Sweet Damper on the Little River

24 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by Jacqui Durrant in Aboriginal, Convicts, Squatters, Uncategorized

Tags

Aboriginal Massacre, Arsenic Poisoning, Dederang Mound, Kiewa River, Sweet Damper

Imagine yourself in 1839, having just eaten a good meal by the side of a creek running into the Kiewa River, in north east Victoria: a safe place you’ve known your entire life. Soon you will be dead.

Mound at House Creek, Dederang (Photograph: Megan Carter, 2019)

Imagine yourself in 1839, having just eaten a good meal by the side of a creek in north east Victoria: a safe place you’ve known your entire life. Suddenly you start to experience severe stomach pain and cramping, as well as diarrhea and vomiting; not regular vomiting, but the kind that contains blood. Soon you are urinating blood too. Those around you — your friends, family, your children and elders — are suffering the same. Before you can try to help them, your condition deteriorates into convulsions and confusion. You finally collapse into a coma. Soon you will be dead.

There is a story among locals in the Kiewa Valley about a strange mound on the banks of House Creek at Dederang, in which the mound is described as a mass grave of Aboriginal people, buried after a massacre committed by early settlers using arsenic-laced damper. To my knowledge the story has appeared in print twice; the first of which was in Desmond Martin’s local history book, Tale of Two Cities. Martin wrote,

‘In addition there is the story of the 180 Aboriginals allegedly buried beneath the two pine trees beside House Creek, south of Dederang, on the old Woodside property… Way back in the foundation years people whose names seem to be unknown moved out onto the back of the run to muster cattle, leaving the woman of the house alone except for a house gin or two. The local tribe cannily paid her a visit and got into the store room as she was getting them a handout of flour etc to keep them peaceable. That night they all had a big feed up down by the creek, and in the morning only a few of the 200 or so visitors were still alive. The rest had been poisoned by the damper made from the station flour. If this is true then it is most unlikely that the unfortunate lady had anything to do with doping the dough. Her visitors probably grabbed a tin of arsenic, or possibly strychnine as these two poisons were common to most properties in the early days, thinking it was “sugarbag”, shared it up, and everybody mixed a fine damper that contained poison instead of sugar. The returning men are said to have buried all the bodies under the mound, and later planted the pines over them.’ [1]

Only recently, the same story has resurfaced in an new, locally published book, Squatters, Selectors and Settlers, Dederang, Gundowring and Monaghan’s Bridge Pioneering District, by Dulcie Smith with Mary Cardwell:

‘One story is told that a tribe of Indigenous people called at a homestead near House Creek. The settler’s wife was there alone and frightened. Her husband and his cattlemen were away working. She deemed it best to give the visitors the good quality flour they demanded. It was possible that there was arsenic mixed in the flour. Around 180 people died where they had their feed. The returning bushmen buried them and their grave is thought to be the hillock. This is where corroborees were thought to happen. “Through the dark branches of the pine trees, the wind groans dirges for the people buried below.”‘ This information is attributed to ‘Alvara McKillop and other anonymous locals’. [2]

This is one of those stories that, considering contextual evidence, seems more than likely to be based on a real event. However there exist some elements which are suspicious. Firstly, it is unlikely that returning stockmen would have gone to the trouble of creating such a huge mound in order to bury these bodies. The mound is clearly unnatural, and if is wasn’t created by stockmen, it may well have been of pre-existing Aboriginal origins. Whatever the case, this mound has been associated with Aboriginal people at least since the late nineteenth century. While touring the region in 1886, James Stirling reported that:

‘At Dederang we noticed a peculiarly rounded hillock at the junction of a small creek… We regretted that we had not time to examine it, but our driver informed us it was locally known as a blackfellow’s mound, one of those monuments which remain of a fast expiring race’. [3]

Secondly, the story is structured to absolve early settlers of murder by attributing the 180 deaths to an accidental poisoning, for which a frightened white woman and the Aboriginal people themselves (Waywurru and/or Dhudhuroa) are responsible. This too, is highly unlikely, since there is enough evidence that European settlers in north east Victoria did deliberately poison Aboriginal people.

One highly suggestive piece of circumstantial evidence comes in the form of an ‘early warning,’ that the first pastoralists in north-east Victoria had either started, or were about to start, deliberately killing local Aboriginal people with sweet damper — damper laced with sugar to mask the taste of arsenic. In June 1838, a pastoralist based in Berrima, in the New South Wales southern highlands, wrote a letter to the editor of Sydney-based paper, The Colonist, complaining that the Government had not given mounted police discretionary power to shoot Aboriginal people. Written only months after the Faithfull Massacre at Benalla, in which Aboriginal people had attacked and killed a number if shepherds, the letter warned that in the absence of police power to kill Aboriginal people they deemed dangerous, pastoralists were about to take matters into their own hands:

‘Since the Colonial Government, by virtually tying down the hands of the party of mounted policemen despatched towards the Hume [i.e.: Murray] River, has refused to afford to the proprietors of sheep and cattle stations on the Port Phillip Road, the necessary protection against the aggressions of the blacks, allow me to call the attention of those gentlemen who, like myself, have sent live stock to the Murray and its vicinity, to the expediency of forming a sort of militia corps, consisting of every hut-keeper, watchman, and stockman, able to shoulder a musket, in order that we may thus be enabled to repel force by force.’

The writer reported that Aboriginal people had ‘recently committed two more murders; one of these unfortunate victims was a shepherd belonging to a gentleman (Mr. Bowman), who resides in this neighbourhood; … I have been informed on good authority, that stockmen and others have often tried the experiment of mixing up arsenic in a damper, placed where the blacks were in the habit of frequenting. No atrocities on the part of the blacks, can in my opinion justify the whites in resorting to such treacherous means of retaliation. Assuredly the end does not justify the means. But what can they (the whites) do?’ … What I would here suggest is, that, until the government see the necessity of giving the mounted police already despatched a discretionary power to shoot a few of the blacks who commit outrages among the stations, the proprietors themselves should, by forming a militia corps, follow the example of Major Mitchell. It is, I admit, truly distressing to be driven to this necessity. But it appears to me that there is no other alternative. … However paradoxical the assertion may sound, I am convinced that the most humane course we can adopt as regards the majority of the blacks themselves, would be to shoot a few of their ring-leaders when detected in the act of committing their outrages. It must come to this at last. There is no other way of convincing them of the superiority of the whites.’

The letter concluded with a plea to the Government to let mounted police shoot specific Aboriginal people, lest the pastoralists turn to the indiscriminate wholesale murder of Aboriginal people by arsenic:

‘Let the Government only act with vigour tempered with humanity, and these outrages will soon be put an end to. Treat the blacks as rational beings, and their natural sense of justice will make them hear reason. Treat them as wild beasts, and they will continue wild to the last. The arsenic affair is horrific! It makes one’s blood curdle!’ [4]

There is no doubt that the author of the letter was well-informed concerning matters in north east Victoria. He already had stock in the area, which means that he would have — either as an individual or partner — held a license to departure herds and flocks and had registered a ‘run’ with the nearest Crown Lands Commissioner. He also resided at Berrima on the New South Wales southern highlands, which was the geographical base from which almost all of the early pastoralists of north east Victoria established themselves. He refers to William Bowman, whose pastoral leases took in the area from Everton on the Ovens River, through ‘Bowman’s Forest’ and the rest of the Murmungee Basin to Beechworth and country as far as Wooragee. He also suggests that pastoralists should ‘follow the example of Major Mitchell’, which can only be a reference to the fact that Mitchell and his party on their ‘Third Expedition of Discovery’ had killed a number of Aboriginal people at what has become known as the ‘Mount Dispersion massacre’ in 1836. Mitchell only received a reprimand for leading the massacre, having claimed self-defence.

The Government never did grant its mounted police powers to shoot Aboriginal people: As subjects of the Crown, Aboriginal people had to be arrested for crimes, and brought to trial like everyone else. Likewise, as subjects of the Crown, neither was it ever legal to murder Aboriginal people — but this didn’t stop the early European pastoralists. When stockmen were implicated in the mass killing of mainly women, children and old men at Myall Creek, the Government committed them to trial, and hanged seven of the perpetrators in November 1838. However, instead of ending the killings; this only meant that pastoralists devoted greater efforts to covering up their wanton acts of murder.

In his letter of 1853, squatter George Faithful of Oxley Plains would recall of these early years of European settlement, ‘The Government … threatened to hang any one who dared to shoot a black, even in protection of his property, and appointed Protectors to search about the country for information as to the destruction of the natives. These gentlemen resorted to the most contemptible means to gain information against individuals, whom the trumpet-tongue of falsehood had branded as having destroyed many of these savages. This, instead of doing good, did much evil. People formed themselves into bands of alliance and allegiance to each other, and then it was the destruction of the natives really did take place.’ [5]

The evidence that pastoralists used arsenic-laced damper to kill Aboriginal people in north east Victoria at this time, doesn’t name the individuals responsible, but it does exist. Assistant Aboriginal Protectors employed under the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate (mainly religious men, not given to ‘trumpet tongued falsehoods’) knew too well what was going on in north east Victoria — where the colonial authorities had opted not to post a regional Protector, resolutely refusing to do so even after Chief Protector George Augustus Robinson requested it. [6]

In June 1839, not even a year after its initial settlement by Europeans, Assistant Protector of Aborigines for the Goulburn district, James Dredge, recorded the prevalence of mass poisonings with ‘sweet damper’. [7] Assistant Protector of Aborigines for the Melbourne area, William Thomas, also recorded in March 1839 that Aboriginal people on the Broken and Ovens Rivers had been ‘put out in this way.’ [8]

Although Thomas does not specifically note the Kiewa River, it is worth pointing out that the Kiewa was at this time barely known to most Europeans, as it lay quite some distance off the main over-landing route from Sydney to the Port Phillip district, and only later did it come to be referred to by them as ‘Little River’. A letter from his stockman to pastoral lisencee John Jobbins, dated from 2 October 1839, locates Jobbins’ run Towangah (Tawonga) Station as being ‘near the head of the ‘Ovens’,’ [9] demonstrating that people at this time were generally unable to find an appropriate geographical descriptor for the Kiewa Valley. Thus when William Thomas writes that arsenic was being used on the Broken and Ovens Rivers, he could well also mean the Kiewa.

If we consider sometime after the Faithfull Massacre in April 1838 up until mid 1839, as a likely timeframe for the massacre on the Kiewa River, this allows us to speculate on which of the settlers in the district at that time could have been the perpetrators. There were, at this time, four stations (pastoral runs) in the immediate area: Kergunyah (‘Kergunnnia’) station, held by John Morrice, Robert Wylde and David MacKenzie, and managed by George Kinchington (who arrived in June 1838 with his wife and family, and would later go on to hold ‘Thilingananga’ station at what would become Bruarong) [10]; ‘Gundowring’ Station on the opposite side of the Kiewa River, held by George Hume Barber, and run by his young son Charles Barber, and their manager Frederick Street (who was a brother-in-law of George Kinchington) [11]; ‘Dederang’ Station, held by absentee pastoralist James Roberts of the property Currawang (near Young), and run by stockmen (one of whom we only know as ‘old Tom’); and finally ‘Towangah’ (Tawonga) Station, held by John Jobbins and managed on his behalf by stockmen whose names are unknown. [12] (*Since first writing this, I have discovered that Dederang station was superintended by John Wingrove. [12b]) All stations would have had a number of assigned or ticket-of-leave convict labourers.

Of the four station-holders, emancipated convict John Jobbins is the only one with a proven record of killing, or inciting his station labourers, to kill Aboriginal people, [13] but this does not lessen the chance that the other station holders and/or their managers were responsible for this mass poisoning. Of the three men who held Kergunyah Station, it seems the Reverends Wylde and MacKenzie (both school teachers at Australian College in Sydney) were merely investors, while only John Morrice was hands-on (and even then, perhaps only occasionally, as he lived at Sutton Forest on the New South Wales southern highlands, with his wife Jane, the daughter of Yackandandah’s first European settler James Osborne). Morrice would have been no stranger to the mentality of racism and brutality: his Scottish-born father had been a slave-owning tea planter in Jamaica. [14] While avoiding naming anyone specifically, Reverend David MacKenzie recounted the use of arsenic to murder Aboriginal people in his 1845 book The Emigrant’s Guide; or Ten Years’ Practical Experience in Australia [15]. MacKenzie’s comments indicate that at the very least he was familiar with the practice of poisoning Aboriginal people. Furthermore, his comments also illustrate that — particularly after the prosecution of men for the Myall Creek massacre — this method was used in preference to shooting, because it was harder to prove Aboriginal deaths by poisoning as actual murder: one could, as the oral history stories from the Kiewa Valley suggest, always blame the frightened wife of a stockman, and the Aboriginal people themselves.

We cannot point directly to anyone who was responsible for poisoning Aboriginal people in the Kiewa Valley, but we can think about the mentalities that went with such an act. It is likely there are still descendants of some early settlers possibly implicated in the murder of local Aboriginal people in the Kiewa Valley, still living locally. It could be distressing for some of these people to imagine that their ancestors were possibly involved in such horrific acts of murder. And yet, the acknowledgement of atrocities needs to happen for the descendants of the Aboriginal people who survived, and for the wellbeing of us all.

Don’t mention the ‘C’ word.

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by Jacqui Durrant in Aboriginal, Beechworth, Convicts, Squatters, Uncategorized, Wangaratta

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Ben Barber, Benjamin Warby, Charles Cropper, Convict Ship Brittania, David Reid, Dhudhuroa, George Edward Mackay, George Grey, John Chisholm, Joseph Docker, Mogullumbidj, Mount Dispersion Massacre, Pelican Lagoon, Sir Thomas Mitchell, Waywurru, William Brodribb

Lately I’ve been wondering what kinds of people were living around the Beechworth area when gold was first discovered in early 1852. By this time, the local Aboriginal peoples had been reduced to small bands of survivors who had witnessed an horrific genocide of their families and clansmen — a genocide wrought by the first European settlers. While it cannot be said that every single white settler was directly involved in this genocide, the killers were thick among them — and so it’s worthwhile asking, in a broad sense, who were these people? The answer is, in fact, reasonably simple; even though generations of local historians almost never mention it.

Image: courtesy National Museum of Australia.

WARNING: Visitors should be aware that this blog post includes subject matter that may cause sadness or distress, particularly to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

While researching this period of early European invasion and settlement of North East Victoria (broadly mid-1830s to mid-1840s, although most of the settlement happened in a single year — 1838), I’ve come across a number of glaring ‘myth-conceptions’, which are perpetrated in just about every history book concerning the region. It’s perhaps understandable how such errors came about: the well-to-do early European settlers who continued to stay living in the region and who went on to have descendants who in turn stayed locally, became the people who were remembered best in local histories. (If you read local history, you’ll be familiar with names like David Reid and Thomas Mitchell). As a consequence, their experiences were taken as indicative of the whole picture of early European settlement in North East Victoria. And yet, numerically, these men were very much in the minority.

Conversely, the people whose involvement in settling the North East Victorian region was either comparatively brief, or those who did not go on to become ‘pillars’ of local society, were barely remembered at all. Thus local history became slanted in favour of the ‘stayers’, who would be forever memorialised as ‘our pioneers’ — as if the only early settlers of the region were free men who came here of their own volition, with the ‘heroic’ intention of single-handedly converting ‘virgin’ countryside into productive grazing land. To say that this picture is at odds with the truth on numerous counts is an understatement.

Several of the largest misconceptions perpetrated about the early European settlers of North East Victoria are ones of omission, and in this post I will tackle but one of them. To illustrate this point, I will for now avoid narrating historical events, if only to present a simple characterisation by way of examples.

***

It should be obvious that none of the ‘pioneers’ who ‘settled’ North East Victoria (the ‘squatters’ who took out licenses to ‘despature flocks and herds’ on Crown Lands, establishing the first pastoral stations of the region) did so single-handedly. When they first arrived in search of grazing lands, invariably with a few thousand head of sheep and/or hundred head of cattle in tow, they arrived in territory which was already fully occupied by Aboriginal peoples of the region: clans of the Waywurru (Waveroo), Dhudhuroa, and so-called ‘Mogullumbidj’ peoples [1]. They not only had to establish head-stations and out-stations from which stock could be managed, but do so while simultaneously dispossessing the original inhabitants. Such a feat could only be managed with the assistance of a labour force.

Each station commonly had a manager or overseer, and various stockmen, shepherds, bullock drivers, and sometimes their wives (who worked as hut-keepers). This workforce, which comprised the majority of non-Aboriginal people in North East Victoria from the late 1830s through to perhaps the gold rush of 1851-2 — people who have remained largely invisible in most local history books — were convicts, comprising either those who had been allocated as ‘assigned servants’ while still serving out their sentences, those who had been given a ‘ticket-of-leave’ (akin to being ‘on parole’), or those who had finished their sentences.

The predominance of convicts can be found in any description of the first overlanding parties to settle in North East Victoria. Among the earliest to attempt to settle were the Faithfull Brothers. After their ‘Convoy of sheep and Cattle’ was attacked and seven men killed by Aborigines at Winding Swamp (Broken River, present-day Benalla), in April 1838, Governor Gipps lamented to Lord Glenelg ‘These men (who were chiefly convicts) did not defend themselves, but ran at the first appearance of their assailants’. [2] The partnership of Morrice, Wilde and McKenzie, who would take up Kergunyah station, was rare among squatters in that they had decided to employ a free man, George Kinchington, as their station manager. Nevertheless, their overlanding party, which arrived with 200 head of cattle on the Murray in June 1838, also had an ‘ex-convict for stockman, and two convict prisoners, one acting as bullock-driver, the other as helper with the cattle.’ [3] Likewise, when David Reid Junior reached the Ovens River on 8 September 1838 (settling on what would become ‘Carraragarmungee’ station), he had been equipped by his father Dr David Reid with 500 head of cattle, 2 bullock wagons and teams and 6 assigned servants. [4]

Not only were members of the convict class to be found among the labourers of the pastoral runs; but emancipated convicts were, on occasion, also to be found as station holders in their own right. Among their number were George Grey and his family, at ‘Pelican Lagoons’ (a small run neighbouring George Faithfull’s, situated in the wedge of land between the Ovens and King Rivers, after which the property ‘The Pelican’ on the Oxley Flats Road is named today). While touring the North East of Victoria in the Autumn of 1840, Chief Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, and Assistant Protector James Dredge, met the Greys. Robinson said of them, ‘These people have, I believe, been convicts… They are in middling circumstances and have commenced dairying, but appear not the most efficient’, [5] while Assistant Protector James Dredge, added dryly, that they were ‘a large family, apparently not remarkable for cleanliness or industry.’ [6] Before going to North East Victoria, Grey had operated a station in the Monaro district in association with Benjamin Warby, and it is likely that he came over with cattle from the Monaro to Wangaratta at the same time as, and in association with the Warbys, who took up land at Taminick Plains. [7] While Robinson wrote that, ‘One of the Warby brothers, I have been informed, has been transported for cattle stealing,’ [8] it seems that is it was Benjamin’s father, John Warby, who (with William Deards) had been convicted of stealing two asses in October 1790 and had been sentenced to seven years transportation. [9]

On the face of it, stealing two asses is not the worst crime known to man, but before you gallop away with the romantic notion that most convicts were downtrodden souls cruelly incarcerated for stealing a loaf of bread or a packet of sewing needles, let me impress upon you the findings of eminent academic historian Alan Frost:

‘It is one of the abiding myths of Australian history that many of those sentenced to transportation… were hapless victims of a savage penal code and an uncaring, class-driven society. It seems not to matter how often or with what clarity the real situation is explained… It would be silly to claim that there were never miscarriages of justice, or that harsh penalties were not given for what we should now consider minor offences. … However, the plain fact is that the majority of 18th century convicts sentenced to transportation were convicted of crimes that we continue to consider serious.’ [10]

This is to say, most convicts arrived in Australia after committing either violent crime, theft of a substantial criminal nature (often with threats of violence), or very occasionally, political crimes. For example, on Oxley Plains, one of George Faithfull’s original stockmen (and longest surviving — he would die a centenarian at Edi in the King Valley in 1903), had been transported for beating a man to death in a fist fight. [11]

And like all convicts, these people also had been subjected to a harsh penal system, which may have reinforced their worst tendencies. Squatter George Grey had been given a conditional pardon for what was originally a life sentence (he was an Irish rebel, convicted as a member of the agrarian-terrorist movement, the Defenders), and he also had been given three hundred lashes for his role in an attempted mutiny aboard the convict ship Brittania in 1797 — a voyage which in itself became infamous for the cruelty of its sadistic captain, Thomas Dennott. [12] In other words, the convict servants (and some of the lower-tier squatters) working on the stations of North East Victoria, were people who, for the most part, were either brutal before they hit the penal system, or had been brutalised by it.

Making matters worse, the region’s ‘Border Police’ force had been established on the cheap by using soldiers who had been transported from South Africa to New South Wales as convicts. [13]

It’s an unstated fact, but the ability to undertake wanton acts of brutality was a payable skill on frontier. Brutality was of practical use in dispossessing Aboriginal peoples of their land, and many convict labourers were — in their day — notorious for their violent attitudes and actions towards local Aboriginal peoples. Writing many years later of the years 1839-44, during which he had overlanded through Yackandandah, Barwidgee and the King Valley with a group of stockman, James Demarr recalled, ‘the white men had been flowing into this newly-discovered country with their flocks and herds… and many of the men they had brought with them were the scum of the earth, so that collisions with the blacks were inevitable.’ Demarr continued:

‘The blacks were driven away from their ancient positions, their hunting grounds taken possession of, their game either destroyed or driven away, and they themselves driven back into mountain fastnesses; the consequence was the black sort every opportunity of revenge, killing the solitary shepherd and stockman whenever they had the opportunity of doing so, and scattering, and partly destroying the flocks and herds. The settlers retaliated in their own way, and old colonists know what that means. … Many of the settlers were well-disposed towards the blacks, and there were men [i.e.: labourers] also like-minded, but the ruffian element mixed up with them, brought on conflicts with the blacks that the kindly disposed were powerless to prevent.’ [14]

Chief Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, and Assistant Protector, James Dredge, were among those who came face-to-face with such ‘ruffian elements’ at ‘Myrhee’ station on the west bank of the King River, owned by absentee squatter John Chisholm (yet another station neighbouring George Faithfull) — ruffian elements which by May Day of 1840 had been inflamed by the fact that a shepherd on their run had been ritually murdered by Aborigines only days before. [15] Robinson wrote, ‘Harry Broadribb, a man who has been a prisoner, acts as overseer.’ [16] Dredge noted with displeasure, ‘His wife got some refreshment for us, but raved an swore awfully against the blacks.’ [17] Robinson provided more detail: ‘Mrs Broadribb is a low hard woman, been I imagine a prisoner. She was not acquainted with us and went on about the blacks in a most strange manner. She would have them all burnt, hung, drowned or any death, provided they were got rid of. She applied the vilest epithets to them and would shower out of volley of abuse upon Broadribb for harbouring the wretches.’ [18]

Two stockmen who worked for Dr George Edward Mackay at ‘Whorouly’ (on yet another station that bordered George Faithful’s ‘Oxley Plains’), became notorious for their violence towards the Aboriginal population, particularly after another attack made by a band of Aboriginals resulted in the death of one of Whorouly’s stockmen. Writing his anonymous reminiscences for the Border Post in 1875, one old station hand recalled Mackay’s stockman, named Bill Thomas — a ticket-of-leave man, who had served as a bullock driver on two of Major Thomas Mitchell’s expeditions into the interior, including the Third Expedition during which Mitchell and his party killed seven Aborigines near Mount Dispersion. [19] According to this writer in the Border Post, Thomas ‘was a most diabolical fellow – a perfect tiger – who was determined to have his revenge on the natives, and, indeed, there were others amongst us that thirsted for satisfaction. Some advised poison, but Thomas met them with the quotation – “Whose sheddeth man’s blood, by blood shall his blood be shed”.’ [20] Thomas clearly escaped any form of repercussions for his actions, but when word got back to Governor Gipps that ‘acts of cruelty had been committed on the aborigines’ of the Ovens district, none could overlook rumours and suggestions regarding the actions of stockman Ben Reid (no relation to squatter David Reid), whose ‘conduct toward the aborigines was complained of by Robinson’ and who subsequently had his ticket-of-leave cancelled and was returned to Sydney. [21] Ben Reid was no doubt among those who, in squatter Joseph Docker’s words, was responsible for the ‘considerable amount of black men’s blood which has already been shed.’ Robinson’s chief complaint against him was that, ‘Reid has had several collisions with the natives, it is feared many have been of fatal character to the aborigines.’ [22]

***

This characteristic aspect of the early settlement of North East Victoria — it’s settlement in the main either by seasoned absentee pastoralists or by inexperienced young sons of the same, who were in turn supported by a crude if not wholly brutal convict labour force — ranks among the factors which combined to make it possible for the European invaders to kill large numbers of local Aboriginal peoples, and to keep the facts of the matter sufficiently secret from government authorities so that effectively nothing could or would be done to stop it.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that every convict labourer was blood-thirsty and wanted to destroy local Aboriginal people — indeed at least three local squatters Joseph Docker (‘Bontharambo’), Ben Barber (‘Barnawatha’) and for as long as he was there, William Brodribb (who held a station on the Broken River which became known as ‘The Junction’, [and who was no relation to the manager of ‘Myhree’]), were notable for the way in which they all employed local Aboriginal people as labourers in the very early days of ‘settlement’. [23] In the Autumn of 1840, George Augustus Robinson ruminated in his journal on why some stations suffered from what was commonly termed ‘depredations from the blacks,’ including substantial losses from having stock either speared or chased away; whereas other station holders suffered almost no losses of stock at all. ‘Mr Broadrib said yesterday that the blacks had speared more of Mr Faithful’s cattle, than of any other person. … There must be some cause for this’ he pondered. ‘Mr Christie lost one or 200 cattle, yet these people say they never allow blacks to come to their stations.’ Conversely, the stations which employed Aboriginal people, and allowed them to travel and camp on the land, had few problems. [24] All is suggestive of a ‘top down’ attitude being responsible for the treatment of Aborigines: that whereas every station employed a brutal and brutalised labour force, on some stations these convict labourers were encouraged by their employers to slaughter Aboriginal people; whereas on other stations they were encouraged to act towards them with tolerance. And the Aboriginal peoples responded accordingly.

References

[1] Concerning the Waywurru (Waveroo), Dhudhuroa, and so-called ‘Mogullumbidj’ peoples, the best works I have read on the nation-boundaries and naming for these Aboriginal peoples, which take into consideration all previous work on the North East area (E.M. Curr (1883), R.B. Smythe (1878), A. Howitt (1904), R.H. Matthews (1905), N. Tindale (1940, 1974), D. Barwick (1984, plus manuscript material produced shortly before her death in 1986, now held in the State Library Victoria), M.H. Fels (1996, 1997), S. Wesson (2000), et al), are by Dr Ian Clarke. Clark has written his papers with a knowledge of the various professional limitations associated with earlier works — those written especially prior to access to critical primary source materials such as the Journals and collected papers of George Augustus Robinson, the journals of William Thomas, and the private papers of Alfred Howitt.

Clark, Ian, ‘Aboriginal language areas in Northeast Victoria: ‘Mogullumbidj’ reconsidered.’ Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 81 Issue 2 (Nov 2010), 181-192.

Clark, Ian, ‘Aboriginal languages in North-east Victoria – the status of ‘Waveru’ reconsidered’, Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, 2011, Vol. 14(4): 2-22

Clark, Ian, ‘Dhudhuroa and Yaithmathang languages and social groups in north-east Victoria – a reconstruction,’ Aboriginal History, 2009, VOL 33, pp.201-229.

[2] SIR GEORGE GIPPS TO LORD GLENELG. (Despatch No. 115, per ship Superb; acknowledged by Lord Glenelg, 21st December, 1838.) in: Australian Aborigines: Copies or extracts of despatches relative to the massacre of various Aborigines in Australia, in the year 1838, and respecting the trial of their murderers; compiled by the British Colonial Office, 19 August 1839.

[3] ‘YACKANDANDAH IN 1838. SOME REMINISCENCES. BY MR. GEORGE KINCHINGTON,’ Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 16 September, 1899, p.8.

[4] Reminiscences of David Reid: as given to J.C.H. Ogier (in Nov. 1905), who has set them down in the third person, type-written manuscript, p.21.

[5] Ian D Clark (ed), Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Protectorate, issued in 6 parts, Heritage Matters, Melbourne, 1998-2000, this entry from Volume 1, entry for Friday 1 May 1840, p.273.

[6] James Dredge, Assistant Protector, Goulburn Protectorate, Three volumes and one transcript of the diary, a letter book and a note book are in the La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection of the State Library [MS 11625 and MS 5244 (transcript) Box 16]. The diaries contain daily and weekly entries from 1817 to 1833 and 1839–1843. This entry: Friday 1 May 1840.

[7] Harry Stephenson, Cobungra Station and Other Mountain Stories, published for the Mountain Cattleman’s Association, Omeo, 1985, p.3.

[8] George Augustus Robinson, Vol 1, 2 May 1840, p.275.

[9] For information on Benjamin Warby’s father John Warby, see entry on the well-researched website called ‘Australian Royalty’.

[10] Alan Frost, Botany Bay — The Real Story, Black Ink, Melbourne, 2012, p.54.

[11] ‘DEATH OF A CENTENARIAN AT EDI.’ Euroa Advertiser, Friday 27 February 1903, p.3.

[12] On George Grey, see entry on the well-researched website called ‘Australian Royalty’.
On the voyage of the convict ship Britannia, see Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships, 1787-1868, Brown, Son & Ferguson, Glasgow, 1959.

[13] John Conner, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788-1838, UNSW Press, 2012.

[14] Demarr, James, Adventures in Australia fifty years ago: being a record of an emigrant’s wanderings through the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland during the years 1839-1844, Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1893, p.132.

[15] George Augustus Robinson, op cit. Volume 1, p.273, 1 May 1840, also 7 May, p.280.

[16] George Augustus Robinson, ibid. Volume 1, p.276, 2 May 1840.

[17] James Dredge, op cit., diary entry 2 May 1840.

[18] George Augustus Robinson, op cit. Vol 1, p.276, 2 May 1840.

[19] D. W. A. Baker, ‘Mitchell, Sir Thomas Livingstone (1792–1855)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mitchell-sir-thomas-livingstone-2463/text3297, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 12 January 2019.

[20] ‘The Blacks,’ Border Post, Albury, NSW, 7 August 1875, p.2.

[21] Copy of Despatch No. 90, Gipps to Lord John Russel, 9 April, 1841, in British Parliamentary Papers, Despatches of Governors of Australian Colonies, illustrative of Condition of Aborigines, House of Commons Paper Series: House of Commons Papers, Paper Type: Accounts and Papers Parliament: 1844, Paper Number: 627, p.106-7.

[22] Joseph Docker to Governor George Gipps, 31 December 1840; and Enclosure 2 in number 25, Report of George Augustus Robinson to Charles Joseph LaTrobe; in British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., p.108.

[23] For Brodribb, George Augustus Robinson, Vol 1, p.232, entry for Monday 20 April; for evidence of Aboriginal people working on Docker’s and Barber’s stations, see their submissions to the NSW Legislative Council’s Select Committee Enquiry into Immigration, 1841.

[24] George Augustus Robinson, op. cit. Vol 1, entry for 9 May, 1840, p.283.

Life on Spring Creek

Category Archives: Convicts

Sweet Damper on the Little River

Don’t mention the ‘C’ word.

WARNING: Visitors should be aware that this blog post includes subject matter that may cause sadness or distress, particularly to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.