For a majority of Aborigines their first experience of permanent settlers came when pastoralists arrived in their clan territories bringing with them horses and drays, cattle and sheep and the varied equipment of the pioneer station. The fear evoked by the white man, already discussed above, was soon matched by concern for local ecologies which quickly showed the impact of the exotic animals. The castaway James Morrell witnessed this process in north Queensland in the 1860s. His clansmen brought him news of a large herd of cattle which had suddenly appeared, surrounded a favourite waterhole and emptied it, leaving fish stranded in the mud. Though tempted to rush in and pick up the dying fish they were too intimidated to venture out of their hiding places. The explorer Thomas Mitchell was another who witnessed the impact of cattle herds travelling out beyond the fringes of European settlement in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland in 1846. An Aboriginal guide was taking Mitchell’s party to a shallow creek where he expected to find water but on arriving on the bank he was disappointed to find that cattle had already been there and had drunk it all. The black showed Mitchell the ‘recent prints of numerous cloven feet’ and the explorer was made to feel ‘in common with the Aborigines, those privations to which they are exposed by the white man’s access to their country’. The experience was repeated the following day. The party approached a pond well known to local clans only to find once again that cattle had drunk the water and trodden the ground ‘as dry as a market place’. Elsewhere Mitchell came across springs and ponds which local clans had tried to protect by cutting down nearby trees and placing the logs over the water. Thus it was, he mused, that the Aborigines ‘first became sensible of the approach of the white man’. He wrote of the fate of the small man-made waterholes in dry stretches of bush which were like oases surrounded by lush green grass. Cattle, he wrote:
find these places and come from stations often many miles distant, attracted by the rich verdure usually growing about them, and by thus treading the water into mud, or by drinking it up, they literally destroy the whole country for the Aborigines.1
Mitchell’s experience illustrated the widespread conflict over water which arose in arid areas all over the continent and in well watered areas as well during dry seasons. It often began as soon as the Europeans appeared. This was certainly the case in the desert where thirsty camel trains and horse teams consumed huge amounts of precious water in Aboriginal wells and springs and soaks. The pioneer Queensland squatter George Sutherland related a similar experience which illustrated the competition for water in a parched environment. He was driving a flock of thirsty sheep through waterless country towards the Georgina River in western Queensland. The local clans, camping around the only available surface water, scattered in terror when the whole flock stampeded towards the billabong.
Conflict was sharpened by the widespread belief among frontier squatters that ‘niggers and cattle don’t mix’; that the half-wild herds were unsettled by the mere sight or sound of Aborigines. As a result the blacks were repeatedly driven away from river frontages and lagoons. They were shot at or ridden down and stock-whipped. Relevant evidence for this is voluminous, coming from all parts of the continent. ‘All the freshwater is surrounded by cattle’, wrote Burketown’s policeman in 1897, and if a black was unfortunate to be seen by the station hands he was ‘hunted, whiped [sic] and severely maltreated’.2 Inspector Foelsche of the Northern Territory police noted how local squatters kept the blacks away from the inland lagoons and billabongs which were important both as meeting places and sources of food. The Protector of Aborigines at Camooweal remarked in 1901 that the station owners and managers claimed that the sight of the blacks disturbed the cattle with the result that the blacks were ‘dispersed by the station hands’.3 Writing of northern New South Wales in the early 1850s the Commandant of the Native Police noted that with the exception of a few stations the Aborigines were ‘in a manner outlawed in their own country, being hunted from the river and creek frontages, and thus deprived of means of lawfully obtaining food’.4 The impact of these policies on black communities was graphically described by an old Roper River black who recalled in old age the hardships suffered by his people when he was a boy during the early years of the twentieth century:
Oh terrible days we used to had: We never walk around much ‘mongst the plain country or groun’. We use to upla hill alla time to save our life. Our old people you know used to take us away from plain or river or billabong. Only night time they used to run down to get the lily, alla young men you know. Can’t go daytime, frighten for white people.5
Cattle and sheep were destructive of the environment in other ways as well. Their close cropping of the vegetation destroyed native flora while plants growing in or around water-holes or lagoons were eaten or trampled under hard hoofs. A north Queensland pioneer wrote of the impact of cattle along the Gulf of Carpentaria coastline:
they trample out the signs of turtles found in dried up swamps, the trail of the crocodile to his nest; they eat the tops of yams, and eat and destroy the lillies, all of which make their (the Aborigines’) natural food scarcer and harder to find.6
Other introduced animals–pigs, rabbits, camels–damaged sensitive local ecologies as well. An Aboriginal woman from the north Queensland coast told a European visitor in 1895 that feral pigs had eaten large amounts of traditional food. ‘I think altogether we die soon’, she lamented, ‘pig-pig eat him yams; plum fall down, wild pigs too much eat’.7
Pastoral settlement presented a massive challenge to Aboriginal society, altering ecologies and disrupting traditional economies. But clans responded creatively to that challenge all over the continent. They studied the Europeans and their animals and began to weave new ideas into long established patterns of social and economic life, co-opting sheep and cattle for their own use and learning the skills of the shepherd and herdsman. There was, after all, a considerable overlap between the methods of the hunter and the herdsman. Kangaroos and emus were driven long distances to be trapped in rudimentary stockyards made of logs and bushes. There are numerous references in the pioneer literature to the discovery of long races of sticks, boughs and bushes which had been used to control the movements of the larger marsupials. Thus Giles referred to what he termed dilapidated old yards, where the blacks had formerly yarded emu or wallaby; K. L. Parker observed that the Euahlayi tribe made bush yards and caught emus in them. Buckley recalled that the clans he had lived with pursued kangaroos in order to hunt them into corners like flocks of sheep. Writing of north-western Queensland Roth noted that local Aborigines mustered emus like cattle driving them into nets and palisades. G. F. Moore found that West Australian Aborigines used the word yekan meaning to drive or to chase to describe the European’s herding of cattle. But while traditional methods overlapped with new we should not overlook the wide ranging adaption apparent in Aboriginal tactics to capture or kill sheep and cattle. There seems to be no doubt that these skills were consciously developed and deliberately improved and that the blacks were proud of their evolving mastery of the new techniques. Davis was told by his Aboriginal hosts in southern Queensland ‘with much minuteness how dexterously they had succeeded in carrying off sundry sheep at different times without being even perceived by the shepherds’.8 How did the blacks so rapidly become efficient sheep stealers and adept shepherds?
Stragglers were driven away when out of sight of the shepherds or grabbed by blacks lying immobile in the grass; dogs were trained to rush in and cut out sections of flocks. An observer in southern Queensland noted that local blacks had well developed techniques which exploited the terrain. They waited until the flock approached the summit of a steep ridge, or the trench of a deep gully and then rushed in with their dogs to cut out twenty or thirty sheep and drive them into rough or broken country. The manoeuvre was executed so quickly that the blacks were beyond reach before the shepherds were aware of the raid. Some techniques seem to have been even more sophisticated. A report from the Western District of Victoria in 1842 described how local blacks enticed ewes out of their pens at night without arousing the suspicion of the shepherds:
Breaking the leg of a lamb, the natives placed it at about 50 yards from where the sheep were penned. The bleatings of the poor little animal soon drew the attention of the ewes, and several of them leaped the hurdles, and made for the spot where it was lying. From this they were attracted by the cries of another lamb, placed at a little distance onwards. The same expedient was followed by the savages of mutilating lambs and placing them at distances from each other till they had succeeded in decoying the old sheep several hundred yards away from the hurdles. They then rushed between the hurdles and the sheep, and drove the latter from the station. So silently was the robbery accomplished, that the sheep were not missed till the following day.9
Skilful cutting-out was only a start. To avoid violent retaliation from the settlers, or at least the loss of the animals in question, it was essential that the flock be driven away as far and as quickly as possible without allowing the sheep to scatter. Consequently pursuing whites often came up with disputed flocks many miles from their station of origin. In the Portland district in 1843 a squatter and his men pursued a flock of 480 sheep across country for 250 miles. A few years later at Wide Bay in Queensland a settler reported that he had followed a group of Aborigines who had successfully taken 500 sheep over two mountains, through a mile and a half of rain forest and on to another mountain. The blacks quickly learnt that success depended on their ability to cover their tracks before the Europeans ventured in pursuit. Many of the methods employed were probably carried over from traditional society for clans were adept at hiding their movements from their enemies. A group of blacks from the Western District of Victoria were found with a flock of sheep twelve miles away from the station where they had been secured but they had been taken on a circuitous route of at least forty miles and through a series of swamps to confuse white pursuers. On the Glenelg River a flock was driven back on its own tracks to blot them out and was then divided into three lots which were driven in separate directions. Elsewhere the blacks burnt grass for a considerable distance around plundered pens to hide the tell-tale tracks.
Rivers presented a considerable problem to black shepherds. Europeans following the tracks of stolen flocks concluded that Aborigines often made repeated attempts to rush their newly acquired sheep down the river banks in order to force them across the water and there are several reports of blacks making log bridges to facilitate the movement of their flocks across stretches of water. In 1850 a party of Wide Bay squatters actually found local blacks in the process of building a bridge24 while a few years earlier in the Grampians, a native police detachment, pursued a group of Aborigines for eight days through gullies, over ridges and across mountain streams where the blacks had made bridges strong enough for the troop horses to pass over.
But even when blacks had escaped with their commandeered flocks and evaded pursuers there remained the need to prevent the sheep from straying. A common solution to this problem was to break or dislocate the sheeps’ hind legs. The pioneer Victorian squatter Hugh Murray reported how the Colac Aborigines took their animals to some secure neighbourhood and feasted upon them, ‘breaking the legs of those they did not at once kill, to detain them’. It was, wrote a fellow squatter ‘a cruel sort of tethering resorted to in those days.10 But less drastic means of securing sheep were widely adopted. Naturally enclosed patches of grass were selected for use, squatters in Wide Bay for instance finding sheep high up on a mountain in a small space surrounded by rain forest which was, they realized, a ‘natural paddock’.11
Of even greater interest was the widespread construction by Aborigines of folds and stockyards to secure captured flocks, a practice obviously adopted from European shepherds though owing something to traditional use of brush fences to control and corral native animals. There are many such reports and they come from widely scattered parts of the continent. Research to date has turned up over thirty separate eye witness reports from districts as far apart as Yorke Peninsula in South Australia, the upper Burdekin Valley in north Queensland and the Champion Bay district in Western Australia. A few examples will suffice for purposes of illustration.
In 1840 a party of Western District squatters followed a group of blacks into almost inaccessible mountains and discovered ‘a very ingeniously constructed brush yard where the sheep had been kept during the night’.12 Six years later at the head of Spencer Gulf local blacks took a flock which they regularly folded ‘whilst they were regaling themselves upon divers roasted legs and shoulders’.13 The South Australian Protector of Aborigines reported finding a yard made of branches and capable of holding from two to three hundred sheep. A party of Maranoa settlers following tracks of stolen sheep found that the blacks had made bough yards for them every night, ‘as well as a white man could have done’.14 In the Burdekin Valley blacks drove 400 sheep into the ranges after a successful raid on a station and built a ‘proper yard’ and regularly shepherded the flock showing ‘how closely and for what a length of time they must have watched the habits of Europeans’.15 The rapid development of Aboriginal sheep raiding techniques was noted by a writer in the Adelaide Observer in 1846. Attacks which were originally ‘ill considered and accidental’ had been superseded by ‘well planned forays’:
the flock is steadily driven, and carefully folded–taken with dexterity and retained with determination. The captors feed upon the sheep until all are consumed–then sally forth in quest of a fresh supply.16
Cattle presented Aborigines with a different set of problems. The half-wild animals of frontier districts were larger, faster and more aggressive than sheep and much harder to kill. Indeed it was difficult to kill them at all with traditional wooden or stone-tipped spears. Numerous pioneer squatters reported cases of cattle coming in off the range covered with spear wounds or with the weapons still stuck in their bodies. A Western District settler found one of his bullocks still alive with thirty spears sticking into its tortured flesh. There is no doubt that one of the principal motives for the adoption of iron tipped spears was to facilitate the killing of the large European animals including draught bullocks as well as horses and cattle. The Portland Gazette reported in 1845 that local blacks were adopting iron spears and were systematically attacking cattle herds with them. Clans living close to the growing networks of telegraph lines adopted spear heads fashioned from porcelain insulators while the Loritja people of central Australia were said to have adopted a cruder and hence more expendable spear for killing cattle.
The greatest problem for the cattle hunters was to immobilize the large beasts long enough to be able to close in for the kill. Many different techniques were tried. The most common appears to have been to rush selected beasts into swampy or muddy ground and then attack them while they were unable to move quickly. ‘They now proceed in a most systematic manner’, wrote the Commissioner for Crown Lands at Moreton Bay in 1844, ‘rushing the cattle into swampy ground during the wet weather and then hamstringing them’.17 The explorer Thomas Mitchell reported that in northern New South Wales local clans had driven off 800 head of cattle when the country was in flood and the horsemen were unable to travel. In such conditions the cattle stuck fast ‘in the soft earth’ and were thus ‘at the mercy of the natives’.18 But swampy ground was only available to some clans and for limited periods of time. Elsewhere other techniques had to be developed.
On the Mulgrave River in north Queensland local blacks dug pits on well used cattle tracks and then speared the trapped beasts. Clans in the Western District rushed in and killed cows while they were calving; in the Bowen hinterland animals were driven through a narrow pass into an enclosed valley. A Riverina pioneer reported that he found a large party of blacks on his run and that they had driven his cattle into a tight circle and were ‘ringing them around’ and ‘riddling them with spears all the time’.19
Experienced frontiersmen noted the development of Aboriginal techniques. The Commissioner for Crown Lands on the Liverpool Plains remarked in 1842 that local blacks had become ‘much more expert and cunning in watching and hunting cattle’ and had trained their dogs to be most efficient assistants to them’.20 A correspondent wrote to the Moreton Bay Courier in 1849 explaining that on the Pine Rivers the Aborigines had developed:
a new system of securing their prey, by wounding the beasts in such a way with their tomahawks that they are easily killed after being driven to the scrubs. This is a considerable improvement on their old system and shows the determined and systematic manner of their outrages. Previously, when the cattle were speared on the river there was a great chance that the savages would be disturbed before they could cut up the carcases and carry them off; and if they drove the herd to the scrubs they would no doubt have considerable difficulty in slaying the infuriated beasts. It was not gratifying … to find that many of their victims escaped after being speared or died too near to the stations for them to secure the anticipated feast. Their present plan has, therefore, been adopted in order that the maimed cattle may fall easily before their spears, when they reach the scrub, exhausted and faint from their previous wounds.21
It appears that some groups killed cattle as near as possible to a river bank in order to use water transport for the large and heavy carcases. A Queensland pioneer reported that the blacks on the Burnett killed cattle on the north side of the river and then conveyed the meat in canoes across to the sanctuary of the rain forest on the south bank. Frederick Curr who settled in the Etheridge district in north Queensland recalled that he had to keep his herds away from the Einasleigh River because local blacks were able to kill the beasts while they were in the water and then tow the carcases downstream where they could be safely cut up and carried away.
Aborigines reacted quickly and creatively to the settlers’ flocks and herds. They turned to good effect their traditional skills while accepting the need for innovation in both techniques and social organization. Ready access to large amounts of beef and mutton enabled groups to meet more frequently and stay together longer. Cooking methods were modified and diet changed with a probable decline in the collection and consumption of native plants. Yet reactions to cattle and to sheep were qualitatively different. When they pursued, killed and consumed cattle the Aborigines were still behaving like hunter-gatherers though they had modified traditional methods to cope with the introduced animals. But in their use of sheep many black clans had clearly travelled beyond the confines of customary experience. They had become effective herdsmen in their own right presenting a fundamental challenge to European pastoralists. All over the continent Aboriginal groups learnt to shepherd their sheep for long distances over difficult terrain, to train their dogs to assist rather than hinder their operations and to feed and water and corral their commandeered flocks. There are a few reports which suggest that the women took over the new role of shepherd while the men continued to hunt the larger indigenous animals as well as the introduced ones.
These developments were arguably the most striking examples of creative adaptation in the history of the Aboriginal response to the European invasion. Yet they have been almost completely overlooked by historians and anthropologists, due in part to the fact that the evidence is widely scattered and often in obscure sources. Another reason is that the Aboriginal venture into pastoralism was confined practically everywhere to a very short period of time coinciding with the moment of maximum conflict with the Europeans and coming abruptly to an end when black resistance was crushed and the survivors were let in to pastoral stations and frontier towns.
But the Aborigines also attacked and destroyed the European animals as part of their resistance to the invader as was indicated briefly above. A long list of such onslaughts could be compiled for each colony but a few examples will suffice for the purposes of illustration. In 1830 Tasmanian blacks beat 100 ewes to death on a Longford property; a few years earlier on the north-west coast a similar number of Van Diemens Land Company sheep were driven over cliffs into the sea. In 1816 in New South Wales 200 sheep of the Malgoa estate were destroyed; fifty were mangled and blinded, the rest thrown down a precipice. On the Liverpool Plains thirty years later four hundred young ewes were left dead in a heap on Cobb’s Station. In 1842 McIntyre Aborigines killed a horse, cut off its head and two legs and hung the entrails out from bush to bush while on the New England plateau the local blacks burnt 1200 ewes and lambs. On a McIntyre River station local blacks killed eighty head of cattle in a single night and hamstrung others while some of the heads were cut off the carcases and put up on sticks. In 1848 forty cattle were drowned by Aborigines in the Brisbane River. Writing to his father from Bowen Downs in central Queensland in 1867 B. D. Morehead reported that the local clans had destroyed his sheep ‘not to satisfy their hunger, but their spite, as in some of their camps there were more than fifty lying dead … or wounded lying about brutally murdered’.22
Aborigines launched systematic attacks on individual properties which were quite devastating in their impact. Ovens river blacks attacked Dr Mackay’s station in 1840 in the absence of the Europeans who returned to a scene of total devastation. Three valuable horses and a working bullock had been destroyed, all but seven of a herd of 1500 cattle driven away; a large barn and four roomed hut burnt to the ground along with forty bushels of wheat, agricultural implements, tools, bedding and clothes. Fifty years later and on the far side of the continent Northern Territory Aborigines burnt and looted Welleroo Station. They killed 30 or 40 fowls and threw them in a heap and carried away almost all moveable property including 20 bags of flour, 4 bags of rice, over 60 pounds of tobacco, all the pipes and matches, two dozen new dungaree suits, two dozen pairs of boots, all the clothes, rugs and blankets, 4 Winchester rifles and 300 cartridges.
Aboriginal attacks were occasionally massive enough to ruin pioneer squatters. Two men so affected petitioned the government for assistance leaving a record of their tribulations. In 1840 Victorian blacks raided David Waugh’s Station killing the shepherds, running off most of the sheep and taking everything ‘that could be, or supposed to be, of use to them’.23 Waugh’s losses which he computed at £1200 were crippling. A generation later John Yeates, one of the pioneer settlers of the Bowen district, assessed his losses while petitioning the Queensland government. The local clans raided his property on several occasions during a three month period in 1867. They took two flocks of sheep amounting to 1300 animals which he valued at 10s a head, 36 rams worth over £2 each and stores worth £55. His total loss of £800 could not be sustained and he abandoned the station.
But spectacular attacks on individual properties should not obscure the smaller, more typical Aboriginal operations, which were cumulatively important. Occasionally neighbouring squatters met to discuss their losses and petition distant governments for protection leaving a valuable record of frontier conditions. In 1842 Port Fairy settlers petitioned the Superintendent of Port Phillip computing their collective losses over a few months at 3600 sheep, 100 cattle and 10 horses. Seven years later the squatters on the Condamine wrote to the local Commissioner for Crown Lands complaining that during a four-month period the blacks had taken 6000 sheep and killed 8 shepherds while doing so. In 1851 the Magistrates of the Maranoa met at Surat and petitioned the local native police officer detailing the losses sustained by the squatters which amounted to 6000 cattle and 2000 sheep in the previous eighteen months.
But the violent and persistent retaliation by frontier squatters and their men forced the blacks to adjust the level of their assaults on European property and seek means to avoid imputation of responsibility. The Sydney Gazette reported in 1824 that the blacks living around the outer settlements had learnt to kill cattle by spearing them carefully in the skull, perforating a hole about the size of a musket ball subsequently claiming that white men were responsible for discovered carcases. In 1847 the Portland Gazette observed that local Aborigines were suspected of killing a bullock but that they had buried the head and skin in a pit in order to avoid detection. In the 1890s on the Diamantina local blacks cooked a bullock in a deep pit dug under a well worn cattle track in order to disguise their culinary operations. At Albany in 1842 a group of blacks devised a scheme to steal one or two sheep from their folds each night over a long period of time. So careful was the operation that the loss was not discovered for several months. A few years later on the Darling Downs the Commissioner for Crown Lands commented that ‘everywhere’ the blacks had adopted the ‘same plan’. Visiting the stations in small numbers ‘under the guise of friends’ they allowed:
no opportunity to escape of pilfering the huts or destroying any stray cattle they may meet on their way. In several instances they have killed milking cows close to the huts, without so much as being suspected till the Bones of their victims happen to be accidentally met with some days later; in one or two instances they have even buried the Bones…24
Accommodation between Aborigines and pastoralists was reached everywhere sooner or later, although it took place gradually and unevenly. Occasionally a group of neighbouring squatters made a collective decision to let the local clans in but more commonly it occurred fitfully, station by station, and over a considerable period of time. Aborigines responded tentatively. Typically a few individuals cautiously approached the Europeans and gradually over a year or two their kin began to spend a greater proportion of their time at station camp sites assigned by the squatter. Europeans kidnapped individual blacks for labour or sex; as hostages, even as tutors in local dialects. Equally the Aborigines sent women or young men into the white men’s society to act as spies and go-betweens. A settler on the Gascoyne River told a government official in 1882 that he had ‘no doubt the women kept by the whites act as spies for their friends in the bush’.25 Aboriginal shepherds and stockmen furtively fed their kin who had not come in. A government official investigating squatter complaints about sheep loss in the north west of Western Australia concluded that:
in the great majority of cases the sheep have been given away by the shepherds at night. In the day time they allow them to go astray in order that their friends may pick them up.26
In some cases it appears that small groups or individuals remained out in the bush refusing to accept European domination. Simpson Newland wrote of his experiences on the New South Wales-Queensland border with an old and recalcitrant black whom he called Baldy:
Our new employees never gave us the least trouble, and as soon as they understood that neither the Queensland police nor our squatting neighbour would bother them while in our country we had the whole lot at our service–good, bad, and indifferent–all except the redoubtable Baldy. I had messages sent to him to come in, that no one should molest him, but all in vain. I never saw him in all my rides, drives, or walks, nor did the overseer, who was constantly on the run for many years. Much of the country was densely covered with thick polygonum swamps, and we were well aware Baldy lurked there during the day, and late at night often joined the shepherd’s camps. Sometimes he went out in back country, away from the hateful white man, and lived the old hunter’s life, obtaining water from the roots of the Kurrajong-trees growing on the dry tableland to the west of the Upper Paroo. On an excursion out there on one occasion I saw his tracks and the thick roots drained of their contents. Probably the untamable savage was close by, maybe our blackboy even saw him, but Baldy would hold no communication with the white race, though in return for the protection given and kindness shown to his people he kept the tacitly understood truce. 27
On some stations formal understandings were reached between squatters and neighbouring blacks. A Queensland pioneer explained to a Parliamentary Committee in 1861 that he had met the local clans and reached an understanding, telling them that he was ‘master on the open ground and they were masters of the scrub and the mountains’.28 On Gamboola station on the Mitchell River Edward Palmer came to an agreement with the blacks of the district undertaking ‘to protect them and give them a beast once a month or so–and let them have one side of the river to hunt upon’.29 Blacks on Merivale Station in southern Queensland negotiated with the whites to secure the right to hunt and hold corroborees and similar agreements were reached on Woodstock and Jarvisfield Stations in north Queensland. On Strathdon in the Bowen district an Aboriginal woman who had lived on the station for a year acted as an intermediary between the local clans and Bode the resident squatter. The blacks agreed to stop killing cattle and threatening the stockmen while Bode promised his protection against the Native Police as well as hunting rights, free access to the river and supplies of blankets and steel axes. These examples are all from Queensland but it seems reasonable to assume that similar understandings were reached between pastoralists and blacks in many parts of the continent.
Most squatters were only too willing to exploit the labour of the Aboriginal camps. Within a very short time young men were working with the stock and women in and around station homesteads. It is probable that the blacks’ eagerness to work for the Europeans varied widely. There are many reports of Europeans using force to recruit and keep their workers and all over Australia young women were forced in concubinage. The evidence for this is overwhelming. Mr Justice Dashwood, the Government Resident of the Northern Territory, told a Select Committee of the South Australian Parliament in 1899 that the ‘forcible taking away of lubras’ was a commonplace of outback life. Police officers who had spent their whole careers on the frontier had told him ‘how men on stations seeing lubras in the bush will pursue them, run them down on their horses, and take them away’.30 A policeman based at Camooweal said that he felt sure:
that if half the young lubras now being detained (I won’t call it kept, for I know most of them would clear away if they could) were approached on the subject, they would say that they were run down by station blackguards on horseback, and taken to the stations for licentious purposes, and there kept more like slaves than anything else. I have heard it said that these same lubras have been locked up for weeks at a time–anyway whilst their heartless persecutors have been mustering cattle on their respective runs. Some, I have heard take these lubras with them, but take the precaution to tie them up securely for the night to prevent them escaping.31
Young men were kidnapped too and taken to be ‘trained up’ for stockwork. But evidence of a voluntary acceptance of pastoral work can also be found. A squatter settled near Bowen explained in 1869 that he had allowed local clans to camp near water holes close to his head station and that on the following day a few men had come up on their own accord and joined his kanaka servants at their work, although ‘they were more in the way than of service’.32 Cattle stations probably provided more congenial work for Aboriginal men than any other European undertaking with the possible exception of the maritime industries for sea-coast peoples. There was considerable overlap between the old economy and the new. Local knowledge, the ability to track and to live off the land; all of these were carried over into the life of the Aboriginal stockman. Knowledge of sheep and cattle gained before coming in was rapidly augmented in minds trained to closely observe animal behaviour. ‘I don’t know what we pioneers should have done without the blacks’, wrote a Queensland pioneer cattleman in 1884, ‘for they can’t be beat at looking after horses and cattle’.33 Horse-riding was an exhilarating experience for people who had known no means of locomotion other than their own legs. ‘Above all’, a pioneer squatter wrote of the Burnett blacks in the 1850s, ‘horse riding enchanted them’.34 ‘They are ambitious to learn to ride’ Chewings observed of young Aborigines in Central Australia, ‘and do not mind a few falls in acquiring the art’.35
The pastoral industry provided many young Aborigines with a role in the European economy in which they could find satisfaction and scope for both traditional and acquired skills. That it was not conducive to greater Aboriginal advance was due to the pull of traditional society on one side and the power of white prejudice on the other. Aboriginal workers were given little incentive to increase their efficiency. They were typically underpaid, given no formal training, were rarely praised and often bashed and kicked and whipped. Even when consideration replaced brutality the paternalism remained. The Thargomindah correspondent of the Queenslander provided an unblinking account of the situation of Aboriginal workers in the south-west of the colony in 1885. There were he wrote:
On all stations … in this western portion of Queensland a certain number of black boys and gins all employed, and it is difficult to see how stations could be worked without their assistance. The vast majority receive no remuneration, save tucker and clothes. They are, of course, bound by no agreements, but are talked of as my, or our … niggers, and are not free to depart when they like. It is not considered etiquette on the part of one station to employ blacks belonging to another. Cases have occurred where blacks belonging to both sexes have been followed, brought back and punished for running away from their nominal employers. For the main part they are fairly well treated, clothed and fed.36
The pastoral industry was clearly a major determinant of the pattern of white-Aboriginal relations in many parts of the continent. Yet there were other areas where the first permanent white settlers were not squatters but farmers, miners, missionaries, sealers, pearlers and townsmen.