Australians, Volume 2

by Thomas Keneally

  It was calculated in 1861 that in the southern districts of Queensland Aborigines had killed approximately 250 Europeans. Deaths on the native side were not calculated. Newspaper accounts detail seventy-six instances of raids on stock as well, though these are only the reported cases. Similar casualty rates probably occurred in the rest of Queensland during the European advance and consolidation. The war seemed to become more intense the further north and west it moved. There was an energetic resistance in the Mackay and Bowen regions, and Governor Bowen in late 1866 believed that 600 whites had been killed by Aborigines. In 1869 the Port Denison Times reported, ‘Our own town at least had its foundations cemented in blood.’ The Cardwell district, the Palmer River goldfields and the Atherton Tablelands were venues for many fierce and bloody skirmishes and battles between settlers and natives. At Battle Camp south-west of Cairns in November 1873 the natives attacked the diggers’ barricades and were shot down by the increasingly sophisticated and high-muzzle velocity bullets from rifles such as the Snider and the Martini-Henry, which made it possible to fire ten rounds a minute, more than three times the quantity of fire the indigenes of south-eastern Australia had faced.

  Early in 1873 George Dalrymple, explorer and land commissioner, reported that the ‘high, wild, broken conglomerate tablelands and ranges about Gilberton had suffered ten murders’, and that nearly the whole Chinese population ‘which formed the valuable alluvial diggers of the field had left the district, leaving the valley of the Gilbert in undisputed possession of the Aboriginals’. One miner, W.B. Kininmonth, reported of the Palmer natives in 1874: ‘They seemed to be long, lanky fellows, more of a copper colour than the Southern blacks and having by far more pluck—as when we pointed our guns at them, they stood still, as much as to say, “Fire away” . ’ George Dalrymple believed in firmness. Finding a group of natives on Shaw Island off Port Denison (Bowen), he told them through the medium of a Fitzroy River Aborigine, one of the six native troopers with him, that his party had come to return ‘blood for blood’ and his message was backed up with rifle fire from other native troopers on the slopes behind the beach.

  At Gilberton the next year four white men were speared and all their property put to the torch. Mr William Hodgkinson MLA, after failing to obtain some compensation for the men and their families, raged that the events ‘would show the people in the North—those people on whom the prosperity of the country so much depended—that they must shoot every black fellow they found, in spite of the pseudo-philanthropists’. Indeed, a northern squatter reported in 1877 that the Warrgamay-speaking clans along the Herbert River were ‘disappearing one by one and sometimes in larger numbers by the aid of powder and ball . . . I heard today of the massacre of four blacks including a woman, a boy of eight and a girl of twelve.’

  Posses of squatters and of native police were involved in pursuing the so-called Kalkadoons of the inland Gulf region, ‘the Plains of Promise’. Kalkadoons were recklessly brave and often turned and charged the muzzles of the carbines. In the Gulf country, the Cape and along the western borderlands with the Northern Territory and South Australia, guerrilla warfare against Kalkadoon and the Waanyi-Garrwa people continued into the 1880s. The lessees of Gregory Downs, the Watson brothers, writing to the colonial secretary on 18 June 1880, testified that ‘sub-inspectors [of Native Mounted Police] and their troopers go into the bush, round up the blacks and shoot them indiscriminately and kidnap the gins and the little boys’. The Native Mounted Police used in the north were recruited from along the Murray and elsewhere in New South Wales and Victoria and had no fellow feeling for these strange tribes they were ordered to attack. In 1884, at Battle Mountain, in far-western Queensland near the site of Mount Isa, as many as 600 Aboriginal warriors confronted settlers and Native Mounted Police commanded by a future Queensland police commissioner, Frederic Urquhart, in one of the largest and bloodiest confrontations of the frontier wars, in which as many as 200 natives were killed and the rest pursued and ‘dispersed’. The white officers who led the Native Mounted Police used those words, ‘dispersal’ and ‘disperse’, to cover a number of sins.

  Covert state involvement in this forced displacement was more open and prolonged than elsewhere in Australia, and the government of Queensland supported the Native Mounted Police as a ‘force of extermination’. The Martini-Henry rifle came into operation in the 1880s and the Native Mounted Police were armed with it. It was claimed to be twice as accurate as the earlier Sniders. But in the 1880s the Winchester repeater rifles also became popular and could discharge fifteen-round magazines as fast as the trigger was pulled. There was no fighting against such weapons with clubs and spears. This reality is reflected in one sweep of the Yungaburra district near Cairns in 1884, when Yidinji people were slaughtered at Skull Pocket along the Mulgrave River, and at Waree. One of the pursuers, Jack Kane, recalled ‘they were easy running shots. The native police rushed in with their scrub knives and killed off the children . . . I didn’t mind the killing of the “bucks” but I didn’t quite like them braining the kids.’

  The struggle between races in northern Australia, like a similar conflict in the prairies of the United States, was a struggle for control of waterholes. Given the scarcity of water in Australia, the conflict was intense. One of the most militant figures in this struggle was Constable William Willshire, stationed at Alice Springs in the 1880s and then at Victoria River. During the 1880s up to 1000 Aborigines were killed in the Alice Springs pastoral district. Amongst desert populations these amounted to huge losses.

  Recounting one engagement between, on the one side, his Native Mounted Police squad, recruited from other parts of Australia and armed with Martini-Henry carbines, and on the other the ‘mischievous’ local natives of the north, Willshire wrote in an eloquent but sinister phrase that his party’s weapons ‘were talking English to the silent majesty of those great eternal rocks’.

  Willshire was a man of physical courage and psychological sturdiness, and—without excusing his euphemism for slaughter—was a man of his time implementing policy with which pastoralists and governments were content. He was the armed herald who proclaimed, and was the instrument of, racial theories harboured not only by himself but by many other participants in popular racial science. His memoirs read deplorably now, a Petri dish of noxious attitudes, but they were presented to the gaze of his generation in the confidence that they would be enthusiastically applauded. ‘Racist’ has become almost too flimsy a word to encompass all that exhibits itself in his book.

  Given the realities of remote Australia, and the war indigenes were fighting to retain land sites, there is no reason to doubt Willshire when he asserts that ‘many sleepless nights and weary anxious days have been gone through in doing duty amongst wild tribes, who during the writing of this book committed murders and killed the settlers’ horses and cattle; and the author, being a police officer in charge of native constables . . . and those acts being exigencies of the service, he had to go out with his trackers and deal with each case respectively as the law provided’. In the dedication of his 1896 memoirs, he honoured James Logan Ledgerwood, a Territory pastoralist. ‘I was prompted to select you for this Dedication as you thoroughly understand the scheming designs of Aborigines who contrive to take the heart’s blood of white men.’

  The lamentations and the tears belonged not to the punished natives but to the relatives of the dead pioneers alone. ‘Oh sorrowing, oh, sorrowing mothers and sisters true, your sons’ and brothers’ bones lay bleaching in scenes of wildest desolation, and in scenes of picturesque beauty, at various waterholes on the Overland Telegraph Line, at dozens of places in the Northern Territory, especially its rivers.’ There is no denying that individual travellers, or small parties, had reason to be fearful of attack. Patrolling the Katherine, Daly, Gregory, Roper and Victoria rivers in the mid-1880s, Willshire claims he did not know when he lay down at night when the attack would come, and if this is so it could not have added
to his kind thoughts. According to him the marauding natives often sheltered between murders at mission stations now beginning to spread across the north, run by Trappist monks, Presbyterians, Jesuits, all of whom he mocked. Their attack made, he said, they then retreated, reassuming the garments of the mission and its pieties. His energy was employed by contrast as missionary of the carbine, and he was relentless in spreading that light.

  His memories are full of ambiguity towards his enemy. The Aborigines, he said, were ‘beautiful liars’, and like many Europeans he showed a certain respect for the full-blood Aborigines, and a genuine interest in their culture, even presenting a vocabulary of the Victoria River language in his book. Indeed, he confessed his initial weakness for the natives.

  I lived with the natives for sixteen years. I spent hundreds of pounds to ameliorate their condition, and in return they attempted to murder me. I was exceedingly kind to them. I incurred the displeasure of white men, who said I was spoiling them through my liberality. My kindness was rewarded with the blackest of ingratitude . . . when I saw my mistake and altered my hand, I became firm, and the natives then respected me with that fawning civility so characteristic of a low degraded race.

  Like many Europeans, he despised fringe-dwelling half-castes, even though it had been through the sexual adventures of the settlers that half-castes were born.

  He was involved in the pursuit of evildoers, for example, when in August 1885 a prospecting party was attacked by blacks and a man named Walker killed. The offending group ‘were tracked up by an avenging party [police and others], and sic transit Gloria mundi!’ In January 1892 Charles Deloitte and George Clarke were murdered at Creswell Downs Station, and again Willshire took to the field with his Native Mounted Police. Then in April 1892 six Malays were massacred by the natives at Bowen Straits east of Palmerston. Altogether, 1892 seems to have been a bad year for attacks, since Mr W.S. Scott, manager of Willeroo Station, was camped for dinner out on his run when speared to death on 11 October. In all these cases Willshire’s ‘carbine spoke’, and carbines were the superior weaponry of the day.

  There was a strange racial ambivalence in Willshire when he pursued a group of Aborigines who had been spearing cattle on the Victoria run in August 1894. He came upon them camped in a gorge off the north bank of the Wickham River. The men picked up their spears and commenced climbing the precipitous sides of the cliff while the females and children crawled into rocky embrasures. Willshire does not say what happened in detail—he merely records that ‘when we had finished with the male portion we brought the black gins and their offspring out from their rocky alcoves. There were some nice looking boys and girls among them. One girl had a face and figure worthy of Aphrodite—had she dwelt in a Grecian sculptor’s brain?’ He treated a pregnant mother with kindly attention, and when she gave birth to a child he reflected, ‘The newborn babe turned out to be a boy, the nucleus of a cattle-killer.’

  His adventures were diverse. He told the tale of a ‘civilised black boy’ belonging to a Justice of the Peace in the lower Victoria district who was murdered by ‘the wild natives of the Gregory River’. Pursuing them to Gordon Creek, they saw a beautiful ‘savage maiden’ running screaming to give warning to the miscreants, but the black trackers were already at the spot before she could do it. The only reference to what happened when his party descended upon the group was ‘when all was over my boys brought her and some others to our camp’. A number who survived the fire fights of the frontiers became the servant-companions of native troopers.

  Obviously there were black women who were not even as fortunate as that.

  A WORKER’S PARADISE?

  Though work was hard and wages low, the idea was fostered in Australia, not merely at the level of civic orations but in the suppositions of ordinary folk, that—by comparison with the factory squalor immigrants encountered—Australia was a working man’s paradise. This belief has been a potent and enduring Australian legend. The decade of the 1870s, said the Sydney Morning Herald, reminiscing in September 1890, was one during which workers were ‘the most fortunate, the best paid and the most prosperous in the world’. The truth was that Australian working conditions in the later nineteenth century were often as bad and occasionally were harsher than those of the Old World, particularly in the way people were worked in country areas but also in the manufacturies of the cities. In the mid-nineties, before she went to Paraguay and New Australia, Henry Lawson would take the young schoolteacher Mary Gilmore to see the misery of Sydney. ‘He used to take me out to see the wrong things, the things repressive of the rights of Australia; the things like a blot upon her and which prevented her being herself. The low-wage workers, the Chinamen working at treadle-saws in underground cellars lit only by a grating in the street, the huddled houses . . . the pale seamstresses . . . the neglected children of the Quay and elsewhere.’ It is significant that young Mary also saw Australia as of its nature a paradise and that it was only ‘the things which prevented her being herself’ that stood in the way.

  In the 1890s depression, the working man’s paradise thesis came under acute pressure. There was a high level of burglary, babies were abandoned on doorsteps, in the slums there were evictions, and the number of people applying for charity doubled. According to the lively South Australian premier, Charles Kingston, a radical, ‘Australian society set high standards for individual self-sufficiency’, and sometimes people simply could not reach them. Only South Australia and Western Australia had state-subsidised Benevolent Asylums, the equivalent of British and Irish workhouses, and these asylums, said the visiting Irish home rule campaigner Michael Davitt, ‘had at least some of the much-dreaded atmosphere of Poor Law Institutions in England’. On the other hand, he continued, workers who had gone to the wall were not treated like semi-criminals, and there was no hereditary pauper class, as in England. And the richest investors in Australian enterprise often lived overseas, like Mount Morgan’s Mr D’Arcy, and this helped the development of the myth of Australian equity.

  And yet . . . In the 1870s, Dr. J.E. Neild, public health expert, wrote, ‘I know from experience something of the chronic domestic dirt which prevailed among the lower classes in the manufacturing towns of England, but nothing that I ever witnessed in the West Riding of Yorkshire and in South Lancashire equalled in repulsiveness what I have found in Melbourne.’ Though housing conditions were generally better than in the slums of London or Manchester, it was a matter of mere degree. On the other hand, even in the depression of the 1890s the average family’s spending power in New South Wales was £38 per head of population per year, compared with £30 in Britain. Did that £8 difference create the basis for awarding Australia the crown as a working man’s paradise? Similarly, the New South Wales statistician Timothy Coghlin found that the average Englishman had to work 127 days to earn the cost of his food, but the average Australian achieved the same result after 119 days of labour, and ate far better food in the process. The far better food was a considerable factor in the belief in the Australian industrial nirvana. To the European working class, meat and tea were luxuries, but were standard in the diet of the Australian working class. There was a chance that because of a better diet, the more successful of Australian working men and their wives and children developed into a distinctive physical type, taller and leaner but generally stronger. That this was not always the case is obvious from any reading of our history, but Rolf Boldrewood, the author of Robbery Under Arms, certainly believed in a better destiny making a better kind of human being, always envisaged as a male. ‘His limbs are muscular and sinewy; his chest is broad; his shoulders well spread.’ According to Boldrewood, the Australian could ‘generally do manual labour after a fashion and at a pace that would astonish a Kent or Sussex local’.

  Politicians and society in general had held out the vision of the working man’s utopia, and now unions intended to hammer down the conditions which would ensure it. The first attempts had been mad
e in the late 1850s by the Operative Stonemasons’ Societies of Melbourne and Sydney, who were transforming these cut-rate ports into modern urban glories. They were like the young Parkes, influenced by Chartism, and believed in the previously forbidden right to ‘combine’ (a right for which Chartists and earlier British and Irish protesters had been transported as convicts). British masons usually worked under shelter and a milder climate, but here in Australia there were few workshops or other awnings to protect the stonemason from the sun or the wet. They believed that the sixty-hour week then in place was far too long. On the cusp of the 1860s, the Printers’ Union was also campaigning for an eight-hour day.

  In 1866 Farmer and Company, the large Sydney store, which like British firms had been willing to work their shop assistants ninety hours a week, became the first in New South Wales to close for the Saturday half-holiday. When Anthony Hordern died in 1868 his sons brought back the Sydney emporium’s closing hours from 10 p.m. to 7 p.m. David Jones adopted even shorter hours during the 1870s and abandoned Saturday-night trading. All this was in part due to the progressive spirit in some of the major Australian shopkeepers. In Brisbane in 1879 the Dublin-born draper Thomas Finney pioneered 6 p.m. closing at his department stores, Finney Isles and Company, and he followed it with early Saturday closing in 1885. The idea of co-ownership appealed to Finney, and he subsidised a staff fund on a £1 to £1 basis. Profit-sharing as a means to motivate and elevate workers was a world phenomenon and many company owners adopted it. In 1888 Peter Johns, formerly a workman on the Crystal Palace in London, and owner of a large engineering works in Melbourne, gave more than half his own shares to employees, an arrangement which helped him, in collaboration with his workers, to survive the 1890s depression almost without damage.