That Unhappy Race Part 9 – Queensland adopts Meston’s system

Cherbourg was one of the reserves created by Meston’s Proposed System. Photo: Author’s collection

Although Queensland’s newspapers agreed with Archibald Meston’s 1895 Proposed System to manage Aboriginal people, Colonial Secretary Horace Tozer initially did nothing. Tozer was worried it would become a large social welfare system at government expense. An impatient Meston chastised him for lack of action, threatening to run again for parliament at the next election. Stalling, Tozer called for another report. He ordered Meston to survey Aboriginal missions and inquire into the troubles on the Cape York frontier.

Meston was pleased to be on the government payroll and set off north in 1896 in a long, slow trawl of Cape York indigenous communities, visiting missions at Yarrabah and Mappoon. He was particularly impressed by Cape Bedford where Lutheran missionaries spoke the local language and gained Indigenous respect. Meston concluded the tribes should stay together in reserves where they could be transformed into Christians. That meant three reserves in Queensland (not the two he originally asked for), one each in the north, centre and south. He followed Gideon Lang, calling for the abolition of the native police and recommended the end of Aboriginal slave labour in the pearling and trepanning industries.

This earned the ire of northern newspapers but Meston was confident when he presented his report to Tozer in October 1896. However under-secretary and police commissioner William Parry-Okeden took exception to the criticism of the native police. Tozer asked Parry-Okeden to improve police strategy in his own tour of north Queensland. At Normanton Parry-Okeden met the government’s medical officer in the north, Dr Walter Roth. Roth impressed him and he urged Tozer to support Roth’s research.

Parry-Okeden’s February 1897 report called for the continuation of a strong, well-officered native police. He said friendly relations between the races could only be established by “affording equal protection and dealing out even-handed justice.” Tozer took Parry-Okeden’s suggestions to Premier Hugh Nelson to restructure the force though it was only a temporary reprieve. This notorious “machine for murder” as 19^th century historian William Rusden called the native police, finally petered out by 1900 replaced by white constables assisted by trackers.

Meston’s system of reserves took shape in 1897. He earmarked Lukin’s Fraser Island site as the southern reserve and 50 blacks were “rounded up” from Maryborough and removed to the island. Meston went west and reported on Aborigines at Charleville, Mitchell and Roma, where many were addicted to opium and riddled with syphilis. Tozer authorised their removal to a new reserve at Durundur, near Woodford. Meston’s report also proposed a draft bill for parliament based on American precedents for reserves under the authority of the Home Secretary, administered by protectors.

The bill gave control of every area of Aboriginal lives to protectors who could withhold wages and keep them on reserves. There were strict penalties against alcohol and opium and employers had to give police details of Aboriginal employees. Tozer took Meston’s suggestion to divide the state but also took Parry-Okeden’s advice to give the northern section to the commissioner of police.

The bill easily passed through parliament, the only debate being a definition of “half-caste”. Tozer told parliament it was “the offspring of an aboriginal mother and other than an aboriginal father” (No one could contemplate a white woman having sex with an aboriginal male). When it was pointed out many half-caste males had important roles of responsibility managing white men and cattle, Tozer made the half-caste rule apply only to females. The Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Bill received Royal Assent on December 10, 1897. It was Tozer’s last major piece of legislation before retiring in 1898.

Tozer appointed Parry-Okeden as Chief Protector for Queensland, with Meston named southern division protector and Roth northern division protector. In 1899 Parry-Okeden was removed from his role with Meston and Roth reporting directly to the Home Secretary. Roth had the extra ethnological task of collecting information about Aborigines in the north. He reported he was being “rushed” by applicants for permits to employ local blacks. Roth’s hope to end slavery in the pearling trade ran into squatter opposition and the commissioner of police told him not to take “too drastic action”.

In the south Meston claimed to have wiped out the opium trade by 1900. He estimated the total number of Aboriginal people below the 22^nd parallel (between Sarina and Rockhampton) as 3500 of which 2300 were employed, 800 were dependent, and 400 were “finding for themselves”. Meston removed 300 Aboriginal people to reserves at Fraser Island, Durundur and Deebing Creek (near Ipswich). Another 50 “half-caste” girls were placed in institutions like Wooloowin’s Magdalen Asylum and St Vincent’s Catholic orphanage at Nudgee. Reserve blacks came from every part of Queensland and Meston proudly boasted he had practiced “severe economy”.

Meston and son Harold managed Fraser Island like a penal colony with discipline sternly applied and inmates “encouraged” to hunt food for themselves. Malnutrition, unsanitary conditions and debilitation brought disease and a high death rate. The government, hearing about violence at the camp, removed the Mestons and gave it to the Anglican Church. Queensland’s indigenous population was so large, a third protector, Alexander Gordon, was appointed to manage the west from Boulia. However proposals to establish a western reserve were ruled out as too expensive. The furthest settlement west was Taroom in the Upper Dawson, created in 1911 but closed down within 10 years. Barambah (later Cherbourg) established in 1904 became the main reserve in the south after the closure of Durundur and Fraser Island.

Gordon was not particularly active and Meston complained that he never left Boulia. Meston roamed southern and western Queensland arranging to remove local blacks over the protests of station managers. He supported an amendment to the 1897 Act introduced in 1901 to prevent Aboriginal marriages without the protector’s permit saying he had a “strong aversion to the admixture of black and white races”. That act remained on Queensland statutes until 1972.

Meston’s self-appointed role as “expert on Aborigines” had mixed success. In 1907, he stood for election in the Cape York seat of Cook but was soundly defeated. Three years later he was appointed director of the Queensland Intelligence and Tourist Bureau in Sydney. He applied unsuccessfully for the position of chief protector of Aborigines in the NT. He eventually died of tetanus infection in Brisbane in 1924, aged 72.

His legacy was compulsory segregation which dominated Queensland’s 20th century Aboriginal policy. Meston wanted to help Aboriginal people. But as Gordon Reid says, his rigid idealisation would not allow him to accept their ability to adapt to new circumstances. Queensland’s inflexible protection system held Aboriginal people in a historical vacuum, “unchanging in a changing world”.

Meston’s Proposal was advanced for its time, though it brought together ingredients brewing in Queensland for half a century. It ended the gruesome reign of the native police and genuinely tried to help Aboriginal people. Its great fault was it lasted long after its need passed. Queensland would spend more on Aboriginal health and housing than other Australian government. But it also cleared people from their land, provided a cheap labour pool and severely restricted personal freedoms.

The aims of protection, removal and exploitation were too contradictory. Power over concentration camps at Cherbourg, Woorabinda and Palm Island was something premier Bjelke-Petersen was reluctant to concede in the 1970s. “We want them set aside in black man’s country – we want them to live exactly like we do”. Joh’s paternalism was a direct link to Archibald Meston. It took the threat of an African boycott of Brisbane’s beloved Commonwealth games to scrap the last vestige of legal protection in 1982.  Queensland’s Indigenous people were finally free, but the inter-generational trauma continues.

See the earlier parts:

Part 1: Historical background

Part 2: Queensland’s violent frontier

Part 3: The squatters’ inquiry

Part 4: the influence of Gideon Lang

Part 5: The Drew and Hale Commissions

Part 6: The empty years (1870s-1880s)

Part 7: Archibald Meston

Part 8: Horace Tozer

That Unhappy Race Part 8 – Horace Tozer accepts Meston’s Proposed System

Horace Tozer, Queensland Colonial Secretary in the 1890s.

Horace Tozer was another unlikely key figure in the fate of Queensland Aborigines, following his involvement in resolving Archibald Meston’s “Wild Australia tour” debacle. Born at Port Macquarie and educated in Newcastle and Sydney, the young Tozer went north to become an articled clerk in Brisbane, before being admitted to the bar. At Gympie he became a member of the mining court and invested in mines. Though elected as member for Wide Bay in 1871 he immediately stood aside by prior arrangement to allow H.E. King to take the seat in a by-election. Tozer became an authority on mining law and a Gympie alderman. He stood again for Wide Bay in 1888, this time holding the seat for 10 years.

Tozer joined the “Griffilwaith” government as Colonial Secretary in 1890 where Aboriginal affairs came under his remit. Busy putting down the shearers’ strike at Barcaldine, Tozer was slow to react when the manager of Glenormiston west of Boulia complained Purcell had kidnapped blacks from his station. Archibald Meston told Tozer they had let that mob free and instead obtained another group of blacks from the Northern Territory. With the blacks still stranded in Sydney, Meston vigorously defended his role saying he was left penniless calling it a “sad and disastrous termination of the tour”.

Tozer stepped in, agreeing for the Queensland government to meet the cost of their return plus their food and accommodation debts in Sydney. When they returned, Meston changed his story about Purcell not kidnapping blacks. After interviewing them, Meston said the NT mob were “chained half the way from Boulia to Cloncurry and taken forcibly against their wishes”. Though Tozer turned down Meston’s request for an inquiry, he was becoming embroiled in indigenous issues with the people of Taroom threatening to shoot Aboriginal people over their consumption of opium in the town. Tozer urged the townsfolk to deal with the matter kindly.

Reports of opium addiction reached Brisbane from all quarters of the colony. Police and magistrates queried whether they could use the Poisons Act or confiscate pipes but Tozer said only fines could be imposed. In the far north, there were reports Aborigines were being “hunted like dingoes” while in the Wide Bay region the press lamented “the abject and miserable condition of the blacks”. Like Meston, Tozer was slowly coming to the conclusion of bringing the blacks together in one spot to house the very old and very young and also those struggling for employment. However he believed local communities should pay for it and the Aborigines should be encouraged to work. “The duty is not upon the government but upon the people,” he wrote.

In 1895 Meston outlined his scheme to Tozer in an address he called “Queensland Aboriginals: Proposed System for their Improvement and Preservation”. Meston’s opening sentence outlined the problem while toadying to Tozer. “To you, Sir, a friend of the aboriginals, I submit this carefully considered plan for the improvement and preservation from extinction of that unhappy race.” The address gathered all the ideas of the previous 60 years from G.A. Robinson in the 1830s to George Lukin in 1893 (who revived the idea of a Fraser Island mission). Meston’s addition was the concept of “preservation”. Tozer was impressed enough to print the document and distribute it to parliament.

Meston’s Proposed System said there were 200,000 Aboriginal people in Queensland at the start of white occupation now there was less than 30,000 heading towards “ultimate annihilation”. He noted the treaties of Pennsylvania and New Zealand and the lack of compensation for land in Australia. Religious missions had failed but now Queensland could preserve the Aboriginal people “in a manner to the eternal honour of herself and our common humanity”.

Meston’s system proposed complete isolation from the whites. The reserves must be at remote places, one in northern Queensland and another in the south, and would provide a pool of ready labour. They would be fed and young blacks would be taught agriculture, horsemanship, blacksmithing and other trades. No whites would be allowed on the reserve without permission.  Around 5000 blacks would be brought to each reserve run by a “protector”, an honorary role to be filled by a “white gentleman”.

If this document seems ludicrous and racist today, Gordon Reid said it was a humanitarian statement when judged against the standards of the 1890s. Tozer and his fellow parliamentarians saw it as a way of solving the “Aboriginal problem” and avoiding the extinction most whites believed was the Aboriginal fate. Meston’s system accepted Aboriginal people as human beings whose customs and beliefs were worth saving, within the framework of the European economic system. The system was flawed as a solution imposed from above. Its authoritarianism would blight Queensland’s indigenous people for much of the 20^th century. The reserves they created became Australian concentration camps.

See part 9.

See also, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7.

That Unhappy Race Part 7 – ‘The Sacred Ibis’ Archibald Meston

Archibald Meston.

Archibald Meston was born in Aberdeenshire in 1851. Aged eight, his family moved to NSW to follow Meston’s older brother who grew crops at Ulmarra on the Clarence River. They switched to sugar cane in 1863 and Archibald helped out on the farm while learning the language and culture of Aboriginal groups. As a young man, Meston was a constant traveller working in canefields and learning Aboriginal vocabularies. He married Frances Prowse Shaw in 1871 and son Harold was born three years later. By then Archibald was manager at Pearlwell sugar plantation at St Lucia, Brisbane and a correspondent to the Queenslander newspaper under the pen-name Ramrod.

A year later the Ipswich Observer appointed him editor. He campaigned for small farmers and against Pacific Island workers in the sugar industry. By 1878 aged 27, he was well known and easily won the seat of Rosewood in the Queensland election, on the vote of German small farmers. Meston’s supporters celebrated the victory with a parade from One Mile Bridge to the centre of Ipswich where the streets were lined with flags.

In parliament Meston was ambitious, dashing and irrepressible. He was immediately made Liberal party whip and considered Premier material. Political opponent Boyd Dunlop Morehead gave Meston the nickname that stuck. Morehead believed Australia should be an exclusive British colony and attacked German immigrants as communists and socialists. Meston strongly defended his constituents in parliament. He noted the Teutonic influence on the British race in a speech littered with classical allusions including the ibis and crocodile sacred to ancient Egyptians. Morehead was grudgingly impressed with Meston’s defence and told him he was the reincarnation of the Sacred Ibis whose plumage symbolised the light of the sun. Meston liked it so much, the Sacred Ibis replaced Ramrod as his pen-name.

Meston’s political ambitions were undone after a defamation action against German-Australian newspaper the Nord Australische Zeitung. Meston was a supporter of Premier Thomas McIlwraith. McIlwraith was investigated for corruption after he handed a lucrative railway contract to Steel Rails which he held shares in, but a Royal Commission cleared him of personal blame. Meston voted to accept the Royal Commission verdict, a decision the Zeitung asserted was “bought”. A furious Meston took the German paper to court but lost, and worse, he lost favour with his German constituents in Rosewood. At the next election the Zeitung’s editor Jean Baptiste Isambert defeated him.

Out of parliament and made insolvent by the court case, Meston edited the Observer until forced out by a syndicate of new owners including McIlwraith and Morehead. In 1882 he moved north to become editor of the Townsville Herald, and then to Cairns where he managed a sugar cane plantation and became a councillor. Meston pushed to make Cairns the northern terminus of the railway to the mining fields. He also established a reputation as an expert on Queensland Aborigines.

This was a surprise to those that knew Meston in Ipswich and Brisbane, despite the linguistic interests of his teen years. The Observer made little mention of Aborigines except to justify a revenge attack by whites up north. He was also reputed to have shot indigenous people during his canefield days to prevent attacks on local plantations. By the 1890s, Meston considered himself an accomplished bushman and empathised with Aboriginal bushcraft in prolific writings. In 1889 he led a scientific expedition to the Bellenden Ker Range and gave an ethnological description of local tribes.

Meston mouthed conventional wisdoms of indigenous culture with wild assertions about cannibalism and depictions of the blacks as “savages”. He admitted to white brutality and unscrupulous behaviour but his Social Darwinism prevented him from seeing a solution. “The Australian blacks,” he wrote in 1889, “are moving rapidly on into the eternal darkness in which all savages and inferior races are destined to disappear.”

Within a few years, Meston changed his mind and began a campaign to protect and preserve Queensland’s native people. His desire to help while treating blacks with contempt, mirrored the paradox of Queensland society which grappled with its conscience on how to deal with a troublesome people. Meston’s campaign dominated the remaining 30 years of his life. He was a regular contributor to Brisbane and Sydney newspapers. He became an implacable opponent of the native police calling them “slaughterers” capable of “systematic outrage.”

In 1891 his reputation as an Aboriginal sympathiser suffered with an extraordinarily ill-advised business venture. Meston assembled a troupe of indigenous people for a world tour called Wild Australia. Business partner Brabazon Purcell gathered Aboriginal people from far western Queensland, the Torres Strait and NT and took them on tour of the capital cities with “a large number of curios and weapons”. In Melbourne the tour ran into trouble as the number of Aborigines and curios did not match the advertised amount leaving Meston with unpaid debts. He “bolted” after a warrant, leaving the troupe with Purcell. When Purcell arranged a departure for England, the Queensland Government objected saying the blacks had been kidnapped and demanded their return. Purcell disappeared leaving the blacks stranded in Sydney, and the Queensland Government agreed to pay for their return.

The man behind the government’s action was colonial secretary Horace Tozer, and an embarrassed Meston was forever grateful to his support. Meston initially backed Purcell but now claimed the blacks were taken from Boulia without consent. Tozer rejected a Meston request to conduct an investigation but it became a public issue. The press found a letter Purcell wrote to Meston which spoke of an opportunity to “investigate the vile and degrading temperament of whites in western Queensland”. Meston’s eventual solution was not to do anything about the whites, but to remove the blacks.

See part 8.

See also, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6.

That Unhappy Race Part 6: The Empty Years

Premier Thomas McIlwraith brought Queensland out of depression in the 1880s but he had no interest in Indigenous affairs.

After the failure of the Drew and Hale Commissions, Queensland Aboriginal policy in 1880s drifted into what Gordon Reid in That Unhappy Race called the empty years. Scottish-born premier Thomas McIlwraith cut government costs and then pushed economic development when conditions improved. Aboriginal affairs would have drifted out of public consciousness but for one man: editor-in-chief and part of owner of the Brisbane Courier and the Queenslander, Gresley Lukin.

Lukin wrote a stinging editorial in the Queenslander on May 1, 1880 calling for reform in response to a letter from Cooktown about the brutal war in the north. In “The way we civilise”, Lukin said Aboriginal people in new territories were treated no better than wild animals. “Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away, entirely at the caprice of white men, and all at the butt of a rifle,” he said. Lukin said those who committed outrages were protected by the majority under a code of silence, while the government looked the other way. When blacks retaliated, they were “dispersed” by native police, a euphemism that meant “wholesale massacre”.

Lukin wrote more editorials in the same vein urging the replacement of the native police with a white force assisted by black trackers. He rebuked frontier journals for encouraging murder of Aboriginals. But Lukin’s pleas went unanswered. At Battle Mountain near Cloncurry the Native Police defeated the Kalkadoon people, while in Brisbane McIlwraith was unmoved. Each show of European superiority confirmed the attitude of powerbrokers that Aboriginal people were doomed to extinction.

The election of Samuel Griffith as Liberal premier in November 1883 offered hope of change. Griffith’s government introduced legislation to protect Aboriginals and New Guineans exploited on ships in Queensland waters. However the bill was watered down in parliament and the abuses and kidnapping continued. Griffith’s Minister for Lands Charles Dutton established a new Aboriginal reserve, a Lutheran mission at Cape Bedford (now Hopevale).

Nearby Aboriginal people were ravaged by goldmining at Cooktown. Though the rough terrain enabled them to offer stiff resistance to native police, they were brought in by hunger and the loss of traditional lands. To placate them, the settlers and the government offered rations. This “peace through food” plan was successful and Griffiths took notice. In 1885 he asked his police commissioner to report on the possibility of replacing the native police with a white force and he gradually rolled out a new system across the north. By the early 1890s this was government policy, keeping the blacks quiet and in places they could be watched. However a new problem added to the need for further control: opium.

One of the earliest to notice was Surat settler E.H. Smith who was “most shocked at witnessing the effects of opium on the ‘niggers’.” Smith said opium was everywhere with Chinese people in Roma supplying the drug at immense profit. A Rockhampton settler said an Aboriginal woman visiting Cooktown “learned the use of it” and spread it to her countrypeople, where it was endemic. “They formerly bought flour, tea, tobacco, red handkerchiefs and now the sale is entirely stopped for opium,” he wrote. Stations paid Aboriginal workers in opium and if supply was bad in some areas, the entire population moved on to other areas. A police inspector said the addiction did not lead to crime but “they lose all their animal spirits and become lethargic in their nature and disposition”.

Opium addiction had become another thing Indigenous people had suffered at the hands of white intruders in Queensland settlement, following malnutrition, disease, dispossession, abuse and violence. In the white community the opium problem fed paranoid suspicions about Chinese influence increasing public pressure to take action. The stage was set in the 1890s for one man with political will to come up with a workable plan. That man was Archibald Meston.

See part 7.

See also, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.

That Unhappy Race Part 5 – The Drew and Hale Commissions

Aboriginal people at Durundur reserve.

By the 1870s those pushing for white expansion in Queensland saw only one way forward: corralling all indigenous people into one place far from white towns. In Maryborough white residents were offended by the large group of Aborigines camped near the cemetery. Though the Maryborough blacks were not troublesome since 1853, there were many massacres of indigenous people in the area. There was existential fear among whites after the Hornet Bank and Cullin-la-Ringo massacres (more blacks than whites died at both places, but that was ignored). There was also distaste at alcohol-fuelled quarrels and the tendency of the blacks to wander the streets naked. There were calls to move “savages” away from sensitive white eyes.

Edward Fuller was a Primitive Methodist who believed Aborigines could be shown the path to a white god. He thought the solution to the Maryborough problem was a mission on Fraser Island. Fraser was first proposed as a mission in the 1840s but nothing came of it. Government proposals in the 1860s to gazette a reserve got a chilly reception from squatters wanting to develop the island. Yet Fuller began his Fraser mission in 1870 attracting 30 people to his camp. He suffered white encroachment with timber-getters moving in, supplying blacks with alcohol. Fuller was a frustrated man on a mission and his inability to convert at Fraser Island, was mirrored by later failures at Lake Weyba, Hinchinbrook Island and Bellenden Plains (near Tully).

Frank Bridgman had better luck with the first secular reserve at Mackay in 1871. Bridgman was a southern grazier who brought sheep to the Isaac region. Initially he supported the native police’s brutal tactics to “disperse” blacks from his property near Fort Cooper barracks. Disperse was a euphemism. Judith Wright‘s grandfather Albert wrote in his diary in 1868 that “about 60 Blacks were shot at Grosvenor Downs last week”.

Mackay squatters sent a letter to colonial secretary Arthur Palmer, another Mackay hinterland squatter, asking for more protection “against the numbers and increasing audacity of the Blacks”. Bridgman believed a reserve of cheap Aboriginal workers might be useful in the sparsely populated north, writing “labour being valuable, there will be less wish to have them shot down.” In 1870 he asked Palmer for land in country too poor for white farmers, recommending scrubby land near Homebush Lagoon be gazetted for Aboriginal people. The land commissioner approved the request in 1871 and within two years Bridgman established the Association for the Employment and Protection of Aborigines in Mackay. The Association wanted low paid indigenous workers to replace indentured South Sea labour under attack in parliament. Bridgman hoped to use them on his sugar plantation.

By March 1873 over 200 Aborigines moved onto Bridgman’s reserve at Gooneenberry. Palmer was now premier and his government established a commission under public servant William Drew to see if the Mackay scheme could work across the colony. The commissioners came north and spoke to squatters (but not to indigenous people). Bridgman told them Aboriginal people were reliable employees. In their May 1874 report, the Drew Commission admitted a system of reserves and protectors would be expensive. It argued Queensland was only profitable from the lease and sale of crown lands “which the Aborigines originally occupied”. But Palmer was now out of power and new premier Arthur Macalister ignored the report.

What forced Macalister’s hand was an attempted murder. When Native Police shot a blackman at Cooktown it made the Sydney papers, catching the attention of Lord Carnarvon, Secretary of State for the Colonies. Carnarvon requested an explanation from the Marquis of Normanby, the governor of Queensland. Normanby rejected allegations of atrocities and argued Aboriginal lives were improved by white settlement. But London interest was embarrassing and unwanted. Normanby and Macalister re-instituted the Drew Commission to implement its suggestions. The Brisbane Courier said this was warranted but defended native police practices on the wild north frontier. “If the aborigines were more civilised than they are, we should either make treaties with them, or we should be at open war with them,” it said.

Queensland’s government opted to buy more time. In 1876 new Governor William Cairns instituted another commission under Anglican Bishop of Brisbane Mathew Hale with four other commissioners. Like the Drew Commission it was stacked with squatter sympathisers including explorers Gregory and Landsborough who saw the destruction of Aboriginal society as an inevitable consequence of Christian civilisation.

The Hale Commission was authorised to “inquire into and investigate the condition of Aboriginal inhabitants of Queensland and to report on the best means to legislate or otherwise improve their condition”. They established a reserve under Tom Petrie at Bribie Island. Petrie used his knowledge of Aboriginal languages to get them to work. Initial reports were favourable. Petrie suggested Brisbane blacks should live at the reserve. But Petrie didn’t stay long and his replacement Father Duncan McNab was a zealot with little empathy for Aboriginals.

McNab had a roving commission from the Catholic Church to convert Aboriginal people as long as it did not cost the church money. He had to fend for himself and applied to take over the Bribie mission when Petrie left. But McNab could not get Aboriginal people to work. Hale wrote to the police commissioner complaining blacks were allowed into Brisbane, a deterrent to keeping them on Bribie.

McNab suggested the place was the problem, not him. He recommended a new reserve on the Stanley River in the upper Brisbane Valley. Supported by new premier John Douglas, Durundur was opened in 1877 and a few blacks moved in. Local squatters thought it would supply cheap labour. The Commission also approved another settlement at Mackay near Cape Hillsborough but this idea lapsed due to lack of government funds. The commission appointed Bridgman as its northern coastal districts agent. He suggested new reserves including one at Palm Island. Palms would eventually become Queensland’s most infamous gulag of the 20th century.

Early efforts of building concentration camps at Mackay, Fraser and Durundur all failed. McNab was impatient, wanting to immediately cure the Aboriginal people of pagan ways while funding dried up from Brisbane. But the Drew and Hale Commissions asked an important question that would not go away: did the Aboriginal people have rights to the land as prior occupants?

See part 6.

See also, part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

That Unhappy Race Part 4: Gideon Lang

Cullin-la-Ringo station, Qld c 1875.

On July 12 1865, Victorian squatter Gideon Lang stood up in St George’s Hall in Melbourne and delivered a lecture on a pamphlet he called The Aborigines of Australia. Lang’s account was the most detailed yet by a settler on Aboriginal people in eastern Australia.

Gideon Scott Lang was a Scot who moved to Melbourne as a young man following two older brothers. At Buninyong he joined his brothers in a farming venture where they considered how to deal with Aboriginal people on their run. The Langs found a peaceful solution with an agreement to feed them if they didn’t attack their stock. The Langs were successful and Gideon branched northwards to the Riverina before he visited the Darling Downs looking for selections. He was elected MP for Liverpool Plains and Gwydir in 1856 and served on the 1856 NSW Inquiry into Aboriginal conditions. By 1865 he was a director of a Melbourne bank and influential in Victoria.

Lang admitted he wasn’t a “blind partisan” for Aboriginal people having taken part in an attack against them in his squatting days. Lang said had anyone died in that attack he would have considered himself a murderer. The first half of his pamphlet deals with his own experiences in the south and solutions for co-existence with Aboriginal people.

The second half of the pamphlet was looked on with alarm in Brisbane: it was a direct attack on the Queensland squatters, their government and their native police.  Following revenge massacres for the deaths of white settlers at Cullin-la-Ringo four years earlier, Lang said frontier issues were caused by the refusal to recognise of Aboriginal society, deprivation of hunting grounds and the lack of government oversight. Lang said it led to atrocious cruelties on both sides, particularly in Queensland where it was the “rule and custom to arrange the black question by killing them off.”

Lang said he held these beliefs for 10 years but had delayed publication of his pamphlet until he found proof of massacres. That proof, he said, had now emerged. In May 1865 Aboriginal people had killed Native Police lieutenant Cecil Hill on the lower Dawson. His death hardened attitudes against the blacks, expressed by a letter writer to the Brisbane Courier: “These incorrigible rogues are becoming unbearable, and required a regular dressing down. Ordinary morality can only be driven into their obtuse skulls by leaden lessons.”

Officials were more circumspect and described revenge attacks for Hill’s death as “collisions” in the official record. These collisions, said Lang, were group punishment on large numbers of blacks. He suggested a new “chief curator” of Aborigines, with a police commissioner’s powers, to punish frontier outrages by white and black. The curator would have power to negotiate the use of waterholes with local groups before issuing pastoral land licences, and stations could hire local blacks who would receive food, blankets, tomahawks and tobacco.

Lang optimistically believed that within two years black and white would live amicably together. But white Queensland squatters were apoplectic at being told how to run their business by an uppity southerner. Queensland MP and squatter Gordon Sandeman rejected claims of atrocities as “sensational” and said Lang had no experience of Queensland. He described the native police as a “defensive force” and asked why Lang did not make his opposition known in the 1856 NSW inquiry when still in parliament. Sandeman said the most humane solution was to remove Aboriginal people from squatters’ runs, though he did not say where they might otherwise go.

Archibald Meston later took Lang’s ideas for his Proposed System in 1895 including the idea of chief curator, which Meston called “protector”. But whereas Meston’s plan was coercive, Lang offered Aboriginal people a choice to take part. In the short term the plan came to nothing. There was temporary relief from colonisation due to an economic crisis in 1866 and the frontier stalled.

In the late 1860s, a new threat emerged. Payable gold on the Mary River near Gympie, the Cape River near Bowen, and Ravenswood near Townsville, brought thousands of miners to Queensland. There were finds at Etheridge River near Georgetown and Charters Towers and the rush continued to the Cape at Palmer River, invading rugged lands that were too forbidding for pastoralists.

As one settler said, the blacks no longer knew where to go out of the way of white people. “No localities they might keep to themselves had been pointed out to them and no system of treatment of them had been laid down,” wrote another. The government looked helpless as blacks drifted to makeshift camps outside new white towns where they were unwelcome.

In 1872 the London-based Aboriginal Protection Society asked Queensland’s third governor the Marquis of Normanby to appoint an unpaid board to look into the Aboriginal problem. New premier Arthur Palmer was unenthusiastic thinking the inquiry’s expenses would cripple treasury. However Normanby got his way. He persuaded Palmer to avoid embarrassing inquiries from London about South Pacific Islander “blackbirding” indentured labour, which Queensland’s sugar industry relied on. The government’s lack of support meant the inquiry was doomed to fail but it had lasting implications.

See part 5 here.

See also, part 1, part 2 and part 3.

That Unhappy Race Part 3: The Squatters’ Inquiry

In 1861 the new Queensland Government held its first Inquiry into Aboriginal affairs. It would not be its last. Among the white “indiscretions” it examined was the killing of five Aboriginal people at Fassifern by Native Police lieutenant Frederick Wheeler. Wheeler was one of many white young men who believed their role was to eliminate all black people. In Fassifern there had been reports of Indigenous people killing settlers’ stock. Without bothering to establish who was responsible, Lt Wheeler shot and killed four men and one woman. He would have got away with murder but for the fact one of the dead worked for local squatter, Ipswich magistrate and MP, Henry Challinor.

The 1861 Queensland Legislative Assembly Select Committee merely issued a slap on Wheeler’s wrists despite reports of other killings in the Logan district. They said he acted with “indiscretion” but because he was a “most valuable and zealous officer” his punishment should just be removal to another area. Wheeler moved to Central Queensland and continued his reign of terror on blacks. It was not until 1876 he was charged in Rockhampton with the death of a black youth. Wheeler fled Australia rather than face justice.

The 1861 Inquiry followed a similar trajectory to inquiries in NSW in 1856 and 1858. All looked at the problem with white eyes and none addressed the causes of the violence on the frontier. The squatters’ parliament in Brisbane thought it was an inevitable consequence of colonisation and believed only a military-style native police force could solve the problem.

The 1861 recommendations were a masterclass of administrative action that addressed processes rather than causes. It ordered the native police appoint cadets, troopers should be stationed away from towns to avoid temptations of alcohol, they should be recruited from areas far from where they would serve, officers would provide monthly reports, and required a new simpler means of keeping accounts.

The Inquiry decided that despite “misguided” officers like Wheeler the native police had to stay. The Queensland “myalls” (wild blacks) could not adjust to civilisation. The Inquiry noted “all attempts to Christianise or educate the Aborigines of Australia have hitherto proved abortive”. They said Aboriginal people were cannibals beyond redemption who had “no idea of a future state”, and were “sunk in the lowest depths of barbarism”. The Inquiry offered no suggestions how to improve their situation.

The policy of Aboriginal expulsion from their lands was allowed to continue. Challinor, the man who exposed Wheeler, told the Inquiry that Aborigines should be allowed to hunt game in their own country. He also supported the Christian mission of William Ridley who recommended co-existence. But Aboriginal people roaming wild among the cattle did not suit squatter interests.

In 1837 Colonial Secretary Glenelg told the Australian colonies the Aborigines should be treated as British subjects. But in 1861 Queensland decided this rule did not apply beyond the frontier. Rare voices like Challinor advocated for Aboriginal protectors in each district to arbitrate issues between black and white. But with Aboriginal testimony not allowed in Queensland courts until 1884 their side of the argument was not heard.

They weren’t heard from in the 1861 Inquiry either and white voices were not supportive. Queensland’s first Surveyor-General Augustus Gregory said the native police was popular on the frontier and necessary for the safety of the colony. Even Aboriginal sympathiser Tom Petrie, who spoke Indigenous languages, said native police had a beneficial role and a white-only force would be “inefficient”. Two missionaries from Zion’s Hill, Johann Zillman and Augustus Rode, admitted they had made no conversions and agreed the native police kept the black population in a state of fear.

The overwhelming view of Queensland’s parliament was either that there was no problem, or if there was, it would solve itself. With this sanguine view the government withdrew from Aboriginal affairs to weightier matters: how to make more money for the squatters.

Those like Challinor that saw the problem, were mostly driven by Christian concerns. The squatters contemptuously called them the Church Party and considered them well-meaning fools with no idea of life on the frontier. Ridley was now a journalist in Sydney using newspapers to promote his ideas. He said missions in Wellington Valley (NSW) and Poonindie (SA) showed Aboriginal people were capable of “social and spiritual improvement”. He believed successful missions must attract Aboriginal people in large numbers. They should not be drilled in European ways but learn bushcraft through hunting and other traditional pursuits. School should be taught in English but hours should be short and the missions should be far from the temptations of towns and their “vile passions”.

Station manager J.C. White, wrote a similar letter to the government about the “pressing” need to find new lands for Aboriginal people. White said station owners forbade them from crossing their runs to hunt kangaroos in case they set fire to the grass. Some resorted to killing cattle, increasing the likelihood of conflict. White said Aboriginal people were not bloodthirsty or cruel but “kindly disposed, hospitable and social, intelligent and improvable”. He suggested protectorates and depots where they could receive food rations and negotiate for employment on stations. He also suggested the native police should be abolished except on “extreme frontiers”. Governor Bowen was impressed by White’s letter and authorised land grants to persons or institutions that might establish Indigenous missions and industrial schools.

When Catholic priest W.J. Larkin offered his services of educating Aborigines in the Roma district, he too got support from the government keen to keep London’s Exeter Hall liberals onside. But a change of government brought a change of attitude. Queensland poured money into the expansion of the railways rather than improving the lives of Aboriginal people. The ideas that germinated in the work of Ridley, Challinor, Petrie, White and Larkin would eventually coalesce in Archibald Meston’s 1895 “Proposed System”.

Next: Part 4

See Part 1 and Part 2

A trip to Coochiemudlo Island

For the Quandamooka people, the islands of Moreton Bay were rich hunting grounds. They could roast water lily bulbs and the roots of ferns, pick pandanus fruit, and hunt birds, reptiles, bats, bandicoots and koalas. They could hunt or net dugong, dolphin, and turtle, and harvest a wide range of fish and shellfish. One small island in particular lay tantalisingly close to the mainland which they named for its distinctive iron-coloured cliffs: “kutchi mudlo” (red stone).

Stones on the island showed they traded with people as far inland as Rosewood, west of Ipswich. The Quandamooka used ochre from the soft red rock to decorate their bodies and shields. They told Dreamtime stories that the red was the blood of a dolphin speared by a sparrow-hawk.

Coastal Aboriginal people lived in blissful ignorance of a dangerous world beyond. Captain Cook named Moreton Bay on his trip north in 1770 but did not explore it. Matthew Flinders explored the bay in great detail aboard the Norfolk in July 1799. He landed on what is now Norfolk Beach, Coochiemudlo on July 19. Next month on Sunday, July 19 there will be the annual recreation of that landing. Flinders assumed the Pumicestone Passage was a river and failed to spot the opening of the Brisbane River.

In 1823 cedar-lumberers Thomas Pamphlett and John Finnegan were wrecked on Bribie Island and survived with the help of friendly Aborigines. Pamphlett and Finnegan were rescued in November 1823 by Surveyor-General John Oxley, on a voyage from Sydney to find a site for a new northern colony. The two men showed Oxley the mouth of the Brisbane River, a quarter of a century after Flinders missed it. In 1824 Oxley’s recommendation that a convict settlement be established at Moreton Bay was implemented.

When the colony of Queensland was declared in 1859, bullock teams swum from the mainland to Coochiemudlo to drag felled trees to the sea. Coochiemudlo was used for oyster farming in the 1880s by the Moreton Bay Oyster Company until ravaged by the marine mud worm at the turn of the century. The islands also became popular as a recreation resort for wealthy Brisbanites, and tourist steamers plied the Bay.

In 1887, the western half of Coochiemudlo was subdivided into one acre lots which owners turned into market gardens producing bananas, passion fruit, grapes, paw paw, pineapples, tomatoes, vegetables and flowers. Despite an auction of 90 lots of crown land in 1888 there was initially little interest from anyone settling on the island. The earliest residents were father and son Henry and Norman Wright who camped there for four years amid the sandflies and mosquitoes before leaving “this god forsaken place” about 1900.

The unoccupied land was exploited for timber and cattle grazing. After the First World War two injured veterans Doug Morton and Eric Gordon started to share-farm on the island. Gordon did not stay long but Morton, who survived Gallipoli and the Somme, found he could survive Coochiemudlo too, and lived there for 40 years.

In 1921 he married Mary Colburn from a farming family at Victoria Point. She was the only woman on the island for the next 12 years. Doug and Mary grew commercial crops and flowers, and cultivated a custard apple they named Island Gem. Doug built jetties and developed the tourist industry. Morton’s Steps on the west of the island are named for him. The Mortons left Coochiemudlo in 1966, when they felt it had become too crowded.

By then the farming era was over. Alfred Grant developed the eastern half of the island in the 1950s. Richard Marsh and Company also subdivided the north and west of the island into tiny allotments for small holiday cottages. Sales stagnated in the 1960s and only 20 people lived permanently on Coochiemudlo in 1970.

A regular ferry service in the 1970s and then a vehicular barge in 1987 made the island more attractive to commuters and retirees and permanent residency increased. The foreshore was kept as a reserve keeping the pristine look from the sea.

Despite living in Brisbane for 17 years, I’d never been to the island until this week. A return 10-minute trip on the ferry from Victoria Point cost just $8 and the island felt a million miles from anywhere despite being less than 40km from the centre of Brisbane.

The walk around the foreshore (a mixture of beach front and mangrove) took me under two hours. There are only a handful of stores and cafes and they congregate around the jetty. There is supposed to be bicycle hire on the island but I did not see any evidence of that when I was there. Perhaps they only advertise on weekends. In any case, the island is ideal for walkers and nowhere is far from anyplace else on Coochie. It’s a beautiful and relaxing part of south-east Queensland, and I’ll be back – though I’m not sure I’ll be there on July 19 for the pageantry of Matthew Flinders day. What the Quandamooka make of that day I do not know, but I suspect that like Australia Day, they don’t look on it with fondness.

That Unhappy Race Part 2 – Queensland’s new and violent frontier

Bora ring, Banyo, Qld (an initiation site for young men). Photo: author’s collection.

When the economic depression of the early 1840s ended, there was a rush to expand into known parts of Australia. New South Wales was settled as far west as the climate would allow and many followed the Darling River tributaries north into Queensland. Explorer Ludwig Leichhardt set off north from the Darling Downs in 1844 and settlers quickly followed him up the Dawson River and along the coast to Rockhampton. Newly wealthy gold profiteers acquired land in the north.

Their cattle and sheep fouled Aboriginal waterways and there was inevitable conflict. As tit-for-tat killing escalated, whites saw it as a life or death struggle and formed punitive parties aimed “to show the blacks a lesson”. The government ignored the growing violence on the frontier. Meanwhile the missionaries that followed the Lutherans were unsuccessful. Undaunted, former Moreton Bay missionary William Ridley went on a 450-mile mission of southern Queensland to understand the similarity of Aboriginal languages and he was accepted wherever he went. Ridley saw how cattle crowded Aboriginal people off their country, “cut off from four-fifths of their usual supply of food”.

In 1857 eight members of the Fraser family were killed by Aboriginal people at Hornet Bank Station on the Dawson. Frontier newspapers called for an overwhelming response and at least 300 Aborigines were killed in the following 18 months. The Brisbane Parliament established in 1860 escalated action – with disastrous consequences for Indigenous people.

The new Queensland Government started life broke. Even the seven-and-a-half pennies inherited in Treasury were stolen after a few days. The Sydney government, unhappy with Queensland’s new status, billed it for ₤20,000 of work carried out before separation in 1859. Ridley gave testimony to the new parliament’s 1861 Select Committee on Aborigines that the only way they could co-exist with pastoralists was if the government cordoned off land to the natives. But new governor George Bowen needed to raise money quickly by borrowing against future earnings in land sales. Bowen rushed through the 1860 Land Act offering attractive terms on one-year leases of 100-square-mile runs. The terms insisted the runs be stocked to one-quarter capacity ahead of a second 14-year lease.

The terms suited the Pure Merinos, the Darling Downs squatters. They dominated Queensland’s first parliament (NSW’s universal male suffrage was not extended north of the border until the 1880s). By 1861 gold-financed land-hungry speculators rushed north and west into the Kennedy, Maranoa, Warrego, Comet and Barcoo districts. Aboriginal people resisted but were overwhelmed by native police.

A rare voice of objection was former officer of native police, Frederick Walker. Walker was an English emigrant who worked on central NSW properties before forming a semi-official troop to protect properties in Port Phillip. His success took him into the Riverina, and then north into the Macintyre and Condamine districts. But Walker developed a conscience saying squatters and Aboriginal had reciprocal rights. Though he continued to crush Aboriginal resistance moving to the Wide Bay in 1852, squatters didn’t like his plain-talking nor the levy they paid to support his troop and used his heavy drinking as an excuse to remove him in 1854. When the native police force halved, Aboriginal attacks increased. Walker continue to mount a private force until ordered to disband by the government in 1859.

The Hornet Bank massacre destroyed trust between black and white and the native police had orders to “disperse any large assemblages of Blacks”. Walker complained to the government of harsh treatment by troopers and in some cases, murder. He hoped to stop this “infernal system” which had “cast a deep stain on the honour of this Colony”. While Walker believed Aboriginal people were less civilised than the British, he thought them deserving of human justice. He encouraged Aboriginal labour at his Bauhinia property and those of his neighbours. Unhappy with the lack of concern in Queensland’s parliament, Walker sent letters to the Times in London about “deliberate murder” on the frontier. Walker unwittingly facilitated the further invasion of Aboriginal lands during his search for the missing explorers Burke and Wills opening up the Plains of Promise in the Carpentaria and the rich Burdekin River valleys.

Any hope he might be taken seriously disappeared after another massacre of whites in 1861 at Cullin-la-Ringo near today’s Emerald. This second massacre seemed to prove Aboriginal treachery in white eyes and confirmed the Queensland Government in its decision to continue with native police. The “live and let live” policy promoted by William Ridley and Frederick Walker was discredited.

See part 3 here.

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See part 1 here.

“That unhappy race”: A history of Queensland’s Indigenous relations (part 1)

Of all pre-Federation colonies, Queensland produced the most comprehensive legislation to deal with Aboriginal affairs. But the powerful 1897 Queensland Act was deeply flawed and had disastrous consequences for the state’s indigenous population in the 20th century, despite well-meaning beginnings. The Act was the brainchild of Archibald Meston who wrote to Colonial Secretary Horace Tozer in 1895 about his “carefully submitted plan for the improvement and preservation from extinction of that unhappy race.”

As Gordon Reid wrote in his book That Unhappy Race it was the first proposal for the preservation (as opposed to protection) of Aboriginal people since colonisation began. Reid’s book is not a study of Aboriginal people, but is concerned with colonial perceptions of a social problem involving Aborigines. Given the usual attitude was to brush “that unhappy race” under the carpet in the hope of speedy extinction, Reid helps us understand 19th century history in the colony where Aboriginal people were most numerous.

The bill passed by Queensland’s Parliament on December 10, 1897 was the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act. Its objectives were to ensure better treatment of Aboriginal people in white employment, to remove the unemployed to exclusive reserves, and restrict supply of alcohol and opium. The Act applied to all Queensland Indigenous people and those who lived with them. A white “protector” was the only non-Indigenous person allowed on the reserve. Authorities issued 12-month permits to employers who wanted to use Indigenous or “half-caste” labour. Indigenous people could not move or be moved from one district to another without the protector’s permission. The protector had full rights over Indigenous people at the reserve including imprisonment for a wide range of offences. Aboriginal rites and customs were banned.

The law was the most comprehensive response to the problem of white and Indigenous co-existence in Australia. The British government optimistically obliged settlers to avoid bloodshed with native people, which proved impossible – or was at least conveniently ignored – on the expanding frontier. Southern colonies set up aboriginal protectorates in the mid 19th century but they proved ineffective against encroaching pastoralism. Towards the end of the century, most administrations had abandoned Indigenous policy – the assumption was Indigenous people were becoming extinct or “out of sight and out of mind”. But Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people remained in large numbers in Queensland despite large scale killings by pastoralists and native police and the fear of miscegenation and opium addiction convinced the government to act. Queensland’s squatter-dominated parliament also saw advantages in a cheap labour pool of Aboriginal workers with few rights.

European meddling in Queensland Indigenous affairs began with the Moreton Bay penal colony (1824-1838) when Lutheran missionaries and the colony’s chaplain tried to convert natives. In his “Proposed System” of 1895, Meston concluded the early missionaries were unsuccessful. “It is hardly likely that Moreton Bay wild blacks of that period would have had any reverence for white men whose physique would bear no comparison with their own,” Meston wrote. By 1828 the colony housed 800 prisoners and 200 soldiers, surrounded by four tribal groups, some hostile. Pioneering churchman John Dunmore Lang hired 10 German evangelical Lutherans for a mission north of the penal settlement at Zion Hill, Nundah with access to government rations. Aboriginal people visited the mission to obtain food in good times but stayed away when crops failed as they did in 1840. Life remained difficult at Zion Hill and there were no conversions, despite missions to Toorbul and other outposts.

Settlers were banned from Moreton Bay until the early 1840s when Patrick Leslie moved up from New England to establish a sheep run on the Condamine. Others followed, putting pressure on the government to open up the colony for settlement. The penal settlement was closed down in 1842 and when the wool price fell, the government ended support for the mission.

Zion Hill was abandoned by 1850 and a new mission sprung up at Caboolture. The anti-Irish Lang, convinced by his vision of a Protestant-only colony, sent another missionary north, William Ridley, but the Catholic Church also had designs on Moreton Bay sending four priests to a short-lived mission on Stradbroke Island in 1843. Neither Protestant nor Catholic had much success. Relations between black and white deteriorated. Settlers believed Aboriginal people were irredeemable and behaved accordingly, most notoriously poisoning Aboriginal people at a Kilcoy station with strychnine-laced flour. By the end of the 1840s, the problem was increasingly solved by force.

See part 2 here.