The development of appropriate tactics was another aspect of the Aborigines’ white problem which we can assume was widely discussed on the other side of the frontier. A critical issue was the degree to which known methods of fighting could be employed against the Europeans and the extent to which innovation was necessary. In his famous study of the Murngin, entitled A Black Civilization, Lloyd-Warner distinguished six varieties of conflict. How relevant these definitions are to traditional society elsewhere has never been determined but it is reasonable to examine the two major forms of fighting which the ethnographic record suggests were practically universal–the large pitched battle and the small, secret revenge expedition.
Pioneer literature contains many references to battles between large Aboriginal parties and they were still being waged years after the arrival of the Europeans. Typically the two sides met at a pre-arranged site and assembled in loose formations. After much shouting of abuse, spears and boomerangs were thrown back and forth between the wavering lines of warriors. After several hours, considerable minor injury and an occasional mortal wound, peace was restored and a corroboree held to mark the cessation of hostilities. Such large formations, with their obvious similarity to the animal drive, were often used against Europeans. But they presented problems, both tactical and logistic. Under normal conditions Aborigines could only gather in significant numbers on those occasions when there was some local and transient abundance of food. It is not clear if Europeans were confronted at times when large groups were already assembled for initiation and other ceremonies in which case clashes with whites were merely a by-product of the normal functioning of traditional society. Another possibility is that fear of Europeans led to the prolonging of customary meetings beyond their appointed time or to the calling together of unseasonal gatherings to deal specifically with the white problem. This seems to have been the case after the Kilcoy poisoning in 1842.
Special meetings would present the problem of ensuring an adequate food supply which could be met by increased culling of fauna by way of large and co-ordinated drives or, more portentously, by turning to the flocks and herds of the European or even their supplies stored in buildings or in transit on drays. Frontier settlers were convinced that large gatherings of Aborigines inevitably led to increased attacks on animals and stations. The crucial step of commandeering European food led to escalation of conflict which in turn encouraged large groups to remain together even longer to seek the protection of numbers. Frederick Walker, the first commandant of the native police on the northern frontier of New South Wales, understood the situation well. It was, he wrote:
the hostile bearing of the settlers that causes the Blacks to keep in large numbers, for they cannot continue the assemblies customary to them for more than a few days at a time, on account of the want of food … They supply this want from the herds of the settlers, and are compelled so to do.1
The many reports of large Aboriginal gatherings–though no doubt often exaggerated by anxious pioneers–emphasise the changes brought about on the other side of the frontier as a result of European pressure. Aboriginal clans coalesced to increase their power and to seek security and there is no doubt that large gatherings did over-awe white communities. Parties of armed settlers avoided conflict with Aborigines on many more occasions than is commonly supposed while the official determination of the New South Wales and later the Queensland government to use the Native Police to disperse any large tribal gathering was eloquent of official concern. But like people confronting armed whites in many parts of the non-European world Aborigines found that concentration merely increased the ability of their opponents to bring their superior fire-power into play.
European accounts allow us to examine, at least in outline, the development of Aboriginal tactics to cope with guns. News of them spread widely but unevenly through traditional society ahead of the white invaders but the amount and sophistication of that knowledge varied considerably. Some clans greatly underestimated the power of firearms and were shot down as a result of their fatal miscalculation. In central Victoria in the 1840s a group of blacks confronted a party of 16 armed and mounted men. They held up shields to keep off the musket balls only to die with the bark, useless and shattered, in their hands. Christie Palmerston wrote of a similar incident in the northern rainforest forty years later. He was challenged by a small hostile party and reached immediately for his gun. ‘Their shields may answer very well for the purposes of their wars’, he wrote with brutal satisfaction:
but my rifle drilled them as if they were sheets of paper. Four of the old generals’ [sic] comrades ran to his assistance when they saw him wrestling with death. I ceased firing for they seemed so helpless at my mercy on seeing a seam of blood oozing from the ghastly wound …2
Elsewhere Aboriginal caution betokened prior warning of the danger and capacity of European weapons. G. A. Robinson reported that he had watched blacks cautiously approach overland parties when the least movement of the well armed Europeans would cause them to take shelter behind trees or throw themselves on the ground. Moorhouse, who witnessed some of the pitched battles along the lower Murray, remarked that although the blacks faced the whites in large formations they chose their ground so they could rapidly escape behind trees and into thick vegetation. Perhaps the single most important lesson to learn was the effective range of guns and often this may have been transmitted back beyond the frontier. Pioneers reported that blacks behaved as though they had a rough idea of the distance at which they were safe from ball or bullet. Eventually the Aborigines came to appreciate the limitations of the muskets used in the first half of the nineteenth century which were inaccurate at any appreciable distance, frequently misfired and took some minutes to reload in any but experienced hands. There are numerous reports of confrontations between Aboriginal clans and lone shepherds during which the blacks taunted the European to try and incite him to fire his single charge; the shepherd for his part stood for hours with his loaded musket knowing that his only safety lay in preserving it. Aborigines laughed, made faces and rude gestures when muskets misfired as often happened particularly in wet or misty conditions. When they did attack they chose the moment of total vulnerability when their European foes feverishly sought to reload discharged muskets. However there was far less scope for Aboriginal initiative when they faced settlers armed, as they were later in the century, with revolvers and repeating rifles although a writer in the Cooktown Herald in 1875 noted how Aboriginal tactics had changed in the face of European fire power. Initially their attacks had been ‘daringly open’ but as the ‘knowledge dawned on their minds that the white race had a fatal superiority of weapons’ their forays became stealthy, cautious and only made at ‘great advantages of numbers and situation’.3 Thus the blacks in the Cooktown hinterland quickly learnt the lesson that European firepower and mobility made the massing of scattered clans a dangerous and self-defeating policy.
But there were other traditions to fall back on and especially the revenge expedition or execution party, an institution widely reported in both pioneer and ethnographic literature. The ‘stealthy sacrifices’ of the Pinya, the Kadaitcha or the Maringo were typically carried out by small groups of men, usually at night and in operations which were well planned, based on good intelligence and timed to allow for the strike and return before dawn. Despite a degree of variation it was a traditional method of punishment, execution and revenge well adapted for use against the Europeans. The opprobrious comments elicited from the settlers were evidence of their unease. ‘Their whole art of war’, wrote a Tasmanian pioneer, was ‘a concealed, silent and treacherous attack’.4 A contemporary in Perth argued that it was not the ‘martial courage of a declared foe’ that was to be feared but the ‘dastardly duplicity of the secret assassin’.5 Fifty years later a Cooktown journalist remarked that there was not ‘a particle of manhood or even brute bravery about the Aboriginals [sic] … their weapons being treachery patiently nursed’.6 Their mode of attack, wrote G. A. Robinson, ‘is by surreption … they lay in ambush for some time before they make their attack, a sudden and unperceived invasion …’7 The hunter’s skills–expert tracking, stealth, self-control and patience–could be turned to effect when attempting to execute individual Europeans. On returning from the bush Davis acted out an Aboriginal dance which mimed the successful spearing of a shepherd–the creeping through the grass, ‘the cat-like watching, the drawing nearer and nearer to the unconscious wretch; the spring, the rush, the fierce blow’.8
The gathering of intelligence was one of the most successful aspects of Aboriginal campaigns. They carefully watched the movements of exploring parties, as indicated above, and continued to monitor the actions of pioneer settlers. Women, children and old people were often sent to observe and report on the Europeans. A traditional story from the Herbert River relates how young boys were regularly sent down to the edge of the rainforest to watch the whites and their Kanaka servants. Aborigines employed on stations and around other European settlements almost certainly provided information about the newcomers for kin still in the bush. Attacks on stations often gave indication of accurate information about household layout and domestic routines, raids being frequently mounted when the men had left home and were too far away to intervene. Houses, wrote a concerned Tasmanian settler:
became an easy prey to these insidious depredators, who will, for days and weeks, watch a house that they have marked out for plunder, till they find the whole of the males absent, they then pounce upon the dwelling, and with a celerity incredible plunder it of every article they consider valuable.9
It seems that as a general rule Aboriginal intelligence about Europeans was better than the settlers’ knowledge of neighbouring clans. Even the Queensland Native Police had difficulty in tracking down blacks who kept a close watch on their movements at all times.
Apart from effective surveillance the other advantage possessed by the Aborigines was their knowledge of their own country which was intimate and detailed to an extent that no European could hope to match. It was often of great tactical importance. Knowledge of fords, passes, tracks and caves facilitated escape from pursuit, rapidity of march and speed of communication. Settlers were often unable to find the blacks they were pursuing or did not even prosecute the search through a sense of inadequacy in the bush. They were very reluctant to ride into forest, mountain or swamp where their horses were hampered and their mobility restricted. A South Australian settler explained that the blacks he was pursuing had disappeared into thick scrubs ‘to which they invariably retreat, and whence they cannot be followed up’.10 In 1846 a party of police surprised an Aboriginal camp at the head of Spencer Gulf but it was decided that ‘to follow them was out of the question from the rocky surface of the whole country’.11 In Tasmania where European parties usually travelled on foot the Aboriginal advantage was even more marked. ‘They are seldom pursued by the settlers’, lamented an island colonist, ‘from a despair of finding them in the almost inaccessible fastnesses’.12 Almost despite themselves the Tasmanian settlers came to admire the bush skills of their black adversaries who had proved themselves ‘a sagacious and wily race of people’.13 They were a most ‘intricate set of people to capture’;14 no-one could conjecture how ‘crafty and subtle they act in the bush’.15 Similar observations were made by a squatter on the Gwydir in 1839. He believed that the whole British army would be unable to apprehend one tribe in his district:
so well acquainted are they with every thicket, reedy creek, morass, cave and hollow tree, in which they can secrete themselves, and so inaccessible to a horse of any white man.16
There are several reports of Aboriginal groups expressing their self-confidence by turning and making faces at pursuing whites and shouting abuse at them in pidgin English. In Northern New South Wales a party of settlers confronted a group of blacks who:
took shelter behind the trees, and kept hooting and telling us they were not frightened, calling us white b ... s [sic] and telling us to come on; we left them as we found them, our force being unable to engage them in the scrubs.17
There are a number of accounts of Aboriginal parties, confident of their superiority in the bush, turning their backs on pursuing Europeans and slapping their buttocks in derision. Reports of this sort came from Port Essington in the 1830s, the Darling Downs in the 1840s, the Maranoa in the 1860s and Central Australia in the 1890s. Writing from the Tempe Downs station in the Alice Springs district in 1891 the local police officer referred to a group of blacks who continued to elude him:
they kept a constant watch for me and when I passed, they came down on the flats below, and killed cattle, they were hard to get on account of so many ranges, therefore they got cheeky and slapped their behinds at my party.18
Aboriginal action fell naturally into the archetypal pattern of guerilla warfare which was ideally suited to their loosely articulated clan organization and dispersed population, their hunting and foraging economy and highly developed bush skills. The Hobart Town Courier noted in 1830 that nature had instructed the Aborigine in her ‘original language’; that the black man had adopted the ‘natural weapons of his condition’. The writer concluded that while settlers might denounce the ‘craft, the cunning and the murderous habits’ they were but ‘natural tactics of war with which providence has provided them’.19 Governor Arthur well expressed the anguish of the frustrated opponent of the guerilla, which is as fresh today as it was a hundred and fifty years ago: ‘They suddenly appear; commit some act of outrage and then as suddenly vanish: if pursued it seems impossible to surround and capture them’.20
For a while on the Australian frontier bushcraft and local knowledge almost equalled the range and power of guns, the speed and endurance of horses. But the balance tipped dramatically in favour of the Europeans as a result of the rapid improvement of their weapons, their growing confidence in the bush and, above all, their using the blacks themselves as guides, trackers and more formally in the para-military native police forces of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. The co-option of black bushcraft began with the earliest expeditions inland from the infant settlement at Sydney Cove, George Caley informing Sir Joseph Banks in 1801 that he intended to keep a ‘native constant soon, as they can trace anything so well in the bush’.21 The use of ‘friendly blacks’ to counter the superior bushcraft of clans in conflict with the Europeans was formally proposed in the 1820s. George Frankland wrote to Governor Arthur arguing that it would be impossible to capture Tasmanian Aborigines ‘without the agency of one or more Individuals of that Race’. If the ‘peculiar tact’ of the blacks could be employed by the Europeans it would at once ‘remove the obstacles which exist to the capture of the Tribes’.22 Jorgenson was another perplexed by the ‘superiority of the Blacks’ in the bush which would never be overcome ‘unless we are taught by them’.23
The argument was accepted and mainland Aborigines were brought to Tasmania to assist in tracking down the hostile clans. The later history of the use of Aboriginal troopers in Port Phillip from 1842 and the northern frontier of New South Wales from 1848 is well known. They appear to have had an immediate and decisive effect in crushing concerted Aboriginal resistance in the Western District of Victoria in 1843 and in south-east Queensland in 1849. The Queensland Native Mounted Police continued to patrol the fringes of European settlement until the beginning of the twentieth century. Black fear of the native police is well documented. At one blow Aboriginal superiority in bushcraft was undermined leading to a serious loss of morale. The Aboriginal trooper combined the tactical advantages pertaining to both sides of the frontier; traditional bush skills were wedded to horsemanship and facility with rifle and revolver. Unwittingly the Europeans may have coopted another, unseen weapon: by hostile clans out in the bush the police troopers were thought to possess the potent magic of strange and distant Aboriginal tribes. The greatest dangers of the new white world fused in the figure of the black trooper with the most serious threat which traditional society could produce.
But while traditional skills could be used to considerable effect against the Europeans there was also a need for innovation. The widespread use of European food increased the flexibility of Aboriginal organization allowing large gatherings to stay together for longer than usual or giving greater mobility to small groups released from the need for daily hunting and foraging. Clans in conflict with Europeans could hide away during daylight and concentrate their whole attention on the struggle with the settlers. Jorgenson noted how European food had enabled the Tasmanians ‘in a great degree to subsist without hunting’ which by compelling them to run over large tracts of ground had exposed them to ‘capture and very great danger’. He was also aware of the link between altered patterns of food consumption and modification of methods of resistance. The island blacks, had, he wrote:
in great measure changed the system of warfare and depredations … instead of resorting to their usual mode of obtaining subsistence, they have closed in upon the settlement, robbing the huts of flour and other provisions in very large quantities.24
Tactics were developed to cope with European firearms and indeed some groups endeavoured to acquire them for their own use. Knowledge of their working was gradually gained particularly from individuals who had worked on pastoral stations or in maritime industries like sealing and pearling. There were frequent reports of blacks using guns to attack Europeans in Tasmania in the 1820s, Victoria in the 1840s and around Cape York in the 1880s and 1890s. The Port Phillip Herald reported in 1840 that several hundred Aborigines had assembled at a station to the north of Melbourne and had threatened to burn down the huts saying that they ‘did not care for white men, as they had more muskets than them, showing at the same time nearly thirty guns of different kinds’.25 Robinson met numerous Aboriginal parties armed with guns during his expeditions around Tasmania. He was told they ‘intended using them against the whites as soon as they could get ammunition, and that they often practiced with them’.26 But while guns were used by Aboriginal groups in various parts of the country they were never adopted on a large enough scale seriously to alter the balance of power between white and black and in fact did not compensate for European co-option of Aboriginal bushcraft.
Beyond the influence of European food and guns there was a clear change of objective from the pursuit of revenge or women which inspired traditional fighting to the development of a form of economic warfare. It began with the straightforward destruction of European property over and above animals taken for food. Sheep were run into swamps and over cliffs or killed and injured with spear and club; cattle were stampeded into rough country or caught and hamstrung. On the troubled McIntyre frontier the squatter Jacob Lowe lost seventy-five cattle in a single night raid. The local clans had clubbed and speared the herd but none had been taken for food. In fact only two carcases had been cut open. The hearts had been taken out and were placed on two poles stuck into the turf facing one another. The message was unmistakable. Lowe subsequently told a parliamentary committee that the Aboriginal objective was clearly not food but the desire ‘to drive us away out of the district–to frighten us’.27 Attacks on stations were often highly organized and devastating in effect leaving animals dead, everything moveable carried away and all else put to the torch.
In various parts of the country tactics were developed to attack and pillage loaded drays at the most vulnerable point of their journey. When a group of drays reached a steep gradient it was common practice for several teams to be combined to pull the drays over the rise one at a time leaving the others vulnerable to sudden attack. If done quickly the raiding party could be out of sight before the bullock drivers were able to intervene. But perhaps the most sophisticated attack on European communications was made on the dray road from Ipswich to the Darling Downs in 1843. The road was barricaded with logs and the stalled drays were attacked by blacks hiding in surrounding vegetation. Two separate sources suggest that the Aboriginal objective was to prevent all supplies reaching the properties on the Darling Downs thereby starving them out. The local Commissioner for Crown Lands was told by ‘an intelligent Aborigine named Toby’ that the mountain clans had ‘formed a plan of intercepting all communications by the high road to the Darling Downs’.28 The Government Resident at Moreton Bay took the threat seriously and a military detachment was stationed in the area for three years. A pioneer Darling Downs squatter visiting Brisbane at the time was told by a friendly black not to return to his property because the Aborigines intended to fence up the road, cut off all communications and attack the stations.
In other places Aborigines came to appreciate the crucial importance of horses to the European economy. At the simplest level this meant choosing to carry out raids on sheep and cattle during heavy rain when boggy conditions kept horsemen at home and allowed operations to proceed without fear of attack. In one or two districts there appear to have been systematic attempts to kill all the horses in order to immobilize the Europeans. This seems to have been the case on the Palmer River where several massive raids were made on miners’ horses. The Brisbane Courier estimated in 1883 that in the previous ten years over 200 horses had been speared though not all fatally. A recent study has determined that 133 horses were killed on the road from Cooktown to the Palmer in six years during the 1870s. But the evidence is even more specific in relation to the McIntyre River district in the 1840s. Not only were many horses killed–one writer suggested 100 head between 1843 and 1846–but local Aborigines specifically stated their intention. A northern squatter wrote to the Maitland Mercury in 1843 arguing that the blacks were well aware of the crucial role of horses and from what they had told him he had ‘every reason to believe that they will destroy all our horses, and thus disable the men from attending to the cattle’.29 Five months later another writer referred to the continued attacks on European animals which were ‘part of the plan of these fellows’ which showed the ‘premeditated and systematic manner in which they set about the work of plunder’.30 A further incident was reported at much the same time. A group of shepherds besieged in their hut were dared by their attackers to venture outside. The blacks said they had already ‘killed all the horses’31 and would now kill the settlers. Five years later another McIntyre settler reported that the Aborigines had driven off all the horses and made massive attacks on the cattle:
The threats they used of killing all our horses first, and then the men, accompanied by the most dreadful yells and shouts, had the effect of striking terror into some of our party.32
Attacks on livestock in general and horses in particular were among the most effective tactics employed by the Aborigines in their struggle with the settlers. Fire was potentially an even more potent weapon. The blacks were, after all, experts in the use of fire in the Australian environment; traditionally they understood its value in regeneration of vegetation, its role in the control of undergrowth, the relative fire resistance of various plant species, the importance of such variables as wind, time of day, temperature and fuel build up. Given the expertise readily available the surprising thing is not that fire was used as a weapon but that it was not used more often. The settlers were particularly vulnerable given the general dryness of the climate and in fact they realized the destructive power latent in the simple fire stick. Fear of Aboriginal-induced conflagration was apparent from the early years of the first settlement on the Cumberland Plain. George Caley told Sir Joseph Banks that had the blacks ‘been bent for to do us as much injury as we had done them’ then the settlement would have been endangered ‘for it was in their power for have done us almost an irreparable injury by fire’.33 Governor Hunter shared the unease about the possibility of Aboriginal attack by fire. In 1800 he wrote:
the mischiefs which these people can with ease to themselves do to us renders it highly essential to our own comfort and security that we should live on amicable terms with them. Fire in the hands of a body of irritated and hostile natives may with little trouble to them ruin our prospects of an abundant harvest, for that is the very season in which they might spread desolation over our cultivated lands, and reduce us to extreme distress; and they are not ignorant of having that power in their hands, for after the destruction of the above two boys they threatened to burn our crops as soon as it could be effected. I caution’d the settlers in consequence that they might be upon their guard. They did not, however, attempt it.34
As a rule Aboriginal use of fire cohered with the level of conflict as a whole–it was sporadic and used more against individuals and their property than the whole of the white community. But where, as in Tasmania in the 1820s, the struggle had escalated into racial warfare, fire was used more systematically and with much greater effect. After witnessing the burning of houses, fences, crops and haystacks throughout the district the settlers of the Clyde Valley met at Bothwell in 1830 and moved an address to the Governor warning that Aboriginal action was ‘affecting not only the lives of the Colonists’ but also ‘threatening the extinction of the Colony itself by firing our Crops and Dwellings’.35
Frontier conflict was ragged, sporadic and uneven. It was uncommon for hostilities to embrace everybody even in relatively small districts. There were usually a few Aboriginal clans that avoided confrontation with the settlers and on the other hand a minority of Europeans who refused to be forced into open antagonism with their black neighbours. Complete racial polarization only occurred at times of very high tension. On the other hand hostilities rarely came to a sudden or complete conclusion. Instead conflict inched away uncertainly. Aborigines eventually decided that the cost of open attacks on Europeans was prohibitively high and only took life when the chances of discovery were low as in the case of lone travellers or solitary prospectors. They learnt to adjust the level of resistance to keep it below the assumed threshold of violent retaliation although European behaviour must have seemed dangerously unpredictable. Forecasting their probable reaction became one of the crucial skills of the emerging interracial politics.
Attacks on property became more selective, secretive, surreptitious. The adjustment of objectives was noted by European observers. The Queensland squatter William Forster argued that after a period of open war the blacks reached a different stage altogether:
when they understand our superior power, and at the same time their predatory habits are still in existence–they will carry on small depredations and will no doubt take life at times, but their object is not to take life–it is not war.36
The Commissioner for Crown Lands on the Darling Downs noted a similar diminution of resistance. The local blacks, he wrote in 1845, were no longer at open war with the squatters driving off whole herds of cattle and flocks of sheep but had adopted instead
‘a system of pilfering that no foresight can prevent’.37 Thirty years later and over a thousand miles away the Cooktown Courier distinguished between districts where ‘a state of warfare’ still existed and those where the Aborigines had given up all avowed hostility ‘their depredations if they commit any, taking the nature of larceny’.38
Considering the advantages possessed by the European the resistance was often surprisingly effective and unexpectedly prolonged. A high price was exacted from many pioneer communities in tension and insecurity as much as in property loss, injury or death. Aboriginal attacks on property had devastating effects on the fortunes of individual settlers and at times appeared to threaten the economic viability of pioneer industries–squatting, farming, mining and pearling. There were occasions–as in Tasmania in the late 1820s, New South Wales in the late 1830s and early 1840s and Queensland in the early 1860s–when Aboriginal resistance emerged as one of the major problems of colonial society. An editorial in Queensland’s leading newspaper in 1879 summed up the impact of Aboriginal resistance in the colony:
During the last four or five years the human life and property destroyed by the Aboriginals in the North totals up to a serious amount … settlement on the land, and the development of the mineral and other resources of the country, have been in a great degree prohibited by the hostility of the blacks, which still continues with undiminished spirit.39
Yet Europeans were only rarely willing to recognize the intelligence and courage which informed the resistance. When they did their comments were particularly interesting. In 1830 a writer in the Hobart paper The Colonial Times referred to ‘a cunning and superiority of tactics which would not disgrace some of the greatest military characters’.40 Another island settler remarked that the blacks had ‘oftentimes evinced superior tact and clearness of head’.41 The official Tasmanian Aborigines Committee thought the blacks a ‘subtle and daring enemy’, a ‘sagacious and wily race of people’.42 A report of 1831 observed that the island blacks:
now conduct their attacks with a surprising organization, and with unexampled cunning, such indeed is their local information and quickness of perception, that all endeavours on the part of the whites to cope with them are unavailing.43
In 1834 Governor Stirling informed his superiors in England that West Australian settlers had found the blacks ‘very formidable enemies, and if they could avail themselves of the advantages of combination it would be useless to attempt a settlement in this quarter with our present numbers’.44 A pioneer colonist concurred, remarking in 1833 that if in addition to their knowledge of the country the local Aborigines had ‘firearms and a little discipline’ they would ‘put an end to the settlement in less than a month’.45 The Commandant at Port Essington wrote in 1834 that local blacks had shown ‘excessive cunning, dexterity, arrangement, enterprise and courage’ in their attacks on Europeans.46 A generation later in north Queensland a writer in the Cooktown Herald remarked that the miners had difficulties enough to contend with:
without having to enter into guerilla warfare, and risk their lives fighting their sable foes, who are immeasurably their superiors in tactics and bush fighting.47
But perhaps the most generous tribute was paid by Edward Eyre who wrote:
It has been said, and is generally believed, that the natives are not courageous. There could not be a greater mistake … nor do I hold it to be any proof that they are cowards, because they dread or give way before Europeans and their firearms. So unequal a match is no criterion of bravery, and yet even thus, among natives, who were labouring under the feelings, naturally produced by seeing a race they were unacquainted with, and weapons that dealt death as if by magic, I have seen many instances of an open manly intrepidity of manner and bearing, and a proud unquailing glance of eye, which instinctively stamped upon my mind the conviction that the individuals before me were very brave men.48
The long running debate endemic in pioneer communities between those who wanted to ‘let the blacks in’ and others equally determined to ‘keep them out’ was undoubtedly reflected on the other side of the frontier. ‘Staying out’ or ‘going in’ to white society was a major question for Aboriginal clans all over the continent. Either choice presented hazards. The unpredictability of European behaviour made any approach to station, farm, mining camp or township a dangerous and uncertain exercise. Yet life in the bush became increasingly hazardous and eventually ‘staying out’ became the greater of the two evils. Dwindling indigenous food supplies put enormous pressure on clans seeking to live in isolation from the Europeans. Malnutrition stalked many camps and children and old people may have often died of hunger in the bush. A western Queensland pioneer was told by local blacks after they had come in that during the era of frontier conflict the Europeans:
used to starve numbers of the old men, women and children to death; for, being hunted into the desert, they had neither the means of carrying water nor of catching game … and of course the weaker members of the tribe felt it most.49
Many clans were faced with a simple, stark choice. They could take European animals and supplies to meet their immediate and pressing needs with the certainty of ensuing retaliation or they could move in to the fringes of the nearest European settlement to escape the tightening vice of hunger and violence.
Evidence of destitution can be adduced from many parts of the country. The officials of the Port Phillip Protectorate wrote of the plight of Victorian blacks within a few years of the European invasion. After a journey through the Western District in 1841 G. A. Robinson reported that the condition of the blacks was deplorable, their poverty the ‘extreme of wretchedness’.50 The missionary Francis Tuckfield was told by Aboriginal informants that there was scarcely anything left to eat in the bush while E. S. Parker observed that the earliest settlers acknowledged that:
the Natives are now in a much worse condition and present a far less robust appearance than when they arrived–and that it is their decided conviction, that they must occasionally suffer great privations, from their altered and often emaciated appearance.51
The picture was similar in other parts of the continent. In 1856 Wiseman saw a group of blacks on the banks of the Fitzroy River who appeared to be desperately hungry. They kept striking their bellies and crying out in broken English ‘Plower, Plower’. He concluded that they were ‘very probably starved’ as fear had pinched them into an isolated and barren corner of their territory.52 In 1877 a correspondent of the Queenslander wrote of the fate of the blacks on the Palmer River. The country, he explained, was infertile and poorly stocked with game and the Europeans had occupied all the watercourses with the result that the local clans were half starved. In 1882 a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald spent a day with a small group of blacks in the coastal rainforest near Cairns. They complained that they found it ‘very difficult to get food’ and because the whites had taken all the good country ‘they had to go to the mountains or rocky places on the coast, where the fish was not plentiful’.53 Near the Gulf of Carpentaria the blacks were driven away from the cattle stations and ‘sent to starve along the coast or in the ranges’. ‘The few I saw’, wrote a correspondent to the Queenslander in 1886, ‘are really being starved to death’.54
Many of those who went into white settlement were refugees from the danger, deprivation and insecurity of life in the bush: they were pushed reluctantly towards European society. Yet in other cases blacks were attracted, or pulled, in the same direction giving rise to Stanner’s aphorism that for every Aborigine who had Europeans thrust upon him, at least one other sought them out. Many aspirations combined to attract Aborigines to white settlement. Intellectual curiosity was obviously important –an expedition from the homeland in to the nearest European outpost was an adventure to be equated with foreign and overseas travel in white society. The desire to experience new food, clothes, weapons, sights, sounds, textures, tastes had been apparent even before the arrival of the pioneer settlers. Writing of central Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chewings noted that many blacks living far from European settlements had: ‘at some time or other journeyed in through some friendly tribes’ country to some cattle, telegraph, or railway station, just to see what the white man really is like.’55 Like travellers anywhere Aboriginal sojourners did not necessarily intend to stay within the European orbit although return became progressively difficult as months and then years passed. Those who willingly but tentatively approached white settlements were not in a position to foresee the degradation which came to dwell in every fringe camp on the continent and the disease, malnutrition, alcoholism and social disintegration which followed inexorably and almost universally from the move into European society.
During the twentieth century there have been many welldocumented examples of voluntary migration from tribal homelands in towards European settlements. This has been particularly important around the fringes of the central and western deserts although outstation movements of the last few years have partially reversed the trend. But twentieth century developments do not necessarily throw interpretive light back onto events of a hundred and more years ago. When applied to the nineteenth century, Stanner’s aphorism is not so much wrong as anachronistic. However, it is true that voluntary migration was prevalent in the vicinity of the major towns. Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth all attracted Aborigines in from their hinterlands and authorities in Melbourne and Adelaide vainly endeavoured to keep distant clans away from the urban fringe. But outside the compass of major towns the situation was usually quite different. From the start of settlement the Aborigines were comparatively safe in the urban areas–at least from powder and shot if not from fist and phallus. In the bush life was much more dangerous. Violence was so common that it must have seemed an ever present possibility. Aborigines were far less likely to move in towards white settlement because they feared for their lives. Curiosity and the attraction of a new world of experience could not counter the danger which encircled the Europeans like an evil penumbra. For their part the settlers were usually so insecure that they were highly suspicious of Aboriginal attempts to approach station, camp or farm. Tentative initial contact had so often been followed by bloodshed that frontiersmen decided that the only safe procedure was to keep the blacks beyond the range of their ever ready rifles.
There were aboriginal groups which sought a political solution to their white problem, a middle way between the stark alternatives of staying out or going in. The desire for a negotiated settlement may have been far more widespread than the available evidence will ever suggest yet there are four relevant examples widely separated in time and place. At the height of conflict on the Hawkesbury River in 1804 Governor King met three local blacks who said they objected to the ever increasing spread of settlement along the valley. They were determined to hang on to the few places left on the river bank and told King that ‘if they could retain some places on the lower part of the river they would be satisfied and would not trouble the white man’. King thought the request so ‘just and equitable’ that he assured the blacks that no further settlements would be made lower down the river.56 Forty years later in northern New South Wales the pioneer settler E.O. Ogilvie came across a group of local blacks living in hostile seclusion in the mountains following a period of conflict with the whites. A limited knowledge of the local dialect helped him exchange views on the existing state of relations between indigenes and settlers. The blacks told Ogilvie to return to his station in the valley. ‘You have the river’, they said, ‘and the open country, and you ought to be content, and leave the mountains to the black people. Go back–keep the plains and leave us the hills’.57 Ogilvie claimed that he wished to live in peace and wanted nothing in their territory except the grass. An understanding was reached which continued to exert a beneficial effect on race relations in the district. Howitt related an even more interesting story. He was returning from an expedition in central Australia and travelling towards the settled districts of South Australia. While at Lake Hope near Coopers Creek he met a celebrated Dieri called Jelinapiramurana who asked him if he would:
tell the white men who were coming up to his country, according to the information sent him by tribes further down, that they should ‘sit down on the one side (Lake Hope) and the (local clans) would sit down on the other, so that they would not be likely to quarrel’.58
James Morrell, the Queensland castaway, was able to fully discuss the white problem with his clansmen. When the first few settlers arrived in the neighbourhood he explained that they were merely the harbingers of a much larger white population. He warned his black kin that ‘there were a great many people, many more than themselves’ and they had plenty of guns, and that if the blacks went near ‘they would be killed’. Morrell told them quite bluntly that the white men had come to take their land away. ‘They always understand’, he explained ‘that might not right, is the law of the world’. But the blacks told Morrell:
to ask the white men to let them have all the ground to the north of the Burdekin, and to let them fish in the rivers; also the low grounds, they live on to get the roots.59
Once restored to European society Morrell appears to have made little attempt to shield his companions of seventeen years from the onslaught of the frontier settlers. Their attempt at negotiation was swept aside as being unworthy of consideration.
There was no neat or decisive end to conflict between Aborigines and settlers; neither armistice nor treaty; no medals, no speeches, no peace conference. Black resistance did not conclude when the last stockman was speared although methods were modified and objectives altered. Sorcery was probably increasingly favoured over physical confrontation as a means of challenging white domination. Killing ceased but raids on European property continued. The most immediate motive was economic; blacks stole to survive. But there was always a political element in Aboriginal behaviour. They continued to believe that Europeans were under a moral obligation to share their abundance, both because sharing was so central to Aboriginal values, and to provide compensation for the loss of land, water and game. The settlers for their part often regarded Aboriginal depredation as a continuation of resistance in a new guise. They said so on many occasions. A typical remark was that of a writer in the Queenslander in 1871 who said that Aboriginal crime had assumed:
a different aspect from the old time spearing of cattle, or the massacre of station hands. The criminal black fellow of the present day frequents the town, gets drunk, robs houses, insults women and otherwise conducts himself like a civilized blackguard. 60
Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal bandits or bushrangers were common in the generation after settlement. Typically they were young men who had grown up in fringe camps and had worked in varying capacities for the Europeans. They were often competent horsemen and handy with guns while still proficient in the ancient bush skills. Though rarely a serious challenge to European society the black bandits created anxiety in small frontier communities and problems for colonial police forces. ‘All settlers will agree with me’, wrote a correspondent to the Port Denison Times, that the ‘half-civilized blackfellow is a more dangerous and troublesome customer to deal with than the myall’.61 Queensland seems to have had the largest contingent of such men. The provincial papers of the 1870s and 1880s abound in reports of their careers, crimes and capture. In 1878 a Gladstone correspondent wrote of Billy Burmoondoo who had been ‘a terror to the district for years’.62 Ten years later the Port Denison Times reported the capture of the notorious jimmy, an object of terror and alarm and in 1882 referred to the shooting of Murdering Harry. At Tambo in 1876 the notorious Saturday was taken after ‘many depredations’ as was Sambo at Wide Bay a few years later. The latter had defied the police for years and during 1875 the terror of ‘club law’ had become so great that the women accompanied their husbands into the fields ‘rather than remain unprotected in their homes’.63 Sambo’s career called forth a comment from the Maryborough correspondent of the Queenslander:
It is difficult to catch these blacks, who are very cunning, and some of them are noted for the number of successful robberies they have committed. One outlaw by the name of Sambo, is a regular Rob Roy, his stealings have been on such an heroic scale. He has been wanted for years past, and all they know is that he is in the district still. The other blacks shield him as sedulously as in some parts of Ireland they shield a gentleman who has had the misfortune to shoot his landlord.64
Whether other bandits received as much protection as Sambo is impossible to say. Some seem to have been outcasts from both black and white communities and there is as much evidence of Aboriginal betrayal as of support and sustenance.
Between 1878 and 1880 the part-Aborigine Johnny Campbell defied the police in a wide area of south-east Queensland during which time he was the ‘sable terror of the whole Wide Bay District’. It is hard to find any detail about Campbell’s life before he took to the bush. But it seems that he rejected his Aboriginal heritage taking pride in his command of English and his skill with horse and rifle. Campbell rode the watershed between the tribal resistance of his Aboriginal grandparents and the world of the white bushranger. He was, a writer in the Maryborough Chronicle argued the ‘local representative of the Ned Kelly fraternity’.65
With Jimmy and Joe Governor the watershed was crossed. The brothers were part-Aborigines and the white community reacted to their rampage by reference to deeply embedded racial stereotypes. They were dubbed the ‘Breelong blacks’, newspapers referred to the ‘black horror’ while the Mudgee Guardian argued that violence was to be expected from Aborigines ‘when the inbred passions of the savage nature assert themselves’.66 There probably was some element of racial antagonism in the Governor’s behaviour. A police sergeant at Wollar reported to his superiors that their mother Annie Governor was a woman ‘with a grievance’ who had ‘encouraged her sons to do acts of violence, as she states that the Government took the poor blacks’ country, giving them nothing in return’.67 But Jimmy Governor was, according to his wife Ethel, ‘particularly touchy about his colour’ and did ‘not like to be called a blackfellow’. 68
The Governors wanted to be bushrangers. Their model was Ned Kelly not the tribal warrior. Ethel reported that Jimmy was an avid reader of stories about bushrangers. Several months after their marriage he said he would ‘be a bushranger before long’ and in the period before the murders of the Mawbey family the brothers were frequently ‘talking about bushranging at night’.69 The desire to go out bushranging was a characteristic the Governors shared with many of the poor, rural working class youth of the time. Contemporaries greatly overemphasised the Aboriginal element in their behaviour. Those observers who remained free from racial hysteria realized this. A journalist who travelled with Jimmy Governor on the ship from the northern rivers to his trial in Sydney reported that:
The outlaw has no trace in his speech of the usual dialect of the Aboriginal. His language is just the same as that of any white Australian … and most of the ‘black fellow talk’ which has been interwoven with remarks attributed to him has either been introduced with an intention of lending supposedly needed colouring or has been insensibly conveyed from the mind to the lips or the pen of the narrator by reason of the fact that Jimmy Governor is usually spoken of as an aboriginal and is so dark skinned. His grammar is not, of course, of the most elegant description, but his only dialect is the dialect of the average bush labourer. Of the latest slang he is a master, and he freely uses ‘flash’ talk and slang in his conversation.70
With Jimmy Governor the bushranger had supplanted the tribal warrior; class had superseded race.
How many people died as a direct result of frontier conflict? It is a question which white Australians have rarely posed and never satisfactorily answered. The few official estimates made in the nineteenth century are of limited value and normally underestimate the numbers of Aborigines shot down by the settlers. However, recent research work in various parts of Australia provides a more satisfactory basis for assessment. It is much easier to determine the number of Europeans who died violently than to make comparable estimates for the blacks. Loos and Reynolds estimated that 850 Europeans and their allies–Pacific Islanders, Chinese, acculturated Aborigines–died by spear and club in Queensland between 1840 and 1897. Though the count was careful, precision was impossible and the figure may have been as high as 1000. Similar estimates were subsequently made in other parts of Australia. In Tasmania the official figure for European mortality was 160 but Ryan has recently argued that 200 is more realistic. Christie has suggested 200 as a reasonable estimate for Victoria; Green has accounted for 25 deaths in the south-west corner of Western Australia between 1826 and 1852 and Prentis 20 for the northeast corner of New South Wales. There is now enough regional accounting to make an intelligent guess about the country as a whole. It seems reasonable to suggest that Aborigines killed somewhere between 2000 and 2500 Europeans in the course of the invasion and settlement of the continent. There were many hundreds of others who were injured and carried both physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives.
Calculating the Aboriginal death toll is much more difficult. Conflict is better documented in Tasmania than anywhere else in the country and Ryan’s estimate of 800 is possibly more accurate than any other we can make. Green has accounted for 102 Aboriginal deaths in his segment of Western Australia and Prentis for 100 in the northern rivers district of New South Wales. Christie has recently argued that the whites killed 2000 blacks during their occupation of Victoria while Reynolds suggested that as many as 8000–10 000 Aborigines died violently in Queensland. For the continent as a whole it is reasonable to suppose that at least 20 000 Aborigines were killed as a direct result of conflict with the settlers. Secondary effects of the invasion–disease, deprivation, disruption–were responsible for the premature deaths of many more although it is almost impossible to arrive at a realistic figure. Many blacks were wounded but recovered. After an expedition to survey the Aboriginal population in central Victoria in 1846 G. A. Robinson reported that many of the adult men had gun shot wounds and ‘other marks of violence on their person’.71 In 1969 an old Northern Territory black recalled that when he was a child a lot of his people had bullet marks on their arms, legs and backs and one had survived although half his mouth had been shot away.
The ratio between black and white deaths varied considerably from four to one in Tasmania up to ten to one in Queensland. Such a discrepancy demands explanation. The rugged island terrain undoubtedly assisted Aborigines in both defence and attack. Horses were less common on Tasmanian properties than on sprawling mainland stations and convict servants usually travelled on foot. They were often unarmed as well. The free settlers were unwilling to give guns to their workers because the ‘black war’ followed a period of serious conflict with gangs of bushrangers. The struggle in Tasmania was over before European weapons underwent their rapid mid nineteenth century improvement with the introduction of breech-loading, repeating rifles and six shot revolvers. Conditions in Queensland were much more favourable to the settlers. The introduction of responsible government in 1859 removed many of the political constraints that had previously held back the full force of white violence. The frontier was vast and in most places favoured the European on horseback while the Native Mounted Police developed into an efficient weapon to ‘disperse’ Aboriginal tribes.
There is then a marked discrepancy between the ratios of white deaths to black in Tasmania, the south-west of Western Australia and north-east New South Wales on the one hand and those in Queensland on the other. This may reflect a wider difference between settlement in the south and east of the continent in the first half of the nineteenth century and that of the second half in northern Australia. Christie’s ratio of ten to one in Victoria may be anomalous. It is possible that his figure of 2000 Aboriginal death is too high although E. S. Parker kept a careful account of conflict in his area of north-central Victoria and estimated that Europeans killed seven Aborigines for every white man speared. Elsewhere he spoke of a fearful preponderance in the settlers’ favour.
The figure of 20 000 Aboriginal deaths in frontier conflict will be thought too high by some, too low by others. However, the evidence concerning the ubiquity of conflict is overwhelming. It can be found in almost every type of document–official reports both public and confidential, newspapers, letters, reminiscences. Settlers often counted black bodies either in anger or in anguish; members of punitive expeditions confessed to their participation in a spirit of bravado or contrition. Later observers came across bones and skulls; buried, burnt or hidden and occasionally collected and put proudly on display. In a few districts officials and settlers assessed the role of violence in the decline of local populations; others noted the disproportionate number of adult women following frontier conflict and the widespread and prolonged mourning for butchered men-folk. The evidence for a great loss of life is voluminous, various and incontrovertible.
Some will think a figure of 20 000 dead too low considering the alarming decline of the Aboriginal population from about 300 000 in 1788 to not much more than 50 000 in a little over a century. Given ample evidence of massacres should we not significantly extend the death list? To answer this question several points should be made. They relate to both sides of the frontier. An overemphasis on the significance of massacres tends to throw support behind the idea that the blacks were helpless victims of white attack; passive recipients of promiscuous brutality. Such an argument runs easily along well worn channels of historical interpretation. Paternalism and sympathy have often merged in support of the view that the Aboriginal experience was a story ‘infinitely pathetic–children as they were, stretching out frail hands to stay the flood tide’.72
But such an assessment parodies the Aboriginal role in frontier conflict. Blacks did not sit around their camp fires waiting to be massacred. They usually knew of the dangers accompanying white settlement even before the Europeans arrived and took action to minimize those perils. While the settlers normally had the advantage of guns and horses the blacks were far more competent in the bush and undoubtedly had a superior intelligence network. Aboriginal clans usually knew in advance what European parties were doing and simply avoided contact. White numbers were too small to scour the country thoroughly while settlers could not afford the luxury of long patrols which took workers away from productive work. Even the Queensland Native Police seems to have spent much of its time in fruitless patrolling without seeing any Aborigines. Clans were most vulnerable when they were in camp and punitive parties often endeavoured to advance on them in the darkness and attack at first light. White tactics succeeded sometimes but the failure rate was certainly very high. Aborigines were inured to fear of night attack from their tribal enemies. It was in consequence hard to take a camp by surprise especially for clumsy and heavy booted Europeans. Many measures were adopted to counter nocturnal danger. Fires were either not lit, kept so small they could not be seen in the distance or shielded by screens of saplings. Without the distant glow of camp fires sleeping blacks were almost impossible to find. Camp sites were chosen on the edges of rivers and swamps and forests or among broken and boulder strewn country to expedite flight and there are numerous accounts of European parties galloping into camps that had already been vacated. Aborigines were acutely observant and their camps were usually surrounded by dogs keen from hunger who provided an effective early warning system.
There were important constraints on European action–legal, political and moral–which operated even in Queensland where control of Aboriginal policy passed to the settlers while there were still large indigenous populations beyond the reach of the whites. But equally important in determining what happened along the frontier was the action of the Aborigines themselves. Their skills, intelligence and tactics were always a significant element in the equation of contact. The settlers may have wanted to kill more blacks than they did, may have dreamed of easy assassination, but counter-action by the blacks frequently frustrated them. The ratio of four or five deaths to one in favour of the Europeans may have been the best that they could achieve during the first half of the nineteenth century with their inefficient guns and fumbling bushcraft.
Another fact of considerable importance when assessing the frontier death rate is that while the demographic evidence is far from complete it seems that there were still large Aboriginal populations in most areas when open conflict came to an end. The demographic decline did not cease when the shooting stopped and was equally significant in those few relatively peaceful districts where it scarcely began. Disease decimated Aboriginal communities–colds, influenza, T.B., measles, whooping cough, dysentery, malnutrition–all took their grim toll. Epidemic diseases were probably more lethal than punitive expeditions. While traditional culture provided skills to deal with guns there were no effective answers to introduced illness. Even a people like the Kalkatunga (or Kalkadoons) who stood up to the Queensland Native Police proved more vulnerable to measles than Martini-Henry rifles.
The catastrophic fall in the birth rate was another factor of demographic significance. Aborigines not only died at unprecedented rates; they were not born, or did not survive childhood, in anything like sufficient numbers to replace the loss by premature death. ‘A child is now but rarely to be met with’, wrote a white official in melancholy mood, ‘a birth but seldom known’.73 The missionary Benjamin Hurst commented in 1841 that he knew of only two children under twelve within a forty mile radius of his station on the western side of Port Phillip Bay. A settler at Lake Colac noted that amongst one hundred or so local women there had not been more than six or eight children born in the previous three years. A contemporary could recall only two births in five years in his district and both children later died. William Thomas kept detailed records of the Port Phillip and Western Port clans. Between 1848 and 1858 the population fell from 92 to 56 and only one child survived. The story was similar all over the continent. In district after district children were found to be ‘few beyond all proportion’.74 Many of the factors–malnutrition, exposure, disease and especially V. D. in a variety of forms–were only too apparent. But beyond even their lethal reach there was the loss of land, the dislocation of the known universe, a previously unthinkable disruption of the cosmic cycle of birth and death and reincarnation. Some groups exhibited an unquenchable determination to survive; for others the onslaught of invasion had destroyed everything. The future itself had been extinguished. Death from disease and chronic infant mortality merely proved that the times were irrecoverably out of joint. The Port Phillip Protectors reported Aboriginal comments eloquent with despair, leached of all hope. Thomas referred to ‘this indifference to prolong their race, on the ground as they state of having no country they can call their own’.75 ‘No country, no good have it pickaninnys’, one Aborigine explained, while another lamented ‘no country now for them … and no more come up pickaniny’.76 A contemporary of Thomas reported that he was asked: ‘Why me have lubra? Why me have piccaninny? You have all this place, no good have children no good have lubra, me tumble down and die very soon now.’77 During the nineteenth century, European observers frequently argued that given the importance of disease and the plummeting birth rate that frontier violence was only a minor factor in the decline of the Aboriginal population. The argument was a perfect anodyne for the tender colonial conscience but nevertheless did contain an element of truth, certainly sufficient to convince those eager to be persuaded. But it ignored the European input into almost every source of Aboriginal misery and cloaked the full significance of frontier violence which was political just as much as demographic. Violence was used to force submission; the impact spread far beyond the actual casualties. Fear and insecurity ran like fire throughout Aboriginal Australia and the scars of that great conflagration have still not healed. The horror of the punitive expedition was graphically captured by a Victorian black who told James Dredge in 1840: ‘Blackfellow by and by all gone, plenty shoot em, whitefellow–long time, plenty, plenty.’78
The memory of the dead, all 20 000 and more, lived on, stamped deeply and indelibly into the consciousness of the survivors, their children, and their children’s children. It is probably the most politically potent folk memory in Australian society. Oral history has tapped a number of stories of massacre; sagas of sudden death, of unforgettable horror. Despite the lapse of time the terror is still alive coiled snake–like in the awful narratives. The following story was told by an old black north Queenslander just before he died in the 1970s:
Big mob come up from Atherton
all the native police come up
all got the rifle, all got handcuffs
fire for bullock, roast im, altogether
bullock is for tucker
shoot im altogether, shoot im altogether
chuck im in the fire
all the revolvers going on
talk about smell
nobody gonna be alive
chuck im in the fire, half alive,
sing out
you all finished no more
Native police shot im all
Widow come back cryin
she lose im husband
all finished, they shot em live
all cryin come home
to this valley here79