A Country to be Reckoned with by Patsy Trench

Author:Patsy Trench
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Australia, Australian history, pioneer, farming, stock and station agent, family history, aboriginal people, convicts, crime and punishment, transportation
Publisher: Prefab Publications
Published: 2018-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

1842/3 The law and the Aborigines

In 1842 an Aboriginal man named ‘Fryingpan’ appeared at the Maitland Assize Court accused of spearing cattle on William Scott’s property Bullerue, on the Gwydir. I was looking for details about the trial when I came upon what looked like an eye witness account of it written by none other than Charles Dickens.

To be precise, although Fryingpan did appear in the court along with his friend the Duke of Wellington (their monikers were probably bestowed on them by convicts), only Wellington was actually tried that day, possibly because the only witness to Fryingpan’s alleged crime, Scott’s overseer George Bull, was absent.

The detailed account of the trial appeared in a piece called Going Circuit at the Antipodes, one of many essays that appeared in Dickens’s Household Words, published in 1852. The writer gave a vivid description of the accused: tall and gaunt, about 35 years of age, with ‘large, flashing, expressive, deep-set eyes’, a mop of ‘coarse-matted black hair hung about his shoulders’ and wearing nothing but a dirty blanket. It took some pushing and shoving to get him into the dock, but the moment he set eyes on the judge he broke into ‘a violent grin’, said the writer. Transfixed by the Chief Justice’s wig and gown, Wellington’s grin quickly developed into an outright laugh, but rather than attempting to suppress it he turned to the rest of the court and invited them to join in the joke; which, despite themselves, they did. Even the sour-faced Sheriff had to turn his back to laugh into his sleeve, and such was the air of general merriment the Chief Justice himself had difficulty keeping his face straight.

Notwithstanding, when the court eventually calmed down an interpreter was brought in and the indictment read and translated to the prisoner. There followed a brief, energetic conversation between prisoner and interpreter before the answer was delivered to the court: ‘May it please your Honor, he only says it's all a pack of lies, and that he never speared the cattle at all; but he thinks he knows the blackfellow that did spear them, and he will bring him down to the court in a few days, if your Honor will allow him to go and look for him.’

Unfortunately for Wellington his plea was contradicted by several witnesses and he was found guilty and transported for ten years to Van Diemen’s Land. He was led from the court still grinning, ‘as if he had got to the end of a pleasant entertainment’.

Our onlooker, while enjoying the spectacle, was on reflection appalled and dismayed. What right do we have, he wrote, to submit ‘this poor child of nature’ to ‘an English court of justice, mock his ignorance with a jargon of law forms, and conclude by tearing him from his hunting grounds, his wife, and little children, for ten years?’ And yet, he went on to ask himself, how else might a colonist’s property be protected? He had no answer to his own question.

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