Australian historians have only recently rediscovered the violence used to secure the conquest and effect the pioneering of the continent. Yet almost every district settled during the nineteenth century had a history of conflict between local clans and encroaching settlers. Many of the Europeans who lived through the time of confrontation were quite realistic about the human cost of colonisation. A small town pioneer wrote in 1869 that his community ‘had its foundations cemented in blood’.1 ‘I believe I am not wrong in stating’, observed another, that ‘every acre of land in these districts was won from the Aborigines by bloodshed and warfare’.2 Black resistance in its many forms was an inescapable feature of life on the fringes of European settlement from the first months at Sydney Cove until the early years of the twentieth century. The intensity and duration of conflict varied widely depending on terrain, indigenous population densities, the speed of settlement, the type of introduced economic activity, even the period of first contact. Edward Curr, who had perhaps the widest overview of white-Aboriginal relations in nineteenth-century Australia, wrote the classical account of frontier conflict:
In the first place the meeting of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia and the White pioneer, results as a rule in war, which lasts from six months to ten years, according to the nature of the country, the amount of settlement which takes place in a neighbourhood, and the proclivities of the individuals concerned. When several squatters settle in proximity, and the country they occupy is easy of access and without fastnesses to which the Blacks can retreat, the period of warfare is usually short and the bloodshed not excessive. On the other hand, in districts which are not easily traversed on horseback, in which the Whites are few in numbers and food is procurable by the Blacks in fastnesses, the term is usually prolonged and the slaughter more considerable.3
While black resistance has gained increasing recognition discussion of Aboriginal motivation is still rudimentary. Nineteenth century writers frequently discussed Aboriginal action but rarely analysed their motives. Compulsions of savagery were often propounded as a satisfactory explanation of black behaviour. ‘There are some who affect to believe’, observed a humanitarian squatter, ‘that it is unnecessary to ask why a black has committed a murder’. ‘The cause, say they, is sufficiently accounted for by his savage and blood-thirsty nature’.4 Modern scholars documenting the resistance have assumed, perhaps understandably, that opposition to invasion is so basic and universal a reaction, that it scarcely warrants discussion, while others have referred to an elemental territoriality. ‘All living organisms’, wrote Bauer, ‘jealously defend to the best of their ability whatever portion of the earth’s surface they inhabit’.5 Regardless of the ultimate value of such generalizations, they offer little to the historian seeking to describe and explain the variety and complexity of Aboriginal behaviour. Yet while biological determinism should be eschewed it is clear that land is central to any discussion of white-Aboriginal relations whether in the nineteenth or twentieth century. Such an investigation must begin with the nature of traditional ownership but that takes the reader into the centre of a major and long running anthropological debate.
There are two basic positions. Radcliffe-Brown argued, and has been supported more recently by Tindale and Birdsell, that Aboriginal Australia was divided into clearly defined, discrete territories with fixed and known boundaries. In an essay of 1913 Radcliffe-Brown referred to a ‘very rigid system’ of land ownership backed up with strict laws relating to trespass.6 In his classic 1930 study of the social organization of Aboriginal Australia, he defined the horde as a ‘small group of persons owning a certain area of territory, the boundaries of which are known, and possessing in common proprietary rights over the land and its products’.7 In 1974 Tindale argued that all tribes claim and occupy a ‘discrete territory with finite limits beyond which members have a sense of trespass’.8
The second view, advocated by Hiatt, Meggitt, Petersen and others, is that boundaries were far less clear and social organization more complex than traditional theories have allowed. The very concept of the self-contained tribe has been called into question with the suggestion that Aborigines identified themselves according to kinship, marriage, territory, totemism, language and ceremony and that these overlapped and intersected in complex ways. Sutton has argued that descent groups owned constellations of sacred sites rather than neat parcels of land. While most of the sites were clustered together a significant number were separated by sites belonging to other groups while some sites were owned by more than one descent group. Estates, he concluded, were not ‘whole blocks or tracts of country in the sense of surveyed real estate’ but were ‘collections of points in a landscape’.9 Land-use patterns were complex as well. Neighbouring clans intermingled, foraging and hunting on each other’s territory; easements were provided for travellers, temporary hospitality for sojourners. While discussing the ritual and economic life of the Yir-Yoront of Cape York Lauriston Sharp carefully defined tribal attitudes to ownership, access and trespass:
A majority of the Yir-Yoront clans have multiple countries which are not contiguous, and which vary from an acre or two up to a number of square miles in area. The countries of a clan, with their natural resources, are owned by all clan members in common … The right of exclusion is exercised only in exceptional cases, in which there is an actual or pretended drain on the resources of the land, indicating that one of chief functions of clan ownership of land is the apportionment and conservation of natural resources. The natives state that a clan may even forbid a man crossing clan territory to get from one of his own clan territories to another, but no example of such extreme clan action could be cited. People gather and hunt, ordinarily, in whatever country they will. Thus there is practically a standing permission which opens a clan’s countries to all, but this permission may be withdrawn by the clan for those who are persona non grata.10
The second strand of interpretation seems more pertinent for the assessment of the Aboriginal response to European explorers and pioneers. As a general rule clans did not react immediately to European trespass although illusions about returning relatives or fear of guns may have significantly modified their behaviour. Indeed the history of inland exploration indicates that local groups tolerated the passage of European expeditions provided they behaved with circumspection. On many occasions Aborigines hospitably allowed squatting parties to establish themselves and even assisted them during the first few weeks of their occupation. Clearly white and black perceptions of what was taking place were very wide apart. Unless forewarned Aborigines probably had no appreciation of the European’s determination to stay indefinitely and ‘own’ the soil. After all the first white intruders came and went again in a way that would have fully accorded with black expectations. Even Morrell had difficulty in explaining the objectives of the first squatting party to enter his district. He persuaded his clan to go on a hunting expedition to the hill overlooking the camp of the pioneer stock-men but his kinsmen were doubtful if they would find the Europeans in the same spot as earlier reports had placed them. Thinking that the white men were the ‘same as themselves’, Morrell explained, ‘they were not sure whether they were there’.11 Initially the white intrusion may have seemed an event of merely transient importance. Cape York Aborigines told the anthropologist Donald Thomson how the appearance of the Europeans fitted in with their sense of history and continuity. ‘After the Big Men’, they explained, ‘the Middle People lived, last we come and we find the white man’.12 The expectation that the settlers would eventually go away lingered for many years in some places. In the 1960s old Dyirbal people in north Queensland still had ‘a solid hope that one day the white man would be driven out, and the tribe would once more be able to resume peaceful occupation of its traditional lands’.13 The Europeans had been in the district for ninety years.
Throughout Aboriginal Australia the appearance of strange blacks carried the threat of revenge killing, abduction of women or the exercise of potent magic. But it did not portend forced dispossession or exile from the homeland. While conflict was ubiquitous in traditional societies territorial conquest was virtually unknown. Alienation of land was not only unthinkable, it was literally impossible. If blacks often did not react to the initial invasion of their country it was because they were not aware that it had taken place. They certainly did not believe that their land had suddenly ceased to belong to them and they to their land. The mere presence of Europeans, no matter how threatening, could not uproot certainties so deeply implanted in Aboriginal custom and consciousness. The black owners may have been pushed aside but many refused to accept that they had been dispossessed; they never conceded the major premise of the invasion. Yet for others ejection from cherished homelands was a shattering experience. The missionary Francis Tuckfield discussed the ‘white problem’ with Port Phillip blacks who visited his station and complained about being driven from their favourite camping grounds. He concluded that they were acquainted with the ‘relative possessions of the Black and White population’ and they asked him: ‘Will you now select for us also a portion of land? My country all you gone. The White Men have stolen it.’14
The white invasion often forced blacks into a more assertive and possessive stance concerning clan territories. E. S. Parker came to the conclusion that it was an ‘important and unquestionable fact’ that the Port Phillip Aborigines were ‘not insensible to their original right to the soil’.15 He referred to the experience of a settler who was confronted by an old man who told the whites to leave the district because the land and water belonged to the Aborigines. Robinson reported a similar case in the Western District where a party of Europeans were ordered by local blacks to depart because, they said, ‘it was their country, and the water belonged to them, if it was taken away they could not go to another country’.16 A very similar response was reported at much the same time from Ipswich in southern Queensland. A large party of blacks marched up to a recently established station and ordered the Europeans to be off ‘as it was their ground’.17
But Aborigines reacted less to the original trespass than to the ruthless assertion by Europeans of exclusive proprietorial rights often from the very first day of occupation. It was behaviour probably unheard of in traditional society. Increasingly the newcomers impinged on accustomed patterns of life, occupying the flat, open land and monopolizing surface water. Indigenous animals were driven away, plant life eaten or trampled and Aborigines pushed into the marginal country–mountains, swamps, waterless neigh-bourhoods. Patterns of seasonal migration broke down, areas remaining free of Europeans were over utilized and eventually depleted of both flora and fauna. Food became scarcer and available in less and less variety and even access to water was often difficult. Attacks on sheep and cattle, made frequently in desperation, provoked violent retaliation: reprisal and revenge spiralled viciously.
The missionary William Ridley described the fate of a group of Balonne River blacks in the 1840s. Their situation was typical of what happened all over the country:
On this river the effect upon the aborigines of the occupation by Europeans of the country was forcibly presented. Before the occupation of this district by colonists, the aborigines could never have been at a loss for the necessaries of life. Except in the lowest part of the river, there is water in the driest seasons; along the banks game abounded; waterfowl, emus, parrot tribes, kangaroos, and other animals might always, or almost always, be found. But when the country was taken up, and herds of cattle introduced, not only did the cattle drive away the kangaroos, but those who had charge of the cattle found it necessary to keep the aborigines away from the river … After some fatal conflicts, in which some colonists and many aborigines have been slain, the blacks have been awed into submission to the orders which forbid their access to the river. And what is the consequence? Black fellows coming in from the west report that last summer very large numbers, afraid to visit the river, were crowded round a few scanty waterholes, within a day’s walk of which it was impossible to get sufficient food … that owing to these combined hardships many died.18
Ceremonial and religious life was disrupted by the settler incursion. Important sacred sites were desecrated, albeit unwittingly in many cases, access to them denied and large ceremonial gatherings often dispersed by anxious frontiersmen or officious police detachments. Cave paintings were daubed with graffiti, sacred boards stolen. Members of the Horn Scientific Expedition of 1894 found a cave of great religious significance in central Australia and took sixty wooden sticks and fifteen stone tablets but left axes, knives and other bric-a-brac in return. But dramatic events like desecration or dispossession were not the only sources of conflict; it often rose up out of bitter arguments between settlers and blacks who had lived in proximity and reasonable accord for some time before the outbreak of hostilities. Aboriginal women and European property were major causes of such confrontations. They were deceptively simple. Settlers caught blacks taking their property; angry shouting, blows, spearing and shooting followed. The pioneers usually assumed that Aborigines were compulsive pilferers and few historians have bothered to look any closer at the question although references to black greediness and cupidity abound in the literature. While it is true that European material abundance was a major focus of tension the assumption that Aboriginal envy was the principal cause of conflict is both superficial and ethnocentric.
Aborigines could not help being struck by the quantity of possessions owned by even poorer settlers. But it is far from certain that they admired the whites for their abundance which must have appeared to lack any rationale. The jealous possession of large herds of animals would have seemed totally unnecessary especially when so few were killed for food. J. D. Wood, a settler who had shrewdly studied Aboriginal perceptions, commented that: ‘greediness in us, is with them a great crime, their ignorance prevents them having a knowledge of the cost of our property.’19 The anthropologist Donald Thomson made similar observations about traditionally oriented people he studied in the 1920s. ‘White men’s meanness’, he wrote, in hoarding great quantities of tobacco and other things which could not possibly be used in a day or two was ‘hard for them to understand’.20
Reciprocity and sharing were central to the social organization and ethical standards of traditional society. In her study of the Euahlayi tribe K. L. Parker illustrated how sharing was inculcated from the earliest age. Old women crooned charms over babies to make them generous in later life. She had often heard them singing a song which included the refrain:
Give to me, Baby
Give to her, Baby
Give to him, Baby
Give to one, Baby
Give to all, Baby21
European observers were struck by the importance of sharing in Aboriginal society. ‘They are truly generous among themselves’, wrote William Thomas of Port Phillip blacks in the 1840s.22 ‘Meanness is rarely found among these people’, noted Donald Thomson while on Cape York a hundred years later. Both men observed that reciprocity was so fundamental to Aboriginal society that the clans they knew had no word meaning ‘thank you’. Thomas explained that while food was always distributed among those present it was not considered a gift in the European sense, rather as a right ‘and no thanks to the giver’. He was, he thought, the first person ‘that taught them the meaning of the word thanks’.23 European possessiveness was morally obnoxious especially as Aborigines assumed that whites had come by their goods without special effort or obvious virtue. J. D. Wood remarked that the blacks thought whites: ‘had only to ask in order that we may receive anything we require and they think us culpable if we refuse them what they covet.’24 A pioneer squatter told a Queensland Parliamentary Select Committee in 1861 of a pertinent incident which had occurred some years before on the McIntyre River. Local blacks had killed a bullock and advanced on the hut of the beleaguered squatter with the animal’s kidney fat stuck on their spears. They called out to the whites offering them a share of the fat saying ‘that they were not like the whites themselves–greedy’.25
Anger about European possessiveness was clearly one of the motives behind the taking and destruction of their stock and other property. Aborigines acted to make the whites share their goods; the motivation was as much political as economic. It was not so much the possessions that mattered as affirmation of the principles of reciprocity. The great disparity of property merely exacerbated tensions inherent in the situation. Innumerable small skirmishes over European possessions appearing to be little better than unseemly brawls, were in reality manifestations of a fundamental clash of principle, the outward showing of one of the most significant moral and political struggles in Australian history. The settlers were transplanting a policy of possessive individualism, hierarchy and inequality. Aboriginal society was reciprocal and materially egalitarian although there were important political and religious inequalities based on age and sex. Two such diametrically opposed societies could not merge without conflict. One or the other had to prevail.
Conflict over women was a constant feature of relations between white and black, an aspect of contact stressed by nineteenth century observers and one much more familiar to Aborigines than the struggle for land and water. Women were a major focus of indigenous politics and control of their bestowal was perhaps the principal source of secular power in traditional society. The arrival of the Europeans saw the conjunction of an almost woman-less pioneer population and a society which allowed the ceremonial exchange of women and the offer of sexual favours as a means of hospitality or method of diplomacy. The resulting sexual symbiosis preceded, followed, even punctuated periods of interracial conflict. Some explorers reported the offer of women, others were discreetly silent on the matter, none admitted to temptation. Sturt noted that his camp was overwhelmed with offers of sexual accommodation while in the Centre; Giles found that attractive young women were brought up to his men one after another; while on his Lake Eyre expedition of 1874 Lewis observed that despite the fear his party evoked local clans sent ‘as is customary with them six of their lubras as a peace offering’.26 When Moorhouse visited the tribes on the Lower Murray after intense conflict with the parties travelling from New South Wales to South Australia they told him that all the white people they had ever seen before asked for women to be brought up so they could have sexual intercourse with them.
Physical understanding, perhaps even mutual gratification, appears to have quickly bridged the gulf between the cultures but an understanding of the social and political ramifications of sexuality took much longer. For most frontiersmen an encounter ended abruptly with ejaculation and withdrawal; for Aboriginal women and their kin that was often just the beginning. The randy woman-less white man was not only encircled in warm flesh: he was also enmeshed in an intricate web of kinship. The acceptance by the settler of what seemed to be quick, casual copulation frequently involved him in expectations of reciprocity, and what was more, continuing reciprocity. Many apparently excessive demands for food, tobacco and the like came from blacks expecting European men to behave henceforth as classificatory brothers, sons and nephews. ‘After that familiar intercourse’, Moorhouse wrote, ‘the Natives seem to claim a liberal and constant supply of food, and in case it is not given, they do not hesitate to use violence in obtaining it’.27 A similar situation was reported on the Gwydir River in northern New South Wales in the 1830s. Shepherds and stockmen had sexual relations with local Aboriginal women but when they subsequently ‘refused the Blacks anything they wanted’ attempts were made to kill them.28
But beyond bad behaviour stemming from ignorance of Aboriginal custom European men deliberately cheated, raped and abducted black women. The emergent frontier custom of ‘gin-busting’ trampled over sexual customs and incest taboos. Moorhouse set out to unravel the reasons for black hostility on the overland route from New South Wales to South Australia and sought the help of a Sydney black who had made the trip several times. The riverine clans indicated that they were becoming enraged with the whites because they had:
used the women … and much abused them. The abuse (they explained), consisted in the Europeans promising the Aborigines food, clothing and tomahawks for the use of their females, but the Europeans did not fulfil their promises, after gratifying their passions, the women were turned out late in the evening or in the night, and instead of the men having their promised rewards, they were laughed at and ridiculed.29
Sexual relations between white men and black women were, then, a major source of misunderstanding, bitterness and conflict. But many Aboriginal attacks on Europeans were motivated by revenge for previous injury or insult whether there had been any sexual contact or not.
Revenge was the mainspring of violence in traditional society, source of ever present anxiety about dangerous magic and surreptitious attack. Death was universally attributed to malevolent sorcery, necessitating an inquest to determine guilt and retribution which characteristically took the form of counter-magic or a revenge expedition aimed at the putative killer or a close relative. But while pay-back killing was endemic in traditional society it was usually contained within the resilient bonds of kinship for if clans were near enough neighbours to fight they were liable to be linked by at least classificatory, if not actual, blood relationships. Customary institutions and practices can be seen, therefore, to have promoted intermittent personal violence while at the same time inhibiting the development of widespread conflict. They fostered the feud but prevented escalation into warfare. Revenge killing was also related very closely to the dominant ethic of reciprocity. It was the means of restoring a status quo upset by prior death or injury; of reasserting the balance of rights and obligations. While discussing conflict in Murngin society the American anthropologist Lloyd-Warner observed that:
the fundamental principle underlying all the causes of Murngin warfare is that of reciprocity: if harm had been done to an individual or a group, it is felt by the injured people that they must repay the ones who have harmed them by an injury that at least equals the one they have suffered.30
How did Europeans fit into this presumably age-old pattern of revenge and reprisal? Deaths resulting from frontier skirmishing could be directly attributed to Europeans and we do not know if inquests were considered necessary in such cases. It is distinctly possible that in the early period of contact Aboriginal enemies were thought to be implicated in marking down the particular victims to be killed by musket balls and bullets. White men may have been seen as unwitting agents of powerful black magic. Did blacks credit Europeans with the powers of sorcery attributed to their own ‘clever men’? They initially assumed that guns were magic and may have associated death by European poison with sorcery. In several places in South-Eastern Australia the English word poison was borrowed to describe the powers of local ‘clever men’.
Despite the impact of the European invasion the whites may have appeared less formidable than they supposed. Western Australian blacks told the early settlers that they initially considered whites as inferior to themselves, that they saw the Europeans going about unarmed and open to attack, and felt sure of success. While guns were weapons to be reckoned with the Europeans were not necessarily perceived as being more dangerous than distant blacks whose potent magic was blamed for death by accident, disease, deprivation and exposure. At the very time that whites were shooting down blacks along the frontier more were also dying from other causes which were typically attributed to the malevolent sorcery of hostile Aborigines. Howitt related the story of a group of twenty-five Braidwood blacks–men, women and children–who died after drinking what was apparently poisoned alcohol. Blame for their deaths was attributed not to the whites, or even to misadventure, but to clans from Tumut or Goulburn who had put Gubburra or evil magic in their drink. Inter-clan fighting and revenge killing continued throughout the period of open conflict with the Europeans and indeed long after in some places. The pressure of the settlers on both Aboriginal society and the environment may have actually increased the amount of fighting between rival clans. In 1897 the German missionary Poland asked an Aboriginal informant how it was that so many local blacks had been killed in the previous twenty years. He was told that: ‘Blacks have killed them, who are hostile towards us, or policemen or white men have shot them or the evil spirit got them.’31 However a pioneer New South Wales missionary argued that the growing tendency to attribute death to the whites had led to a decline of inter-clan feuding. It was, he wrote:
formerly a custom, when any of their number died, to receive a challenge from another tribe to go to war, to vindicate themselves, from the imputation of having been the cause of his death–but now, they usually attribute their visitations from death to the influence of white men. However unjust this may be to their white neighbours, it is certainly a blessing to themselves, as it saves them from many a desperate and bloody conflict.32
But when Europeans were clearly responsible for the death of Aborigines the desire to exact due revenge remained strong although fear of guns and massive reprisals may have promoted caution and helped determine that sorcery rather than physical attack would be the preferred method of operation. A Western Australian pioneer wrote to the Perth Gazette in 1833 observing:
the doctrine of taking life for life seems perfectly established, and they avow their determination to act upon it, for though I expressed strong dissent they seemed thoroughly satisfied of its propriety.33
A generation later a Queensland squatter remarked that in his experience blacks took ‘life for life in some shape or other’34 though it might take years to consummate and there is no doubt that Aborigines carried out carefully planned executions of specific Europeans for known crimes against kinsmen. Pioneer literature recorded many instances of the kind. In his reminiscences of early pastoral life in Queensland James Nesbit referred to the fate of one McLaren who was expertly tracked for a whole day and was eventually speared when incautiously putting down his gun. G. S. Lang recorded the death of a shepherd on Mt Abundance Station who, during twelve months, never relaxed for an instant while out on the run as he was aware of the determination of the local clans to kill him. A moment’s inattention just before his contract expired was long enough to allow a spear to rip through his body. Then there was the case of Anthony Cox who was executed in the Maronoa in 1851. He had been under threat from local clans for three months; eventually an Aborigine walked boldly up to the shepherd’s hut and drove a spear into him before the two other Europeans present could intervene although they subsequently shot the executioner.
What happened when the guilty European was unknown or beyond reach? When dealing with other Aborigines the more experienced clan members could draw on their knowledge of kinship networks to determine who could appropriately be punished in particular cases. But with white men the situation was entirely different. The basic problem was that of accountability which was in turn dependent on Aboriginal perception of European social organization. Were whites to be considered as one people and thereby mutually responsible? They did speak the one language but on the other hand those in the bush were divided into small residential groups. This was one of those white problems probably widely discussed among Aborigines in contact with the settlers. Davis, the convict escapee, noted Aboriginal uncertainty when they were seeking to determine who to attack in revenge for the 1842 Kilcoy poisoning. They were considering an onslaught on the exploring party led by Thomas Petrie which ventured inland after landing in Wide Bay and asked Davis ‘whether they belonged to the Whites who had poisoned their friends’.35 Davis deflected his kin from their projected attack by arguing that the explorers were totally different people because they had come from the sea and were therefore not accountable for the Kilcoy massacre which was perpetrated by shepherds who had arrived overland from the south.
The evidence provided by European pioneers underlines the variety of Aboriginal solutions to this problem. An experienced frontier squatter was asked by the 1861 Select Committee on the Queensland Native Police if he knew of any instance when blacks had taken revenge on members of one station for violence dealt out at another. He answered that his experience suggested that they confined their retribution to the family who had injured them. ‘They do not make reprisals’, he said, ‘except to revenge themselves upon particular individuals’. 36 Twenty years earlier Swan River Aborigines ‘seemed to intimate’ that their revenge was limited either to place or person. They explained to a European confidant that they were ‘very bad foes with respect to some districts’ but very good or friendly ‘with respect to others’. ‘This shows’, the settler concluded, ‘they consider us devided [sic] into distinct tribes’ although he endeavoured to show the blacks that Europeans were all the same; that ‘to touch one offended all’.37
As well as seeking to punish particular individuals Aborigines sought to keep revenge proportionate with the original offence as dictated by the principles of reciprocity. In at least some of their dealings with Europeans blacks sought to use violence to restore an equilibrium upset by previous conflict in a manner common in traditional society. This explains the often sporadic nature of Aboriginal attacks on Europeans, the way in which weeks or months of concord were succeeded by periods of antagonism. At Moreton Bay in 1843 the Commissioner for Crown Lands reported that local blacks boldly asserted ‘their intention of having a certain number of lives of white men by way of compensation’ for kin killed in conflict with the squatters.38 Blacks around Perth explained that after retaliation had been effected they considered that friendship had been restored. ‘White man shoot black man, very bad’, they said, ‘black men spear white man, very good, very good, plenty shake hands’. Armstrong, the Aboriginal Interpreter, wrote to the West Australian Colonial Secretary explaining that local blacks said that because the settlers had shot one of them they had speared one of the white people and that consequently they were ‘all friends now’.39 J. D. Wood, whose perceptions of Aboriginal behaviour were clearer than his prose, explained in a memo to the Queensland government in 1862 that:
If you (the Reader or Hearer) kill any Aboriginal his relatives catch me or any other White man supposed to be of the same nation, they will kill us, after which you, (the reader or hearer) may walk about amongst them in perfect safety.40
While discussing the consequences of the so called Battle of Pinjarra the Western Australian Advocate-General remarked that up until that event the local blacks had believed that, like themselves, Europeans balanced life against life and were ‘content if we took a corresponding number of lives to those taken by them’. But the massive onslaught at Pinjarra had caused the ‘complete annihilation of this idea’.41 These remarks are particularly pertinent because they relate to the impact of European violence on Aboriginal behaviour.
Traditional society we can assume had been able to sustain the level of violence created by pay-back killing over long periods of time and inter-clan feuding continued undiminished until well after the Europeans arrived. Occasional fighting with whites may not have appeared a radical departure from these long accepted patterns of violence. But the settlers had no intention of allowing the continuance of a situation which challenged their monopoly of power and the absolute supremacy of the introduced legal code even though they frequently ignored it themselves when dealing with the Aborigines. Pioneer communities appeared to be unable to cope with the psychological tensions produced by even small amounts of inter-racial violence. The punitive expedition–official and unofficial –was the almost universal riposte. The objective was simple: the use of overwhelming force to crush resistance once and for all and drown in blood the Aboriginal determination to take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Terror succeeded in many places. Massive force did achieve peace for the pioneer, subjection for the blacks. But elsewhere an ascending spiral of violence forced Aborigines to shift decisively into new patterns of behaviour, to concentrate more and more on the struggle with the settlers.
Aborigines were often stunned by the numbers killed in encounters with settlers determined to bring an end to conflict ‘once and for all’. The violence must have appeared both totally disproportionate and indiscriminate, sweeping away individuals and sometimes whole local groups who had not necessarily been involved in attacks on the settlers. The desire for revenge, to measure life for life, became increasingly difficult to consummate. The problem of accountability was compounded by the length of the casualty list. At this point some shunned further violence turning to sorcery or sinking into quiescence. But amongst other groups two crucial decisions were made–that white people were mutually accountable and responsible for each other’s actions and therefore fit subjects of Aboriginal attack. Colour alone was now enough to identify the enemy. When those conclusions had been reached a shift of decisive importance had been made. For the groups in question the constraints of custom had been circumvented, they had moved from feud to warfare.
Initially, then, the blacks had dealt with Europeans as though they too were Aborigines. Their violence was judicial rather than martial, seeking revenge rather than military victory. But the settlers were determined upon radical changes. They had no interest in peace and equilibrium until the invasion was fully effected and all resistance crushed. Till then violence was bound to escalate. Many contingent factors turned events in the same direction. Misunderstanding, fear and anxiety merged and simmered in the volatile frontier environment. Violent death and succeeding violent revenge built up brutal momentum as the settlers pushed further into Aboriginal Australia.
Three celebrated Aboriginal attacks on Europeans can be examined to illustrate these themes–the Maria ‘massacre’ in South Australia in 1840, and the successful Aboriginal attacks on Hornet Bank and Cullinlaringoe in Queensland in 1857 and 1861 respectively. Each case was seen at the time as evidence of Aboriginal savagery and treachery and although well reported in contemporary newspapers there have been few satisfactory historical accounts of them.
The events leading up to the Maria ‘massacre’ were deceptively simple. The ship travelling from Hobart to Adelaide was wrecked off the Coorong. Twelve survivors were eventually killed by Aborigines who had initially helped them travel along the beach towards the mouth of the Murray. Six months after the event the Aboriginal side of the story was presented by Dr Richard Penny who as surgeon to the whale fishery at Encounter Bay had learnt the local language and arrived at a sophisticated understanding of traditional society. The blacks explained that they had helped the whites travel by carrying their children and providing them with fish and water. When they came to the end of their own country they tried to explain that they could go no further and demanded clothes and blankets in recognition of the trouble taken up to that point. The Europeans refused to give them anything, saying that when they reached Adelaide the blacks would be fully rewarded. They probably did not understand what the Aborigines were trying to tell them. The blacks attempted to help themselves. The whites resisted. Scuffles ensued, tempers flared, and the weaponless Europeans were killed. Their deaths were not inevitable. With a little luck the survivors might have reached Adelaide full of praise for the friendly blacks of the Coorong.
In October 1861 nineteen Europeans were killed by Aborigines at Cullinlaringoe Station on the Nagoa River in central Queensland. The district had only recently been settled and initially relations between blacks and squatters were amicable. Daniel Cameron, the pioneer of the area, reported that local clans had constantly assisted him during twenty months of occupation and in June 1861 the Commissioner for Crown Lands remarked that the blacks were quiet and friendly on both the Comet and Nagoa. But Native Police patrols were already changing the situation. The Commandant explained to the Colonial Secretary why he had decided to send a large detachment into the district. Blacks were reported to be gathering on the Comet and while they had been peaceably disposed they could not be trusted when able to muster in large numbers. In March the police attacked blacks in the area. Frederick Walker, managing a local property, complained to the Government, warning that Native Police action would inevitably lead to serious conflict. The whole tribe he said was ‘dreadfully excited and accused me and all the Europeans, with complicity in what they rightly termed treachery’.42 C. B. Dutton, a neighbouring squatter, took the matter up with the leader of the detachment, Lieutenant Patrick, speaking of it as an ‘unfortunate and untoward event’. According to Dutton’s testimony Patrick justified himself by saying that:
other Police Officers before they had been in the force a fortnight had sent in dispatches (I use his own words) ‘of lots of blacks shot. And here had he been in the force six months before he had shot a single black’.
Like Walker, Dutton impressed on the Government that the blacks were moved by feelings of:
deep implacable revenge for unprovoked injuries. They ask me why they are shot. They say ‘bail no me kill white fellow … bail take ration, what for shoot him?’ How are they to be answered, how appeased?
And he answered with venom, ‘there is but one answer, you are black and must be shot’.43
But not all the squatters opposed the actions of the Native Police. In his memoirs Jesse Gregson recorded his part in the events of 1861. He established himself at Mt Rainworth Station in May. The local clans persistently endeavoured to establish friendly relations but were rebuffed each time. Gregson believed firmly in the policy of ‘keeping the blacks out’. One of his shepherds lost a flock of 500 sheep. It was found by the blacks who began to drive it away. Gregson arrived with Patrick and his detachment and, as he termed it, a brush took place. The Aborigines determined on revenge. They gathered men from the scattered clans and attacked the recently established Cullinlaringoe. The Wills family, who were not expecting trouble, may have died totally unaware of what had gone wrong with the peaceful pattern of contact established during their few weeks in the district. They may have been attacked because they were the closest Europeans to the gathering point of the clans or perhaps they were regarded as the least prepared to repel an attack.
The events at Hornet Bank are fairly well known. The Frasers were managing the property and had close, if not always amicable, relations with the neighbouring Aboriginal clans camped on or near the station. An apparently well planned and unexpected attack was made late at night and all but one member of the household were killed. It appears that the women were raped before death–an unusual accompaniment of Aboriginal attack Various attempts were made at the time to explain Aboriginal motivation but none could compete with the insistent references to the savagery and treachery. However there are scattered pieces of evidence which enable us to advance beyond the folk-wisdom of the frontier. The Honourable M. C. O’Connell told the 1861 Select Committee on the Native Police that the killings were a consequence of the young men ‘having been in the habit of allowing their black boys to rush the gins’ in neighbouring camps. Archibald Meston, the Queensland ‘expert’ on Aborigines, heard from a friend of the surviving Fraser son that the white employees of the family had whipped and raped two local Aboriginal girls. This story was confirmed by W. Robertson who claimed to have discussed the events of 1857 with old Aborigines who as youths had been present at the time. They reported that after the women were raped the local clans attempted to use sorcery against the offending Europeans. When that appeared to have no effect they sent an old woman to the Frasers to explain the circumstances and seek redress. When no action was taken by the whites the clans determined on revenge. So the evidence concurs on the importance of sexual attacks on Aboriginal girls but attributes blame variously to black and white employees of the family. But one account directly implicates the young Fraser men. J. D. Wood explained in a memo to the Colonial Secretary that when arriving in Queensland he made enquiries about Hornet Bank. He was told by a Mr Nicol who had been in the Native Police in 1857 that Mrs Fraser had repeatedly asked him to reprove her sons ‘for forcibly taking the young maidens’ and that in consequence she ‘expected harm would come of it, that they were in the habit of doing so, notwithstanding her entreaties to the contrary’. Several other informants told Wood that the Frasers were ‘famous for the young Gins’ and all agreed ‘that those acts were the cause of the atrocity’.44
Of the three cases discussed above the Maria ‘massacre’ was clearly the most unpremeditated, even accidental event, arising out of the tension and misunderstanding inherent in the situation following the shipwreck. At Hornet Bank and Cullinlarin-goe Aboriginal action was carefully planned and thoroughly considered and followed months of provocation–harassment by the Native Police on the one hand, sexual molestation by some, if not all, the young men on the station on the other. Even the raping of the Fraser women appears in retrospect to have been a deliberate, political act. But there were other aspects of the attack on Hornet Bank which call for comment. It appears to have been part of what Wiseman, the local Commissioner for Crown Lands, called an ‘extensive conspiracy’. Writing at a time of extreme anger and anxiety he may have mistakenly seen connections between unrelated events. Yet he noted that many circumstances supported his interpretation. Two or three days before the attack the black women and children left the stations on the Dawson and went away in one direction while the men went in the other. News of the successful onslaught was, he believed, known to blacks a hundred and more miles away well before local Europeans had heard of it. On receipt of the intelligence in the camps ‘rejoicing immediately commenced’. Several other attacks were launched in the district at much the same time but they were unsuccessful. Wiseman referred to many other circumstances ‘too tedious to relate’ which illustrated the Aborigine’s ‘feeling of hatred’ towards the settlers.45
We may never know enough to accurately chart the regional variations of frontier conflict and Aboriginal resistance in every area of Australia. But in a few places the documentary evidence is plentiful. This is true of Tasmania where voluminous official reports, newspapers and other records can be balanced up with the detailed diaries of G. A. Robinson written while travelling extensively in what was still Aboriginal Tasmania. Robinson understood the Tasmanian dialects and spent many hours talking with the blacks at a time when conflict with the whites had reached a bitter crescendo. He provided by far the most important European account of Aboriginal motivation and the cumulative effect of settler brutality. Robinson realized that the Tasmanians had experienced ‘a multitude of wrongs from a variety of sources’.46 The accumulation of private injury and personal tragedy fused to produce the bitter racial hatred and desperate resistance of the Black War of 1827–1830. ‘They have’ wrote Robinson:
a tradition amongst them that white men have usurped their territory, have driven them into the forests, have killed their game … have ravished their wives and daughters, have murdered and butchered their fellow countrymen; and are wont whilst brooding over these complicated ills in the dense part of the forest, to goad each other on to acts of bloodshed and revenge for the injuries done to their ancestors and the persecutions offered to themselves through their white enemies.47
The more observant settlers noted the change in Aboriginal attitudes which took place during the second half of the 1820s. One told an official committee that although he had been aware of black hostility in the past it had previously been ‘excited by some temporary aggression of the Whites the Remembrance of which gradually gave way to better feelings’. The desire for revenge had not originally extended beyond the ‘Tribe; or family, in which it originated’. But the situation had changed and he now detected a ‘determined spirit of hostility’ among the whole black population. He concluded with the observation:
I think the Blacks look on the whole of the white population as Enemies and are not sensible of any benefit they might derive from living with us on friendly terms.48
The escalation of conflict which occurred in Tasmania in the 1820s was mirrored in other parts of the continent. The occupation of the northern pastoral frontier of New South Wales and Queensland witnessed a similar burgeoning of racial violence as the pastoralists moved deeper into Aboriginal territory. Bloodshed in one district built up expectations about its probability in the next. Squatters came over the horizon with their guns loaded ready to keep the blacks out until they were willing to submit. Expectation of conflict was diffused on the other side of the frontier as well. The pastoralists followed the river valleys and open savannah, riding along those channels of Aboriginal communication where information was most rapidly disseminated. Conflict of the late 1830s and early 1840s took place in north-eastern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland where inter-tribal contact was strengthened by the large gatherings to harvest the bunya trees in the ranges north of the Brisbane Valley. Refugees from conflict with the whites almost certainly found succour among clans still beyond the settlers’ reach ‘relating to each other the history of their wrongs’.49
There was no G. A. Robinson on the northern pastoral frontier but it is possible to gather a little evidence from a variety of sources. Davis provided important material about the Aboriginal reaction to the poisoning of a large number of blacks–probably fifty or so–on Kilcoy Station in the upper Brisbane Valley in 1842. News of the terrible deaths spread widely in Aboriginal society over a significant area of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales. There was a large gathering in the mountains where, according to Davis, representatives of fourteen or fifteen different tribes were present. The suffering and terrible deaths of those poisoned were graphically mimed for the benefit of the visitors, a performance which Davis was later to repeat for his white rescuers. The anger of the assembled blacks was unmistakable. They were, said Davis ‘much infuriated’ by the news and swore to have vengeance.50 This decision was apparently widely and rapidly communicated. Schmidt, the German missionary at Moreton Bay was warned by friendly blacks that the tribes to the north had determined ‘to attack and kill whites whenever they met any’.51
Similar sentiments, relayed through intermediaries or expressed in frontier pidgin, were reported at various points from northern New South Wales to central Queensland. On the Mooney River in 1843 a group of blacks told beleagured shepherds holed up in their hut that they intended to ‘kill or drive all the white fellows off the Mooney, McIntyre and Barwon Rivers’.52 At Wide Bay in 1851 a squatter reported that the blacks had sent messages through intermediaries to the effect that as soon as the bunya nut was ripe they intended to ‘take all the sheep in the district and kill all the white men’.53 In 1856 when Charles Archer was about to cross the Fitzroy River the local blacks assembled in great numbers on the opposite bank and openly stated their determination to ‘attack and destroy all the whites who might attempt the location of the country in that direction’.54 Two years later four shepherds were besieged in their hut on Camboon station. They offered their attackers all their possessions. But the blacks retorted that they wanted nothing but the lives of the white men and that they would also ‘take the lives of all the b - y [sic] white men in the country’.55 In 1858 Wiseman wrote to his superior in Sydney about Aborigines who openly proclaimed that they would gradually murder all the whites and rid their land of the invader. He was an intelligent and experienced official and after fifteen years on the pastoral frontier had concluded that:
no tribes will allow of the peaceable occupation of their country but, following the counsel of the boldest and strongest men amongst them, will endeavour to check the progress of the white men by spearing their sheep and murdering the shepherds. This I have known to be invariably the case … some solitary murder may occasionally occur owing to the wicked and foolish conduct of the white labouring man in his relations to the Blacks … but the greater number of murders which I know of in these districts I should attribute to the determination of the natives to pillage and murder till they can drive out the white men.56
The evidence, then, suggests that Aborigines attacked and killed Europeans for a variety of reasons. At the time of earliest contact they struck down threatening beings who it was thought had come from the spirit world. Subsequently whites were killed in unpremeditated melees arising from the anxiety and tension inherent in frontier encounters. In many cases Aboriginal action was penal in objective, punishing Europeans as though they were fellow blacks in an attempt to impose on the newcomers the moral standards and social obligations of traditional society. The spear was used to assist the assimilation of the European into the Australian way of life. In many parts of the country, for at least some of the time, absorption of the small numbers of Europeans seemed the most practical solution to the white problem. It should not be seen as less realistic or less worthy than open confrontation which many must have realized from the start was bound to be both futile and suicidal. Assimilation was after all a policy premised on a self-confident belief in the value of Aboriginal society and culture. It was one method of defending them from the unprecedented challenge presented by European invasion. When this policy failed two alternatives remained–acceptance of whatever corner could be found in the new order imposed by the settlers or an attempt to drive the invaders away. In many parts of the country the blacks fought a war against the Europeans. But it did not always begin when the whites first arrived. It was more common at the end of a considerable period of inter-action. In Tasmania, for instance, conflict did not climax for a generation after the first settlement. Elsewhere the shift from feud to warfare was more rapid but on the other hand there were districts where accommodation was achieved before the final stage of conflict was reached and others where massive retaliation crushed the black resistance almost before it began.
The role of sorcery is an important aspect of Aboriginal resistance hitherto overlooked by historians. Magic was, after all, widely used against enemies in traditional society, supplementing or supplanting physical attack. That it was similarly used against white foes is beyond doubt especially when open conflict carried such disproportionate danger for the Aborigines. Sorcery was probably employed in order to enhance the chances of success for attacks with spear and club during the earliest period of contact and continued to be used long after overt resistance had come to an end. In the Aboriginal mind this hidden side of the resistance may have been at least as significant as physical confrontation. Unfortunately for the historian magic was likely to have been performed in secret and kept hidden from intended white victims. Yet there is enough evidence to illustrate its importance. It comes from a variety of sources but the most valuable material was provided by officials of the Aboriginal Protectorate in Victoria and South Australia in the 1840s.
In October 1840 there was a crisis in white-Aboriginal relations at Port Phillip. Following widespread settler concern about black assertiveness in the districts around Melbourne a party of soldiers and border police under the command of Major Lettsom surrounded a large ceremonial gathering a few miles north of the town and captured the whole assembly. They were marched into town and imprisoned overnight. One man was shot at the time of capture and another while escaping from incarceration. The blacks were frightened and infuriated. G. A. Robinson reported that the most influential men amongst the tribes in Melbourne warned him that they intended ‘returning to the mountains and forest ranges and killing every white man they could find unprotected’.57 E. S. Parker told a similar story. The blacks had said they would take to the mountains and try and ‘drive the white fellows from the country’. 58 The Protectorate officials–Robinson, Parker and Thomas–worked hard to restrain the blacks and, given the lack of immediate physical retaliation, felt they had been successful in defusing the situation. But their accounts make it clear that the Aborigines channelled their anger into magic in order to unleash the horrifying power of Mindye the rainbow serpent on the whites and those blacks who were friendly with them, especially the Port Phillip clans. Thomas reported that the blacks from his station at Narre Narre Warren had fled because a celebrated Goulburn River ‘clever man’ had said the Mindye was about to come. Parker was even more specific. Several of the senior and influential blacks were, he observed, fully sensible of the injustices they had suffered. They warned that the dreaded Mindye would appear with the threat of a pestilence which was ‘to sweep off the Port Phillip blacks and all the whites’.59 Reminiscing later he recalled that at the time of the Lettsom raid several old men told him confidentially that:
destruction was coming upon the white population not even excepting those whom they knew to be their friends. It was known that they were practising secret incantations with this object.60
Months after the imprisonment Parker found that the Goulburn River clans were still furious about their treatment and were practising magic to call up the Mindye to destroy the Europeans and those Aborigines who had befriended them.
The reaction of Victorian Aborigines to capture and temporary imprisonment at the hands of Major Lettsom is of great interest. Their anger was intense and sustained. Direct physical retaliation was considered but rejected, whether owing to the advice of Robinson, Parker and Thomas, as they supposed, or to fear of retaliation is impossible to determine. The resort to magic illustrated a profound belief in their continuing power to counter the technological supremacy of the Europeans. It is ironic that they hoped to visit on the whites a pestilence similar to the great epidemic which had struck the Victorian Aborigines a generation earlier and which must have remained vivid in the memories of the older people. The hoped-for pestilence was described to Parker ‘graphically enough as producing dreadful sores, dysentry, blindness and death’ and he was later able to identify ‘the threatened agent of destruction as smallpox’.61 Yet the action of Major Lettsom and his force was far less violent than the behaviour of whites in many other parts of the country. It is reasonable to assume that the only unique feature of the events in Victoria in 1841–42 was that there were three Europeans in close enough contact with the blacks to be able to report on their objectives and motivation.
Thomas noted a further but apparently unrelated case of anti-European sorcery at Port Phillip. An old and very celebrated ‘clever man’ was captured and imprisoned for sheep stealing. His incarceration caused great distress among blacks around Melbourne and news of it was carried to the corners of the Colony. Signal fires were lit and could be seen in all directions; messengers from seven different districts came in for urgent consultation; the Melbourne blacks pleaded with Thomas to let the ‘clever man’ go. When he explained that he was unable to secure the release the several hundred town blacks fled into the bush warning Thomas that the whites should leave for Sydney or Van Diemens Land because the sorcerer would unleash the Mindye. In 1849 there was a similar occurrence in Adelaide. The local Protector of Aborigines reported that four blacks had arrived from the north with the alarming news that ‘clever men’ were about to create havoc in the town. Many Aborigines fled to escape the threatened catastrophe.62 Edward Eyre referred to a similar situation a few years earlier when the appearance of a comet convinced South Australian blacks that powerful northern sorcerers were about to destroy Adelaide because a senior man of their tribe had been imprisoned in the local gaol. The comet, Eyre was told, was: ‘the harbinger of all kinds of calamities, and more especially for white people. It was to overthrow Adelaide, destroy all Europeans and their houses’.63 Similar events were reported from New South Wales. During the 1830’s there was a:
solemn ceremony of the Natives in the Country to the west of Bathurst in which all the tribes around seemed deeply interested, they had all met together to call upon the Great Spirit, they perceived how their ranks were thinning and no children born, they perceived the havoc civilization were [sic] making on their hunting grounds and they met together to implore the aid of the Great Spirit.64
Anti-European sorcery often merged with ceremony, dance and song and it was in this form that it was occasionally witnessed by white observers. Tasmanian Aborigines sang every night around their camp fires, their favourite songs those in which they recounted their assaults on, and fights with the whites. Widowson referred to a sort of dance and rejoicing, jumping and singing performed by island blacks when celebrating a successful attack on the Europeans. A Queensland pioneer who had wide experience of Aboriginal society in the post-contact period referred to what he called the death to the white man song which was sung frequently at corroborees with intense bitterness. On a North Queensland station in 1874 a large gathering of blacks was seen to make two effigies of white men and then all those present ‘after exciting each other with war songs and dances, attacked the effigies with their tomahawks and cut them to pieces’.65
There are four reports, widely separated in time and space, of a Queensland corroboree depicting a pitched battle between Aborigines and white stockmen. It is not clear if the dance was created in one place and then widely disseminated or if similar corroborees evolved separately although there is a close resemblance in the descriptions provided by the four European observers. The performance began with a group of dancers representing a herd of cattle. Bovine behaviour was minutely and exactly mimed, then a second group dressed as hunters carefully and slowly stalked the ‘herd’ and eventually attacked them with spear and club. Some ‘cattle’ fell to the ground, others stampeded into the darkness. The hunters began to prepare the fallen ‘beasts’ for cooking when a third troupe of dancers appeared from out of the trees. They were made up to look like Europeans with imitation cabbage tree hats, faces whitened with pipe-clay, bodies painted blue or red to represent shirts and legs done up to simulate moleskins and leggings. European behaviour was carefully depicted; the pseudo white men: ‘bit the cartridges, put on the caps, and went through all the forms of loading, firing, wheeling their horses, assisting each other, etc, which proved personal observation.’66 After a protracted struggle with casualties on both sides the whites were ignominiously defeated and depending on the particular dance either all killed or driven away to the intense delight of the spectators.
The four reports in question all relate to the generation between 1860 and 1890 and to the eastern half of Queensland. It seems probable that such anti-white corroborees were frequently performed. They were obviously entertaining, embodied a good deal of accurate observation of frontier life and allowed the vanquished to experience in art the triumph and revenge no longer attainable in the real world. Whether the Queensland ‘battle’ dance was associated with anti-European magic is impossible to say. But sorcery was related to a sequence of corroborees danced in far-western Queensland in the 1890s. Roth described a series of dances performed over five successive nights which he called the Molonga corroboree. He determined that it had entered Queensland from the Northern Territory in the early 1890s and travelled from the headwaters of the Georgina River down through western Queensland in the space of two or three years. The German missionary Otto Siebert recorded it as performed by the Dieri in the northwest of South Australia and noted that by the early years of the twentieth century it had passed on as far as Port Augusta at the head of Spencer Gulf. Baldwin Spencer saw the cycle danced by the Arunta at Alice Springs while A. P. Elkin reported performances at Penong on the Great Australian Bight in 1915 and at Horseshoe Bend in 1930.
Roth provided the earliest and most detailed description of the Molonga but he did not understand the meaning or the purpose of the sequence. Fortunately, Siebert provided a brief but fascinating account of the central theme and symbolism of the five nights of dancing. The corroboree had its origin in the desire for revenge against Europeans after the shooting of blacks presumably somewhere in the north-east corner of the Northern Territory. Prominent in the performance were dancers made up to look like Europeans who carried long forked sticks to represent their rifles. At the climax of the sequence a figure–Siebert said a female water spirit–suddenly appeared to devour all the ‘European’ dancers while the destructive magic was directed out in all directions to kill the settlers and the Aborigines who were friendly with them. Thus it is clear from Siebert’s account that the Molonga corroboree was an intensely emotional performance directed specifically at mobilizing the most potent magic available in order to destroy the whites and their black allies.
There may have been other dance sequences created like the Molonga to turn back the tide of European invasion. Magic must have seemed the most realistic method to adopt given the weapons of the Europeans and their propensity to exact violent and disproportionate revenge. But did Aborigines continue to believe in the efficiency of their sorcery? Twentieth century studies make it clear that faith in magic and in the powers of the ‘clever men’ has been one of the most enduring features of traditional culture surviving longer than almost anything else, even language itself. There were in-built barriers to scepticism–time-honoured methods of rationalizing failure and claiming authorship of the contingent. The obvious inability of ‘clever men’ to drive the Europeans away could be readily explained in ways well tried in traditional society. The failure of magic to immediately achieve stated objectives could be seen as being due to faults in the ritual or to the influence of counter-magic performed by other and often distant ‘clever men’. As Europeans on the frontier were normally accompanied by strange blacks it was probably often assumed that their magic threw a protective ring around the white men. Violent hostility to such ‘tame station blacks’ may have stemmed in part from this perception of their role in the advance of the European settlers.
But we should not assume that Aborigines believed their magic was without effect. Pioneer settlers were often very vulnerable and must have appeared so to the blacks who may have often concluded that sorcery was responsible for the bad seasons, bad luck, and accidents which befell Europeans in every part of the continent. Many were, after all, financially ruined and abandoned farms and stations. Alluvial miners took up and deserted finds with frenetic speed while ships were wrecked all around the Australian coasts. The immediate cause of the white retreat or misfortune would not have been apparent giving scope to those who attributed European misfortune to the magic of the clever men of near or distant tribes. Aiston and Horne referred to a noted kurdaitcha man from central Australia who claimed to be able to make lightning strike where he liked and to have killed a white man with his power. Mrs K. L. Parker recalled that local Aborigines were convinced that a black from the north-west, beyond Euahalayi territory, had called up a storm which wrecked the stable and store on her station. She made an even more interesting observation about the famous rain maker who it was said was so angry with the white people:
who were driving away all emu, kangaroo, and opossums, the black-fellow’s food, and yet made a fuss if their dogs killed a sheep for them sometimes, that he put his rain stone in a fire, and while he did that no rain would fall. He said that if all the sheep died the white fellows would go away again, and then, as long ago, the blackfellows country would have plenty of emu and kangaroo.67
Simpson Newland made a similar assessment of Aboriginal motivation observing that they made no attempt to make rain during long periods of drought. Their intention, he believed, was to drive the Europeans out of their country and given the devastating effect of drought on sheep and cattle stations it is reasonable to assume that blacks believed that their magic was often an effective weapon against the white invaders.
R. M. Berndt collected a number of traditional stories at Menindee in western New South Wales in 1943 which illustrated the presumed ability of ‘clever men’ to unleash their powers on the settlers. One related to an old ‘clever man’ called Mulgadown Tommy who lived on the fringes of Cobar. His dogs were poisoned by the townspeople and in revenge he brought up the poison which sorcerers were thought to possess and spurted it out so that the fumes covered the nearby mine. The result was that he ‘cleaned out a great number of people’ until his own friends stopped him. Berndt did not suggest any source for the story but it may have related to a fatal mine accident which in the blacks’ camp was thought to be a consequence of powerful magic unleashed to punish the Europeans. A second story referred to another old sorcerer called Billy who was working as a shepherd on a sheep station. One morning Billy woke up too late to take some rams out of their pen, a job which he was expected to do before breakfast. But as the meal was being served he went and got his food and took it into the yard to eat. When the white boss saw the rams still in their pen he abused the old man, grabbed his breakfast and threw it onto the ground. Old Billy got up and walked slowly towards his camp. On the way he let out his magic cord which, unknown to the Europeans, attached itself to the doors and windows of the bosses’ house. Before he reached his camp he turned around and looked back at the house:
he could see all the string, although these were invisible to the ordinary person. Then he released his assistant totem, the lightning, at the same time pulling sharply on the strings, as he did so they went off like a loud report of thunder and an immediate flash of lightning igniting the house. The cook ran around throwing buckets of water upon the flames, but instead of extinguishing the fire it acted like kerosene and the flames flared up more fiercely.68
It seems probable that there were many stories like these ones. They were obviously important because they allowed the seemingly powerless and abject blacks to go on believing in the potency of their culture and in the ability of the ‘men of high degree’ to harm and humble even the domineering white boss. Magic was then a crucial factor in the psychological resistance to the Europeans.
Frontier conflict was then widespread in colonial Australia. Most districts saw fighting between resident clans and encroaching settlers although it varied greatly in duration and intensity. Conflict was triggered by tension and misunderstanding, by the possessiveness of Europeans towards the land and water, by competition over women and by diametrically opposed concepts of personal property. Once blacks had been injured or killed their relations were impelled to seek vengeance. Reciprocal violence quickly spiralled. Sorcery played an important part in the conflict although it was usually hidden from the Europeans. The problems arising from fighting with the white men demanded adjustments to customary ways as well as the development of new concepts and techniques.