BLACK-WHITE RELATIONS IN THE GULF COUNTRY TO 1950
Blackheath History Forum, Saturday 29 August 2009
by Tony Roberts
First, a short introduction.
FRONTIER JUSTICE: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900, is the first of two volumes. The
sequel, ROUGH JUSTICE, continues the story to 1950 and should be finished early next year.
Together they reveal excruciating details of the cruelty and violence that accompanied
dispossession during the years of South Australian administration to 1910, and then, through the
period of Commonwealth control, the injustice, discrimination and violence that continued to 1950
and beyond.
When you see who owned the stations on which Aboriginals were slaughtered; and the names of
the South Australian premiers who knowingly allowed it to happen; and the names of the Prime
Ministers responsible for the discrimination and oppression after 1910, it reads like a "Who's Who"
of famous Australians.
When you see in fine detail what was done to hundreds of innocent men, women and children, it
reads like a horror story from another country.
That is why some people want this history to remain hidden, as we saw during the so-called
"history wars" a few years ago. Yet we remain diminished as a nation if we don't have the courage
to face up to our past. Celebrating the good, but denying the bad.
My talk today is in two parts. Part 1 deals with aspects of the first volume, focusing on a number
of issues I withheld from the book. Part 2 will be shorter, and draws on material from the sequel.
Finally, could I invite each of you to imagine, as you listen this afternoon, how you would feel if
members of your family had been among the victims.
And how you might feel about the
governments who masterminded, condoned, or concealed these atrocities.
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PART 1
FRONTIER JUSTICE: The History to 1900
STUDY AREA
The Gulf country is almost exactly the size of Victoria: from the Queensland border in the east to
the overland telegraph line (or Stuart Highway) in the west, and from the Roper River down to
Tennant Creek. It includes the Barkly Tableland and comprises some 17% of the Territory. If one
were to exclude the vast desert areas not settled by pastoralists, it's about a quarter of the Territory's
pastoral country.
What happened here was repeated in the other settled districts of the Territory, making the
Gulf country an ideal region for studying black-white relations to 1900 and beyond. And the
frontier violence here was similar to what happened in the other colonies in earlier years.
BORROLOOLA
Borroloola was small, isolated, the only town in the district, and the most lawless town in Australia
at the time. The permanent population in the frontier days varied from just thirty to fifty whites and
Chinese, but there was always a floating population, many of whom were criminals on the run from
the eastern colonies. By 1900 the town was dying, the population was down to five and so it
remained, more or less, for the next fifty years.
ABORIGINAL POPULATION
This district was the traditional country of fifteen discrete language groups, or 'tribes', or peoples.
When the first whites passed through the area, the size of the tribes ranged from about 250 on the
fertile coastal country, to perhaps 200 on the semi-arid Barkly Tableland to the south. I estimate
the Aboriginal population of the district at that time, to have been at least 3,000 people,
although some official estimates suggest a much higher figure.
This contrasts with a white
population of less than 300 in the 1880s and 1890s when the cattle stations were at their peak.
PASTORAL SETTLEMENT
By the end of the 1870s, South Australia was heavily in debt and very little pastoral land in its
Northern Territory had been taken up. But a sequence of events, including a reduction in pastoral
rents, triggered a massive boom in the northern half of the Territory in 1881.
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Within a matter of months, and certainly by the end of that year, every inch of the Gulf country had
been taken up: leased to just fourteen lessees, as if it were vacant land.
There was no regard for the legal and human rights of the Aboriginal owners of the land: no
explanations, no consultations. Much like today, in the Territory.
Lessees had only three years to comply with a minimum stocking rate. So by mid-1885 the whole
of the district was occupied — not just leased, but occupied — and all fourteen stations were
declared by the owners, to be stocked. Some of these stations were huge and the average size was
in fact almost 16,000 square kilometres (that's 6,000 sq miles, or 4 million acres).
The first cattle station was formed in June 1881. It was Elsey, on the Roper River, made famous by
the book We of the Never-Never, a romanticised and selective account of frontier life.
Twelve of the leases were taken up by wealthy businessmen from the eastern colonies, the other
two by pastoral families from New South Wales. One of the principal owners of Alexandria, the
largest station on the Barkly Tableland, was the Queensland premier, Sir Thomas McIlwraith. The
chairman of McIlwraith's private pastoral company was Sir Richard Baker, an Adelaide barrister
and wealthy pastoralist in his own right. He was also the Minister responsible for the Northern
Territory and the South Australian Minister for Justice, yet he did nothing to stop the massacres.
Many of these lessees and their agents were ruthless men, who placed money and power above the
lives and livelihoods of Aboriginal people. Baker was once described by a political opponent, who
became premier, as "false as a friend, treacherous as a colleague, mendacious as a man, and utterly
untrustworthy in every relationship of public life". He was knighted in 1886.
DISPOSSESSION
So in the space of just four years, the Gulf country's Aboriginal population of at least 3,000 was
dispossessed of all their land. Dispossessed of an area the size of Victoria in just four years.
Compared with more than 35,000 years of occupation, four years must have seemed like the blink
of an eye.
And all because successive South Australian governments were anxious to have a pastoral industry
at any cost — especially if that cost was borne by people who were powerless, spoke no English,
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had inferior weapons, lived far from Adelaide, and were regarded by a significant portion of the
South Australian population, and certainly by the ruling class, as "savages".
ACCESS TO LEASES DENIED
There was a clause in the pastoral leases from 1851, allowing Aboriginals full and free access to the
whole of the lease area, including the waterholes, as if the lease had not been granted. It was
inserted not by the politicians but by the Governor, Sir Henry Young, an English lawyer and
humanitarian, because of the practical consequences of dispossession: nowhere to live, no access to
water, no means of obtaining food. But once he left office the clause was ignored by South
Australian governments, pastoralists, and police. Not out of ignorance, but arrogance, and utter
contempt for the legal rights of Aboriginal peoples.
CONSEQUENCES OF DISPOSSESSION
Apart from the violence, which I'll come to in a moment, what were the practical, day to day
consequences, of this dispossession?
First of all, there were profoundly important spiritual and cultural consequences, because of
the complex spiritual link that traditional Aboriginal people have with their own country and
its natural environment. Dispossession meant much more than the loss of a place to live, or a
means of survival. Important multi-tribe ceremonies could no longer be held for fear of being shot.
Then there were the physical consequences. The following glimpses of frontier life come from an
Alawa man, Barnabas Gabarla Roberts, who was born about 1894 and was 20 years old by the time
the shooting of his people tapered off. His country was Hodgson Downs station, south of the Roper
River, where his father witnessed the arrival of the first cattle in 1884.
Mostly I paraphrase Barnabas for brevity, but occasionally I use his own words in the first person.
Most of these recollections were recorded in 1967 when he was in his seventies.
As a little boy he was terrified of the white men, and of being shot. Never happy, he said,
just worried all the time, frightened, running, hiding. Never allowed to cry because his
mother said the white man might hear, and shoot them all.
The extended family was hunted from his father's country: "Shoot 'em people like kangaroo,
like bird. Oh, terrible days we used to [have]. Bad times. Bad times, alright."
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They had to hide in the hills, unable in daylight to go down to the rivers, the lagoons and the
flat country where much of their food was found. They could only run down there at night.
They were unable to care for country by burning, nor could they burn the grass to find
snakes, goannas and lizards.
Often they were too frightened to light a fire even for cooking, let alone warmth on a cold
night, and had to eat their meat raw.
They were constantly on the move, too scared to stay in one place: "all-a-time we go, we go,
run away from white man and his bullet."
They had to cover their tracks, or walk on grass, or stones.
People shot by whites couldn't be given proper funeral rites, not only because ceremonies
were too risky, but because the white men cremated the bodies. As they did across the
pastoral frontier.
And sacred sites were desecrated by white men and cattle.
The government was aware of these day to day issues, and the shootings, from a detailed report by
John Parsons, the Government Resident in Darwin, tabled in parliament in June 1885. It was
completely ignored by the government. The premier was Sir John Downer.
There were also, of course, acute emotional consequences, still evident today in the old
Aboriginal people at Borroloola, who have talked with me at length about the violence done
to their grandfathers and grandmothers.
ENFORCEMENT
Pastoral settlement was enforced by what must have seemed to Aboriginal people like weapons of
mass destruction. Weapons so powerful that one shot could kill two or more people.
Most popular by far were the ·57 calibre Snider rifle, designed for big-game hunting in Africa, and
the more advanced, more powerful ·45 calibre Martini-Henry. These were military rifles, used by
the British army, but almost every overlander, stockman and station manager had one or the other.
And they were not used for hunting kangaroos.
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Both weapons could kill an elephant. The enormous bullets caused horrific injuries to those not
killed outright. When fired into a crowd, a single bullet could pass through one person and then kill
or maim others. The Martini-Henry was capable of killing a person at more than a kilometre.
These rifles were far more powerful than the Winchesters used against native Americans, although
a small number did in fact use Winchesters.
TRIBES FIGHT BACK
The tribes fought back against the violence and dispossession, some more aggressively than others,
but their main targets were the cattle that were destroying the pristine waterholes. It was difficult to
get close enough to the white men, because of their revolvers and long-range rifles, yet some were
targetted, though only twenty were killed to 1900. And a number of these had been shooting
Aboriginal people and or abducting the young women.
Although this resistance was largely ineffective, because of primitive weapons (spears, boomerangs
and throwing sticks) and no tradition of tribes joining forces to fight a common enemy, resistance
resulted in retaliation, or "punishment" as it was called, that was even more savage and
disproportionate than before.
ROLE OF THE POLICE
This work of "punishing the blacks" was usually done by the police, often supplemented by a large
posse of stockmen. The primary role of the police was not to maintain law and order, but to make
the Territory safe for whites and their cattle, regardless of the cost in Aboriginal lives and misery.
The police were armed with Martini-Henry carbines and ·45 calibre revolvers.
While only
revolvers were used against whites, the Martini-Henry carbines were used primarily, and almost
exclusively, for shooting Aboriginal people. It was as if an unofficial war had been declared on
the true owners of the land.
In the euphemistic language of the northern frontier, from Queensland to the Kimberley,
"dispersing the blacks" simply meant shooting them, but once this expression became widely
understood, it was replaced by two others with exactly the same meaning: "punishing the blacks",
or "teaching them a lesson".
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"A severe lesson", meant wholesale slaughter, while "a lesson they will never forget" meant exactly
that. The last example of this was in 1928 when about 100 people were shot near Coniston station,
as we'll see later.
"Punishment" also involved wanton destruction. After slaughtering the occupants of a camp, the
police would burn the bodies, the houses, weapons and canoes, and shoot the dogs. Station
managers and stockmen did likewise. The Americans might have called this "shock and awe".
The police were an avenging force, acting as judge, jury and executioner. Historian Tony
Austin has described their methods as "extreme para-military measures".
The man in charge of policing in the Territory for the whole of the frontier period, from 1870 until
his retirement in 1904, was Inspector Paul Foelsche, a former soldier in the German army.
Foelsche was clever, cunning and devious. With Aboriginal people he was utterly ruthless.
In 1875 he sent a large party of police and civilians to the Roper River with these cryptic but
sinister instructions: "I cannot give you orders to shoot all natives you come across, but
circumstances may occur for which I cannot provide definite instructions." In a letter to a friend he
was more candid, saying the men had been sent to the Roper to "have a Picnic with the Natives".
And I don't think he sent them with a tablecloth and a basket of sandwiches. He said he would like
to have gone himself, but he didn't care for large parties because, he said, "there are too many taletellers". Evidence suggests the death toll was over 100.
Three years later, in another letter to the same friend, Foelsche referred to recent police massacres
near Pine Creek as "our nigger hunt". In another letter, he observed: "By the majority of the
population here the Aborigines are looked upon as beasts, destitute of reason and are treated as
such."
In 1880 and 1881, after two white men were murdered on the Coast Track near the Limmen Bight
River, Foelsche complained that "the dread of police is unknown", down there. This was a most
telling remark. He asked the government, in his usual cryptic language, for what amounted to
immunity from prosecution for his men, so they might kill sufficient of the local tribes to teach
them a lesson. He said he wanted to "inflict severe chastisement if the Government will legalise it."
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In 1886 when a stockman was killed on McArthur River station while attempting to shoot
Aboriginals, a party of twenty-two led by Constable William Curtis shot 64 people in one camp
alone, according to a stockman who took part.
This was institutionalised slaughter, funded and approved by the South Australian
government, on a scale that beggars belief.
SLAUGHTER
The word "slaughter" was often used during the frontier period by those opposed to the massacre of
Aboriginal men, women and children.
And this is why. The usual procedure was for the white men to remove their boots, creep up to an
Aboriginal camp and surround it silently before dawn. At first light, they would take aim and at a
given signal would begin shooting the sleeping victims. If anyone happened to be sitting up or
standing they'd be shot first.
Another method was to gallop into a camp during daylight, catching the occupants by surprise, and
shoot as many as possible before the rest run away. In open country the horsemen would then
chase those who were fleeing and shoot as many as they could.
This was not frontier warfare, it was indeed cold-blooded slaughter.
REASONS FOR THE MASSACRES
What were the reasons for the massacres? My studies reveal five main reasons:
The most common by far was retaliation & punishment for attacks upon white men, cattle,
or horses.
Second, on a number of stations, the land was simply cleared of “wild blacks”, so the cattle
would not be disturbed at the waterholes and stockmen would not be at risk of attack.
Third, punishment for Aboriginal behaviour considered cheeky, or impertinent. A single
spear thrown harmlessly into Thomas Moore's tent at night on the Calvert River, resulted in
camp after camp of local people being wiped out over the following months, except for the
young women he and his men abducted.
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Fourth, pre-emptive attacks upon large numbers of Aboriginals painted for ceremonies,
often described as “weird war dances”, with the painting described as “war paint”. I think
some whites on the frontier had been reading too many dime westerns.
Fifth, some whites had a grudge against Aboriginal people because they had once been
attacked, or one of their family had been killed by Aboriginals.
OTHER FORMS OF WHITE VIOLENCE
But apart from the massacres, there were other forms of violence against Aboriginal people.
First, random shooting. Some men even boasted of shooting Aboriginals on sight. One
claimed to have killed thirty-seven. So common was this practice that when the Yanyuwa
people, whose country lay to the east and north-east of Borroloola, hadn't seen one of their
number for some time, they assumed he or she must have been shot.
Second, rapes of young women, and girls as young as seven or eight, by men with syphilis.
The result was an excruciating death within a few years. Child sexual abuse in the Territory
was prevalent, but the perpetrators were white.
Third, abduction of young girls by men wanting to avoid catching a venereal disease. They
were held prisoner for years, and hunted down with trackers and dogs if they escaped. On
one station, kidnapped girls and young women were sold to passers-by for £10 each.
Fourth, men shot in cold blood to gain possession of their wives for casual sex. Sometimes
the woman, too, was shot, next morning.
Fifth, when the shooting was over, any babies still alive were killed without wasting bullets:
held by the ankles, their skulls were dashed against a tree or rock. “Just like goanna”, say
old Aboriginal people. A crying baby was left behind when Garrwa people fled a camp on
the Robinson River: it was thrown onto the hot coals of a cooking fire, by a white man, still
crying.
Sixth, people were shot for sport. Here is an example from Vanderlin Island that is not in
the book. A large boat arrived at a remote beach where people were camped. Men came
ashore with guns, all the Aboriginals ran into the bush, including the grandfathers of the
man who told me the story. All except for a heavily pregnant young woman, who climbed a
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tree and hid in the canopy. The white men stood under this tree, talking. One of them
looked up, saw her, called out to his mates. They all looked up and laughed. When the
laughing stopped, one of the men raised his rifle and shot her. She fell to the ground dead.
Yanyuwa people ask "why?".
Seventh, and finally, sadistic cruelty. An Aboriginal man was punished for something,
perhaps stealing, by having both his hands impaled on a tall sapling, sharpened to a point at
the top. This was done by Jack Watson, who also had 40 pairs of Aboriginal ears nailed
round the walls of his hut. Watson was a member of a prominent Melbourne racing family
and was educated at Melbourne Grammar. He managed Victoria River Downs, one of the
biggest stations in the Territory.
NO WHITE WOMEN OR CHILDREN HARMED
In stark contrast to the brutal treatment of Aboriginal women and children, not a single
white woman or child was ever harmed in any way. Not in the Gulf country, nor anywhere else
in the Territory. There were not many white women and children, but there were some, including
Mrs Costello and her seven children on Valley of Springs station on the Limmen Bight River, a
region where there were many fatal attacks upon whites and many massacres. She knew the local
Aboriginals wouldn't touch her or the children. They were too civilised for that.
EXTINCTION OF TRIBES
The town of Borroloola was in the south-east corner of Wilangarra country. By 1900 this tribe was
almost extinct: a decade or so later, it was extinct. By about 1920 other tribes were close to
extinction, including the Ngarnji and Binbingka. Today, I believe they too are virtually extinct, and
a number of others have been reduced to remnants.
Despite claims by many historians over the years that disease caused more Aboriginal deaths than
violence, that was absolutely not the case in the Gulf country. Nor, I suspect, in other districts
either. I believe they got it wrong because insufficient work had been done in those days on the
extent of frontier slaughter.
PASTORAL DECLINE
As if the story wasn't tragic enough to this point, the pastoral industry, for which the
government had been willing to sacrifice hundreds of lives and dispossess thousands of
people, was a failure.
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Six of the 14 stations were abandoned within ten years, others changed hands and nearly all were
greatly reduced in size. This occurred between 1892 and 1894. Many owners lost a fortune.
ROLE OF THE MEDIA
In the Darwin newspaper, the Northern Territory Times, Aboriginal people were constantly being
described as "niggers", "treacherous savages", "venomous serpents", and worse.
Following an attack in Arnhem Land in which one man was killed and two wounded, the Times
stated:
"We must go into actual warfare with them ... Shoot those you cannot get at and hang those
that you do catch on the nearest tree as an example to the rest".
The attitude of the southern press was quite different. In 1885 when news reached Adelaide of a
series of massacres over a wide area south-west and south-east of Darwin, in which at least 150
men women and children were slaughtered, the South Australian Register was scathing: "Down in
South Australia good men try to civilize them with the Bible; elsewhere we civilize them with the
Martini-Henry rifle", said the paper.
It described the killings as "cold-blooded murder", "a
butchering expedition".
And in a swipe at the government of premier, John Downer, the Register went on to say: "The
perpetrators are not only those who shot down the ... blacks, but the officials who authorized and
concealed this disgraceful deed."
The Territory press responded with typical belligerence. The North Australian remarked: "As to
the shooting of blacks, we uphold it defiantly", while the Times praised the police party, saying that
shooting was "the only rational method of dealing with blood-thirsty savages".
The Times was owned and edited then by Vaiben Solomon, a member of the Adelaide
establishment, educated at Scotch College, Melbourne. He went on to become a member of
parliament, like his father, and together with John Downer was among those who drafted the
Australian Constitution. Which may explain why the Constitution did not regard Aboriginals as
"people".
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DEATH TOLL
In the book there is a table of fifty-three "Multiple Killings of Aboriginals". Most of these were in
fact massacres — a term which requires a certain minimum death toll, among other criteria. And
these are just the ones I know about. There were, of course a great many more than that.
After considering the circumstances of these cases, and allowing for others that went unrecorded;
and the random shooting of individuals; and taking account of the attitudes of government and
settlers alike, I believe the Aboriginal death toll from white violence in the Gulf country, on
the Territory side of the border, to be at least 600, or about one fifth of the population.
Compared with 20 white deaths, this gives a ratio of 30:1. Yet the death toll could easily be as high
as seven or eight hundred. We will never know the true figure.
And the true figure is not important. It is certainly not something to be trivialised by ratbag rightwing commentators, who say "show me the proof, the archival records".
Police who committed mass murder knew better than to write a detailed report.
Civilians who committed mass murder knew better than to boast about numbers.
Nor could they even know how many they killed, because many of the victims died a slow death in
the bush, from their wounds.
What is important are these undeniable facts:
One, there were more than fifty massacres. The victims included women, children, babies
and other non-combatants.
Two, at least 600 Aboriginal people were killed as a result of these actions, compared with
just 20 white deaths.
Three, a great many people were shot randomly, or for sport.
Four, not a single white person in the Gulf country was ever charged with murder.
And finally, not a single white woman or child was harmed in any way by Aboriginals.
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Let us not be side-tracked by numbers.
GOVERNMENT CULPABILITY
Who should be held accountable for the rapid dispossession, the cruelty and the slaughter, in
the Gulf country and throughout the Territory?
Before the leases were issued during the pastoral boom of 1881, the government knew, from a wide
variety of reports, that the Gulf country was heavily populated. They knew exactly what the
consequences of wholesale pastoral settlement would be, from experience in South Australia over
the past 45 years: starvation, sickness, degradation and massacres.
At the very time as it was issuing leases in the Gulf country, the government was issuing rations in
South Australia. And had been for decades, thanks to pressure from missionaries and other
humanitarians. There were also Protectors of Aboriginals.
But in the Gulf country there were no ration depots, no protectors and, for the first five to seven
years no police officers to curb the excesses of station managers.
And when the police did arrive, they took charge of the slaughter, taking no prisoners.
Successive South Australian governments were responsible for all of this. All of it!
They issued the leases.
They failed to help the dispossessed.
They used the police as terrorists to enforce white settlement.
They armed them with military rifles that could kill elephants.
They gave them unlimited ammunition and authority to use it.
Most damning of all, they knew Inspector Foelsche was a ruthless killer, yet they left him in
charge for the whole of the frontier period, 34 years, from 1870 until his retirement in 1904.
Then rewarded him with the Imperial Service Medal. Kaiser Wilhelm gave him a gold
medal.
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Can we be sure that governments knew what was happening in the Territory? Yes, absolutely.
There was a steady stream of major police massacres from at least 1874 to the late 1890s, there
were some police reports, quarterly reports from the Government Resident in Darwin, letters from
station owners, first-hand reports from visiting Territorians, and enthusiastic reports in the Northern
Territory Times. And they knew they were shipping massive quantities of Martini-Henry bullets to
the Territory. They knew alright.
In all of the circumstances, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Aboriginal people
of the Northern Territory were expendable and had been earmarked for extermination if
required.
Under the international Laws of War, it is likely that the South Australian government would have
been guilty of war crimes had it formally declared war on its own Aboriginal peoples in the
Territory, and then conducted that war in the manner I have described.
"HISTORY WARS"
Before closing Part 1 of this talk, I want to comment briefly on some statements made during the
so-called "history wars" a few years ago: statements which I believe were untrue, un-Australian and
exceedingly offensive to my Aboriginal friends. Here are three examples.
In the November 2000 edition of a magazine called Quadrant, Mr Keith Windschuttle challenged
the estimate by historian Henry Reynolds that at least 20,000 Aboriginal people had died in frontier
violence in Australia. Windschuttle wrote:
"the British colonies in Australia were civilised societies governed by both morality and
laws that forbade the killing of the innocent. The notion that the frontier was a place where
white men could kill blacks with impunity ignores the powerful cultural and legal
prohibitions on such action. For a start, most colonists were Christians to whom such
actions were abhorrent."1
This view is simply incorrect.
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The second example is from 2003. Sir Anthony Mason, former Chief Justice of the High Court of
Australia, wrote: "there can be no denial of the fundamental proposition that the Indigenous peoples
of Australia were dispossessed against their will of much of their traditional lands."2
Sir Anthony was stating the obvious and was absolutely right.
But on the ABC Lateline program on 3 September 2003, Tony Jones asked one of his guests, Mr
Windschuttle, whether he agreed with Sir Anthony. Mr Windschuttle replied that he did not agree
and went on to say:
"In most of the mainland the level of violence was extremely low, was individual squabbles.
The idea that there was some frontier warfare, or Aboriginal resistance, where the will of
the Aboriginal people was thwarted by these invaders, is a mythological construct."
The truth is the exact opposite. The wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children,
which occurred in every Australian colony, cannot be characterised as mere "squabbles".
The third example is from that same Lateline program. Mr Windschuttle said he disagreed with Sir
Anthony "because what happened was not against their will ... most Aborigines ... were overawed
by these strange new people: they were intrigued by their society, fascinated by their technology,
they wanted to know about what they had."
Let us look at each of his four closing points:
"overawed by these strange new people"
If the Aboriginals of the Gulf country were overawed,
it was by the savagery and wanton violence of those
who dispossessed and slaughtered them.
"intrigued by their society"
Intrigued by men who raped little girls and shot
pregnant women? I don't think so.
Sickened, more likely.
"fascinated by their technology"
Fascinated by Snider and Martini-Henry rifles? I don't
think so. Horrified, more likely.
"wanted to know about what they had"
They had syphilis! That's what they had, Mr
Windschuttle — syphilis!
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John Howard repeatedly attacked frontier historians for revealing the truth about our dark past. He
did so again on 30 October 1996 in the parliament, saying: "I think we have been too apologetic
about our history in the past … the Australian achievement”, he claimed, “has been a heroic one, a
courageous one and a humanitarian one."3
Well, I see nothing heroic in the abduction and rape of little girls.
I see nothing courageous in the countless massacres of men, women and children.
I see nothing humanitarian in holding babies by the ankles and dashing their brains out.
PART 2
ROUGH JUSTICE: 1900 to 1950
The frontier culture of violence, discrimination and injustice towards Aboriginal peoples continued
to 1950 and beyond. The Commonwealth government took control of the Territory in 1911, but
nothing much changed, except that massacres became less common because times were changing,
the violence less overt, and the courts were used to give a pretence of justice. But it was only a
pretence. In the Local Courts and the Supreme Court there were two laws: one for whites and
another, harsher one for Aboriginals.
The Commonwealth government knew what was happening, but did nothing to stop it. The proof
is in documents signed by Prime Ministers and Attorneys-General.
The last massacres in the Territory were in 1928 when about 100 people were shot over a vast area
near Coniston station in revenge for the murder of a dingo trapper. Not a single person was
charged, let alone the principal culprit, Constable George Murray. The Prime Minister was Stanley
Bruce.
STEALING OF LITTLE CHILDREN
But of all the government injustices from 1911, the stealing of children of mixed descent was
surely one of the most criminal.
In the Gulf country there were a number of good white men, from respectable families, living with
an Aboriginal de facto wife, in a comfortable bush house with a vegetable garden, some cattle,
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goats, on the woman's traditional country, with the blessing of her family. Hundreds of kilometres
from the unsavoury town camps we hear so much about. Their happy, healthy children had little
cousins, friends and a loving extended family close by. It was an idyllic life. These fathers made
wills in favour of their children.
I know this, because I've spent many hours, over many years, talking with some of those children,
who are now in their seventies and eighties.
But children like these, especially girls under five years of age, were snatched by the police if they
got the chance. It was Commonwealth policy, for forty years, from the 1910s until the early
1950s.
The Prime Minister for much of the 1920s was Stanley Bruce, who actively promoted this evil
policy of "breeding out the colour". Bruce set a pattern for his successors to follow.
Referring to children under five years of age at the Alice Springs "half-caste" home, known as The
Bungalow, he wrote in 1927:
"There are also at the Home at Alice Springs a number of quadroons and octoroons under
five years of age who could hardly be distinguished from ordinary white children ... if these
babies were removed, at their present early age, from their present environment to homes in
South Australia, they would not know in later life that they had aboriginal blood and would
probably be absorbed into the white population and become useful citizens."
In other words, take them away from their own people — their own country — make them
ashamed of their Aboriginality, send them to a white family far away, and then, only then, might
they become "useful citizens".
Rejection of their Aboriginal heritage was drummed into these children in all of the "half-caste"
institutions, both government and non-government.
How would you feel if the Prime Minister did that to your mother, or sister, or daughter?
Among the most respected families in the Gulf country today are four, to my personal knowledge,
whose children only avoided being taken away, when they were young, because their fathers pulled
a gun on any policeman who tried to take them, and promised to shoot him.
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Yet all four of these fathers were refused permission to marry their de facto wives, because white
men were never allowed to marry "full-blood" Aboriginal women.
Horace Foster was one of these men. The son of a lawyer, his brother was the editor of the
Brisbane Courier. When he saw a horseman approaching he would tell his long-time Yanyuwa
partner, Alice Bajamalanya, to take their two children into the bough shed and stay there, while he
stood guard with a shotgun. He died in an accident in 1941 at their home at Manangoora, on the
Wearyan River, with its magnificent vegetable garden.
When Constable Ted Heathcock arrived to investigate the death, he saw the two children, Rose 10
and Jim 8, and told Alice, grief-stricken over Horace's death, to take the children into Borroloola
when the next boat was due, in a few months, or else! They would be sent to the Roper River
Mission. Imagine how this would have affected the already grieving children, and their mother.
Some time after Rose and Jim arrived at the Mission, they were told their mother had died, so they
might as well stop crying, and asking for her. It was a lie, but they didn't know this until Rose was
in her fifties, living in Alice Springs where she worked as a nurse, and someone told her "your
mum is still alive, and living in Borroloola."
When Andy Anderson complained by letter to the federal Minister in 1932, about not being
allowed to marry his partner, Alice Yumbara, a Garrwa woman, he was told: "All applications
made by white men for permission to marry female Aboriginals are unequivocally refused."
The reason, of course, was that the government wanted no more "half-caste" children, as they were
called.
Andy was one of the nicest, most decent men in the Territory. Born in Norway, his father was the
naval attaché at the Norwegian embassy in Paris and a former Admiral in the Norwegian navy. In
October 1948 a police constable went to Manangoora , where he now lived, and tried to take away
his two boys, aged about 11 and 14. Andy put a loaded revolver on the kitchen table and said "if
you touch my boys I'll shoot you". The young constable thought he was bluffing, but soon realised
that the wiry World War I veteran was not, and went away empty-handed.
19
Fortunately, a Patrol Officer from the Native Affairs Branch happened to be visiting Anderson on
the very day this happened, and wrote this description of the two boys: "The two half-caste sons are
well victualled and clothed. There was a strong bond of affection between father and sons."
This was absolutely true: I know the family well.
Yet the policy of the government was that all children of mixed descent had to be taken away
and institutionalised, regardless of the circumstances.
It had nothing to do with education, or neglect, or what was in the best interests of the child.
It was about "breeding out the colour", to use the offensive official language. And punishing
the parents who were illegally "cohabiting".
Take no notice of people like Tony Abbott, the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs, who
pretends that the policy was well intentioned, in the best interests of the children, and that most of
them were taken away for their own good.
It was, in fact, a policy of pure evil.
CONTROL OVER ABORIGINAL LIVES
The first half of the twentieth century was a time when the government also had absolute control
over the lives of Aboriginal people of full descent, until the day they died. Here are just two
examples.
Police were able to physically examine Aboriginal girls and women to see if they had venereal
disease. At random, no witnesses, a power wide open to abuse. I can name police who did abuse
it.
Aboriginals were not allowed to see certain silent movies at the Darwin picture theatre. For
example, they weren't allowed to see East of Suez on Saturday 19th January 1929, by notice in the
Gazette, but they were allowed to see The Air Hawk the following Tuesday. This puzzled me, until
I discovered that East of Suez, based on a play by Somerset Maugham, dealt with interracial
marriage and the victimization of a child of mixed descent.
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VIOLENCE
Violence by police and others was widespread.
In the 1940s it was still possible for a station owner to shoot an Aboriginal stockman and
either burn and hide the body, or have a friendly policeman put it down as an accident.
Beatings with hobble chains and whips were common, and occasional shootings were
invariably classed as "accidental".
Aboriginal men and women who ran away from a brutal boss were chased down and
whipped. In the old days, of course, they were shot.
In the 1930s and 1940s Constable Gordon Stott had an unusual method of stopping
prisoners from running away during a long patrol on horseback, if he had too many
prisoners to fit on the heavy chain he always carried. Using a shoeing rasp from his toolkit,
he rasped the skin off one heel of each prisoner not on the chain.
In 1933 Stott raped a teenage Garrwa girl during a long patrol in remote country. Two
weeks later he thought he had contracted a venereal disease. This was embarrassing, as he
was engaged at the time to the daughter of a famous Territory family. He beat the girl
savagely over the next two days in front of Aboriginal witnesses. Two nights later she died
of internal injuries. In 1959 Gordon Stott was awarded the Police Long Service and Good
Conduct Medal.
THE JUSTICE SYSTEM
There was blatant discrimination by the justice system. A Yanyuwa man named Dambulyama,
the number one traditional owner of the Borroloola town site and very important for his unique
knowledge of certain songs and ceremonies, cut his wife's throat in a fit of rage in August 1921.
He was sent to Darwin to stand trial for murder. A white jury acquitted him, saying the murder was
not premeditated and was carried out in a fit of what they called "temporary insanity". It was
customary for the courts to treat tribal killings — black against black — leniently.
But the judge didn't like the verdict and wanted him gaoled "for a substantial term as a
punishment". In this, the judge made an error of law. As the law stood at that time, an acquitted
21
person could not be punished. They were innocent. They could, however, be detained at the
governor's pleasure if found to be insane.
But Dambulyama was not insane! The Chief Medical Officer, Dr Leighton Jones, examined him
while he awaited trial, and more thoroughly six weeks afterwards, finding "no evidence of
insanity", adding "he answers questions readily and intelligently."
By order of the Governor-General, Dambulyama was detained initially for 12 months in Fannie
Bay gaol, and then indefinitely, thanks to misleading recommendations from the Attorney-General,
Littleton Groom.
Thirteen years later, in 1934, the gaoler and certain other officials in Darwin felt sorry for the old
man, who kept asking when he would be allowed to go home.
But the Chief Protector of Aboriginals, who was also the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Cecil Cook,
who had a low opinion of Aboriginal people, was only prepared to transfer him, indefinitely, to the
low-security Kahlin Aboriginal Compound in Darwin. Yet Cook admitted to keeping the old man
under observation for the past twelve months and finding "no evidence of insanity".
Attorney-General Robert Menzies was provided with a detailed three-page briefing by the
Secretary of his Department, seeking his instructions in the matter. The briefing omitted Dr
Leighton Jones's findings but did mention Cook's more recent finding of no insanity. Menzies
agreed with Cook that Dambulyama should not be set free, merely transferred to Kahlin
Compound.
Menzies put a recommendation to Governor-General Sir Isaac Isaacs but it was grossly misleading:
He referred to the jury's finding of "insanity" thirteen years ago, but this was dishonest as
the jury in fact used the expression "temporary insanity", which had been used also in the
departmental correspondence. There is a difference.
He omitted to mention that thirteen years ago Dr Leighton Jones found "no evidence of
insanity" and a year later found "no symptoms whatsoever of insanity".
He omitted to mention that Dr Cook could find no evidence of insanity during observations
over the past twelve months.
22
He failed to explain why a man innocent in the eyes of the law (because he was found "not
guilty"), and who in fact was not insane, had been detained in prison for the past thirteen
years.
The Governor-General signed the order, bearing Menzies' own signature, and Dambulyama's
incarceration was continued.
The archives are silent as to Dambulyama's ultimate fate, but his seventy-five-year-old nephew in
Borroloola, whom I know well, says he must have eventually escaped or been released, because as
an old man he lived for a time in Katherine with his son, who was born in 1921, and is thought to
have died in the Darwin leprosarium. He never returned to Borroloola. The songs and ceremonies
he owned were lost forever.
CONCLUSION
Successive South Australian governments masterminded, condoned, or concealed the violent
dispossession and oppression of Aboriginal peoples in the Northern Territory to 1910.
Premiers
like Sir John Downer played an active role.
The same was true of successive Commonwealth governments from 1911. Prime Ministers like
Stanley Bruce, and Attorneys-General like Robert Menzies, were among those who practised
discrimination or condoned injustice.
Today, the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 remains suspended in respect of the Northern Territory
Emergency Response, the "Intervention" as it's called. The Government is now able to discriminate
on the basis of race — for example by quarantining Centrelink payments — while denying
Aboriginal Australians their rights as citizens in the courts. It is being done, they say, in the best
interests of the Aboriginal people, and with the best of intentions.
Rather like the excuses for removing all "half-caste" children to institutions in the past.
The Aboriginal people of the Territory have suffered enough discrimination, injustice and
paternalism over the past 150 years.
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The discredited, paternalistic policies of the past have no place in Australian society today.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
1
“The Myths of Frontier Massacres, Part II: The fabrication of the Aboriginal death toll”, Quadrant, Nov 2000.
2
Foreword to The History Wars, Macintyre and Clark, 2004.
3
Hansard 30.10.1996.
Other sources can be found in FRONTIER JUSTICE: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900 and in the
forthcoming sequel, ROUGH JUSTICE: A History of the Gulf Country 1900 to 1950.
© Tony Roberts 2009