|
COPYRIGHT 2005 Mulini Press
In November 2004 I was driving back to Canberra with Victor Crittenden after both of us had given papers at a commemoration of the noted naturalist and pioneer novelist, Louisa Atkinson (1834-1872), at the Mt Tomah Botanic Gardens in the Blue Mountains. Victor's friends and acquaintances will not be surprised to read that talk turned to nineteenth-century literature. In particular we talked about a Mulini Press publication, Fifty Years Ago: An Australian Tale by Charles de Boos (1). I knew only vaguely of the existence of this book so Victor told me the story. At first I was only mildly interested as he recounted the plot of the novel, published in 1867, in which the author looks back, as the title states, to colonial life in former days. But then Victor came to a sudden, startling incident in which three Aborigines attack an isolated homestead while the husband is away, kill the mother and three youngest children and maim the eldest son and leave him for dead. The father, George Maxwell, returns to find his massacred family. After recovering his wounded but still breathing son from the shallow grave where the Aborigines had buried him, he and his son vow vengeance on the murderers. Not only will he kill them but, in a ritualistic response to the dreadful deed, he will kill one on each anniversary of the massacre. This gruesome vow shapes the rest of this long novel as Maxwell saves each of the Aborigines from death several times so that the killings tan take place on an anniversary. Each ritualistic killing involves severing the right hand of the victim and nailing it to a tree. Each of the three books that follows: 'The First Black Hand', 'The Second Black Hand', 'The Third Black Hand', culminates in the death of one of the three assassins (2).
As I listened to this fictional story I was struck by similarities to the massacre of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank station in 1857. I had written about this event and had studied it in some detail when I was researching my biography of Rosa Praed (1851-1935)(3), the nineteenth-century Queensland-born novelist who had not only written about Hornet Bank in her factual and fictional writing but whose father, Queensland pioneer squatter and politician, Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior, was a major organiser of the subsequent retaliation.
The Hornet Bank massacre of eleven Europeans, including eight members of the Fraser family, took place about dawn on 27 October 1857 at a station on the upper Dawson River in central Queensland. Squatters had begun to occupy this country from 1847 following Ludwig Leichhardt's 1844-45 journey through the area on his expedition to find an overland route to Port Essington on the north coast of Australia. The first European occupant of Hornet Bank station, Andrew Scott, arrived in the early 1850s. In 1854 he leased the station to Scottish-born John Fraser who took his wife, Martha, and a large family ranging in age from young children to the early twenties, to live in this isolated area near the edge of European settlement. Two years later John Fraser died of dysentery while on a droving trip to Ipswich and his eldest son, William, then aged 23, took over management of the station in collaboration with the lessee, Andrew Scott(4).
The stations on the Dawson River were on the land of the Yiman people who bitterly resented the invasion of the European settlers with their flocks of sheep and herds of cattle while, to the Europeans, the Yiman were an impediment to the expansion of their pastoral empires. Stories circulated of Aboriginal people murdered by poisoning--on one station they were given a Christmas pudding laced with strychnine--and of the abduction and rape of Aboriginal women. Cruelty towards the Yiman people inflamed their already overwhelming sense of injustice at being forced off the land that had been theirs back to the broken, scrubby gorge country and they made the country dangerous for the European invaders. Shepherds in boundary huts were attacked and killed and settlers feared leaving their wives and children unprotected. At Isla station on the Dawson,...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
