1793 to 1795 1794 1795: overview
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- August 1794
- Lieut.-Governor Grose to the Right Hon Henry Dundas
May 1794May 1794: Collins‘Some natives, who had observed the increasing number of the settlers on the banks of the Hawkesbury, and had learned that we were solicitous to discover other fresh-water rivers, for the purpose of forming settlements, assured us, that at no very great distance from Botany Bay, there was a river of fresh water which ran into the sea. As very little of the coast to the southward was known, it was determined to send a small party in that direction, with provisions for a few days, it not being improbable that, in exploring the country, a river might be found which had hitherto escaped the observation of ships running along the coast. Two people of sufficient judgement and discretion for the purpose being found among the military, they set off from the south shore of Botany Bay on the 14th, well armed, and furnished with provisions for a week. They were accompanied by a young man, a native, as a guide, who professed a knowledge of the country, and named the place where the fresh water would be found to run. Great expectations were formed of this excursion, from the confidence with which the native repeatedly asserted the existence of a fresh-water river; on the 20th, however, the party returned, with an account, that the native had soon walked beyond his own knowledge of the country, and trusted them to bring him safe back; that having penetrated about twenty miles to the southward of Botany Bay, they came to a large inlet of the sea, which formed a small harbour; the head of this they rounded, without discovering any river of fresh water near it. The country they described as high and rocky in the neighbourhood of the harbour, which, on afterwards looking into the chart, was supposed to be somewhere about Red Point. The native returned with the soldiers as cheerfully and as well pleased as if he had led them to the banks of the first river in the world.’71 August 1794What effect the opening of the road from Rose Hill to the Hawkesbury in August 1794 had on the escalation of violence in the following months is unclear. It is reasonable to assume that it reassured one group and alarmed the other. It should be seen as a factor in the escalation of violence. Lieut.-Governor Grose to the Right Hon Henry Dundas31st August 1794 ‘The settlers placed on the banks of the Hawkesbury, being seventy in number, are doing exceedingly well. The ground they have already in cultivation has all the bearing better wheat than has yet been grown in the colony. I have caused a very good road to be made from Sydney to the banks of the Hawkesbury, by the which we discover the distance from this place by land is much less than was expected. An officer who is by no means considered as being particularly active undertook for a trifling wager to walk there from Sydney in nine hours, and with great ease to himself performed a journey in eight hours and two minutes which formerly required an exertion of some days to accomplish.’72 In his account of the violent confrontations on the Hawkesbury from September 1794 to February 1795 David Collins is at his circumspect best in presenting the events as being isolated and unrelated. He had several reasons for this. He wanted to avoid openly criticizing Captain Macarthur who was the superintendent of the Parramatta district at the time and had some involvement in the events. He did not want the authorities at home forming an opinion that affairs in the colony were being mismanaged. As well, by attributing the activities of a small number of settlers to the whole, Collins was able to maintain his fiction about the immorality of the Hawkesbury settlers in general. In September 1794 David Collins recorded an attack in which a Hawkesbury settler and his servant were wounded. 73 It was followed in the same month by another attack in which a settler’s hut was plundered and approximately six to eight Aboriginal people were killed in a reprisal raid. Collins attributed the attacks and the subsequent reprisal to the taking and keeping of Aboriginal children.74 Jan Barkley-Jack in her work Hawkesbury Settlement Revealed has linked these apparently disparate elements together. While the events as described by Collins are probably correct, Collins, for his own reasons, did not make clear until his entry for February 1795, that the Aboriginal attack on Shadrack and Akers, the settler and his servant, were in any way linked to the death of a Aboriginal boy. Whether it was a case of mistaken identity and the real targets were Forrester, Doyle and Nixon is a moot point.75 David Collins created the impression that the events relating to the torture and murder of a Aboriginal boy took place in October 1794. A close reading of the text reveals that the murder took place in August, possibly September, but definitely not October. The most likely sequence of events is that settlers on the Argyle Reach took and kept at least one Aboriginal boy who they tortured and murdered in August 1794. Aboriginal warriors attacked and wounded Shadrack and Akers in September 1794, possibly in a case of mistaken identity. A second attack on a settler’s hut in the same month led to a reprisal raid in which six to eight Aboriginal people were killed and the Aboriginal people were driven away from the area. This interpretation is made possible by the journal of Richard Atkins who was a magistrate at the time. In his journal for 25th September 1794,76 Atkins wrote, “The settlers at the Hawkesbury have killed 6 of the Natives, since wh time they have not seen them. How far this is justifiable I cannot say. Atkins’ note of the 21st that unless we have rain soon the wheat will fail us” provides another reason for conflict. Drought appears to have exacerbated relations between Hawkesbury River Aboriginal people and the settlers. Collins’ account of the killing of the boy is divided into four parts in his book. Firstly he relayed verbal accounts of the torture and murder of a Aboriginal boy. Then he summarised an “examination” in which the chief witness claimed the boy had been shot to prevent him escaping to tell nearby threatening natives that there was only one gun on the farms. Collins then expressed his concern that “it was a tale invented to cover the true circumstance”. His suspicion of the truthfulness of the witnesses, and of the rigour of the examination, is contained in the sentence “No person appearing to contradict this account, it was admitted as a truth”. The fourth part of his account expresses a concern at the lawlessness of the settlers, which is an echo of Phillip’s earlier concern, and the need for “authority”. This is the closest he came to criticising the officer responsible for the examination, most likely Macarthur. Fortunately the details of the “examination” are contained in the Bench of Magistrates records of proceedings. They provide further insight into events on the Hawkesbury and how they have been recorded. It is only through these records that we learn the likely location of the murder and the names of some of the participants. The murder took place near or on the farms of Forrester and Doyle. These farms were on the edge of settlement, upstream from Windsor on the right bank of Argyle Reach. The names of Forrester and Doyle reoccur in the trial of five settlers for the murder of two Aboriginal boys in the same location in 1799. The examination was perfunctory and as it took place at Parramatta it was almost certainly carried out by Lieutenant Macarthur.77 Directory: docs docs -> Application for acem docs -> Observational Assessment of Teaching Practices Teaching Assessment Initiative Proposal Submitted to The Teachers for a New Era project docs -> Traditional British values docs -> From Warfighters to Crimefighters: The Origins of Domestic Police Militarization docs -> Borzoi Club of America Register of Merit Program I. What is a Register Of Merit docs -> Protecting the rights of the child in the context of migration docs -> United Nations E/C. 12/Esp/5 docs -> 9th May 1950 the schuman declaration docs -> Getting To Outcomes® in Services for Homeless Veterans 10 Steps for Achieving Accountability Download 327.81 Kb. Share with your friends:
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