Double Vision: A History of Race Relations in the Wide Bay and Burnett

By Margaret Slocomb

Double Vision serves as a prequel to Among Australian Pioneers, which highlighted the experience of Chinese indentured laborers on the northern frontier from 1848 to 1880—a time of intense conflict.

With this latest book, historian Margaret Slocomb responds to a call for more regional histories of early contact relations, so we can understand their complexity as well as the diversity of reactions and responses that followed.

The author observes that encounters at the margins of settlement between new societies seeking profits and traditional owners defending their land are bruising, brutal affairs conducted beyond the reach of regular norms and conventions, and contested within a framework of conflicting, mutually incomprehensible and irreconcilable laws.

The Northern Districts of Wide Bay and Burnett on the tribal lands of the Kabi Kabi and Wakka Wakka nations represented that frontier from roughly 1845 until Queensland formed a separate colony in 1859. Dispossession was violent by its very nature, but there was also accommodation and adaptation on one side, and compassionate advocacy on the other.

Join the author as she seeks if not the full truth, at least a unified understanding of our shared history and mutual recognition of its contested nature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Dec 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982296384

Margaret Slocomb

Margaret Slocomb holds a PhD in history from the University of Queensland, Australia. An education specialist, she spent most of her professional career in China and several countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia. This is her first book on Australian history.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-9637-7 (sc)

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Balboa Press rev. date:  12/28/2022

Contents

Figures

Abbreviations

Preface

Part 1:        The Dreaming and the Market

Chapter 1:   First Encounters – Wild White Men – Free White Settlement and Black Resistance – Squatters Move onto the Mary and the Burnett – A First Reckoning

Chapter 2:   Occupation of the Wide Bay and Burnett – War of Resistance – Arrival of the Native Police

Chapter 3:   The Jaunt to Fraser Island – The Burnett Squatters Turn against Walker – The War is Over?

Chapter 4:   Sawyers and Squatters – Boundary Changes and Changes of Officials – The Native Police After Frederick Walker

Chapter 5:   Separation and State-Building – Maryborough – Lieut. Bligh’s Sword – The 1861 Select Committee – Amelioration

Chapter 6:   The Case of Mr Inspector Harris – Aboriginal Rights in Law – Collusion and Compromise – Solutions

Part 2:        Charity and Cruelty

Chapter 7:   Numbers Pre-Contact and Post-Conflict – Blanket Conciliation – Amelioration and Reform – Reverend Fuller’s Mission

Chapter 8:   The Long Boom – Thinking Aboriginal Labour – The Importation of South Sea Islander Labour

Chapter 9:   The Virtuous Colonists of Wide Bay and Burnett – Queensland’s Early Reserves

Chapter 10:   A Modest Proposal – From White Cliffs to Bogimbah Creek – The Act and Fraser Island Mission Reserve – Cherbourg’s Early Years

Notes

Select Bibliography

Figures

Figure 1. Area of Pastoral Settlement in Queensland by 1859

Figure 2. Map of Queensland census districts (1871) - Burnett District

Figure 3. Map of Queensland census districts (1871) – Wide Bay District

Figure 4. Wakka Wakka and Kabi Kabi Nations: Approximate Tribal Territories

Figures 5 Estimated Number and Distribution of Aboriginals, 1788 and 1927

Figures 6 Estimated Number and Distribution of Aboriginals, 1788 and 1927

Abbreviations (appearing in Notes)

Preface

HISTORY IS A HYMN TO WHITE PEOPLE, AND ALL

OF US OTHERS HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED.

¹

My generation was taught almost nothing about Australian history, apart from convicts, explorers and riding on the sheep’s back, with never a mention of the role or the fate of the original Australians, least of all those in my own district. Consequently, when the history syllabus caught up with progressive social trends in the 1970s, teachers were often only one lesson ahead of the students when it came to discovering local history. Skirting round the issue proved to be a poor and unworkable teaching strategy. Inevitably, a curious student raised a hand in class one day and asked, What happened to the Aborigines, Miss? I told her the truth, that I didn’t know, but the question remained like a small stone in my shoe for decades afterwards, nagging for attention.

Awareness grew amidst a series of landmark events and their consequences that started in the 1980s. In 1982, a group of five plaintiffs representing Murray (Mer) and Darnley Islanders brought an action against the State of Queensland and the Commonwealth of Australia in the High Court claiming native title to their homeland in the Torres Strait. What became known as the Mabo Case caused some anxiety in Queensland, with fears stirred up by vested interests that native title would result in claims being made for the return of freehold property to the traditional owners. The term terra nullius entered the vernacular and everyday conversations revealed the notion itself to be the myth that it had always been. As the case proceeded and the Queensland Parliament took pre-emptive measures to try to defeat the case, discussion and debates about Aboriginal history began to escape from academia into the suburbs. When the claim was upheld by six of the seven High Court judges in mid-1992, most Queenslanders who had followed the case regarded the decision as a victory for the little man, one of the underdog beating the odds. The Court recognised that customs and laws of the people of Mer developed over thousands of years were fundamental to their traditional ownership and underpinned their rights and obligations in relation to the land. The Native Title Act was passed by the Australian Parliament in 1993, opening the way for claims by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to rights to land and compensation. Needless to say, no white man’s suburban backyard was ever re-possessed.

On 2 August 1995, the attorney-general of Australia made a formal request to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission to trace the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence, and the effects of those laws, practices and policies. The shocking report of the national inquiry, entitled Bringing them home, finally shattered what anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner had called variously the persistent indifference to the fate of the Aborigines and the suffocation of conscience. The report began:

The histories we trace are complex and pervasive. Most significantly the actions of the past resonate in the present and will continue to do so in the future… For individuals, their removal as children and the abuse they experienced at the hands of the authorities or their delegates have permanently scarred their lives. The harm continues in later generations… The truth is that the past is very much with us today, in the continuing devastation of the lives of Indigenous Australians. That devastation cannot be addressed unless the whole community listens with an open heart and mind to the stories of what has happened in the past and, having listened and understood, commits itself to reconciliation.²

There could not be reconciliation without truth, however confronting or shameful it may be, Governor General Sir William Deane reminded us in that report. National shame, as well as national pride, he said, can and should exist in relation to past acts and omissions, at least when done or made in the name of the community or with the authority of government… The present plight of so many Aborigines must be acknowledged as largely flowing from what happened in the past.³

For four days in May 2017, over 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders who were delegates selected from regional meetings that had been held around the country, met at Uluru on the land of the Anangu people to discuss constitutional reform for recognition and acknowledgement of the Indigenous peoples. The convention produced the Uluru Statement from the Heart that told of the torment of their powerlessness and their desire for constitutional structural change to empower them to take a rightful place in their own country. Their first call was for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution requiring them to be formally consulted by Parliament on legal and policy matters that affected their communities. Secondly, the Uluru Statement sought a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of treaty or agreement-making between governments and First Nations, and truth-telling about history. The Statement from the Heart is a generous invitation to the Australian people to meet together and finally unite. It concludes,

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

Hopefully, on an appointed Saturday in 2023 or early 2024, the Australian people will go to the polls and vote Yes in a referendum to allow an alteration to the constitution in order to make way for an enduring First Nations Voice to the Federal Parliament. The Queensland State Government has already commenced the process of treaty-making with the First Nations. The third step, once a Voice is enshrined in the constitution and a formal treaty is signed, is the truth-telling process.

Truth commissions are typically conducted as formal, judicial proceedings that follow acts of extreme state-sanctioned violence, especially genocide and civil war, such as those that have already taken place in Nuremberg, South Africa, Latin America, and Cambodia. The justice they deliver may be retributive or restorative, but the aim of this transitional justice is to allow people to comprehend their shared experience and enable them to regain a sense of security and peace. This model, however, may not fit the Australian conditions. According to legal scholar and the leading constitutional lawyer on First Nations recognition in the Australian Constitution, Megan Davis, The modern Australian incarnation of truth-telling that emerged from the Uluru Statement from the Heart … derived from local people devising local solutions.⁴ She warns that there will be a dissonance between problem and solution if truth-telling is not anchored by a proper settlement framework, as outlined by the Uluru Statement. She refers to the alternative historical commission for situations like Australia’s. Historical commissions, she notes, serve to clarify historical truths and pay respect to previously unrecognised victims or their descendants. Ultimately, however, truth-telling must come from local communities:

The idea of the Makarrata Commission mentioned in the Uluru Statement is that, if established, First Nations and communities or regions can choose when to lock into the commission for resources and when to share their stories with the world. This work might be undertaken in conjunction with local councils, local history societies or other local community groups… Every single First Nation should choose how truth-telling should occur… And they should be able to access support, including resources for stories to be collated, archived and, where appropriate, made public with relevant permissions. This would create a record of history: a unified understanding of the contested nature and experience of Australian history.

The goal, therefore, is a unified understanding of our history and a recognition of its contested nature and experience – one history, our history. There may be initial reluctance to do this coming from both sides, on one to share the stories with the world, and on the other to listen and accept them as truth. What historian Henry Reynolds refers to as a whisper in the heart persists among some older white Australians as a sense of uneasiness, a lurking shadow of guilt about what really happened on the frontier not long ago, at least in the case of Queensland.⁵ They may resist attempts to peel away the scab of the past. Some Indigenous communities may fear that their stories will be disbelieved or rejected. Truth-telling requires an environment of mutual trust. More than any other history, Mark McKenna notes, the history of the frontier continues to unsettle and trouble us – we rake over the embers, endlessly searching for redemption.⁶

For some years, there has been a call for more regional histories of race relations on the Australian frontier. Encounters between two cultures, Richard Broome argues, are inherently complex. The reactions and responses, I would add, are also inherently diverse. Bob Reece challenged the dispossess-resistance interpretation of Aboriginal-European interaction that, he said became a powerful academic orthodoxy in the 1980s. It is wrong, he argued, to subsume all these reasons [why Aborigines attacked and killed Europeans] under the rubric of ‘resistance’ and create the impression that it was all of a piece.⁷ Accommodation or adjustment was just as marked as resistance, he continues, and the two responses can each be seen as forming part of the spectrum of Aboriginal European relations.

This history of race relations in the Wide Bay and Burnett, from proclamation of the districts in 1847 up to the bureaucratic decision in the early twentieth century to remove Aboriginal people to designated Government-controlled reserves, is testament to the complexity and diversity of interactions between the traditional owners and the Europeans who were intent on dispossessing them of their land. The colonial districts were formed on the native territory of two large Aboriginal nations, the Kabi Kabi on the coast and the Wakka Wakka in the hinterland. Generalisation is dangerous, but at some point necessary in order to describe the different interactions that occurred. In the Wide Bay, where pastoralism was not dominant, there was a constant, usually low-level hum of hostility on both sides of the racial divide; in the Burnett, once most squatters accepted and adopted the practice of letting in, that is, sharing the runs with the traditional owners, despite sporadic acts of violence, there were also deliberate efforts to forge some kind of amicable co-existence. In the middle, in both districts, were the Native Police creating havoc. Within the European communities (and perhaps within the Indigenous communities also) there were fracture lines about how to respond and relate to the other. In both districts, there were European men of courage and conviction who refused to avert their gaze from the horrors that were being committed around them. In particular, I refer to the work of the advocates Carl Feilberg and William Walsh and their impassioned separate campaigns to disband the Native Police and to find a way to enduring peace.

Inevitably, this history is told from a European settler perspective because theirs were the records that I consulted. It is also unduly weighted in favour of those parts of the districts where there was a concentration of white settlers, that is, where townships developed, and where the court and other institutions that represented the colonial administration were established. The hubs of Maryborough and Gayndah also attracted Aboriginal people from the surrounding locality for a host of reasons.

The title, Double Vision, is self-explanatory. While there was some degree of accommodation and adaptation, of rubbing along in the relationships that developed on the frontier, at no point, it seems, was there ever a genuine understanding between black and white. The editor of the Burnett Argus ruminated on this subject in 1864, telling his readers:

Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than the existing method of dealing with the aborigines of this country, and the general understanding, or misunderstanding, or rather the want of any understanding at all, that exists between the white population and the blacks.⁸

For him, there were two peoples under one sky who saw the universe from entirely different perspectives. Almost a century later, W. E. H. Stanner explained this want of any understanding at all as a clear dichotomy between The Dreaming and The Market, the former a set of doctrines about values that were determined once-for-all in the past, and the latter a variable locus where values are redetermined according to changing human needs.⁹ No two styles of life could be more different, he wrote, than the Aboriginal and the European traditions.

What we seek, finally, is what Megan Davis describes as a unified understanding of the contested nature and experience of Australian history. This does not mean one understanding or a compromised understanding. Differences must be recognized and celebrated, and historians will welcome the challenge this offers.

In writing this book, I have tried to keep in mind the question that my young student asked, What happened to the Aborigines? I don’t know if I have answered her satisfactorily, or with the full truth, but I have tried as far as possible to keep to the facts as they are generally known. I offer this final comment from historian Don Watson in self-defence:

[W]riting history, writing the story of the past as if it were the truth, is an act of considerable presumption and for anyone attempting it humility is the appropriate attitude to strike. The best historians set themselves tasks which require more imagination, passion and skill than mere fact grubbing. Historians are at their most arrogant when they are most narrow in their inquiry. Often they are least persuasive when they are most certain.¹⁰

Note on Cover Design

The cover design is from an oil on paper work entitled Double Vision by Kylie Brislane, a Year 11 student of Kepnock State High School in Bundaberg that was part of an exhibition curated by Jess Newitt, Head of the Department of the Arts at the school. It is used with Kylie’s permission, and that of her teacher and the school.

PART 1

THE DREAMING AND THE MARKET

The colonists’ ‘mania’ – the word is their own – for stock and land soon disclosed as axiomatic that ‘a hunting and pastoral economy cannot co-exist within the same bounds’. Consequently, Aboriginal society survived only outside the pastoral bounds. Within them, the racial pattern – dominance and subjugation – became a rule of practice, and the structure of equities – the Europeans’ maximal, the Aborigines’ minimal – became if not an open rule of law, then its tacit convention... [T]he destruction of Aboriginal society was not the consequence of European development, but its price, which is a very different thing.

W. E. H Stanner, 1963¹

Ours is a market-civilisation, theirs not. Indeed, there is a sense in which The Dreaming and The Market are mutually exclusive. What is The Market? In its most general sense it is a variable locus in space and time at which values – the values of anything – are redetermined as human needs make themselves felt from time to time. The Dreaming is a set of doctrines about values – the value of everything – which were determined once-for-all in the past. The things of The Market – money, prices, exchange values, saving, the maintenance and building of capital – which so sharply characterise our civilisation, are precisely those which the Aborigines are least able to grasp and handle. They remain incomprehensible for a long time. And they are among the foremost means of social disintegration and personal demoralisation... Indeed if one tried to invent two styles of life, as unlike each other as could be, while still following the rules which are necessary if people are to live together at all, one might well end up with something like the Aboriginal and the European traditions.

W. E. H. Stanner, 1958.²

Figure 1. Area of Pastoral Settlement in Queensland by 1859

figure%201%20updated.jpg

Figures 1,2,3 - Source: L. E. Skinner, Police of the Pastoral Frontier (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975).

At Separation in 1859, the colony of Queensland extended from Waverley station at Broad Sound to the border with New South Wales. The electric telegraph line shown in this map of 1868 did not exist then, nor did the townships of Mackay, Clermont, Springsure, Roma or St George. The map clearly shows the Wide Bay and Burnett districts, bounded by Fraser (Great Sandy) Island and ranges to the north, south and west, with the townships of Gayndah and Maryborough centrally located.

Figure 2. Map of Queensland census districts (1871) - Burnett District

figure%202%20updated.jpg

The runs of Mondure and Boonara are recorded on this map as Proston Station and Hawkins Station respectively. Booubyjan is roughly halfway between Hawkins Station and Ban Ban Station.

Figure 3. Map of Queensland census districts (1871) – Wide Bay District

figure%203%20updated.jpg

This map adjoins Figure 2 on the east. It shows the early settlements of Bundaberg and Gympie.

CHAPTER 1

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First Encounters – Wild White Men – Free

White Settlement and Black Resistance

– Squatters Move onto the Mary and

the Burnett – A First Reckoning

The first encounter between the European invaders and the Aboriginal inhabitants of the land just to the south of the Tropic of Capricorn that is drained by the Burnett and Mary rivers and abutted by Fraser Island occurred between a ship and the shore. Captain James Cook’s journal entry of 20 May 1770 recorded passing at a distance of four miles a black bluff head or point of land, on which a number of the natives were assembled.¹ He consequently named the bluff Indian Head. The island’s traditional owners, the Badtjala/Butchulla people, who watched the Endeavour sail past that day commemorated the event in a song that was passed down several generations before it was translated into English and recorded by Edward Skipper Armitage, a Maryborough pioneer who had a long association with Fraser Island. It began, The boat rose up out of the sea like cloud,/ ..../And they saw many men walking about on it./They asked each other who were these strangers?/And where were they going?² Since the ship’s first landfall and the fatal encounter with the Gweagal people at Kurnell on the southern shore of Botany Bay, they had known that the ship was coming their way, but it passed uneventfully through the shoals at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and made landfall for only a second time near Bustard Head, approximately one degree of latitude to the north of where they stood. They had no way of understanding that at the end of the ship’s voyage along the eastern coast of the continent, Captain Cook had planted a flag on a small island and held a brief ceremony to officially take possession of fully one third of the continent’s vast land mass in the name of his king, George III. Without their knowing, let alone their consent, they had become British subjects and their beloved island, K’gari, had been swallowed up by the British Empire.

The same intricate means of communication that tracked the passage of the Endeavour must have kept the peoples of the Wide Bay and Burnett districts informed of the arrival of further ships not far from that first landing place in Botany Bay that disgorged many white people and their strange animals who did not depart. For fifty years, however, they were left in peace. Then, in 1822 and again the following year, an area of land was explored and surveyed in the vicinity of Moreton Bay, about 150 miles to their south, in preparation for a proposed penal settlement of secondary confinement, that is, for convicts who had re-offended in New South Wales. The Moreton Bay settlement was slow to start. By 1826, buildings were still temporary and it was without a hospital and a gaol. Commandant Bishop reported on 14 March that they were on good terms with the natives who had brought in two bushrangers who had absconded; they had rewarded them with tomahawks and blankets.³ He considered them to be useless as stockmen, however, as they were afraid of cattle. Shortly after that report, Patrick Logan replaced Bishop as commandant.

During the four and a half years of Logan’s brutal command, from March 1826 until he was murdered on 17 October 1830, probably by local tribesmen, the convict population rose from seventy-seven to just under one thousand. The growing pressure on the land, resources and traditional lifestyle of the original inhabitants inevitably caused friction. On 30 May 1827, Ensign Innes wrote to the colonial secretary from Moreton Bay concerning an attempt by the Aborigines to steal maize; the guard was speared through the hand and one of the natives was subsequently shot by soldiers sent by Logan.⁴ This killing was officially recorded as accidental. In January the following year, two prisoners were killed by natives, one of whom was arrested and held in custody pending trial. In June, more prisoners were killed. Logan attributed this to disputes between Aborigines and runaways. More specifically, before the Select Committee on Secondary Punishment 1831-32 in London, the botanist and explorer, Allan Cunningham, attributed the hostility to liberties having been taken with the women by the convicts.⁵

It is a clear indictment of the brutality of the penal system at Moreton Bay that so many prisoners absconded. According to Mamie O’Keeffe, 504 of the 2,062 men who were sent to Moreton Bay absconded, many of them more than once, despite the terrible punishment that was inflicted on those who returned, either voluntarily after a short time in the bush or through the agency of constables, or of Aborigines who were offered rewards of blankets and tomahawks for their capture.⁶ Only 138 of the total number of prisoners were women, two of whom were known to have absconded.

There were two routes of escape, the most frequented being south towards the penal station at Port Macquarie, either by sea or overland through the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. The northward route was unknown, and many who chose that path must have perished from starvation. Those who survived by spending long periods with the Aborigines before returning to civilisation were few, but their stories are remarkable. These are the men who have passed into history as the Wild White Men.

Wild White Men

The first of these survivors to abscond were George Mitchell and John Sterry Baker who both ran on 8 January 1826, before Patrick Logan took over command at Moreton Bay.⁷ Mitchell returned after a couple of years, having heard from another runaway that new evidence had resulted in a pardon for him. Baker, meanwhile, was accepted into a tribe in the Upper Brisbane, now the Lockyer Valley, that roamed the area later known as the Darling Downs. He lived among them for more than fourteen years until he gave himself up in August 1840. The official record notes his surrender in correspondence between Commandant Owen Gorman and the colonial secretary along with plans to send him to Sydney to act as interpreter in the trial of three Aboriginal men for the murder of the surveyor, Stapylton, and his servant, Tuck, near Mt Lindsay at the end of May 1840. Two of the three, Mullin and Ningavil, were found guilty and returned to Moreton Bay for execution the following year.⁸

Four of these Wild White Men: James Davis, David Bracewell/Bracefield, John Graham, and Samuel Derrington all owed their survival to the Wide Bay tribespeople of the Kabi Kabi/Gubbi Gubbi nation, chiefly those in and around the area now known as the Sunshine Coast, that is, from Double Island Point where there is an easy crossing to the southern tip of Fraser Island, then southward to Noosa and Tewantin at the boundary of the Wide Bay district, and inland towards Mount Bauple and the Mary River. Three of them also played a crucial role in the saga that surrounded the aftermath of the sinking of the Stirling Castle and the hazardous rescue of Eliza Fraser, wife of the ship’s captain.

The brig Stirling Castle set sail from Sydney, bound for Singapore, on 15 May 1836. On board were the captain, James Fraser, his wife Eliza and his nephew, a first and second mate, and a crew of around fifteen men. One week later, the vessel was wrecked in the Swain Reef group, off present-day Gladstone. Two of the crew were drowned immediately, and the survivors took to two boats, neither of them seaworthy. Unable to find sufficient water or food, the boats’ crews parted company.

Approximately three weeks after leaving the wreck, the longboat, with Captain Fraser, his wife and nine others aboard, beached on the eastern shore of the large sandy island that would take the Fraser name, about five kilometres north of Indian Head. At this point, the crew effectively mutinied. On 23 July, informing the captain that they intended to walk to Moreton Bay, they set off, leaving the captain, his wife, and the first and second mates to make their own way.

After this, the narrative of their ordeal, as recounted by Eliza Fraser becomes unreliable and the thread of the story is confusing. She said that they fell in with a tribe who stripped them and forced them to go to their camp where they were apportioned to different masters who treated them with great cruelty. Captain Fraser was speared in the shoulder when unable to work and later died of his wound. Three days after his death, according to Eliza, she and the first mate, Brown, were taken to the mainland by one of the natives in a canoe, the second mate, Baxter, being too weak to accompany them. She said that she was held captive there for some days until forced to accompany the tribe to another destination farther inland. It was there, she said, that John Graham rescued her from the tribe and took her to where Lieutenant Charles Otter was waiting to return them to the Moreton Bay settlement.

Historian Fred Williams suggests that the native who plucked Eliza Fraser and the first mate, Brown, from the island was the escaped convict, David Bracewell.⁹ He was sent to Moreton Bay in December 1827 and ran for the first time six months later. Unable to survive alone, he returned to the settlement after five days and received the mandatory punishment of 150 lashes. Following a second failed attempt, he absconded successfully in February 1831 and remained at large until 23 May 1837. During those six years, he was passed on by various tribes until he was awarded the protection, as son, of the warrior chief, Eumundi, and given the name of Wandi. He was not the first of the Wild White Men to be adopted in this way. John Graham got away from Moreton Bay six months before Bracewell’s first attempt and according to Cilento and Lack, remained with a tribe near Noosa, a little south of where Bracewell found asylum, for six and a half years.¹⁰ They almost certainly crossed paths during the three years that their sojourns with the tribes overlapped. Three days after his seven-year sentence had expired, by his estimate, on 9 November 1833, Graham gave himself up, not knowing that the rules had