Out of the Silence

by Robert Foster

  no one sees who kills the Cattle, and no one can prove before a Court who did it – no apprehension can be made without almost certain loss of life and when this has been done the Police may be convicted of Murder because they can not prove what in the eye of the Law would be sufficient participation in crime …

  These savages could not be made to understand our Laws whatever pains we might take to teach them – they know none other than that by which their own conduct is regulated; the Majesty of our laws is nothing in their eyes – they will not yield to the covenants of the Law whilst they have the least power of resistance, and every instance of successful resistance only incites them to further acts of violence … From 15 to 20 Troopers at hand would be required to protect our frontier stations – they should be well armed, and (in my opinion) directed to use their arms.42

  Whereas in 1858 Warburton had advocated providing police protection on all newly established stations, by the 1860s he began urging settlers to take more measures to protect their property and defend themselves. As the 1860s progressed and the great drought set in, Aboriginal people were forced to compete ever harder for diminishing resources, and a constant complaint to police from settlers was the theft of goods and provisions from their huts. On the earlier frontiers further south, station owners had regularly employed hutkeepers to watch the stores during the day while shepherds were out on the run. This precaution appears to have been largely dispensed with in the more marginal country in the northern and western regions of the colony. Police troopers investigating thefts often reported not only that shepherds’ huts were left unattended, but also that doors were left open or merely fastened with a piece of string. When urged to employ hutkeepers, the station owners’ typical response was that ‘it will not pay’, but they nonetheless expected the police to pursue the thieves and recover the property.43

  The Commissioner had some sympathy for Aboriginal people in these circumstances: ‘the practice of leaving huts with provisions in them open and uncared for obtains a great deal too much – it is not fair to tempt hungry and uncivilized men in this manner’.44 He had less sympathy for the settler who not only left his provisions unprotected, but often his stock as well: ‘if he does not like’ to take the precaution of employing sufficient men, Warburton complained, ‘he ought to be prepared to part with a few head’.45 On a number of occasions the Commissioner threatened to withdraw police from a district as a means of forcing settlers to better protect themselves.

  In October 1863, when a settler in the northern district requested more police support after his unprotected huts had been plundered and the cattle driven off, the Commissioner reported to the Chief Secretary that it was futile for the police to ‘fire into a mob’ of Aboriginal people ‘after the Sheep are stolen & killed’. Instead, he was willing to allow that settlers should use their own firearms in preventing Aboriginal attacks on their property in the first place. He advised that

  owners of Stock should increase the number of their Servants in charge of their property, and that they should supply them all with serviceable arms for the defence of their lives or property … supposing more Police were to be there are they to shoot the Natives like dogs? Or are they to be sent there to relieve the Settlers from the necessity of taking care of their lives and property?’46

  The great drought

  Buoyed by some years of good rainfall, the pastoral frontier had begun moving north of the Flinders Ranges into the Lake Eyre Basin. This was even more marginal country, suitable mainly for cattle. But by 1864, the great drought was beginning to take hold. In the spring of that year, George Reynolds, an employee working on the Lake Hope run, wrote to the station owner’s brother William Dean about the state of the country. He had just returned from a trip south to Blanchewater, noting that even the ‘stone country’ was in poor condition: ‘I assure you it was quite a treat to see something for the horse to eat. We want rain very badly’.47 In another letter written a week earlier, he commented that at Lake Hope, the Aborigines had ‘had a turn at the cattle’, but had been quiet for a while. He personally felt little cause for alarm: ‘I think the niggers will leave us alone, they do not like our rifles, and we have a knack of shooting pretty straight’.48

  By the following year the drought had taken stronger hold. In good years the Aboriginal people of the district could keep their distance from settlers by moving to smaller water sources, but in times of drought they had no choice but to fall back on the principal waters in the district, which by this time had become the jealously guarded life-blood of the stations. In April 1865 John Jacob’s station near Mount Fytton was again raided, the sheep driven off and the shepherd John Jerrold killed. Rumours were abroad that the Aborigines were mustering at Umberatana. In a letter published in the Register Jacob observed that if ‘the police cannot come up, a muster must be made of the settlers, and the country thoroughly secured’.49 Police Troopers Gason and Poynter did come up, although not until September. They tracked the suspects for the raid on Jacob’s station – Parrallana Jacky, Parrallana Tommy and Parrallana Jacky’s wife – to a location near Mt Freeling, and Tommy was shot and killed while allegedly fleeing from the police.50

  Jonathan Hughes, a settler who had been in the district at the time, wrote to the Register with a different version of events. The Aboriginal people, he said, had approached the shepherd asking if they could take some sheep. The sheep they were given were so emaciated from the drought that they had no ‘butter’ on them, which is why they killed some others. This was how the struggle had occurred in which Jerrold died. Hughes wrote:

  They see our people settle in their country, occupy it all, and wantonly destroy the animals on which the natives have depended for food. They cannot prevent or obtain redress for this; but when they are reduced to the verge of starvation, and, following the example of the white men, seek it from the flocks and herds of the white man, they are hunted, captured and chained.51

  Writing again the following month, he observed that the drought had become so severe that the game on which the Aborigines depended for food had ‘become almost extinct in many localities’. ‘No wonder’, he added, that ‘in their extremity’ Aboriginal people should take the ‘flocks and herds of the settlers’.52 A doctor at Nuccaleena wrote to a friend in Adelaide in early December praising the Aborigines of the district for their forbearance; they were, he wrote, ‘on the brink of actual starvation’, and yet ‘bear their destitution with great patience’.53

  In November 1865, Henry Dean wrote to his brother about the difficulties he was facing on Lake Hope station, and his letter was forwarded for publication in the Register. Dean described the impact of the terrible drought which was gripping the district, and the trouble they were having with Aboriginal people: ‘The blacks have been playing up with the cattle since I left the station. They have been killing them by wholesale. I am going at them in a day or two, just to let them know that I am home again’.54 He expressed the view that the ‘down-country blacks … are spoiling our Lakes blacks by putting them up to all sorts of mischief’. How it would end he did not know, ‘but for the protection of our lives and property stopped this must be’. A few days after Dean’s letter was published, Thomas Elder, a part-owner of the Lake Hope property, addressed the parliament on the subject of the drought and its devastating impact on the pastoral industry. To underline the gravity of the situation he read out Dean’s letter, including a passage that had been omitted in its published version. After noting that the Aborigines had been ‘killing cattle by wholesale’, Dean had written:

  A few days ago a lot of blacks stuck up one of our men; he saw them killing a cow, and as soon as they discovered him they faced and tried to drive him back. They then all got round and sent their boomerangs at him until he was obliged to fire upon them to save himself from being murdered, and one of the natives was killed, of which we have sent notice to the police.55

  The remainder of the letter is identical to the published version. It appears the
Register was concerned enough to publish the section indicating Aboriginal aggressions, but was unwilling to report the news that the stockman had fired upon and killed ‘one of the natives’. Dean and his men did ‘go at’ the Aborigines. In a biographical sketch of Henry Dean which draws on his wider correspondence with Elder, Rodney Cockburn relates how Dean ‘used forcible methods in order to establish the authority of the white man’: ‘He burned down three of their camps’, and ‘sent out a party of station hands to clear the country northwards’.56 In the course of his campaign to drive the Aborigines from his run, his own party of nine men was attacked as they slept beneath a dray. Charles Neumann was killed and six of the party were wounded, including George Reynolds who the previous year had bragged of his ‘knack of shooting pretty straight’. Dean himself suffered four spear wounds. Dean’s party ‘made a spirited defence’, shooting several of their Aboriginal attackers.57 In a letter to Thomas Elder, Dean related the circumstances:

  The blacks caught me asleep at last, and all but killed me. They had been giving us a great deal of trouble for some time, and seemed determined to do as they liked with us and our property until we were compelled, for the preservation of our lives and property, to put a stop to the slaughter of our cattle and attacks on our men … the blows came so thick and fast that they would not give a man time to rub his eyes. So soon as I got the spear out of my ear I shot a black though the body with my rifle. It was something awful.58

  Official reports record that four Aborigines had been shot dead and several others wounded in this clash.59 None of the official police reports give any information about Dean’s earlier attacks on the Aboriginal camps, actions which would surely have motivated an Aboriginal attack. Police Trooper Poynter was the first to investigate the attack on Dean’s party. Reporting to Inspector Roe, he requested that since he only had ‘sixty rounds of cartridges’ with him, he wished to be forwarded another ‘one hundred rounds as I have no doubt I shall want them’.60 With Samuel Gason, Poynter led a party of 15 men in pursuit of Dean’s attackers, but apparently only ‘succeeded in meeting with a few natives, the majority having decamped’.61 However, in a letter to Thomas Elder, Dean made it clear that the state of conflict with the Aborigines at Lake Hope was not over: ‘We must have more men and more arms to defend our position and our property, otherwise this country will have to be abandoned by the settlers’.62 Another member of his party was even more direct:

  We want some large sized revolvers, as those we have are too small. We shall not be able to settle the up-creek country until we are stronger handed, as I am afraid it is now open war between the blacks and us.63

  The continuing cycle

  When Corporal James Wauhop reported his clash with around forty Aboriginal people on Mudnowadna station near Mount Deception in 1863, leading him to recommend breech loading rifles for Mounted Police, he noted that the Aborigines involved in the incident were members of the ‘Lake Hope Tribe’ who had come down as far as Brachina ‘to procure a kind of red earth that they use in painting themselves’.64 Brachina is a long way from Lake Hope – hundreds of kilometres south. What the Corporal’s observation alerts us to is that the settlers in the district of the Flinders Ranges contended not only with local Aboriginal tribes resisting the invasion of their country, but also with distant Aboriginal groups who regularly travelled through the region to collect ochre from Parachilna in the southern Flinders, in the vicinity of Brachina Gorge.

  The nineteenth century anthropologist Alfred Howitt noted that parties of Diyari men numbering as many as eighty would set out in the winter of each year from the region of Lake Hope to travel the 400 to 500 kilometres south to Parachilna. It was here that they collected the sacred red ochre that motivated their long journey. As Philip Jones points out in his book Ochre and Rust, the ochre network was considerably more complicated; many other groups from the north, and quite probably the south, journeyed to Parachilna to collect it. The ochre mine was one of the most important sites in the region, and the regular journeys to it were effectively pilgrimages. During the course of the journey, Aboriginal groups would of course sustain themselves by hunting: prior to the arrival of Europeans, their principal diet would have been the kangaroos, wallabies, and the small mammals of the region; after the arrival of Europeans, sheep and cattle provided their sustenance. Many of the violent confrontations reported by settlers in the region during the 1860s were with members of these ochre expeditions, and settlers gradually came to realise it. Settlers often made reference to the presence or approach of the ‘Saltwater Blacks’, so named because they appeared from the vicinity of Lakes Blanche and Gregory, inland salt lakes north of the Flinders Ranges. The Aboriginal people of the Flinders Ranges, the Yura, were sometimes colloquially referred to as the ‘Hill Blacks’. Pompey, who had attacked John Jacob’s station in 1858 and was shot dead by Samuel Stuckey in 1864 while allegedly stirring up revolt among his Aboriginal station workers, was considered a ‘Saltwater Black’.

  Jones suggests that the violence settlers meted out to these groups in retribution for loss of stock may have been well in excess of what official records might indicate. In November 1863 an ochre party of forty to fifty men stole sheep from Captain McKay’s station near Beltana, forcing the station workers to seek shelter in the kitchen while a messenger was sent to get help. McKay, the overseer and another man tracked the stolen sheep to Wariotta Creek. The Aboriginal party allegedly attacked them with waddies and boomerangs, forcing them to employ their firearms. Mounted Constable Wauhop investigated the ‘affray’ and reported that he had seen the remains of three Aborigines who had been shot; he believed that ‘more’ had been injured.65 Two decades later, the owner of the Blinman mines, T.A. Massey, recalled this episode: in his account, ‘11 blacks were killed on the spot, and it is said that 40 to 50 others died of their wounds before they reached their own territory’.66 It is possible that Massey’s account is exaggerated, but its existence casts doubt on the official record.

  Shortly after the event on McKay’s station, Commissioner Warburton suggested a plan that he thought might remove the need for the northern Aboriginal groups to make the ochre journey through country now occupied by settlers: that is, to provide it to them nearer to home.67 While this plan was first mooted in 1864, it was not attempted until a decade later. In 1874 the government paid for four tons of ochre to be mined from a site south of Adelaide and carted to the Killalpaninna Mission in the Lake Eyre district to be distributed among the Aborigines there. As Jones points out, the experiment was a failure: the cultural significance of the Parachilna ochre and the ritual journey to collect it could not be replaced with a cartload of ochre from just anywhere.68

  With the dramatic expansion in the government system of ration distribution over the 1860s, the era of conflict between Aboriginal people, police and settlers in the northern districts was already waning when in October 1866 a party of German Lutherans from the Hermannsburg Missionary Society set out from the Barossa Valley with the plan of establishing a mission in the north.69 At Blanchewater Station they met Sub-Protector Buttfield, who informed them that another missionary party, Moravian brethren from Melbourne, had arrived just before them.70 Like the Lutherans, the Moravians had chosen this missionary field partly because of the stories they had heard about how the Aboriginal people of the district had helped the stranded Burke and Wills expedition at Coopers Creek.71 The Moravians established themselves at Kopperamanna, about 70 kilometres north-west of Lake Hope, while the Lutherans chose Lake Killalpaninna, a further 15 kilometres distant.

  Within two months of the missionaries’ arrival, Aborigines began gathering in large numbers at Perigundi, and rumours spread that they planned to kill all the Europeans in the area, including the missionaries. Aside from any political motives for wanting to attack the intruders, Aboriginal people must have been appalled that these newcomers were occupying two of the most important water sources in the district, and that during the middle of a drought. This was the
same region where, just the year before, Henry Dean’s men had endeavoured to ‘go at’ Aboriginal people at Lake Hope, only to be attacked in return. In early March 1867, a large Aboriginal gathering was preparing for a corroboree within telescope distance of Kopperamanna. Believing this to be a prelude to a planned attack, the Moravians sent a message to their brothers at Killalpaninna to be prepared. On 14 March, as a large tribal group began gathering at Killalpaninna, the missionaries started to make plans to flee. As it happened, a police party was on patrol in the district and arrived at Killalpaninna to dispel the tension, although in spite of the presence of the police, an attempt was made on the life of brother Vogelsang as he set off from Kopperamanna to return to his mission at Killalpaninna.72

  The powerful message to the missionaries was that their presence was not wanted. The very people they had come to ‘save’ were trying to drive them away. Corporal Morton and Constable Gason visited all the Aboriginal camps in the district and spread a message that the missionaries had come ‘to instruct and protect them’; that if they interfered with the missionaries in any way, ‘the Police would take them to Adelaide or shoot them down’.73 For their own safety, Morton recommended, the missionaries should augment their numbers; otherwise they required a permanent police presence, for Aboriginal people would know ‘that they would not protect themselves with firearms’. In a letter to their brethren in Germany, Reverend Goessling summed up the missionaries’ dilemma: ‘What shall we do? If we defend ourselves and shoot heathens it will kill the mission prospects forever … If they kill us … this is not a desirable end. The Lord must assist’.74

  In the short term, the missionaries retreated to the protection of Bucaltininna station, but their presence presented the police with an ongoing problem. In particular, their pacifism left the newly-appointed Police Commissioner, George Hamilton, with a dilemma: how could he best protect them when their very attitude ‘emboldened’ the Aborigines and might lead them to ‘rob and murder them without compunction or mercy’? In a memo regarding the missionaries’ unwillingness to defend themselves – they are referred to as ‘non-combatants’ – Commissioner Hamilton makes it very clear what was expected of police and settlers in these remote districts: