‘View of the Hawkesbury River New South Wales’ showing the bend from Windsor Reach into Argyle Reach. Watercolour by John Lewin painted between 1805 and 1812. Courtesy of the Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales.
1 The Death of Hodgkinson and Wimbo
Late winter, for a grain-grower in New South Wales, is one of those periods when pursuits other than farming might be possible. On the banks of the Argyle Reach of the Hawkesbury River, not far from today’s town of Windsor, it was that time for Thomas Hodgkinson. He was a family man in his twenties. His seven years as a convict were in the past. The wheat crop was standing like lush green grass, and it was too early to plant corn. In mid-August the days start to lengthen. The weather is usually cool but sunny, sometimes very windy. The nights can be cold and often frosty. It was around the middle of August 1799 when Thomas Hodgkinson and his companion, John Wimbo, set off from the Hawkesbury River farming settlement heading towards the mountains. They were looking for game.
When Hodgkinson left his home that day, he had no idea it would be the last time he farewelled his wife and young children. With Sarah only four weeks from giving birth to their third child, perhaps she reassured him they would be fine in his short absence.
John Wimbo (Winbow or Wimbolt) was a man of about 36, a gamekeeper. He may also have been a Hawkesbury farmer but there is no record of land granted in his name. Wimbo had come to the British colony of New South Wales as a convict with the Second Fleet. His death sentence for highway robbery had been reduced to seven years transportation. To his Hawkesbury friends John Wimbo had a claim to fame for his accuracy with the musket. Three years earlier he had tracked down, shot and killed John Caesar, known as Black Caesar, a runaway Madagascan convict with a reward on his head.1
‘View of the Hawkesbury River New South Wales’ showing the bend from Windsor Reach into Argyle Reach. Watercolour by John Lewin painted between 1805 and 1812. Courtesy of the Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales.
Hodgkinson and Wimbo had arranged with some local Aboriginal men to accompany them on the hunt. But at the appointed time the tribesmen did not show up and the two men decided not to wait. Carrying several days’ supplies they walked to the west of the Argyle Reach, along the river and towards the foothills of the Blue Mountains. After eight miles they were above the Richmond Hill farms and heading into eucalypt forest. Working upwards they moved past rocky outcrops into heavily timbered country.
The same Aboriginal men caught up with them the next day and asked if they had found any pheasants (the lyrebird or perhaps the large bird known today as the pheasant coucal). When the hunters said they had not, the tribesmen invited them to stop for the night and look for pheasants the next day. As evening was coming on, the two white men made their campfire and their Aboriginal companions made another nearby. Later, the white men lay down under blankets and went to sleep. They were oblivious to what was coming. From the Aboriginal camp two or more people crept over and stabbed Hodgkinson and Wimbo through the body with short pointed sticks called dowels. Their death was quick.
‘The Blue Mountains Pheasant’ or lyrebird. Engraved by Philip Slager in 1813–14 and published by A. West in Sydney in 1814. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.
How it happened and who carried out the murders was explained in the courtroom testimony of Jonas Archer.2 He was the last witness in the prosecution’s case against five Argyle Reach men charged with killing two young Aboriginal teenagers—murdering them in revenge for the death of Hodgkinson and Wimbo, more particularly for Hodgkinson, their neighbour.
Jonas Archer also lived on the same stretch of the river. He had arrived in the colony as a Third Fleet convict and by 1799 was a free man and one of the most successful farmers on the reach. Archer recounted the story of how Hodgkinson and Wimbo died from what he had been told by Yellowgowie, a local Aboriginal clan leader.3 Yellowgowie was visiting Archer’s house when Archer used the opportunity to question him about the missing men. Hodgkinson and Wimbo had been gone for well over a week and perhaps Archer had already assumed Aboriginal people had killed them. Yellowgowie told him the killers were Major White and others; Archer could only remember that one name. Archer knew Major White. He had often seen him about the farms with others of the local clan. Major White was an adopted name, probably taken years earlier after meeting the First Fleet surgeon John White amongst Governor Phillip’s party exploring the upper Hawkesbury.
View up the Argyle Reach from the river bend into Windsor Reach. Photograph taken by the author, 2013.
Yellowgowie’s visit to Archer must have occurred at the beginning of September, as it was then 17 October when Archer told the court the visit was about six weeks previous. This places the visit around two weeks after Hodgkinson and Wimbo were killed and two weeks before the settlers murdered the two Aboriginal teenagers.
When Hodgkinson and Wimbo failed to return to the settlement, perhaps people went looking for them. Someone must have found and reported the location of the bodies, as we know a party of soldiers and settlers was sent out to bury them. Archer was a member of that party and he was able to describe the state in which they found them. They were lying naked under pieces of wood and ‘both were speared in the bodies’, Archer said, and ‘mangled’ (meaning mutilated). Their clothing, provisions, arms and blankets were gone.
There were other Argyle Reach men in that burial party, including at least three of those later tried for killing the two Aboriginal teenagers. One of them, William Timms, described, in his defence statement, his own reaction when he was challenged over his part in the murders. He was at the gravesite where the corpses of the young Aboriginal men had been exhumed and examined. ‘Ah my poor Master Hodgkinson was not buried like this. He was cut into pieces with a tomahawk and a death spear run through his yard and came thro’ the back part of his neck.’
The killers were surely in a frenzy of blood lust to treat the bodies of their victims in such a brutish manner. The awful sight had a marked affect on the men in that burial party. Henry Reynolds, in his book Frontier, describes the emotional surge that comes at such a time. Under the heading ‘An animal craving for revenge’ he quotes from a Tasmanian newspaper of 1831.4 The article was published following a coronial inquest during which a group of settlers viewed the bodies of two young men killed by Aborigines.
a glance of indescribable emotion passed over the features of every person present. A feeling of indignation, mingled with horror, was visible in every countenance … The most hard hearted could not behold the mournful spectacle without inwardly cursing the perpetrators of murders so foul and barbarous.
Jonas Archer continued relating his story to the courtroom. The day after Yellowgowie’s visit he had another Aboriginal visitor. It was the young man known as Little Jemmy or Jemmy. Archer told Jemmy that Major White had the gun belonging to Hodgkinson and he asked him to bring it in. Jemmy must have agreed because Archer then went to Sarah Hodgkinson and told her that in a few days she should have her husband’s musket returned. And a week or two later, as requested, Jemmy and some of his comrades brought in the gun. They may have first looked for Archer, but it was to a man at work on the adjoining farm that they delivered the firearm.
That man was James Metcalfe, who lived and worked on Forrester’s Farm. He, like Archer, had been in the party sent to bury Hodgkinson and Wimbo. When he realized the musket was Hodgkinson’s he was keen to return it to the widow. He asked Jemmy and two of Jemmy’s companions to wait in the house. Forrester’s wife Isabella Ramsay gave them some bread to eat while Metcalfe delivered the musket to Sarah Hodgkinson, a few hundred metres away.
That chain of events may have led the trial jurors to think the return of Hodgkinson’s gun was a trap laid by the Argyle Reach settlers. Later that evening they took the three young Aborigines outside and killed two of them—Jemmy and a younger lad known as Little George. The third escaped. Governor John Hunter certainly believed the settlers had trapped the three in order to wreak their revenge. In his diary entry some months later he described the killers as cowardly.5 However, Hunter’s version of the events that evening does not align with the evidence given in court and in the depositions made by witnesses three weeks before the trial began.
It is important at this point to explain to the reader exactly what records constitute evidence about the murder of Jemmy and Little George, the subsequent trial of five colonists, and Governor John Hunter’s reports on the events. Regarding the trial itself, there are three handwritten versions of the court’s proceedings. One, neatly written, went back to London with Governor Hunter’s letter.6Another is only a partial copy. The third is complete, but with the defendants’ statements separately recorded. It has some words scratched out, corrections, an occasional additional word or two inserted above the line, and, in one place, a paragraph crossed out and rewritten in the margin. This one is undoubtedly the record written in the courtroom.7
Although the trial record has been published in Volume 2, Series 1 of the Historical Records of Australia (HRA), the charge and the plea were not included there. For that information one must go to the trial transcript Governor Hunter enclosed with his letter when he sent the whole matter back to England. There the charge reads ‘for wantonly killing two natives of this Territory’ followed on the next page by the plea—‘not guilty’.8 The HRA heading for the trial is ‘Trial for Murder of Two Natives’ and the same words are entered in the page margin.9As the charge was not actually ‘murder’, this is a mistake that has certainly been misleading to the casual reader.
David Collins’ book, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Volume 2, is a diary account of transactions in the colony between September 1796 and August 1800. Collins’ Volume 1 finishes in September 1796 with his own departure from the colony back to England. Volume 2 represents the period after Collins’ departure and up to Hunter’s own departure. It was published in 1802 after John Hunter returned to England and handed Collins the text for the major part of the volume.10 Perhaps Hunter was too embarrassed to claim authorship of a history of what had transpired in the colony while he was governor. He had been recalled after the Home Office had decided that Hunter had failed in the job of controlling expenditure and stopping the ruinous rum trade. Hunter asked David Collins if his papers could serve for a second volume under Collins’ own name as author. This book is particularly useful for an account of the violence between the settlers and the Aboriginal people at the Hawkesbury settlement and the views of Hunter himself on those events.
But these are not the only records relating to this trial. When the Judge-Advocate was preparing the indictments he was looking at the sworn statements given by witnesses. These statements, or depositions as they were called, are also in the New South Wales State Archives, and copies are in the NSW State Records on a different microfilm reel to that holding the trial proceedings.11 The depositions add new evidence about the murder of Jemmy and Little George that has not so far been published in any book. A comparison of what witnesses said in their depositions with what they later told the court provides new details about what happened the night of the murders and who was involved.
The deposition records also include the bond, the undertaking that each witness made when they agreed to give evidence. Six people signed it with their mark and a seventh, Chief Constable Rickerby, signed his name. The legal agreement obliged them to appear in court if and when they were called to give evidence. The bond named those who were to be charged: Edward Powell, Simon Freebody, James Metcalfe, William Timms and William Butler. However, there are no depositions from those five men. If they did give depositions those recordings were discarded, presumably on the basis that they would give their defence statements later, when the trial was in progress. Three of the seven depositions that were retained are from men who were in the group of people who took the three Aborigines out of Isabella Ramsay’s house the night Jemmy and Little George were killed. As we shall see, those three were amongst those taken into custody. Two of them decided to turn king’s evidence in order to save themselves.
