‘The funeral procession of Baggara a native of New South Wales.’ 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.
About one week after Acting Governor Paterson sent the Parramatta troops to the Hawkesbury he received a report from their commanding officer. It said that action took place on the first night they arrived at the river. A ‘large body of natives’ had emerged from the woods during the night and arrived at a settler’s farm intent on plundering it. Just exactly on which farm the action occurred was not reported, but some of the soldiers were in the proximity and their response was immediate. The Aborigines fled with the soldiers in pursuit. The brief message said seven or perhaps eight natives were killed. An exact number could not be ascertained as when the scene was examined the next morning the bodies were gone.1
The report was brought to Sydney together with some Aboriginal people captured during the skirmish.2 According to Paterson the prisoners comprised one man and four women. But Collins reported it as one man (apparently crippled), five women and some children. They were cared for in a small hut near the hospital. One woman carrying a baby had been shot through the shoulder. The baby, wounded by the same shot, did not survive long. Another woman gave birth to a baby boy but the infant died immediately. The man managed to escape down to the shore and swim across the harbour to the northern side. Speculation had it that he had been involved with several of the murders at the Hawkesbury. Paterson tried to gain the confidence of the women prisoners but eventually was convinced he could not. Gaining nothing by their capture, he sent them back to the Hawkesbury.3
That ‘large body of natives’ the soldiers had surprised may have comprised the entire clan as it apparently included pregnant and breast-feeding women, a baby and small children, those least able to escape when surprised by the soldiers. It is unlikely the men had their spears at the ready as no soldier was reported wounded. Since Paterson’s orders had been ‘to destroy as many as they could meet with’, one wonders how threatening this group of Aborigines had been when the soldiers opened fire. With seven or eight people dead the clan’s loses were great, yet no soldier was wounded.
Knowing his orders were to deal amicably with the natives, Paterson told his London masters he was very regretful he had to harm them. Explaining his decision to deploy his troops against the Aborigines, he took the opportunity to blame the ex-convicts at the river for initially fomenting the trouble. ‘I have no doubt of their [the Aborigines] having been cruelly treated by some of the first settlers who went out there’.4 Again this is probably a reference to the treatment meted out the previous October to the Aboriginal boy before he was shot trying to swim the river. The spectre of this tortured child continued to hang over the Hawkesbury settlers. Collins, Paterson and eventually Hunter all cast aspersions on the moral character of those at the river, harking back to the cruel treatment the natives received by some of the settlers in the early days.5
When the troops finally withdrew to Parramatta it was time for Aboriginal justice—a payback attack on one of the settlers. This time it was further up the river and close to Richmond Hill. On 29 May, ex-convict William Rowe, a settler newly arrived to his land grant, was slain along with his three-year-old son during an attack from local Aborigines. His wife Mary was wounded. She ran from the scene and clambered down the riverbank, hiding amongst reeds at the river’s edge. She lay there half-immersed in water and waited. When finally discovered she was taken to Parramatta and placed in the hospital. Traumatized by seeing her husband and little boy killed, she received much sympathy and she slowly recovered from her wounds.6
This attack, so soon after the troops had withdrawn, made it clear that a more permanent military detachment should be stationed at the Hawkesbury. Paterson ordered one of the officers, Lieutenant Edward Abbott, to go back to the river with part of the original detachment. From that point there would be a larger force to protect the settlers and their farms. In early June, when Abbott arrived back at the river, he had under his command an ensign (Neil McKellar), three sergeants (including Sergeant Goodall who had arrived earlier in May), three corporals, three drummers and 83 privates.7 Paterson was running short of able-bodied officers across the whole settlement, so by October Ensign McKellar was back to Sydney.8 There being no barracks at the Hawkesbury for the soldiers they were billeted amongst the settlers. This was as much for providing places to sleep and eat as it was for the protection of the farms.
From a muster taken in June we know there were well over 500 people at the Hawkesbury, not counting the military. About two-thirds were serving convicts and the rest settlers and their families.9 Most people were still receiving rations from the government storekeeper William Baker while, in the same period, people brought in their harvested corn to be received by the same man. When the store was full in June some people heaped their cobs outside the storehouse building. The colonial schooner took another load back to Sydney but it was not enough to relieve the storage problem. As the cobs deteriorated in the open it became a frustrating loss for those who had brought in their produce without having it officially measured and received.10
On 16 September Paterson wrote his final report back to London. John Hunter had already arrived nine days earlier and had taken office on the 11th. Paterson wrote that a flash flood at the Hawkesbury had inundated several farms and drowned one settler. He thought that flooding made uncertain the future prospects for farming there regardless of the uncommon fertility of the soil. There were no current disturbances from Aboriginal people but many settlers, alarmed at the floods, wanted to abandon their land grants.11
With soldiers deployed around the farms at the Hawkesbury, confrontation with the Aborigines ceased. This was the situation at the river when John Hunter arrived. Collins reported all was still quiet in November although life at the river carried other dangers—a man and woman drowned attempting to cross one of the creeks by walking across a tree thrown over the waterway. But in the next month, December 1795, another attack took place downriver at the outskirts of farming, where support from other settlers was remote. A large group of Aborigines stripped the farm hut of everything they found. No settler was reported injured but an armed party, most likely made up of soldiers stationed at Windsor Reach, was dispatched to punish those responsible. When they found the offending group they fired indiscriminately killing four men and a woman and wounding a child. Four people were taken prisoner. We know nothing of the fate of those prisoners although one may have been a young girl about five years old, orphaned by the death of her parents. According to Collins, the whole episode failed to teach the Aborigines to stay clear of settlers. He explained this as the natives being determined to carry out the revenge they had vowed for the injuries they had received at the settlers’ hands.12 But he was unclear as to what injures he meant; when and where. Unless he was referring to the recent punitive party, he was generalizing.
This action was very soon followed by an attack on two men in a boat travelling up the Hawkesbury to the farming settlement. The owner, convict John Lacy, had been given permission to ply his boat between Sydney and the Hawkesbury settlement.13 He was wounded severely and later died. His attackers were probably Darkinjung from the lower Hawkesbury area, a different group to those that had been involved in the farm raids the previous year. But with settlers attempting to take over the river flats downstream, and boats more frequently plying the river, it is no surprise that Aboriginal resistance resurfaced.
A few weeks later, in February 1796, two new settlers to the Hawkesbury, brothers of the name Hynes (or Hynde), died in an Aboriginal attack. This was in the vicinity of present day Wilberforce, about three miles downriver from the Windsor Reach. It happened just two days after they arrived at their new grant.14
The outer areas of the settlement presented another worrying issue for the colony’s new governor and commander-in-chief. It was the number of runaway convicts committing robberies—sometimes armed robberies. These ‘villains’, as Hunter referred to them in a letter to Joseph Banks, had led large parties of natives to plunder the settlers’ cornfields at night. Hunter believed the natives followed directions because they were ‘exceedingly fond of our Indian corn’. As a consequence of the violence several Aboriginal people were killed. But settlers had also lost their lives when they offered resistance. Hunter told Banks, ‘we are now obliged to arm the Settlers in their own defence, but under the strictest regulations for preventing their wantonly shooting at the Natives.’15
Hunter had already made a government order in January, to the whole colony, that all arms (except military) must be registered.16 The commissary and storekeepers in the different districts were to take the names of those who had arms so the commissary could issue certificates of registration. The constables were to apprehend anyone carrying arms without such a certificate and settlers who reported such a person would be issued with the confiscated firearm. Some settlers quickly had their guns registered; they were anxious to keep them to protect their farms and families. But only a minor proportion of arms issued from government stock could be accounted for—fewer than fifty of a total of between two and three hundred.17
Two convicts who had absconded from duty were reported to the Governor as being frequently seen with the natives. People thought they were assisting and even directing the natives in acts of hostility. Collins went so far as to say these men had ‘demonstrated to the natives of how little use a musquet was when once discharged, and this effectually removed that terror of our firearms with which it had been our constant endeavour to inspire them’.18 On 22 February 1796 Hunter issued another government and general order that recommended everyone who knew these men, or knew of them, was to use every means to ensure their capture. In the same order Hunter made it clear that he expected people to come to the aid of their neighbours if there was any threat of attack from Aborigines. He referred to ‘frequent attacks and depredations’ at the Hawkesbury and other places. For the preservation of their crops and the security of their families
they should on all occasions of alarm mutually afford their assistance to each other by assembling without a moment delay whenever any numerous body of the natives are known to be lurking about the farms.19
Anyone not providing assistance in these circumstances would be ‘proceeded against as persons disobeying the rules and orders of the settlement’. At the same time he ordered that no person with a firearm should:
wantonly fire at or take the lives of any of the natives, as such an act would be considered a deliberate murder, and subject the offender to such punishment as (if proved) the law might direct to be inflicted.
Not only did the order warn settlers about the serious consequences of wantonly firing guns at Aborigines but it also forbade them from encouraging Aborigines to ‘lurk about their farms’. According to this directive Hunter believed that the shelter that some people had afforded Aboriginal people had been the cause of the trouble. It appears that at this point in the spread of European farming settlement in New South Wales Governor Phillip’s policy of amity and conciliation was one that Hunter had abandoned.
Perhaps Collins composed the order on behalf of the Governor, as his own diary entry is virtually a rearrangement of the same words. He did elaborate, however, about the behaviour of Hawkesbury settlers. Reports must have come in that settlers had not come to the aid of a neighbour who was under attack. Collins pronounced them all as ‘indolent and improvident even for their own safety and interest’. He also commented on the behaviour of those Aborigines who lived with settlers. He thought that once they had ‘tasted the sweets of a different mode of living’ they would steal from the settlers. If they did not steal, they would instead invite their friends to do so.20 Collins did not say this was happening only at the Hawkesbury and it is likely his comments applied across the colony. We know with certainty that one Aboriginal man must have been living in the settlement at the river as he was being fed with provisions from the government store in August 1796. Some settlers looked after Aboriginal orphaned children. That might have included children abandoned during a violent encounter, children not returned to their Aboriginal parents. What is clear is that Hunter was trying, through his government and general orders, to stop conflicts arising by separating the Aboriginal people from the settlers. The military could only do so much in driving back a troublesome Aboriginal group.
‘The funeral procession of Baggara a native of New South Wales.’ 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.
It was necessary to compel the settlers to cooperate. They needed to help each other when a threat appeared and generally keep Aboriginal people away from the farms. He had issued guns to help in their defence on the proviso that they were not fired without provocation.
It was downriver again, a few weeks later, in May 1796, when the next hostile encounter occurred. The colonial schooner Francis was going up the river with provisions when some Aboriginal warriors were seen off a high point of land known as Portland Head. They were brandishing spears in a menacing fashion. The Governor himself was there, either on board the Francis or in an accompanying boat. He sent one of his men to land on the opposite shore. The fellow reported back later that he saw ‘a large body of natives’ close by. He thought they were there to cremate the corpse of a man. It was assumed that this was a ceremony for someone killed in a contest amongst the Aborigines themselves.21
When Governor Hunter arrived at Windsor Reach he began assessing the settlement. Hostilities from the Aborigines were not as pressing as the problems arising amongst the settlers themselves. A spate of robberies and personal disputes could not be dealt with on the spot because there was no local magistrate. Taking the matter to the Parramatta magistrate was time-consuming for constables, settlers and the military alike. A man on the spot was needed so that disagreements could be resolved and punishments decided upon. But Hunter had no suitable person amongst the civil officers who could be spared. For the moment, the civilian constables, under the control of a chief constable, would have to make do.22 Many of the robbery problems were put down to people who, having served their time, immediately took themselves out of public labour and off-the-store. Despite the fact that they needed permission to do this, they did it anyway. Having no means to support themselves they were thought to be the prime offenders in robberies, in Sydney and at the Hawkesbury.23In an effort to control the problem Hunter ordered all people who were off-the-store and out of servitude to appear in Sydney. If they were bona fide, they would be issued with a certificate. Settlers would then only be allowed to employ those with certificates. The strategy worked and many people flocked into the town, lining up at the Judge-Advocate’s house for a certificate. Some, falsely representing themselves as having served their sentence, were detected and sent back into government labour.24
‘Burning of a corpse’, drawing published in Collins’ An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Volume 1.
David Collins noted in June that natives had killed another man at the Hawkesbury and another had drowned.25 He gave no details of those events but in the next month reported a murder at the river, this time of a convict servant by his master. The servant died in a few hours and the man who killed him, settler John Fenlow, was taken to Sydney and gaoled. He escaped from his cell and, although encumbered by heavy irons, managed to make his way back to the Hawkesbury. He was recaptured after some Aborigines reported him. They spotted him in the woods at the back of his farm on Wilberforce Reach.26 To whom they reported this information Collins didn’t say. Perhaps it was a settler, perhaps a soldier or even the commandant, Captain Abbott. But the very fact it occurred gives us a different picture to what was happening amongst the Aborigines at the river. Collins, it seems, would make a diary entry of every hostile encounter the Hawkesbury settlers experienced, particularly when it ended in a death. But almost never do we read about friendly encounters, when settlers came across Aboriginal people tending their animal traps, carrying game they had killed, fishing from a canoe, or even being given food at a settler’s door. Of course those day-to-day encounters were not newsworthy to an officer whose main preoccupation was with maintaining control in the penal colony. The Aboriginal people had not disappeared from their traditional land in the upper Hawkesbury area. They were there trying to go about their business and that included interacting with the settlers. Exchanges in conversation, as difficult as they must have been to the understanding of both parties, did occur. That some local Aborigines reported Fenlow’s appearance at the back of his farm is evidence that relations could be, and sometimes were, peaceful and cooperative.
Fenlow was tried for murder in Sydney, found guilty and executed the next day. The townsfolk’s propensity for ghoulish spectacles was satisfied when the surgeons conducted an autopsy and found a large gallstone the size of a lark’s egg. As soon as they allowed people into the hospital to see the body the place was filled with several hundred people, men women and children, gawking at the dissected corpse.27
Two months later, in September 1796, David Collins embarked on the Britannia to go home. With him went the notes for the book he was to publish and letters Hunter had asked him to deliver. Collins had been dutiful in his self-appointed role as the historian of this new British colony on the other side of the world. When John Hunter arrived back in Sydney as governor, he and Collins would have conversed about their writing. Hunter’s 1787–92 journal28 was already in print and he probably brought a copy with him, and perhaps another to give Collins. It is possible they discussed collaborating on a future publication about the history of the colony for the next period, while Hunter remained governor. Whatever the plan—if there was one—Hunter continued to keep a journal. After Collins left New South Wales the main sources of information about the colony, and the Hawkesbury settlement in particular, are Hunter’s own official correspondence, the government orders he issued, and the second volume of David Collins’ book: An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. It was published in 1802 after John Hunter returned to England and handed Collins the text for the major part of the volume.29 Collins agreed to keep Hunter’s authorship secret, but it is no secret today.
So it was Hunter who continued the history, and it is from his account in Collins’ second volume that we learn most about the Hawkesbury settlement between September 1796 and 1800. In late December Hunter again paid a visit to the Hawkesbury. At 59 years of age, Hunter was still physically a very capable man. He and his party of officers walked from the northern shore of the harbour (in the vicinity of Manly) to Broken Bay, as they had in Governor Phillip’s time. There they boarded the colonial schooner and sailed up the river for two days. Progress being slow they quit the schooner and continued their way with small boats by which they reached the first area of farms on the lower reaches. The area had been abandoned recently because of trouble from the Aborigines of that area. Hunter thought that if the arable land was sufficient to provide farms for a number of settlers, enough for mutual protection, they might re-establish farming there. But he soon saw that the river flats were too narrow for that. On they went and reached the main settlement on 1 January. A muster was held and the settlers were reminded they needed to repay any grain they had borrowed, an abundant wheat crop having just been harvested.
The Governor’s party returned to Sydney overland, via Toongabby, following the road to Parramatta that Acting Governor Grose had finished just before he left the colony. At Toongabby Hunter and his party witnessed a fierce bushfire that destroyed a government wheat stack containing 800 bushels. To save the stacks in another government field Hunter called upon the gaol-gang to beat the surrounding stubble with bushes. By next morning the wind had died and their efforts had saved the stacks. Hunter kept his promise to the men and ordered their chains to be knocked off.30
Perhaps it was while Hunter was away on this Hawkesbury trip that he heard of the murder of the young Aboriginal girl who had been in the care of his own household in Sydney. He reported the shocking news as having reached him in late December. The child, between six and seven years of age, had been the orphan of parents killed twelve months earlier in the punitive action downstream on the Hawkesbury. She was brought to Sydney and, Hunter wrote, ‘being a well disposed child, soon became a great favourite with her protectors’.31 Quite affected by the atrocity of the murder he explained it as being caused by jealousy—jealousy of the girl’s special treatment—she being of a different tribe to those living in Sydney who murdered her. Her speared body, minus the arms, was found in bushland near the Governor’s house.
The next lot of trouble between the Aborigines of the upper Hawkesbury and the settlers there was in April the same year, 1797. A group plundered a farm house and set the house and wheat stack on fire. Hunter gave no more information than those bare facts. Perhaps this settler had delayed too long in getting his grain to the store. By the 21st of the month the granaries at the Hawkesbury, Sydney and Parramatta were full and they were closed for the following four months.32 Experiences like this one tested the determination of settlers. To lose your house and possessions was obviously a big setback. But to also lose the product of your hard labour was even more demoralizing. This was the kind of thing that sent people back to the township, relinquishing their land grant.
About this time attacks from other Aboriginal groups were occurring in different farming areas of the colony. Farms to the north of Sydney were targeted in March.33 Provisions and clothing were lost and a man and woman killed. A group of settlers in that area armed themselves and pursued the culprits during the night. At sunrise the next day they came across a large band of Aborigines, around one hundred. They fled at the threat of firearms, leaving behind a quantity of Indian corn and other items including musket balls stolen from soldiers. The pursuit continued until the outskirts of Parramatta, when the settlers decided to enter the town to rest. About an hour later a large group of Aboriginal warriors entered the town ready for battle. They were led by Pemulwy, who had a reputation for violence dating back to the murder of John McIntyre, Governor Phillip’s gamekeeper. The settlers and some soldiers tried to take Pemulwy, this ‘riotous and troublesome savage’, as Hunter described him. But the sudden attempt to seize him ignited the conflict; Aboriginal spears flew and one settler was hit in the arm. The muskets prevailed. Five Aboriginal men died and Pemulwy was severely wounded. Hunter wrote of his regret that so many were killed in this manner, just as Collins had earlier expressed the same sentiment. This time the settlers had banded together to pursue the offenders, had assembled without delay, and had mutually afforded their assistance to each other. It was Hunter’s own order in action and Hunter’s own words of regret and justification:
However unpleasant it was to the governor, that the lives of so many of these people should have been taken, no other course could possibly be pursued; for it was their custom, when they found themselves more numerous and better armed than the white people, to demand with insolence whatever they wanted; and if refused, to have recourse to murder.34
Pemulwy had received seven pieces of buckshot in the head and body. He was taken to hospital and his wounds treated. And although chained, he managed to escape and disappear. A few weeks later Governor Hunter himself came across Pemulwy when on an exploratory expedition south of Sydney. The party was looking for potential farming land towards the Georges River. They worked their way downriver to a point near Botany Bay. There they met with several groups of Aborigines including Pemulwy who was anxious to know if the Governor was angry with him. Incredibly, one of the gentlemen, perhaps Hunter himself, told Pemulwy the Governor was not angry; news that Pemulwy was happy to hear. And so the encounter was over and Hunter’s party walked back to Sydney without any attempt to chastise, let alone recapture, Pemulwy. Perhaps Hunter did not want to instigate another violent incident, particularly at some distance from town. Perhaps he wished to maintain peace with the Botany Bay Aborigines in general by refraining from marking out this one man for retribution. But this was not the last heard of Pemulwy. Being told the Governor was not angry with him was not likely to change Pemulwy’s behaviour. Hunter knew that himself. ‘There could be but little doubt,’ he wrote, ‘that his savage brutal disposition would manifest itself whenever excited by the appearance of an unarmed man.’35John Hunter was treading a dubious path with an Aboriginal man determined to attack the farming settlers, a warrior who had been on the colony’s wanted list for some time.
Hunter’s behaviour towards Pemulwy on that occasion has similarities with the way he later dealt with an Aboriginal man named Charley. Regardless of knowing Pemulwy’s guilt in leading the attack on the northern farms, he did not reprove him for the aggression or try to recapture him. More than that, he forgave Pemulwy by letting him know, or allowing another person to tell him, that the Governor was no longer angry. Two years later he would not punish Charley, an Aboriginal man presented to him for punishment after he had almost killed a settler. Hunter’s hands-off policy, from his own position of authority, is hard to understand. Especially so when he gave orders to the military for punitive raids and condoned the actions of settlers who wanted to pursue hostile Aborigines. But there it was. Hunter would not, himself, order the punishment of Pemulwy in 1797, nor of Charley in 1799.
In May 1797, Aboriginal attacks targeted farms closer to the harbour, at Lane Cove. Black–white relations in the farming settlements were at low ebb. And although attacks at the Hawkesbury and the northern farms were by people from different tribes, Hunter’s response applied across all farming settlements: ‘If any of the natives could be detected in the act of robbing the settlers, to hang one of them in chains upon a tree near the spot as a terror to the others.’36He knew the Aborigines were superstitiously afraid of the sight and sounds of a dangling human body, clothes fluttering in the breeze, iron chains rattling.37 If only they had been kept at distance from the outset, not ‘indulged’, becoming familiar with the white people. Perhaps then, Hunter wrote, they would not have been so troublesome.
Hunter blamed a great number of the attacks on some of the freed convicts, men who had served their time, were off the public store and were causing trouble. They were teaching Aboriginal people to rob and assault the settlers. He told the Duke of Portland in a letter dated June 1797 that Aborigines had threatened to burn the crops and to kill any cattle they found. Hunter had armed the herdsmen in response and was contemplating sending out armed parties ‘in all directions to scower [sic] the country’. He admitted to going out himself, with a party of officers, to try and apprehend these troublemakers. He was bent on curtailing the loss of Aboriginal lives that would be inevitable under the incitement of ‘villains who have got amongst them’.38
This was a similar sentiment to the one he had earlier expressed to Joseph Banks when he told him about the ‘villains’ living as ‘banditti’ amongst the Aborigines and leading them in plundering the corn crops and houses of settlers. One year later the problem continued and Hunter was still worried that Aborigines and settlers alike were at risk of dying in these outbursts of violence.
In October two men were to stand trial in Sydney for murdering an Aboriginal man. It was the first time such a case came before the criminal court. The victim was known as Tom Rowley. Like some other Aboriginal men he had adopted the name of an officer; this time it was one from the New South Wales Corps. Rowley had plenty of experience with Europeans. He had accompanied Mr Raven, the master of the ship Britannia, to Bengal in 1795. Two men, William Miller and Thomas Bevan, were charged with murdering Rowley by shooting him in the leg and then battering him to death. As David Collins had departed the colony it was Acting Judge-Advocate Richard Atkins who presided in the court. When the case came before him there were no witnesses to call and Atkins discharged the men for lack of evidence. Governor Hunter was angered and frustrated that there was no conviction. He assured the acquitted men he would make an example of the first person convicted of ‘having wantonly taken the life of a native’.39
On the last day of the month an open boat arrived from the Hawkesbury with a cargo of corn. During the journey down the river a party of Aborigines came alongside in friendship and asked to board. The vessel must have been larger than a simple rowing boat as the crew obliged the request. But once on board their visitors suddenly tried to seize the small arms. A struggle ensued in which the boat’s crew prevailed but not before some of the ‘unexpected pirates’, as Hunter called them, lost their lives. At the same time another boat was found to be in the possession of Aborigines of the same area. It belonged to a settler but had been missing for a while and was assumed swept out to sea. The crew and its load of Indian corn were presumed lost. Now, however, it was clear that tribesmen of the lower Hawkesbury must have seized the boat, killed the crew and taken the corn. This alarming discovery was a revelation as to the capabilities of the Aborigines of the lower Hawkesbury. The officers thought some runaway convicts who were living amongst the natives must have helped plan the attacks.40
Towards the end of November 1797, one of these runaways gave himself up. He was John Wilson, the same man who had explained the Aboriginal attack on Shadrach and Akers back in 1795. Wilson was one of four men Hunter named in a government and general order earlier in May.41 They were all suspected of assisting Aboriginal groups to take livestock, burn houses and injure or murder settlers. The order offered them fourteen days to give themselves up under threat that they would otherwise be considered guilty of conspiring with the natives in acts of plunder and therefore liable to be executed without benefit of trial. Shortly after the order was proclaimed one of the four turned himself in, and another was arrested. Both were put to trial for theft but acquitted through lack of proof.
In November, six months after that May deadline, John Wilson came in of his own accord. He was scarified in the chest and shoulders in the manner of the clansmen with whom he had been living. He wore only a kangaroo skin apron. He told various tales of his travels that he claimed had ranged for over a hundred miles in every direction. He had seen extensive tracts of open well-watered land, a pheasant type of bird and a quadruped larger than a dog—strong and large in the shoulders whilst thin in the hind parts. Hunter reasoned that if he punished Wilson and sent him to hard labour that the man would shortly abscond again and rejoin his Aboriginal companions. Instead, in an extraordinary act of mercy, Hunter pardoned Wilson. Then, in an attempt to make him useful, he proposed that Wilson, with the assistance of some of his Aboriginal friends, find and apprehend some of the convicts who were at large in the woods. Hunter described two such individuals that Wilson could go after immediately. They were absconders who had just stolen two mares from a government stable in Parramatta. Hunter wrote of the difficulties in deciding how to deal with those who persisted in committing the most awful crimes. He found himself ‘obliged to punish with severity, or to be fearful even of administering justice in mercy, lest that mercy should prove detrimental in the end, by encouraging others to offend in the hope of impunity’.42 In the case of Wilson he pulled back from carrying out severe punishment. Instead he gave Wilson a generous pardon in the hope that out of it would emerge something useful.
In the event, Wilson did prove useful when Hunter sent him to accompany some Irish convicts on an excursion to the south of Sydney. They were so certain a free settlement existed there, within walking distance, that they made plans to provision themselves and leave in numbers. To stop such a foolish plan Hunter arranged for a small representative group to go and find out the truth the hard way. Wilson was amongst the armed detail that accompanied them.43 As for the men who had stolen the two mares, Wilson did not find them but an Aboriginal woman at the Hawkesbury reported seeing the horses in the vicinity of the river. ‘She also mentioned,’ wrote Hunter, ‘that one of the men that went off with them had been killed by the natives, and that the other had perished with hunger.’44
It is just a brief note in the historical record, but nevertheless intriguing. In those few words we can see another human drama played out, this time between two unfortunate escaping convicts and Aborigines in the upper Hawkesbury region. The improvident thieves took their chances and lost to the harsh Australian bush—unwelcoming to strangers as it can be. Perhaps they too had succumbed to the belief that a free settlement was only a couple of days ride away. One can speculate on what might have happened first. Was it the encounter with Aborigines, or the two horses running off from the men who stole them? One man lay dead, the other dies slowly of starvation. The horses find their way to the river and an Aboriginal woman spots them. Had she come into the farms with others of her clan who had murdered one of the men? Or was she cohabiting with a settler or soldier and heard the story through her kinfolk? Whatever her circumstances, she knew what had happened and she feared nothing and nobody in telling the story. It makes for a brief note in the historical record but it says something that is quite different to the reports of plundering raids and murders of the preceding years. And on this occasion there were no consequences for those who killed one of the robbers; no soldiers’ party seeking them out with guns at the ready. This was understandable from Hunter’s viewpoint. These runaways were the victims of their own foolhardiness.
The two horses were not recaptured as five months later their skeletons were found only about one day’s ride to the north-west of Richmond Hill. The men who found them were exploring the area. Hunter speculated that the men who stole them killed them for food.45 That, however, does not quite fit with the story told by the Aboriginal woman.
In February that same year, 1798, an attack at Toongabby on John Tarlington’s household took place. Around this time Pemulwy was leading some of the attacks around the farming district, but not on this occasion.
John Tarlington was a defence witness in the trial of the Hawkesbury five. On the last day of the hearing Tarlington was first to give evidence. He told in some detail of the attack that had happened eighteen months earlier.46 He and his wife were beaten and two others were killed. One was Tarlington’s servant, a free man named Joseph Collins, the other a visitor, Nicholas Redman. The perpetrators were from the clan that was usually found around the Hawkesbury farming area. Tarlington identified, as part of the attacking group, the two young Aborigines allegedly killed by the defendants. One was Little Jemmy whom he sometimes referred to as Jemmy. The other was a younger lad known as Little George or George.
However, it was two others—one Tarlington named as Macnamarra and the other Little Charley—who first came to his house on the day of the attack. They were welcomed inside, their hands shaken in friendship and given bread at their own request. Suspecting more natives might appear, Tarlington looked outside and saw Major White, Jemmy, Little George and Terribandy approaching. They were also welcomed inside the house and a meal of meat and cabbage was shared amongst them. Little Charley got up for some water and slipped out of the door. Tarlington followed and saw another twelve or fifteen natives approaching. They all came inside the house leaving their spears at the door, as had the others. Tarlington’s wife and servant passed out the remainder of the food while Tarlington took three—he said Jemmy, Charley and George—on their request, out to the melon patch. They sat down with the melons and began eating them. Jemmy went off some distance and called out in his own language something that Tarlington did not understand. Twenty or thirty more natives came out of the bush and, as Tarlington described it, ‘saluted the witness friendly’. On hearing the voices outside the house those inside came out, Joseph Collins included. The whole group dispersed around the grounds helping themselves to melons and corn. As this was occurring Tarlington suddenly heard an English voice. A white man approached and each knew the other’s name. It seems Tarlington was expecting this man, Nicholas Redman, to rendezvous at Tarlington’s farm with a man named Joseph Malony.47 When Malony arrived he asked Tarlington what had brought all the natives there. Tarlington did not tell the court what reply he gave, but it must have been obvious as the natives asked for more bread. Tarlington said his wife then left the house, accompanied by Charley, to go and fetch more bread. Perhaps this was from a neighbour. A few minutes later Terribandy threw a spear at Joseph Collins. Tarlington himself was then attacked and wounded by spears. He identified Little Jemmy as having speared him in the side and Little George spearing him through the arm, both also beating him with their clubs or waddies. Tarlington ran away and successfully managed to hide himself in a loft. Not so lucky Nicholas Redman—he was killed and ‘mangled’. The visitor, Malony, managed to escape but was severely wounded while doing so. The natives then plundered the house and took property of every kind including the livestock. When he thought they were gone, Tarlington came down from the loft and went in search of his wife. She had been severely beaten by Charley. Joseph Collins, Tarlington’s servant, died of his wounds a few days later. Nicholas Redman was already dead.
Anybody in the courtroom for Tarlington’s testimony would have winced as they listened to it—the deception, the calamity, the bloodshed and ruination in what happened. It was completely destructive of any trust and friendship that might have existed between the Europeans and Aborigines involved. But it happened eighteen months before this court case. The two Aborigines killed by the settlers on the Argyle Reach—Little George and Jemmy—had been directly involved. Little Charley or Charley had also been involved. A question from the court elicited an answer that shows us that this was the same Aboriginal man taken before Governor Hunter and then released. ‘Have you heard of any other Injuries committed by said Charley upon the White People since,’ the Judge-Advocate asked.
‘I heard of Goodall being wounded by said Charley,’ Tarlington answered. ‘Were the Natives whom the Prisoners are charged with killing concerned in the murder of Redman?’ the Judge-Advocate asked.
‘Yes—they were,’ Tarlington answered. It was a definite ‘yes’, but Tarlington did not say he actually saw Redman attacked. If, at the time Redman was killed, Tarlington was trying to find a hiding place, then it could be that he only supposed Jemmy and Little George were directly involved. On the other hand, Jemmy and Little George had speared and beaten Tarlington and it is quite possible Tarlington witnessed the attack on Redman before he ran from the scene. On the face value of Tarlington’s evidence, Jemmy and Little George were the killers of Nicholas Redman. Asked to estimate the age of Little George and Jemmy at the time the attack took place, eighteen months before, Tarlington found it difficult, but estimated Little George as being about eleven or twelve and Jemmy about fifteen or sixteen.
A despatch with news of the attack at Tarlington’s farm reached the Governor the day after it happened, on 19 February 1798. It reported one man murdered and three severely wounded. Further news came in a few days later that two more were killed ‘in the same manner’. The attack was thought linked with the ripening of the maize fields. The orders to retaliate were given, if with regret. That was the sentiment expressed by Governor Hunter in David Collins’ second volume:
It became, from these circumstances, absolutely necessary to send out numerous well-armed parties, and attack them wherever they should be met with; for lenity or forbearance had only been followed by repeated acts of cruelty.48
Nevertheless, it appears that all the Aborigines involved in the Tarlington attack evaded those ‘numerous well-armed parties’. Despite the intention, retaliatory brigades were often unsuccessful. They rarely found the natives they were after. Their quarry usually had enough warning to vanish into the bush. Without the benefit of surprise search parties could look for days and find nobody to punish. Jemmy and Little George were still to cause trouble months later by stealing from settlers, as recalled by defence witnesses in the trial of the five Hawkesbury white men.
There is no record of another serious outburst of indigenous–settler violence for another year and a half. Then in late July or early August 1799, just before Lieutenant Thomas Hobby took command of the soldiers at the river, a soldier named Cooper killed a native woman and child. It was an extraordinarily inflammatory act. What then followed was a spiral of violence: an attack on a man named Smallsalts on the road from the Hawkesbury to Parramatta; the murders of Hodgkinson and Wimbo while on their hunting trip; an attack on ex-sergeant William Goodall on his farm near Toongabby; and, on the 18 September 1799, the murder of Little George and Jemmy at the hands of the Argyle Reach settlers.
