Out of the Silence

by Robert Foster

  Now required by the Advocate General to take statements from the other shepherds involved, the local JPs duly forwarded three more depositions which, they said, ‘fully corroborate’ the other shepherds’ statements. To these local Justices, apparently, the authorities’ fuss over the incident seemed excessive, and they rejected the Advocate General’s concerns about the ‘origins and extent’ of the affray. Far from ‘resting in obscurity’, they wrote, its origins and extent were clear: it had been caused ‘by the blacks refusing to give up the sheep’, and their resistance had been met by the shepherds ‘who all through appear to have acted with great moderation’.24 As for Carter’s varied statements about the Aboriginal deaths, ‘it is a point that we have been unable to discern, and … is at variance with [our] unanimous opinion’.25 The Advocate General was not satisfied. He considered that the Justices’ failure to discern a discrepancy in the shepherd’s statements was ‘extraordinary’, and their approach to the affair had been altogether lax: they had assumed that evidence was to be taken merely ‘to warrant a commitment’ against the Aboriginal prisoners, rather than ‘to inform the Crown of the truth of the matter’. In short, there was good reason to consider ‘the whole affair an extremely suspicious one’.26 Protector Moorhouse was sent to the district again, with a police Sub-Inspector and Pari Kudnutya as guide, to see if the Aboriginal bodies could be recovered. Pari Kudnutya took them to two graves, but the bodies had been removed and burnt.27 The efforts to gather sufficient evidence to bring the shepherds to trial continued into the new year, and were delayed in part by the unwillingness of the station owner John Hallett to answer questions put forward by the police magistrate.28 Finally, the case collapsed after Carter absconded on a ship to England, and the Grand Jury found that the other shepherds had no case to answer.29

  Despite the authorities’ efforts to bring the circumstances of this event to light, they were hampered by a whole range of difficulties that repeatedly beset them in effectively providing Aboriginal protection through legal process: the lapse of time before the event came to official notice, which in this case it did almost accidentally; the shepherd’s contradictory statements, which left the circumstances veiled in obscurity; the laxity of local JPs, who were also neighbouring landowners, in pursuing an investigation until prompted; the station owner’s reluctance to co-operate in an investigation; the obstruction of evidence in the burning of the bodies; and finally, the opportunity for the key suspect to disappear. Pari Kudnutya, the Aboriginal witness in the case, was only able to provide his testimony and guide the Protector to the gravesites because he had been brought to Adelaide and incarcerated on a charge of sheep stealing after Hallett’s shepherds had killed two of his countrymen. It is little wonder that Aboriginal people themselves did not appreciate the protective function of British law.

  Meanwhile on the west coast, despite the apparent peace that had followed the first wave of violence at Port Lincoln in the early 1840s, violence flared again as settlers sought new and even more distant runs. By 1848, pastoral settlement had extended 150 miles to the west, toward Venus Bay, and 50 miles to the east, toward Franklin Harbour.30 As settlement spread, so did the potential for conflict. In June 1848, shepherd John Hamp, who worked on William Pinkerton’s Stoney Point station on the western extreme of this new frontier, was waddied to death.31 In the following month on the same station, shepherd Charles Goldsmith was attacked as he tried to protect his sheep. He fired upon his attackers, reportedly wounding one man, and his attackers retreated.32 Wherever Aboriginal attacks occurred, settlers or their shepherds would be sure to retaliate. The local magistrate at Port Lincoln was Henry Price, who had recently arrived in the district from the mid north. Price warned the authorities in Adelaide that settlers’ confidence in the government to protect their lives and property through the law was something they ‘do not possess’, and without that confidence, settlers would continue to administer ‘justice’ in their own way. He also cautioned that ‘this feeling is fast spreading amongst the settlers themselves – Nor is it to be wondered at. Each fresh outrage committed by the Natives irritates and hardens them, and unfortunately in such instance some person peculiarly inoffensive from age or known disposition seems selected as the victim.’ For as long as government resources were limited in policing Aboriginal people and protecting settlers’ property, he concluded, Aboriginal people would suffer ‘continued loss of life’.33

  In May 1849 two murders of Europeans in quick succession revived the sense of crisis that had gripped the district just a few years before. On 3 May 1849, Captain James Beevor, whose Tornto station lay about 80 kilometres north-west of Port Lincoln, was killed by two spear wounds through the heart.34 Just four days later, while the police were out in pursuit of Beevor’s killers, another murder occurred on E.B. Vaux’s Lake Hamilton station adjoining Beevor’s run. Annie Easton, the wife of one of station’s shepherds, was alone in the hut with her baby when Aborigines killed her and rifled the station stores. Her baby was left unharmed. This latest spate of murders shocked the local community. Beevor was an ‘old and much respected settler’, while Easton was a woman and a mother; the fact that she was killed on her bed gave rise to unconfirmed suspicions that she was raped.35

  Commentators in the press made little effort to investigate the motives for such attacks, typically ascribing them to the ‘treacherous and cunning’ character of Aboriginal people. One correspondent, for instance, pointed out that Beevor was a war veteran, renowned for his courage and strength. That he had been murdered ‘in so treacherous a manner’, wrote a correspondent to the Register, ‘makes the blood in me rise’.36 However, an event that was uncovered during the murder investigations suggests a more concrete motive. The bodies of five Aborigines were found near a mine about 30 miles from Port Lincoln, not far from the location of Beevor’s and Easton’s murders. They had died of arsenic poisoning. Suspicion fell on the hutkeeper Patrick Dwyer. Dwyer’s hut had been plundered on several occasions and it seemed he laced flour with arsenic and deliberately left it for the Aborigines to take. Based on Clamor Schurmann’s autopsy, the Commissioner believed there to be a connection between the poisonings and the murders of Beevor and Easton:

  The supposition of their being connected is also strengthened by their known and natural propensities to retaliate and revenge the wrongs sustained by members of their own peculiar tribes and if eventually proved to be correct, tends to point out the imprudence to say the least of it of resorting to unlawful methods of punishing the Aborigines, a practice rendering the innocent on both sides liable to the consequences of the sins of the guilty.37

  Before an investigation could be completed against Dwyer, he fled the district and the colony.

  For as long as new pastoral frontiers expanded, it seemed the cycle of violence, of resistance and retaliation, would persist. Governor Robe’s insistence to the Government Resident at Port Lincoln that discretionary punishment of Aboriginal people must be abandoned and the letter of the law henceforth be followed had no sympathy from settlers who felt themselves to be insufficiently protected by the government. The day after Annie Easton’s murder, a Port Lincoln settler wrote to the Register bemoaning the ineffectiveness of the legal system: ‘I say the present system will not do now, and it never will, until the race of blacks – I mean Australian blacks – are exterminated’. They were constantly ‘prowling’ about the stations for the purpose of plunder and ‘assassinating our shepherds’, always contriving to attack when the police were nowhere to be seen. His solution was to ‘let us punish them ourselves’.38 On 16 May 1849 the Clerk to the Government Resident John Brown reported to the Governor that in the aftermath of Beevor and Easton’s murders there were ‘three separate parties of volunteers out in the pursuit, as well as all the available police force from Port Lincoln’; a fourth volunteer party was anticipated.39 Brown was concerned about what these parties might do. He had, he told the Governor, advised the Corporal of Police to ‘prevent, in as much as possible,
the indiscriminate slaughter of the natives which the exasperated state of the settlers had rendered probable’.40

  Decades later, stories began to circulate in the district of a massacre of Aborigines near the cliffs at Elliston in retaliation for the murders: ‘hundreds’, it was claimed, were driven over the cliffs to their death. If there is truth in these stories, its origins probably lie in these punitive expeditions, which were organised not just in response to the settlers’ deaths but also for more minor attacks on local stations. Thomas Cooper Horn led one such expedition three weeks after Easton’s death, after his Kappawanta run was robbed and a shepherd threatened. Horn’s party tracked the alleged offenders to the Waterloo Bay cliffs. As the Aborigines scrambled down the cliffs to escape, Horn and his men fired upon them, killing three, and capturing five others.41 It is powerfully ironic, and revealing of the historical echoes of the culture of secrecy, that later stories of a massacre at this place, dismissed by many because never proved, served to mask the genuinely disturbing violence of this era which all too often occurred out of sight and out of mind.

  Chapter 6

  ‘THE NATURAL WORKING OF AN UNSOUND SYSTEM’: ADMINISTRATIVE RESPONSES TO FRONTIER VIOLENCE

  ‘The difficulties attending any attempt to secure permanent peace’

  The period between 1847 and 1851 witnessed the most intense period of frontier conflict on South Australia’s southern frontiers; not only was there a disturbing renewal of violence on Eyre Peninsula and a peaking of violence in the south east, but there were outbreaks of violence on the newly opening frontiers of Yorke Peninsula and the mid north. These events gave government officials reason to reflect on the causes of conflict and to consider how it might best be suppressed. Port Lincoln’s Government Resident Charles Driver, writing with a world-weary sense of resignation, eloquently observed that the succession of murders was ‘merely the natural working of an unsound system, only rendered prominent here from the circumstances of the district which from its extent of unavailable land will never carry a sufficiently large European population to overawe the natives’.1

  The principle of ‘overawing the natives’, as a necessary pre-requisite to their subjugation, was becoming one of the key tenets of frontier settlement. Shortly before Driver penned this observation, another resident of the district wrote to the Observer criticising the government yet again for not providing sufficient police protection, ‘without which there cannot be that effective combination of force and rapidity of action necessary to overawe the natives, whom it is the universal opinion here nothing will keep quiet but the most severe measures’.2 Writing in the aftermath of alleged poisonings on Vaux’s station in 1851, Justice of the Peace Henry Price was frank about how the cycle of violence worked. On the ‘hostile feelings’ station workers entertained toward the Aborigines, he speculated:

  They are – directly – greater sufferers than their masters – Their lives alone are in danger – and in numberless instances – now too common to be even mentioned or reported the huts are stripped of their clothes and blankets and rations not always to be replaced. The death of a native becomes to them a matter of triumph as the death of an enemy. I fear that the transition from the mere rejoicing in to the actual accomplishing of their destruction cannot in every instance be difficult or distant.3

  Without confidence of being ‘cared for and protected by the Government’ to allay settlers’ distrust, he found it difficult to imagine a means ‘for securing permanent peace.’4 Henry Price’s words on the ‘reckless’ character of station labourers were strikingly similar to Edward Eyre’s words on the worst excesses of the Australian frontier when he speculated on the first outbreak of violence at Port Lincoln in 1840. As Eyre had stated, even the most well-intentioned settlers became drawn into a cycle of violence because of the injudicious behaviour that characterised the pastoral frontier. The Protector agreed. In 1849 he observed that if ‘the settlers are injudicious in exposing their property, and the shepherds determined to hold intercourse with the women, it is impossible to prevent collisions’.5 After the renewed wave of troubles at Port Lincoln in 1851, he wrote again: ‘Common prudence would accomplish more, than at first sight, it would appear to do, and if it had been exercised at Port Lincoln latterly, it is more than probable, the late distressing occurrences, would not have taken place.’6

  But more immediately, although Aboriginal aggressions in the Port Lincoln district might have begun as a concerted resistance to invasion, they became as time passed a response to starvation. Many Aboriginal people in the district, Corporal Geharty wrote, ‘were absolutely on the point of starvation’. When questioned as to their ‘reasons for injuring the white men, they state that they were refused food’.7 Archdeacon Matthew Hale, who had established the Poonindie Mission in the district, was of similar mind, observing that Aboriginal people ‘are almost driven by destitution to resort to any means in order to procure food’.8 The presence ‘of the foot of the white man upon their soil’ had not only deprived them of their land, but also kept them from their water sources and prevented them from procuring ‘the necessities of life’.

  The Commissioner of Police understood this also. The ‘root of the evil’, he wrote, was the deprivation Aboriginal people were suffering through their loss of land and resources:

  We see the Native driven from his hunting grounds and his food, by the lawful intrusion of the White man, starving, and in want of water; we see the White man, in possession of food and water in abundance, that, indeed, which the native requires to keep body and soul together, we see this inestimable prize, this unendurable want, I regret to say, in many instances, ill-protected, and in some cases left quite exposed, and results are murder and robbery.9

  Asked to respond on the need for increased police protection in Port Lincoln, the Commissioner himself doubted that more armed forces would be beneficial. No increase in police numbers, he stated, would ‘have the effect of preventing the murders and aggressions’, when Aboriginal acts against settlers were driven by desperate want; it is then ‘but a bare act of Justice’ to alleviate that want ‘with an equivalent for that food of which he has rightly or wrongly been deprived and the want of which, I feel inclined to believe, has instigated him to the commission of Crime’.10 The Protector of Aborigines also argued that Aboriginal aggressions against settlers were occasioned by deprivation aggravated by drought, and he suggested that many of the attacks against settlers might have been prevented with government provision of food supplies:

  I may observe that nine tenths of the murders committed by the natives, have been committed in the autumnal season or say from the last days of January to that of June. It appears that want in the Port Lincoln territory has been the cause of the recent outrages, that the late drought compelled the tribes to leave the interior for the coast and it is probable that had provision Depots been in operation, the evils might have been avoided.11

  By the end of the 1840s no one seemed particularly satisfied with the rule of law in managing frontier collisions: neither the government officials who attempted often in vain to implement it, nor the settlers who regarded it as inadequate to their needs, and certainly not the Aboriginal people for whom its imposition incurred the worst punitive effects. While mounted police had so far been the government’s principal instrument in dealing with Aboriginal resistance on the colony’s remote frontiers, they did not and could not resolve the underlying problems of Aboriginal starvation and dispossession. By the late 1840s, the government turned to other, more conciliatory approaches in an attempt to prevent the seemingly unremitting cycle of violence.

  The Protectorate

  When the position of Protector of Aborigines was conceived, it was imagined as one of the strategies, along with the accommodation of Aboriginal rights to land and the impartial application of the rule of law, which would help to avert in South Australia the sort of violence that was occurring in the earlier settled colonies. The Protector was to be responsible directly to the Gove
rnor and thereby, it was hoped, remain aloof from the self-interest of settlers. His instructions stipulated that he was to teach the Aborigines the ‘arts of civilization’ and the ‘fundamental truths of CHRISTIANITY’. He was to ‘observe their means of subsistence’ and, while ‘leaving them … to their own exertions’, ensure that they did not ‘fall into destitution’. Finally, considerable stress was placed on the fact that he was to work in the field: ‘a great part of his time must be spent among the natives’; he must ‘make himself acquainted with their language and dialects’ and their ‘peculiar districts’ and he ‘must visit frequently all the tribes in the Province to which the Europeans have access’.12 To support his task, he was given the powers of a magistrate and coroner.

  In a province incorporating tens of thousands of Aboriginal people, speaking dozens of languages and as culturally diverse as the nations of Europe, these were utopian demands, but through the years of the 1840s and early 1850s Protector Matthew Moorhouse did the best he could. He oversaw the operations of the Native Location and the Native School in Adelaide, he supervised the implementation of a colony-wide system of ration distributions, and he was periodically called upon to conduct coronial inquiries and organise interpreters for the court.