Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900

Index

List of Illustrations

Maps

Eastern Australia 1885 showing relevant places and features

Study area showing Northern Territory station boundaries 1885

Principal Aboriginal language groups prior to European contact

Northern section of study area and the Top End of the Territory 1885

Southern section of study area 1885

Tables

Northern Territory Gulf Cattle Stations, 1885.

Multiple Killings of Aboriginals

Illustrations

Dillon Cox

(courtesy Barry Cox)

Telegraph construction depot, Roper River

(courtesy State Library of South Australia, B 4635)

Harry Readford

(courtesy Diana Yuille)

Ernest Favenc

(courtesy Jan Goodwin)

Constable William Wiltshire

(reproduced from Pictorial History of Port Augusta, Rigby, 1914)

John Costello

(courtesy John Costello)

Mary Costello

(courtesy John Costello)

Nat Buchanan

(Gerald Terry Collection, courtesy Caroline Thornton)

D’arcy Uhr

(courtesy Peter Bridge)

Constable Michael Donegan

(courtesy South Australian Police History Unit)

Jack Watson

(courtesy Jan Cruickshank)

Inspector Paul Foelsche

(courtesy Northern Territory Library Spillett Collection, PH 0238/2188)

Borroloola police station

(courtesy Museum Victoria, W.B. Spencer Collection, 1267)

Lugger at Borroloola wharf

(courtesy Museum Victoria, W.B. Spencer Collection, 1153)

Borroloola store

(courtesy National Archives of Australia (ACT), A3, 14/2482)

Tattersalls Hotel

(courtesy National Library of Australia, Greenwood/Gilstrom Collection, VN 3117562)

Vaiben Solomon

(courtesy State Library of South Australia, B 3685)

August Lucanus

(reproduced from Kimberley Scenes, Hesperian Press, 1991)

Elsey homestead

(courtesy Historical Society of Katherine Inc., Jaensch Collection, 75.01)

John McLennan

(courtesy Historical Society of Katherine Inc., MacFarlane Collection, 88.073d)

Rakuwurlma (‘Vanderlin Jack’)

(courtesy Museum Victoria, W. B. Spencer Collection, 1954)

Yanyuwa woman

(courtesy Museum Victoria, W.B. Spencer Collection, 1505)

Yanyuwa rope maker

(courtesy Museum Victoria, W.B. Spencer Collection, 1412)

Marra and Yanyuwa males

(courtesy Museum Victoria, W.B. Spencer Collection, 1498)

McArthur River homestead

(courtesy Mitchell Library State Library of New South Wales, NCY 3-290)

Tanumbirini homestead

(courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, NCY 3-49)

Tom Lynott, Charley Havey and Charley Scrutton

(courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, NCY 3-291)

Charley Scrutton

(courtesy Perry Morey)

Harry Bathern

(courtesy Mona Rennie)

Harry Lanson

(courtesy Northern Territory Library, John Oxley Library Collection, PH 0171/0137)

Frank Hann

(courtesy Battye Library, 003123D)

Emily Creaghe

(courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PA 4043)

Wollogorang homestead

(courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, NCY 3-288)

Queensland Native Mounted Police

(courtesy Queensland Police Museum, PM 1194)

‘Police boys doing duty (lynch law)’ by Oscar

(from Oscar’s sketchbook, Colin MacKenzie Collection, courtesy National Museum of Australia)

‘Dispersing usual way. Some good shooting’ by Oscar

(from Oscar’s sketchbook, Colin MacKenzie Collection, courtesy National Museum of Australia)

‘Murderer hoppled to tree. Troopers despatching’ by Oscar

(from Oscar’s sketchbook, Colin MacKenzie Collection, courtesy National Museum of Australia)

Notes on Oscar’s sketches

Oscar was an Aboriginal from the Palmer River area in far north Queensland. In 1887 Augustus Glissan, a magistrate and the manager of Rocklands station in the Queensland Gulf country, asked the Native Police at Cooktown to obtain for him an Aboriginal youth. Later that year, when Native Police troopers were transferred from Cooktown to Turn Off Lagoon, travelling by steamer to Burketown, they brought Oscar with them. He was about nine or ten years of age, was unable to speak many words of English, and had never been on a horse. How he was obtained by the police is not recorded, but the likelihood is that he was either kidnapped or was the survivor of a massacre.

Glissan noticed Oscar’s talent for drawing and in about 1895 gave him a small, lined notebook and coloured pencils. The teenager drew forty everyday scenes from north Queensland and the Gulf country. Glissan prepared a list of captions for the sketches based on information from Oscar, and in a letter dated 30 March 1899 he described the list, saying: ‘this the boy gave me in his own way and I have put it as well as I can’. Nine of the sketches featured the Native Police. The captions for the three reproduced in this book are those of Glissan.

Taken as a whole, Oscar’s sketches contain a degree of detail which suggests he was an eyewitness to many of the events portrayed. His sketchbook, together with Glissan’s letter and the list of captions, are in the National Museum of Australia.¹

Preface

This book is a history of the most colourful and lawless part of Australia’s last frontier, from first contact to 1900, centred on the town of Borroloola in the Northern Territory. The Gulf Country was a vast region stretching from the Barkly Tableland to the Roper River, and from the Stuart Highway to the Queensland border and beyond (see Map 1). A justice of the peace in 1886 wrote ‘This town and district are in a state of terror for want of police protection’, and a government surveyor said the region was home to ‘all the scum of Northern Australia’.

Conflict began with the first overlanders in 1872. Ten years later, Elsey station was established and soon the entire district was taken up by pastoralists, dispossessing the Aboriginal population of more than 2,500 people. Now facing rogue station managers and stockmen, as well as the criminals and overlanders, the tribes fought back with increased urgency. The scene was set for one of the most disturbing chapters in Territory history. What followed is examined against a backdrop of tacit approval by the government in Adelaide, complicity by officials in Darwin and applause from the Territory press. The evidence has been drawn from government files, parliamentary papers and first-hand accounts by white participants, complemented by numerous detailed descriptions from Aboriginal people whose immediate families were directly involved.

My interest in Northern Territory history, and in Aboriginal people, dates back to the 1960s when I lived in Adelaide and began travelling extensively through the Flinders Ranges and the far north of South Australia. Often I would collect an older Adnyamathanha man named Howard Clark from the sheep station near Hawker where he worked, and listen as he told stories of the old days while we drove through his country in the northern Flinders, or sat around many campfires. A shy, gentle person, Howard taught me a great deal about the bush and his people, and took me to places unseen by tourists. But he wouldn’t join me on my trips further north and into the Territory, afraid the ‘wild blackfellas’, as he called them, would spear him.

Map 1. Eastern Australia 1885 showing relevant places and features.

I became intrigued by the colourful history of the Gulf country with its tiny town of Borroloola, and in 1974 made the first of many trips there, driving up from Canberra where I was then working. From the books of Ernestine Hill I discovered that among the handful of old white men living in the town in 1933 was a man named Charley Havey. My late maternal grandmother was a Havey, from South Australia’s mid-north, and the name was not a common one. It emerged eventually that Charley was the brother of my great-grandfather, Frank Havey, and had been in Borroloola since about 1906. In addition to his various small-scale business interests, Havey was the local magistrate and coroner for more than thirty years. Borroloola now had a family connection, and piecing together its obscure history would become a passion.

In addition to archival research, I interviewed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who had known Havey and the other old residents of the town. By the early 1990s a number of my informants had died and few were left who knew about the old days, so this occasional, part-time work became more urgent. In 1997 two Darwin historians, Professor David Garment and Dr Michelle Dewar, persuaded me to publish my modest material on Borroloola, which they believed was historically important. What I had was little more than biographies of the non-Aboriginal residents of the town and its immediate vicinity, from about 1900 to 1950 when Havey, one of the last of the old-timers, died. More interviews and research would be required, but I thought a simple, interesting little book could be produced fairly easily.

I was totally unprepared for both the quantity of archival material that existed and its disturbing content. In Havey’s court, as in other Local Courts throughout the Territory, and indeed in the Darwin Supreme Court, there was striking evidence of two laws: one for whites and another, much harsher one, for Aboriginals. More surprises lay ahead. Massacres appeared to have been widespread throughout the district during the frontier period, so a widening of the study area was needed to confirm whether this was so. The outcome was a series of incremental increases in the study area over the next six years, each one requiring the structure of the book to be altered.

By now the book had grown to the point where it had to be split into two, with the end of the frontier period, about 1900, as the logical dividing point. Frontier Justice is therefore a very different book to the one I intended to write.

Aboriginal people are warned that quotations in this book from newspapers and other contemporary material contain language which today is considered offensive. The photographs include images of Aboriginal persons who died more than fifty years ago, and the text contains the names of some who died more recently.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the very large number of people who have helped with this book in various ways. In particular I would like to thank Steve Johnston, Whylo McKinnon, John Bradley, Gordon Reid and Darrell Lewis for their very considerable assistance and patience over many years.

Others to whom I am greatly indebted include: Bruce Ah Won, Lenin Anderson, John Avery, Mick Baker, Frank Barrett, Peter Bridge, Bobbie Buchanan, David Carment, Alf Chambers, Barry Cox, Jack Cross, Margaret Dallwitz, Michelle Dewar, Raymond Evans, Samantha Farnsworth, Robert Foster, Roy Hammer, Bob Hill, Joyce Johnson, John Keighran, Margaret Kowald, Campbell Macknight, Dawn May, Pat McCarthy, George Menham, Peter Monteath, Perry Morey, Vern O’Brien, Allan Peters, Henry Reynolds, Jonathan Richards, Cecilia Sykala, Cheryl Taylor, Mavis Timothy, Helen Tolcher, Barbara Traine-Brown, Frank Uhr, Bill Wilson and Alexis Wright. The staff at University of Queensland Press have been particularly helpful, providing excellent cooperation and sound advice.

I wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Northern Territory Government, from whom I received a History Award in 1997.

Map 2. Study area showing Northern Territory station boundaries 1885.

1

Pioneers of the Coast Track

Famous in frontier literature and legend because it was so difficult and dangerous, and saw the biggest cattle drives in our history, the Coast Track went for a thousand kilometres from Turn Off Lagoon to Katherine (see Map 2). There were crocodile-infested river crossings, long stretches of deep sand, poor grasses and attacks by Aboriginals. Yet the vast cattle stations in the northern half of the Territory and the Kimberley, established during the pastoral boom of the early 1880s, were stocked almost entirely from the eastern colonies via this route. The numbers of cattle, horses and men involved were extraordinary. One contract alone, for Glencoe station, was for 20,000 cattle. By the end of 1885, when the stations were largely stocked and the flood of animals and men had subsided, more than 200,000 cattle had passed along this narrow track. Buchanan, Durack, Costello, Scrutton, Cahill, Weldon: the names of those who took part read like a ‘Who’s Who’ of our frontier heritage. Stores and shanties sprang up at the larger river crossings, those at the McArthur growing into the town of Borroloola. And then came the Kimberley gold rush of 1886 when prospectors in their hundreds followed in the tracks of the cattle. It was a momentous time in Australian history.

Watching in stunned disbelief were the Aboriginal peoples who had enjoyed quiet ownership of this land for thousands of years. Precious lagoons providing food and clean water were fouled by cattle; permanent living areas, fish traps and wildlife habitats were damaged or destroyed; and beasts bogged and died in the shrinking waterholes of the dry season, turning them into slimy swamps. The visitors were attacked, along with their horses and cattle, but spears, clubs and boomerangs were no match for the latest rifles, revolvers and shotguns. The enormous herds soon began spilling out from the stock route and occupying the countryside, the entire district having been leased to pastoralists as if it were vacant land. Sites of profound significance were desecrated by the strangers and their livestock, either inadvertently or deliberately. Now dispossessed, the original owners of the land were forced to live secretly, back in the hills and gullies. Resistance continued but was met with terrible reprisals. People were shot for the spearing of a single cow, and women and children were sometimes among the victims. By 1900 at least one tribe was close to extinction, soon to disappear completely, while others had been so severely depleted they would never recover. It was a momentous time in Aboriginal history.

The southern inland region of the Gulf of Carpentaria has been occupied by Aboriginal peoples for more than 35,000 years. When the first overlanders passed through in the early 1870s with cattle and horses, followed closely by prospectors heading for the goldfields north of Pine Creek, this land was owned by at least nineteen discrete language groups, or ‘tribes’ as they were usually called (see Map 3). The Northern Territory portion of the district comprised some 223,600 square kilometres, or 17 per cent of the Territory.

The country of each ‘tribe’ is divided into a number of estates, and for each estate there are two distinct groups of people, commonly known as ‘owners’ and ‘managers’. In the Yanyuwa language and certain others in the Gulf, these are called ngimarringki and jungkayi respectively, although the spelling differs between languages. Every person, male and female, is both an ‘owner’ for their father’s country and a ‘manager’ for their mother’s. The former have primary spiritual responsibility for protecting the estate, and the latter organise ceremonies, decide whether outsiders may enter the estate, and perform a wide range of other duties.¹ Where damage to a sacred site has occurred, the owners are held accountable and must pay compensation to the managers, regardless of whether they were powerless to intervene. In the event of serious damage or disturbance to a site of major importance, the owners would find themselves in grave trouble. In extreme cases the penalty they faced was death. These were exceedingly serious matters, as they are today, and directly influenced the way in which Aboriginal peoples reacted to European settlement and to perceived instances of environmental damage.²

Map 3. Principal Aboriginal language groups prior to European contact.

While it is beyond the scope of this book to describe fully the complex system of complementary rights and responsibilities of owners and managers, it is important to understand that both groups suffer very real distress in the event of an estate or its sites being physically damaged or compromised in any way. Similar distress follows the cutting down of certain trees that are sacred, or the death of certain protected species of animals, birds, reptiles and marine life associated with a particular tract of country.³

Europeans were generally unaware of the fundamental and profound importance of land to Aboriginal peoples. It is this complex spiritual link with the land, and indeed with the entire natural environment of their ‘country’, which gives each Aboriginal person their sense of identity and which lies at the heart of their spiritual beliefs. In the case of coastal peoples, ‘country’ includes the marine environment.

A great many important sites were damaged by Europeans unwittingly, for example by building a house or stockyard on or too close to a very important place, or through the soil at such a place being disturbed in some way. There was no communication between early station managers and Aboriginal people about the location of culturally important sites. The land was simply occupied as if it were terra nullius and severe punishment was meted out to any Aboriginal who resisted. So the Aboriginal owners found themselves in an impossible situation: while obliged by the strict laws of their own society to protect and care for the land, they were liable to be hunted down and shot for doing so by white strangers who seemed to observe no laws. These newcomers raped and killed women and children, showed contempt for the natural environment, and disturbed log coffins of the dead, among other things.⁴

Seemingly natural disasters such as cyclones and floods, or even epidemics, were often thought to be the result of human misbehaviour in connection with an Aboriginal site. For example, an influenza epidemic in 1968–69 was believed by the older Yanyuwa to be a consequence of cattle disturbing a sickness site on Bing Bong station, north of Borroloola, which the old people believed could cause a virulent form of influenza. When Cyclone Kathy devastated the town in March 1984 it was attributed to Europeans intruding on sites associated with a dangerous rainbow serpent.⁵ The potency of such beliefs is likely to have been infinitely stronger in the years following the first appearance of Europeans and their destructive animals, resulting in great anguish and anger.

Named after Pieter de Carpentier, governor-general of the Dutch East India Company, the Gulf of Carpentaria was sailed in the 1600s by Dutch navigators seeking commercial opportunities. First to reach this part of the southern land they called New Holland was the Duyjken under Willem Jansz, which sailed down the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in 1606. Next were the Pera and Arnhem in 1623 under Jan Carstensz and Willem van Colster. They became separated and Colster, in the Arnhem, discovered Arnhem Land on his way home. In 1644 the Limmen, Bracq and Zeemeur, all under the command of Abel Tasman, made a more detailed examination of the Gulf coast.

Some of the Dutch names have survived, including Cape Vanderlin, Limmen Bight, Maria Island and Groote Eylandt, while others have not. The Van Alphen and Abel Tasman rivers appeared on early Australian maps but by about 1900 their names had been changed to the Calvert and Robinson. The Dutch landed at various places along other parts of the northern coast but there is no record of any such landing in the southern Gulf. Once they were satisfied that the indigenous peoples had no knowledge of precious metals or spices, the Dutch saw no reason to establish any trading centres on the coast of New Holland.

By about the 1720s, fishermen from the port city of Makassar, on the island of Sulawesi in the Dutch East Indies, were making annual commercial voyages to favoured locations along the north coast of New Holland from Cobourg Peninsula to at least the Wellesley Islands, and possibly the west coast of Cape York Peninsula.⁶ This stretch of coastline—which was clearly shown on maps of the day—and its inhabitants were known to the fishermen as Marege’ (pronounced ‘Ma-rey-geh’, with a glottal stop at the end). Others visited the Kimberley coast, which they called Kayu Jawa. Initially, the main purpose of the voyages was to collect and process trepang, a prized ingredient in Chinese cuisine, but turtle shell, pearl shell, shark fin, sandalwood and occasionally hardwood were also taken, or were bartered from the Aboriginals.⁷

The fleet set sail with the north-west winds, usually in December, and returned with the south-easterlies in about April. Both the fleet and the industry grew in size and sophistication, and by the first half of the nineteenth century between 30 and 60 praus, each with a crew of around 30 men, were visiting Marege’ every year. In other words, a thousand or more trepangers were spending each wet season on the shores of what is now the Northern Territory, interacting with the local peoples, trading with them and sometimes forming lasting friendships.⁸ Most of the masters of the praus were relatively cultured, wealthy and of high social standing. While the same may not have been true of the crewmen, they were at least constrained by some authority. Emeritus Professor Campbell Macknight, an authority on the industry, has noted that this sophistication and discipline were important factors in its impact on Aboriginal peoples.⁹ Europeans would later be compared unfavourably with the trepangers from Makassar.

Aboriginals obtained a variety of goods from the visitors, including tobacco (which was highly valued), pipes, iron axes and knives, rice, arak (an alcoholic drink) and cloth.¹⁰ They also gained valuable new technology: dugout canoes like those carried by the praus—a big improvement over their own bark models—and metal, to replace their wooden spear points for harpooning dugong and turtle. Over the years, a number of Yanyuwa people from the Sir Edward Pellew Islands were among the Aboriginal men and women who sailed in the praus back to Makassar, returning the following season with stories of another world whose society and culture were totally different to theirs. A visitor to Cobourg Peninsula in the 1820s noted that Aboriginals from Port Essington were ‘fond of travelling about and frequently go in the Bughese prahus to Macassar [ sic]. Several have also visited Sydney in merchant vessels—the Heroine had no less than five on board...’¹¹

The language of these visitors—Makasar, with its different spelling—became a second language for coastal Aboriginals, a lingua franca that was widely understood along the coasts of Marege’. Makasar words were incorporated into local languages, that of the Yanyuwa people, for example, containing personal and place names, and at least thirteen other borrowed words.¹²

An important consequence of this contact with the trepangers was that coastal peoples acquired skills and expertise in dealing with foreigners that would stand them in good stead when the Europeans arrived. In particular, they learnt the importance of protecting the resources of their territory from those who would exploit them. Their counterparts from the inland regions would learn these lessons the hard way and, in some cases, too late.

But the familiarity between the two races was cautious. Arguments sometimes occurred, grievances festered and occasionally there was violence that led to bloody massacres on both sides. Considering the length of coastline visited by the trepangers, the numbers who came each year, and the growing astuteness of coastal peoples in trading and seeking payment for the use of their natural resources and labour, the incidence of violence and disputation was lower than it might have been. Moreover, the visitors were armed with daggers and primitive muskets, and some praus had a small cannon mounted in the bow, both for protection from pirates during the voyage to Marege’ and to deter attacks by Aboriginals. It was usual for between two and six praus to work together, so the visitors had considerable strength in numbers.¹³

Smallpox was introduced into northern Australia during this period and most likely came from the Malay archipelago. There were at least three or four epidemics, the first recorded in about 1789, which would have affected not only the coastal peoples but also many of the inland tribes, resulting in a sharp reduction in population levels.¹⁴

By the time Matthewr Flinders, a British naval officer, conducted the first detailed survey of the Gulf in the Investigator in 1802–3, correcting errors in the old Dutch charts and bestowing British place names, the trepangers had an intimate knowledge of the Gulf and had given their own names to numerous places along the coast. Flinders ignored their names and those of the Aboriginal peoples which were thousands of years old. Bartalumba Bay and Dalumbu Bay at Groote Eylandt are among the few Makasar names to be found on modern maps.¹⁵

The first Europeans to visit the district by land were the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt and his party. Privately sponsored, they left Moreton Bay (now Brisbane) in September 1844 and reached Port Essington on Cobourg Peninsula in December the following year. Originally the party comprised eight Europeans and two Aboriginals, with seventeen horses and sixteen cattle, but two of the Europeans turned back and another was killed by Aboriginals on Cape York Peninsula. Leichhardt appears to have crossed the Nicholson River at Turn Off Lagoon, in which case he would have noticed a well-worn Aboriginal footpath following the river upstream from there, for this was a major east—west trading route and later a stock route and road known as Hedley’s Track.¹⁶ There is some evidence to suggest that the explorer may have travelled up the Nicholson on his ill-fated last expedition.¹⁷ In 1845, however, Leichhardt travelled north-west from the Nicholson, in places following another Aboriginal trade route which ran parallel to the coast.¹⁸ This part of his course, as far as the Roper River, would become the main section of the famous Coast Track.

Aboriginal footpaths, which once criss-crossed the entire continent, were undoubtedly used by explorers, stockmen and drovers far more extensively than is generally realised. There was no reason for European newcomers to try to find a new route, which may have no water, or convenient river crossings, or food or firewood, and could have impassable obstacles, if a major Aboriginal footpath already existed. Historian Mark McKenna has noted that such footpaths were certainly used by the first Europeans in his area of study, the far south-east of New South Wales. They were, he wrote, ‘approximately 4 feet wide and were maintained by regular firing’. Indeed, he discovered from the earliest settler diaries and journals that Aboriginal ‘roads’, as they were called, were not only adopted by the first Europeans, but deliberately sought out, then widened.¹⁹

Leichhardt was a careful observer of Aboriginal peoples and was keen to make use of their bush foods and medicines. He tried to maintain good relations with them; for example, when he took possession of seeds gathered by three locals who ran off in fright near the Mitchell River, he left ‘a large piece of iron as payment’.²⁰ On more than one occasion he responded to a threatening gesture from a frightened local by distancing himself from his colleagues, dismounting from his horse and offering a gift in a non-threatening manner.

Thanks to Leichhardts eye for detail, his journal provides the earliest account of the Gulf peoples and their lifestyle. In the vicinity of what is now the Robinson and Wearyan rivers he described emu traps around waterholes, fish traps and fishing weirs across rivers, well-used footpaths, major living areas with substantial dwellings, wells of clear water and a sophisticated method of detoxifying the otherwise extremely poisonous cycad nuts. There were moderately high concentrations of people leading an industrious lifestyle. All of this was markedly different to the stereotyped images of ‘savages’ leading a ‘nomadic’ and ‘primitive’ existence. Yanyuwa oral history confirms Leichhardts observations and emphasises the fact that people in the old days were constantly moving about and interacting with others—whether hunting, looking after country, attending ceremonies, visiting relatives, or working and trading with the fishermen from Makassar.²¹ It was a time of considerable and purposeful activity.

As they neared the McArthur River, Leichhardt’s party exchanged presents ‘in a very amicable manner’ with several Aboriginals who had run after them.

These natives must have had some intercourse with white men, or Malays, for they know the use of a knife, and valued it so highly that one of them offered a gin for one. They appeared equally acquainted with the use of our firearms. No doubt they had seen the Malays, and probably some had accompanied them to the islands, as it is a common custom of the Malays to take natives home with them, that they may become friendly to them when fishing for trepang at this part of the gulf.²²

The party reached the McArthur near Wardawardala (Black-fellows’ Crossing), but travelled twenty-six kilometres upstream to the limit of the tidal influence where they crossed at Warralungku, one of the major Aboriginal crossing places along this wide river, a kilometre upstream from present-day Borroloola. Leichhardt named the river in honour of James and William Macarthur of Camden, New South Wales, but the spelling has since been corrupted. He crossed the Limmen Bight River near the Four Archers, which he named, and the Roper at what became known as Leichhardt’s Bar (now Roper Bar).

Other rivers named by Leichhardt included the Nicholson, Calvert, Robinson, Wickham, Roper, Wilton and Hodgson. Knowing that the Van Alphen and Abel Tasman had been named by the Dutch navigators, he retained their names. Before long, however, for reasons not recorded, the names in Leichhardt’s journal bore little resemblance to those in common usage. Not only did the authorities replace the Dutch names, but they transferred many of Leichhardt’s names from one river to another, possibly through ignorance. This needs to be kept in mind when reading Leichhardt’s journal and the accounts by early overlanders. For example, the first big river encountered by the explorer after crossing into the Northern Territory was the Van Alphen. Leichhardt described it as ‘a fine river with a bed three hundred yards broad from bank to bank, but with a narrow channel of running water’.²³ Some thirty kilometres and two days later he came to a small river that had recently ceased to run but which contained small, deep pools. Leichhardt named this the Calvert. By about 1900, however, official maps of the Territory had ceased showing the larger river as the Van Alphen, calling it instead the Calvert, and the smaller river had been renamed Stockyard Creek. What we know today as the Robinson, Foelsche and Wearyan rivers, appear in Leichhardt’s journal as the Abel Tasman River, Cycas Creek and Robinson River respectively:

Next to visit by land, in August 1856, was Augustus Gregory with six companions and thirty-four horses—the North Australian Expedition—on their way east from the Victoria River to Moreton Bay Keeping to the south of Leichhardts route, they crossed the McArthur River near Warrunguni, twenty-four kilometres upstream from Borroloola, then travelled south-easterly until they reached the Nicholson River close to where it crosses the Queensland border. Gregory recorded few details of the Gulf peoples.²⁴

At this time no European had traversed the continent from south to north. At his third attempt, John McDouall Stuart reached Van Diemen Gulf, east of present-day Darwin, in July 1862. His route lay to the west of the Gulf district and became the main track from Adelaide to Palmerston (as Darwin was originally known) and, a decade later, was used for the overland telegraph line.

Pastoral expansion in north-west Queensland had approached the Northern Territory border by the 1860s, leading to the establishment of Burketown in 1865. But development of this rough, frontier outpost stalled a year later when a deadly fever was introduced by boat from Java, reportedly killing more than thirty people. Two of the survivors who helped bury the dead and evacuate the living were publican John (‘Black Jack’) Reid and Native Mounted Police officer D’arcy Uhr.²⁵ Both would feature in the early history of the Borroloola district. The fever passed and the stations were reoccupied, but most of those in the town made plans to move east to the Norman River, later the site of Normanton, and station owners spoke of moving their operations into the Territory where the climate and land were reported to be superior.

Some of those at the very edge of the pastoral frontier, shunning civilisation, were curious about what lay beyond the settled areas and knew they could make good money by establishing new stations in fresh country for wealthy speculators. Prospectors, too, were keen to push the frontier and by 1864 at least one party had travelled by sea to prospect between the Roper and Limmen Bight rivers.²⁶ Others may have heard of this venture and possibly reached the same area by land. In any event, the first Europeans to venture beyond Burketown into the Northern Territory in the footsteps of Leichhardt probably did so in the late 1860s, although their names are not recorded. At a time when the Barkly Tableland to the south was yet to be explored and Stuart’s track was too dry to be reliable for cattle, this was the most promising route into the Top End of the Territory for stock.

Around 1868 news reached Burketown that Aboriginal people had murdered three men well towards the McArthur River and looted their wagon loaded with supplies. Arthur Ashwin, an experienced bushman and a friend of D’arcy Uhr, described what happened:

When it was known, the police magistrate in Burketown sent D’arcy Uhr with his trackers, twelve in number, and told him to punish the tribe that committed the murders and take no prisoners, which he did; he very nearly wiped the whole tribe out. His twelve trackers were a murdering lot and took a delight in shooting any wild blacks, but they always had their white leader in front when they made a raid on a wild camp.

Uhr said in one camp the wild blacks showed fight and rushed out towards them with clubs. Uhr had his rifle barrel bent and the hammer knocked straight guarding a blow from a club and would have been done in only for one of the trackers shooting the nigger attacking him ... they nearly shot the whole tribe of bucks, as Uhr called them; it done a lot of good for years after. The trackers did not shoot the women or children, [on] strict orders from Uhr, and for years after there were about two hundred gins and no bucks.²⁷

Uhr and his troopers are known to have shot a considerable number of Aboriginal people in the settled districts of western Queensland and may well have acted excessively on this occasion, far from the nearest white witnesses, both to punish the presumed killers and to make the route safe for other travellers. Nevertheless, the casualties were unlikely to have been anywhere near as high as Ashwin suggests.

In 1868 the Burketown correspondent for the Brisbane Courier reported that Uhr and his troopers had shot twenty-eight Aboriginals after several horses were speared close to the town. A further thirty-one, he said, had been shot near the Norman River following the murder of a man named Cameron (or Cannon). Uhr was praised in language which offers an insight into frontier attitudes: ‘Everybody in the district is delighted with the wholesale slaughter dealt out by the native police, and thank Mr Uhr for his energy in ridding the district of fifty-nine (59) myalls.’²⁸ The Courier article included a gruesome description of the manner in which one survivor, who had received ‘eighteen or twenty bullets’, was finally put to death. Uhr was demoted later that year and resigned from the force on 29 March 1869.²⁹

Native Police officers and their troopers were armed with British .577 calibre Snider military rifles which fired a massive lead bullet designed to mushroom upon impact, leaving a gaping hole. These bullets had a hollow internal chamber in the nose and would therefore be illegal in modern warfare.³⁰ A resident of the Cooktown district once remarked: ‘A Snider is a splendid civiliser.’³¹

After allegedly shooting an Aboriginal murder suspect at Dalgonally station on the Cloncurry River in 1871, Uhr was charged with murder but acquitted. On the Palmer goldfields two years later, a Chinese man was murdered by Aboriginals. Uhr, who had an interest in a butcher shop there, is said to have accepted an offer of £50 from the dead man’s brother to shoot all of those responsible. Taking another ‘hard case’ with him, said Ashwin, the two men shot a large number of Aboriginal people. Uhr was again charged with murder but acquitted.³² It was rare indeed for whites to be convicted of murdering Aboriginals on the frontier.

By 1870 Europeans had succeeded in reaching the Top End of the Territory using Leichhardt’s route. Dray tracks travelling north, believed to have