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In the beginning
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No Mercy

No Mercy

(Picture borrowed from http://www.ccentre.wa.gov.au/html/1-2.html)

At Lake Mininup in the south there was a massacre in 1841. Historian WB Kimberley wrote :

"Into the remote places this party went, bent on killing without mercy... the black men were killed by the dozens and the corpses lined the routes of the avengers."

In the eyes of the imported law the land was "terra nullius" (meaning the land belonged to no-one). The law also said Aboriginal people were citizens; in fact they were slaves, refugees in their own land.

Many Europeans  deplored the slaughter but did little to change the situation. In some cases it was only the intervention of missionaries which stopped or slowed the murder.

Man of Insights

Lawyer George Fletcher Moore, the first Advocate General of the colony wrote about a Swan Valley leader  known as Yagan and tried to interpret a conversation :

"I regret that I could not understand him, but I conjectured from the tone and manner that the purport was this : "You came to our country; you have driven us from our haunts and disturbed us in our occupations. As we walk in our own country we are fired upon by the white men. Why should the white men treat us so?"

Returning Home

Yagan was later to be murdered by a teenage boy. The corpse was skinned and the head cut off. After being smoked it was sent to England. Yagan's head was buried in a cemetery in Liverpool with other museum relics dumped during the 1960s along with still born babies.

Aboriginal warrior's head back in Australia

Click on this link to read about the return of Yagan's head to Australia.

 

 

Despite many courageous stands by people like Sandamarra in the Kimberley who held up the theft of his people's lands through a long running guerilla campaign, by this century guns had triumphed over spears.

Historian, Professor Henry Reynolds estimates that across Australia 20,000 Aboriginal people were killed by Europeans. That doesn't include the thousands who died from introduced diseases like smallpox and influenza not previously known in Australia.