Warning: this article contains graphic material that may be distressing to some readers.
The news out of Queensland last month that the state’s truth-telling inquiry would be scrapped, I was reminded of a gruesome piece of history that the body may have brought to some wider attention. A few years ago, while researching for another yarn I stumbled across a publication entitled ‘The Aborigines of Australia’.
It was composed in 1865, by a Scottish-born pastoralist who wrote and published a book about his experiences with several Aboriginal nations as he acquired land across the colony’s frontier. Gideon Scott Lang Esq. (b1819-1880) had migrated to Australia in 1839. It was a violent time: the ever-growing expansion of the colony was met with fierce resistance by the peoples whose lands were being stolen. They in turn were violently suppressed, conflicts that would become known as the Frontier Wars.
Travelling across western-Victoria, central NSW, the Riverina, across the Murrumbidgee, into south-east Queensland, the Darling Downs and into Moreton Bay, Lang saw and heard of those wars first-hand. “As a large extent of country is taken up at one time, and this is done simultaneously ‘on every station, they must go somewhere, a collision takes place, and the war begins,” he wrote in his publication The Aborigines of Australia (1865). Lang however was most critical and outspoken of Queensland, highlighting that the ‘wholesale slaughter’ of those people was being perpetrated under the apparent sanction of the Government of that colony. “In Queensland there has always been more destruction of the blacks [sic] in occupying new country than in any other colony, but within the last few years it has been wholesale and indiscriminate and carried on with a cold-blooded cruelty on the part of the whites quite unparalleled in the history of these colonies,” he wrote. “In Queensland now these bad whites do as they please, from all accounts, simply because it is the rule and custom to arrange the black question by killing them off.” Lang was highlighting the protracted violence of Queensland’s pastoral frontier that would decimate the state’s Aboriginal population between 1848 and 1898. Brutal conflicts raged between pastoralists, farmers, miners, citizen militias and the Native Police force against the Waanyi, Iman, Wakka Wakka, Butchulla, Quandamooka, Kalkadoon, Darumbal, Bigambul, Kabi Kabi/Gubbi Gubbi, Woppaburra and Guugu-Yimithirr, and Yidinji peoples (to name only a few).
There were protracted, violent massacres of Aboriginal men, women, and children by shooting and poisoning of water and flour - all of which was well-documented in contemporary newspaper accounts, station records, private correspondence from settlers, and in records kept by officers in charge of Native Police patrols. The native police were a state-sanctioned paramilitary organisation with groups of Aboriginal troopers under the leadership of a white officer, who operated with lethal efficiency on the frontier for more than 50 years. Lang outlined the scenario for his readers in his 1865 publication: “A man is killed by blacks, and eight weeks afterwards a native camp is charged, and as many are shot as the attacking party can get at.” Some historians estimate that up to 60,000 (or more) Aboriginal people were killed. Almost 90 per cent of the area’s Aboriginal population perished between 1830 and 1890, dwindling to no more than 25,000.
A 1925 sketch in The Daily Mail of the retaliation after the Hornet Bank Massacre Perhaps Lang was referencing the mass poisoning of 60-100 Gubbi Gubbi people by arsenic being placed in their flour on Kilcoy Station in Southeast Queensland in February of 1842. Or the slaughter and atrocities that occurred at Hornet Bank station in the Dawson River district in Central Queensland in 1857, following the deaths of twenty Europeans which saw some 300 people killed in indiscriminate retribution. Or the massacre of some 300 plus Gayiri people in the Medway Ranges in the Central Highlands in revenge of the killing of 19 whites at Cullin-la-Ringo station near Emerald in Queensland in October 1861. In 1867, native police atrocities actually provoked laughter in Queensland parliament, and in 1874 the Police Commissioner, David T. Seymour, blatantly stated: “No instance of the wholesale slaughter of the blacks has ever come under my notice privately or officially during a residence of nearly 14 years in the colony.”
The Native Mounted Police continued to operate in Queensland as a separate police unit until its disbandment in 1900. Historian Dr Jonathan Richards from Griffith University calls this period ‘our nation’s longest war’ that occurred during Australia’s colonial and post-colonial periods. “State-sanctioned, racially-based violence – an issue that many Australians are either ignorant of or deny occurred – was often carried out by uniformed mass-murderers,” says Richards. “This was an integral part of the nation’s creation history.” Lang died in July 1880 in Woolloomooloo in Sydney just before the horrific events at Lawn Hill station (on Waanyi country in Queensland’s Gulf Country) came to light. It involved the shooting of Waanyi men, women and children and the taking of their body parts as trophies. Repulsively, not only was Lawn Hill station decorated with 40 pairs of ears of Waanyi people nailed on the walls, but station owner Frank Hann, and his station manager Jack Watson, are both recorded as having cut off the heads of Aborigines and presented them as souvenirs or bounty.
By the end of the 19th century that frontier brutality and violence of the colonial period had morphed into a draconian “Protection” regime. The first of Queensland’s ‘protectionist’ laws - the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act - was proclaimed in 1897 and established the framework for government control of missions and reserves and the lives of Aboriginal people, thereby removing the basic freedoms of all Aboriginal people in Queensland. The Act gave police, politicians and public servants the ultimate power to control every aspect of the lives of Aboriginal people, including resettling by force, removing children without proof of neglect, forbidding marriage without approval; censoring mail; compelling reserve residents to work for low wages (or no wages); and seizing property without consent. That Act remained in force until 1939. Other draconian and punitive Acts followed and were used, in some cases until the 1980s, as a means of implementing policies of protection, separation, absorption and assimilation of Indigenous populations, depending on the prevailing philosophy of governments at the time. Aboriginal Queenslanders call this period ‘living under the Act’ – and under ‘the Act’ they were separated from their land and their families and were not allowed to speak their languages, continue their cultural practices or teach them to their children. These brutal Acts allowed government officials under the control of the Chief Protector and, after 1939, the Director of Native Affairs to `remove' Indigenous people to and between reserves and to separate children from their families. Men, women, and children living on reserves and missions were used as a cheap source of labour. Children were sent away at an early age to work, and adults were sent to work as domestic servants or on pastoral properties. Under the Act, they did not have the right to spend or manage their own money. Their earnings were paid directly to the protector or superintendent of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander district, reserve, settlement or mission. In 2002, former Premier Peter Beattie estimated about $500 million dollars was stolen from Indigenous people in Queensland. The Queensland Government agreed in 2019 to settle the Stolen Wages Class Action for $190 million dollars ($50 million of which was soaked up in legal fees). From the ‘wholesale slaughter’ of Aboriginal people, to ‘living under the Act’ to stolen wages - this is all part of Queensland’s history. Our history.
