‘chase’ in a small boat, shooting one man dead. The others managed to land on a nearby island. McRae could see them ‘standing on the shore’ and as they ‘made for the mangroves’ he ordered his men to fire. His official report stated simply that ‘several were shot or wounded’. Like Withnell, he claimed that it was impossible to capture them and that he therefore had little choice but to shoot them. Who he was shooting did not appear to matter. The object was to shoot as many of the Yaburara as possible.
On the twentieth, Withnell’s party went ashore on one of the islands ‘to the north of Flying Foam harbour’, most probably Angel Island or Gidley Island, where they ‘came upon a native camp’. The country was ‘rugged’ and as the Yaburara were ‘armed’, Withnell and his men ‘had a sharp skirmish with them’ and only narrowly escaped being speared. He reported that ‘none of them were taken’ but failed to mention how many were shot. For the next two days both parties continued searching without managing to take any prisoners. By 22 February, both McRae and Withnell had returned to Roebourne and Cossack. McRae thanked the members of the expedition for the ‘performance of their duties’ on such an ‘unpleasant trip’ and then gave Sholl a firsthand account of their expedition. On paper, Sholl interpreted their efforts as something of a triumph, telling the Colonial Secretary five days later that as a result, the ‘loss of life amongst the isolated whites has been prevented, the well disposed natives confirmed in their amity towards us, the wavering made steadfast, the guilty terrified, and the old feeling of security revived amongst the whole white population’. Despite the fact that not one of the guilty had been brought back to Roebourne, Sholl still saw the expedition as a resounding success, a conclusion that suggests his intention was always to demonstrate the settlers’ power over Aboriginal people by punishing them indiscriminately and spreading terror. Only then would ‘the old feeling of security’ among the settlers return. It also seems extraordinary that Sholl could claim such extensive impact for the expedition from the mere handful of encounters he mentions in his official report. Far more likely is that his reports omitted much of the ‘unpleasant’ detail and that many more Yaburara were killed than he had claimed. His public statements differed markedly from his private accounts. As he confided to his sister, he had led a ‘strong party to go out and give them fitz … [and] a great many were lost’. In any case, Sholl had not yet finished the ‘lesson’ he was teaching.28
Over the next three months, the search for the murderers and thieves continued. On 18 March, Sholl despatched another party, which resulted in the shooting of at least three more men. In May, two others who were allegedly involved in Griffis’s murder were arrested and sent to Rottnest Island gaol for twelve years. Again, it is possible that many more Yaburara were shot during these confrontations. By June 1868, Sholl was ‘glad’ to inform his superiors that ‘the natives [had] been quiet’ since he last wrote.29 Estimates of how many Aboriginal people were killed between February and June 1868 would be forever disputed. Official accounts placed the number at less than ten. But only one year later, when the settler William Taylor wrote to the Colonial Secretary critical of the treatment of Aboriginal people in the north-west, he referred to the manner in which Sholl’s expedition ‘murdered the blacks … committing the most cowardly and diabolical acts both on innocent women and children’. Taylor also alleged that Griffis was murdered because he had abducted Aboriginal women, an allegation that would become the cornerstone of the surviving Aboriginal oral history relating to the massacre that was recorded in the late twentieth century. Ngarluma elders spoke of Griffis ‘raping’ Yaburara women:
Lots of Yaburara people [at Murujuga] long time ago. This policeman took a young girl into the bush, with a rifle. The old fella (the girl’s husband) he got a spear in his hand, he put the spear right through the policeman’s chest. The other police all got their guns, went out there, got all the Yaburara up, got them all together, shot them down. Must be 30, 40 people killed.30
While definitive evidence of the numbers killed will never be found, the circumstantial evidence of frontier language and settler attitudes towards Aboriginal people at the time is far more conclusive. Only three years before he led the expedition to avenge Griffis’s death, Alexander McRae was in Roebuck Bay, just south of Broome, having already been forced out of Camden Harbour by the Worora. ‘The niggers are a savage, determined race of people,’ he told his sister in August 1865, ‘the worst that have been met with on this side of the continent. A good many have been shot, but it does not seem to have had the desired effect’. Three months later he complained to her again: ‘the natives are still very troublesome although a great many of them have been shot’.31 McRae was no stranger to a culture in which Aboriginal people were shot at first sight. Nor was his approach to frontier conflict shaped exclusively by his experience in the northwest. When the results of his expedition were reported in his home district in Victoria, the local paper noted proudly that the son of a local squatter and his men had ‘shot several of the murderers’ before adding in the next sentence: �
��The new country is, however, progressing favourably, copious rainfalls have fallen, and the increase of lambs has been 100 per cent’.32 Despite the fact that the lives of Aboriginal people were protected equally under the law, many settlers viewed them as subhuman, a mentality that was certainly not exclusive to the ‘lower orders’ of society. Sholl’s well-read son Trevarton, who assisted his father in administrative matters at Roebourne from 1865 and spent his ‘fearfully hot’ days waited on by his ‘nigger servant’ while reading Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen and Byron, remarked casually after his return from a 7-week expedition south to Exmouth Gulf: ‘Saw any amount of niggers, obliged to pepper one lot, others friendly’. Once British settlers had a stake in the land, they would not tolerate interference. The clear instructions given to Charles Nairn by the investor Walter Padbury left no doubt as to how he should deal with ‘troublesome’ natives: ‘you must shoot at them’. The settlers, he told Nairn, ‘must fight and subdue the natives’ in order to provide greater ‘security to property’.33 A similar approach was adopted at sea.
Although legislation was passed in the 1870s to regulate the employment of Aboriginal people in the pearling industry, it was constantly dismissed on the distant ground of the frontier. As pearling began in earnest in the late 1860s, disobedient Aboriginal divers were sometimes shot in the water as they tried to swim away. In August 1868, in the wake of the shootings at Murujuga and Flying Foam Passage, John Watson was one of the main witnesses in the trial of fellow pearler Robert Rowland, charged with murdering three Aboriginal divers near Port Hedland. Rowland, who had already spent time in prison for attempted murder, had also been a member of Withnell’s punitive expedition. Watson described how he saw ‘three natives’ accused of trying to strangle a white man taken on board a pearling vessel, the Little Eastern. ‘Six or seven white men’ surrounded them on deck. As Watson’s boat came close by he heard someone shout: ‘We will shoot them’. The ‘master’ of the Little Eastern insisted that he would have ‘no bloodshed’ on his vessel, to which another of the pearlers replied: ‘I’ll take them on board my own boat and shoot them’. Watson tried unsuccessfully to persuade the men ‘not to shoot the natives’. One of the prisoners, a ‘young man’, his face ‘marked all over with smallpox’, was then forced into the water after which several of the pearlers took their shotguns and fired at him repeatedly, ‘perhaps twenty shots’. ‘We have settled him’, one of them declared. The same was done to the next man. Watson saw his body rising to the surface, ‘blood and bubbles coming out of his mouth’. He left before the third ‘native’ was dealt with.34
In the late 1860s, ‘shooting natives’ was standard practice on the north-west frontier. Yet there was also a fierce debate within settler society regarding the morality and justice of such brutality. As Watson tried to persuade the pearlers not to shoot their captives, so Charles Nairn tried in vain to stop the shooting of Aboriginal people near Gregory River in 1863.35 It was little different on the other side of the frontier. Aboriginal people debated whether they should kill white settlers, especially in cases such as the murder of Griffis, because they knew that to do so would result in massive retaliation. Watson’s depiction of the pearlers also highlights the isolation of frontier life and the tendency of settlers to see their communities as threatened and vulnerable, forced by the vast distances that separated them from ‘civilised society’ and for their own ‘protection’ to take the law into their own hands. Many pastoralists and pearlers in the north-west, including experienced administrators such as Sholl, believed that it was their right and duty to do whatever it took to secure their foothold on the land. Burying the mutilated bodies of law officers such as Griffis only fuelled their anger and further steeled their resolve to assert their authority.
Until recently it was thought that allegations of a massacre at Murujuga in early 1868 did not surface until the late nineteenth century. But during the same court case held in Perth in August 1868, in which Watson gave evidence, the defendant’s counsel, Parker, attempted to excuse his client’s actions by referring to the events at Murujuga and Flying Foam Passage months earlier. At that time, ‘there was a kind of war between the whites and the natives’, Parker proclaimed, ‘referring to the massacres which had taken place near Roebourne’. This evidence is crucial because it reveals that only six months after Sholl’s expedition, the terms ‘war’ and ‘massacre’ were used in court to describe what happened at Murujuga. It also confirms that there were multiple ‘massacres’, not just the one that occurred at King Bay on 18 February. Twelve months later, even Sholl implied that the cost to the Yaburara had proved devastating. When two of the alleged murderers came to Roebourne of their own accord in February 1869, Sholl granted them an amnesty because, he said, ‘the natives have received a severe lesson and much blood has been spilt’.36
In the decades before responsible government was granted to Western Australia in 1890 and the state belatedly joined the Australian Federation in 1901, the story of the ‘Flying Foam Massacre’ lay at the heart of a fiercely divisive debate over the treatment of the state’s Indigenous population in the north-west. From the 1870s to 1890s, as pearlers gradually combed the inland areas to capture more and more divers—a practice known then as ‘blackbirding’ or ‘nigger hunting’—allegations of forced labour, chain gangs, incarceration, severe beatings, stockwhip floggings, shootings and an ‘unquestionable system of slavery’ abounded. Letters to the Colonial Secretary in London (where slavery had been abolished in 1833), written in the hope that the British government would be more likely to protect Aboriginal people than their representatives in Perth, testified to the most horrific cruelties. In one instance, in 1878, Lionel Gould claimed to have witnessed the flogging of Aboriginal women for failing to harvest sufficient pearl shells. When one of the women working on De Grey station attempted to ‘steal’ pearls, the station owner boasted to Gould: ‘I made a grab and caught her by the hair and flogged her till she pissed and shit herself’. Letters and articles published in the Perth press by those willing to speak honestly about the shameful treatment of Aboriginal people in the north-west were loudly denounced by the city’s establishment and those who had once lived in the region.37
In 1886, the divisions between the humanitarians who were convinced the colony had lost all sense of morality and those who defended the settlers’ ‘stern justice’ came to a head when the Anglican missionary Thomas Gribble published Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land, in which he detailed countless examples of settler brutality. Gribble would eventually be run out of town, penniless after losing a libel case and disowned by many in the church hierarchy in Perth, the government and conservative press. But his courage and that of many others resulted in the British government refusing to cede responsibility for Aboriginal affairs to the new colonial government in 1890. In a controversy that exposed the deep fear in Western Australian society that the colony had been established illegitimately, the Flying Foam Massacre stood as a flashpoint of settler anxiety.
Gribble had quoted the evidence of the former Roebourne resident David Carly, who stated categorically that it was ‘very well known around Nickol Bay and Flying Foam Passage that in one day there were quite sixty natives, men, women and children shot dead’. He claimed to have been shown the ‘skulls of 15 who were shot dead’, including three children.38 The controversy that erupted in the wake of these allegations simmered for almost a decade, with claims surfacing in late 1892 that up to 150 Yaburara ‘were massacred in cold blood’.39 Twenty-five years after Sholl authorised the punitive expedition from Roebourne, debate still raged as to how many Aboriginal people had been killed. Many in Perth were so appalled by the stories that trickled down from the north-west they would gladly have cut the region free. But in the pages of the Perth papers, former pastoralists of the north, incensed by the suggestion that they had presided over gross injustice, vehemently denied allegations of a ‘massacre’ and blamed atrocities on the ‘worst class of pearlers’.40 The victims, apparently, were
the settlers, not the Yaburara.
As Charles Harper, newspaper editor, politician, one-time pearler, pastoralist and business partner of Alexander McRae, wrote to The West Australian in November 1892: ‘remember the Foam Passage massacre. Yes, I remember the time well. On riding into Roebourne in the early part of 1868 I found the few people there in a most excited and nervous state, armed men patrolling the town at night, and women too terrified to sleep’. Harper admitted that ‘some [blacks] were shot’ but ‘how many was never exactly known, but it was doubtful’, he thought, ‘that more than 10 were killed’. He then claimed that after the shooting, ‘a little child was found accidentally wounded in the thigh, the wound was bound up, and it was taken off to the boat and tended with care, though it ultimately succumbed’. Each time an irate pastoralist sought to defend Sholl’s party they revealed (or invented) previously unknown detail in an attempt to justify what occurred. In the same letter, Harper also detailed other examples of frontier conflict in the north-west, admitting that one ‘severe engagement’, carried out not under the instructions of government but ‘the first law of nature—self preservation’ could indeed be classed as a ‘massacre’.41 But with regard to Flying Foam, he remained extremely defensive and protective of Alexander McRae’s reputation. Others, like the wealthy pastoralist of the north-west AR Richardson, a member of parliament who would soon become Western Australia’s Commissioner of Crown Lands, were more brazen:
The blacks, elated with victory, and like bloody hounds madly excited with a first taste of the white man’s blood, sent in a message to the little settlement [of Roebourne] that they now intended to serve all the rest of the white fellows in the same way, and drive them right out of the country … The settlers that were in … [Sholl’s] party were as justified in obeying orders as British soldiers when they shot at either Kaffirs, Zulus, Abyssinians or any other inferior race, and for which they are frequently decorated with medals … and their names sounded forth as heroes and brave soldiers, the pride of the nation … as to these silly allusions to the ‘settlers’ having taken away their country from the natives, I always thought the country was taken possession of in the name of the Queen, and that the Crown leased it to the settlers, taking payment of rent from them for the use of it. Please censure the ‘flag’ for taking the country and not the subjects who merely occupy it.42