From the Edge

by Mark Mckenna

  Specific reports detailed mass killings within one year of the miners’ arrival. In October 1874, after ‘the blacks’ had speared large numbers of horses near ‘Pine Creek’, ‘diggers’ were ‘apprehensive’ of further ‘raids’ and decided to act:

  22 diggers, well armed, mustered one evening and proceeded up the creek in quest of the blackfellows’ camp. After travelling nearly all night, their fires were at last sighted, and the avengers, dividing into two parties, and posting themselves conveniently for the work of dispersion, waited patiently for the dawn. When at last day broke, something like 200 blacks were seen squatting about the fire. The white men soon made their presence known, and in a moment the yelling of the blacks, thus taken by surprise, was horrible. ***** They did not show fight but ran right in the direction where the second party, who had not yet shown themselves, were posted *****31

  Each asterisk spoke volumes about the law as practised on the ground of north Queensland’s frontier. The Cooktown Courier summed up the general policy towards Aboriginal people in 1878: ‘Putting in plain English this is what we Queenslanders do … we set the Native Police on [the Aboriginal inhabitants] to make them “quiet”. This is effected by massacring them indiscriminately’.32 The editor’s bald statement was partly an attempt to deny community responsibility. For as the same paper’s editorial acknowledged only one year earlier, the Native Police, comprised largely of Aboriginal men from southern Queensland, were not solely responsible for the killing on the Palmer: since the district was settled, it stated bluntly, ‘armed police have been waging continual war with the blacks and private individuals have been doing a good deal of shooting among them’.33 The Chinese, usually unarmed or carrying rudimentary weapons, were rarely, if ever, among them. While they were certainly involved in conflict—reports of Chinese being speared and killed were not uncommon—there is no evidence that they were involved in reprisal parties.34 Despite a government inquiry into the first allegations of ‘slaughter’ at Battle Camp in late 1873, the war against the Guugu Yimithirr continued unabated. It was fought on the goldfields by miners and police and also on the streets of Cooktown, where it was fought in words. Belligerent, shrill and often sensational editorials in the town’s newspapers regularly whipped up community anxiety about the ‘murderously hostile’ natives. It was in the editors’ interest to present themselves as the megaphone of the miners’ phobias about ‘the blacks’ and to champion their pleas for government and police ‘protection’. Sensational language mobilised fear and fuelled violence. And it reflected the deepest insecurities of the British: a handful of ‘savages’ could not hold their enterprise to ransom. After all, they were supposedly the superior race. The leaders of Cooktown opinion could see ‘no middle course’. In their eyes the choice was either ‘the abandonment of the country or the complete repression of these pests’.35

  The Guugu Yimithirr and the Guugu Yalandji fought tenaciously for their land. They were widely believed to be far more formidable fighters than Aboriginal people in the south. Reports from the front line emphasised their bravery, strategic cunning and skilful use of the country to launch raids and avoid their enemy, such as sending smoke signals ‘from a special wood’ or placing ‘small twigs … in various positions’ to warn of an impending attack.36 Despite the fact that the odds were stacked against them—they were outnumbered and faced large numbers of men armed with repeating rifles—they continued to fight valiantly. In 1876, after three years of the more belligerent whites ‘sending a rifle bullet after every blackfellow they saw’, their numbers (anywhere from 1500 to 2000 when the miners arrived) were reported as ‘greatly thinned’.37 Yet ‘in the unoccupied country’, they were thought to ‘hold their own’, and were still largely in control of all the country ‘right down to the north bank of the river estuary on which Cooktown [was] built’.38 The following year locals admitted ‘the blacks [had] been driven not quite six miles from the very town of Cooktown’ and remained ‘not a bit cowed’.39 By the 1880s, however, when the alluvial goldfields were already exhausted, the Guugu Yimithirr and their neighbours also faced pastoralists who had quickly claimed large swathes of land. In 1884, according to Hervey Fitzgerald, the Cooktown police magistrate, the graziers’ policy towards Aboriginal people was little different to that of the miners: ‘extermination’.40 News of these horrors travelled quickly to other colonies. In 1882, South Australian MP William J Sowden was travelling with a parliamentary party to the Northern Territory. He described what he was told about the north Queensland frontier with a candour that remains shocking today.

  Even now it is considered a joke all along the coast beyond Cooktown in many quarters to shoot down blackfellows by way of retaliation, and some men pride themselves on the ‘row of stiff-uns’ they have made in their time, and others talk pleasantly of ‘black-crow shooting’ … Oh! We Christianise the natives, we Europeans; we initiate them by baptism into the mysteries of religion, but the baptism too often is a baptism of blood.41

  Forced out of their traditional territories, often into the lands of other clans, which only created further animosity, their resources and livelihood taken from them or severely compromised (the bêche-de-mer trade saw men, women and children abducted and traded along the Cape York Peninsula coast), their women forcibly taken or traded for sex by miners and pastoralists of all nationalities in an overwhelmingly male-dominated society, Aboriginal people’s capacity to resist was severely weakened. By the mid-1880s, nearly all their watercourses had been occupied. It was around this time that reports emerged of ‘a great quantity of blacks going [into Cooktown] begging during the day’ and spending their nights on ‘the reserves on the north shore’ of the bay.42 Years of war had left them deeply scarred, as CH Tongue, a new arrival from Manchester in 1884, observed: ‘If they see anyone with a gun they keep far away from them and if you point one at them they will run as fast as their legs will carry them. They go from door to door calling out … [for] bread. They will eat anything that is thrown to them’.43 Depictions of Aboriginal people as fringe dwellers became more common. In 1885, curfews were put in place banning them from the town after dark (they would remain in place until the 1960s). In the same year, one Cooktown paper suggested they be ‘rounded’ up and kept by police in the ‘North Shore Reserve’ or on the mission at Cape Bedford. Only then, the editor argued, would ‘the town … be cleared of an intolerable nuisance and the demands of the fishing labour market met’.44 Concerned about the ongoing ‘problem’, Cooktown residents held an urgent meeting in 1889 to discuss measures to keep ‘the blacks out of town’. They were deemed by many residents to be ‘a disgrace to the town and the people in it’. Before the meeting adjourned, others argued that they had ‘more right’ in Cooktown ‘than the Chinese and many others who objected to them’. ‘We had taken their land’, one man told the meeting, ‘and the hunting grounds which supplied them with food, and now it was sought to prevent them from picking up our scraps’.45 But for every person who stood courageously in public to question the morality of their society’s callous indifference towards Aboriginal people, or who wrote eloquently in the Brisbane papers, describing the ‘treatment’ of ‘Aborigines’ as a ‘stupendous blunder’ and a ‘damning blot on the history of Australian colonization’, there were countless more who took the law into their own hands or remained silent onlookers.46 The Lutheran mission established in 1886 at Cape Bedford, north of Cooktown, arrived just in time to throw a mantle of protection over the Guugu Yimithirr and many other Aboriginal people throughout north Queensland who had survived the frontier wars. Noel Pearson’s grandfathers experienced both sides of the war’s aftermath. ‘Arrimi’, a ‘Kuku Warra’ man whose people had been ‘almost entirely annihilated’ in the 1870s, died ‘a fringe dweller on the outskirts of Cooktown’. Ngulunhtul, ‘also known as Charlie’, ‘was taken away as a ten-year-old’ to the mission at Cape Bedford. Placed with Aboriginal people from all over the Cape York Peninsula and as far away as central Queensland, he became �
�a Guugu Yimithirr-speaking Aborigine’.47

  Charlotte Street, Cooktown, circa 1890

  ____________

  To contemplate the overwhelming evidence of the brutality of the frontier that accompanied the Palmer River gold rush challenges our ability to understand what occurred. The newspaper language strips Aboriginal people of their humanity, reducing them to obstacles or ‘pests’, inferior beings who are merely acted upon. The reports of the killing, particularly ‘the mundanity and casual parsimony’ of the language, as Pearson has reflected, remain profoundly disturbing.48 Yet while the language clearly reflects the racial ideology of those who wrote the words, it disguises as much as it reveals, and it often seems difficult to reach the many encounters in which violence was not involved. Noel Loos, one of the first historians to grapple seriously with the brutality of the north Queensland frontier, estimated that almost twice as many people were reported killed by Aborigines in the Cooktown–Palmer district than any other mining field in the far north. While the toll of Aboriginal dead, he concluded, was far greater, he also argued that disease, alcohol, opium, displacement and the continued denial of Aboriginal people’s humanity under the guise of ‘protection’ (from 1897 in Queensland) were even more significant contributing factors than violence in explaining population decline.49 The thundering racism of the era, in which Aboriginal people were condemned to a future-less existence on the margins of settler society, continued the destruction of their society at the same time as it undoubtedly tended to hide the many examples of accommodation and cooperation that ensured their survival, such as working as stockmen and domestic servants. After the initial period of violent confrontation subsided, the two-sided confrontation presented by the Cooktown papers—an illusion in any case given the large number of Aboriginal policemen involved in the killing—became a far messier terrain. What began as the meeting of separate cultures gradually evolved into a murky entanglement in which the power relationship nonetheless remained starkly unequal, the unjust and inhumane policies of colonial and later state governments seeking to control every aspect of Aboriginal people’s lives. No matter how much our present-day sensibilities might wish to ‘move on’ from histories of violence and oppression, it remains a perpetual obligation to remember the way in which the land was conquered. By the late 1890s, the Guugu Yimithirr had been pushed off their traditional lands and suffered significant population loss, while further north, the language of war would continue for many years. In 1905, the Brisbane Telegraph carried a warning that ‘white residents’ from Cape York to the Jardine River would be ‘compelled’ to act against the ‘natives’ who were ‘showing signs of depredations and discontent’. In the midst of this long conflict and in its aftermath, Aboriginal people would never forget how they had been dispossessed.50

  In the Guugu Yimithirr’s remarks to Europeans that remain on the documentary record, and in their art and oral history, they stressed that their land and people had been violently taken from them. Paintings of Europeans on horseback and Native Police brandishing rifles can be found in at least seven remote rock art sites in the escarpment country above the Endeavour, Laura and Palmer rivers, where the Guugu Yimithirr and their neighbours had often sought refuge. Some images show Native Police depicted in the ‘horizontal … position’, reflecting the belief that if they were painted in this way they would soon lie down dead.51 Detailed illustration of the killing can also be found in unexpected sources. ‘Oscar’, an Aboriginal boy who had been stolen or traded from Cooktown in 1887 and sent to work on a pastoral station, left behind a disturbing 40-page sketchbook in which he drew Native Police shooting ‘Aborigines’, including ‘hanging them from trees’ or ‘executing them’ while they were tied up.52 Long after the most intense period of killing had subsided, Aboriginal men told missionaries their people had been ‘killed by tribal enemies, or they were shot by policemen or whites’.53 They also recalled particular events such as the massacre in 1879 at Dumin bigu (Indian Head), just north of Cooktown, in which twenty-four Aboriginal people were ‘trapped in a ravine and shot’ by Native Police. Another four people were ‘presumed drowned’.54 As a young man, Noel Pearson learnt from his elders at Hope Vale about the massacres that had destroyed so many of their people, including memories of Aboriginal stockmen further north at Cape Mellville in the 1950s ‘finding the bones of their people littering the landscape’.55

  Given that much of the killing on north Queensland’s frontier took place between 1873 and 1900, these events were in living memory for many people until the mid-twentieth century. The stories were passed on to their children and grandchildren. The memory of frontier violence was part of the story of how they had come to live on the mission or work on pastoral stations. Today, these same memories are enshrined publicly in Cooktown’s ‘Milbi Wall’ (1998), which tells the story of Guugu Yimithirr history from their perspective. Narratives of massacres have also survived in the memory of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal society because they more readily served as singular, dramatic and sometimes apocalyptic explanations of dispossession and cultural loss. Yet the descriptions of war and conflict that have survived in the historical record do more than just reflect the banality of the killing: they also reveal how the miners and pastoralists perceived themselves as victims. Despite their superior arms and numbers, they saw themselves as vulnerable and isolated, the helpless prey of ‘black demons’.56 ‘Massacres’ were committed not by them but against them—‘dreadful massacre & outrages by Palmer Blacks’—and against their horses and cattle—‘it was resolved to put a stop to this wholesale massacre’.57 ‘Apprehensive’ of the ‘natives’ raids’, they imagined ‘the blacks’ would ‘either slaughter’ them or ‘burn’ them ‘out of their territory’.58 Battling against drought, ‘flooded rivers’, treading the ‘pathless forest’ through ‘the habitat of the wild savage’ with ‘Anglo-Saxon energy and perseverance’, these envoys of ‘civilisation’ had their ‘little homes upset’ and their lives placed ‘in jeopardy’.59 Because Aboriginal raids hindered their mining activities, they complained of ‘incalculable loss’, their position ‘perilous in the extreme’.60 When Cooktown residents in the late nineteenth century were confronted by criticism from humanitarians in Brisbane or further south, they cast themselves as the sufferers.

  If some of those spurious philanthropists down south who are continually speaking of the ‘poor blacks’ were obliged to make the journey to the Palmer, if they were even living here in Cooktown and knew as well as we do what is passing around us, we have little doubt that their maudlin sentimentality would undergo a rapid change. We have had to chronicle many outrages by the ‘poor blacks’ in this district where the ‘poor whites’ have been the sufferers … It is very easy for people who are perfectly safe from such dangers to preach toleration, and humanity, and forebearance, and Christian charity, but were they posed to lose their property or their lives by the spears of the ‘sable bretheren’, the Christian charity and all that would soon evaporate in the smoke of a rifle.61

  Believing they were ‘not sufficiently protected by the Queensland government … from the murderous onslaught of the fierce enemies who have made the road to Palmer a warpath on which every man risks his life’, they called for more police, more arms, and ‘good roads’.62 Isolated and fearful of invasion—it seemed entirely fitting that the Queensland government’s abortive bid to annex Papua New Guinea in 1883 was telegraphed to the world from Cooktown—they also saw themselves as victims of government indifference.63 Cooktown was ‘so remote from the seat of government that its interests [were] in danger of being overlooked’, a sentiment shared by many towns in north Queensland and one that fuelled the push for the region to separate from Brisbane and become a self-governing colony.64 Attitudes towards government were riddled with hypocrisy and double standards. Complaining that government did not protect them, miners and pastoralists blamed the government for forcing them to disperse the ‘blacks’ in their own self-defence. Yet when they were asked
to account for their actions or provide assistance to the Aboriginal people they had dispossessed, they argued that it was ‘the government who had benefited by taking the natives’ land who should provide for them and not the townsmen’.65 At no time during or after the frontier war did the miners or pastoralists accept collective responsibility for what had happened to Aboriginal people in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Distancing themselves from government, they refused to see themselves as the chief beneficiaries of the war they had waged.

  On the streets of Cooktown, lurid tales of the murder of miners and their families by ‘blood-thirsty savages’ reinforced the perception of victimhood among the town’s citizens.66 Women’s bodies were reportedly found ‘stark naked … evidently ravished by the murderous wretches’. Fanciful stories emerged of parents and their children being ‘run down like paddymelons by a merciless mob of infuriated cannibals’.67 Their bodies were then placed on top of a ‘great fire kindled on the hilltop to heat [a] huge oven’, before ‘the horrid banquet’ began. Punitive parties of ‘outraged’ miners and native police quickly avenged the deaths of such ‘poor men’.68 Every allegation, no matter how unsubstantiated, required an even more excessive response. Transfixed by fear and their own sense of vulnerability, one story in particular galvanised Cooktown’s community and literally enshrined an undercurrent of victimhood for decades to come. In October 1881, Mary Watson, the young wife of Robert Watson who was away gathering bêche-de-mer, was reported missing from their cottage on Lizard Island, almost one hundred kilometres north-east of Cooktown. Wild rumours of her fate circulated in Cooktown and all over Australia. Well before her body was found, police had extracted a host of contradictory ‘confessions’ from various groups of Aborigines and exacted terrible revenge against scores of innocent people.69 No-one will ever know how many Aboriginal people were killed. Without a scintilla of evidence, newspapers ran headlines such as ‘Lizard Island Massacre’.70 As the story unfolded, Mary and her two Chinese workers, Ah Leong and Ah Sam, were visited by a group of Aborigines for whom Lizard Island was the ‘home of manuya, the sand goanna’ (the island was not permanently inhabited), where they had long collected medicinal plants. Dismayed to find their sacred ground occupied and their law broken, they speared and killed Ah Leong and wounded Ah Sam before leaving the island.71 Fearful that she would be their next victim, Mary decided to leave the island with Ah Sam and her 4-month-old child, Ferrier, floating out to sea in ‘the pot that the bech-de-mer [was] boiled in’. She drifted for eight days and 65 kilometres in the tank before finally coming to rest on No. 5 Howick Island.72