1. Frontier to Protectionism
History 9
william oates

2. Overview Post-First Contact Disease Frontier Violence
Government & Settler Tactics
Aboriginal Tactics
Native Mounted Police
Massacres-Myall Creek and others
Tasmania
Protectionist beginnings

3. Post-First Contact
“The physical dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land was quite a different phenomenon to their legal dispossession.”1

4. Post-First Contact
“In the face-to-face contact, the process of colonial takeover featured both conflict and co-operation.”1

5. Post-First Contact
“Many Australian colonisers, especially its men, personally implemented the usurpation of land. The story often became violent as Aboriginal people and whites battled for land and other resources.”1

6. Disease

7. Disease David Collins:
The number that it swept off, by their own accounts, was incredible. At that time a native was living with us; and on our taking him down to the harbour to look for his former companions, those who witnessed his expression and agony can never forget either.

8. Disease David Collins:
He looked anxiously around him in the different coves we visited; not a vestige on the sand was to be found of human foot; the excavations in the rocks were putrid bones of those who had fallen victim to the disorder; not a living person was anywhere to be met with.2

9. Disease Was disease a ‘natural’ outcome of ‘first contact’?
Could it have been a deliberate act of ‘germ warfare’?

10. Painting by Augustus Earle captures the effect of dispossession on Aborigines in the Sydney area – early 1830s

11. Frontier Violence
“I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys, and the earlier they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better. I would never consent to hang a white man for a black one.” (Letter to the Australian, 18th Dec 1838)

12. Frontier Violence

13. Frontier Violence
“Atrocities against the indigenes were often hidden from the public records. The British knew well the implications of committing deeds to paper which, although publicly condoned, did not conform to the ‘letter of the law’.

14. Frontier Violence
“The frontiersmen clothed violence in euphemisms such as ‘dispersing’, ‘breaking up’, ‘shaking up’, ‘giving a fight’ and ‘teaching them a lesson’. While frontier warfare was considered men’s business, white women sometimes participated.”3

15. Frontier Violence
White settlers in Qld killed some Aborigines between 1824 & 1908.
As well as death by conflict and massacres Aboriginal people were killed by being given foods laced with poison and having their waterholes poisoned.

16. Frontier Violence Massacres: Wiradjuri 1824
Along the Darling River 1835 to 1865
Major Nunns contribution 1838
Gippsland region 1840 to 1851
Yeeman 1857
Cullin-la-Ringo 1861
Forest River 1926

17. Government & Settler Tactics
Series of Kidnappings
Hostage taking was practiced to acquire intelligence
Bennelong – who was forcibly kept in British custody in chains

18. Government & Settler Tactics
Poisoning of water-holes
Poisoned flour (arsenic)
Man-Traps
Raping of women
Torture

19. Aboriginal Tactics

20. Aboriginal Resistance

22. Native Mounted Police
Established in 1848

23. Native Mounted Police “set an Aborigine to kill an Aborigine”
Underlying premise:
“set an Aborigine
to kill an Aborigine”

24. Native Mounted Police
“Led by white officers, and equipped with horses, authority and guns, this band of murderous little bastards was the perfect killing machine!” (Rosser, B. 1990)

25. Native Mounted Police
Trained Aborigines were engaged to hunt, track & kill other Aborigines
Ceased operation in 1900

26. ‘The Avengers’, an undated watercolour by S. T
‘The Avengers’, an undated watercolour by S. T. Gill, depicts the response which the settlers on the frontier had to Aborigines. Often the attacks upon Aboriginal camps were unprovoked and unjustified.

28. Massacres-Myall Creek & others

29. Myall Creek Massacre
Seven men (white) were found guilty & hung for the murder of 28 Aboriginal people
Changed the way violence was conducted on the frontier

30. Tasmania Conciliation 1828: Lieutenant-Governor Arthur’s proclamation.
Role of Governors
Answerable to London not elected constituents
Native & colonist subject to the rule & protection of Law.

31. Tasmania ‘Black War’? The ‘Black Line’ 1824 to 1831
“The proclamation of martial law in November 1828 was a defacto declaration of war.” (Windshuttle 2002)
Does it take two to make a ‘war’?
The ‘Black Line’

33. Protectionist Beginnings
Qld – Archibald Meston
Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act [1897]

34. A good Read

35. Notes
A McGrath, ed., Contested Ground – Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, St Leonards, 1995, p. 15
B Elder, Blood on the Wattle – Massacres and Maltreatment of Australian Aborigines since 1788, NSW, 1988, p. 15