Gariwerd by Benjamin Wilkie;

Author:Benjamin Wilkie; [Wilkie;, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781486307708
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing
Published: 2012-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

As elsewhere, economic sabotage was the focus of Jardwadjali strategies of resistance. In early August 1842, a hutkeeper at the Fulham station near Balmoral, west of the Victoria Range, approached his employer, Francis Desailly, and told him that a shepherd by the name of John Hickey had not been seen since the previous evening. He said a flock of sheep was missing, and that another shepherd had found a broken spear on the property. Recognising the tactics of the Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung, Desailly set out in pursuit. He travelled east from his property ‘into the heart of the Grampians’ for about 70 km, finding clothing belonging to the shepherd along the way, until he found a group of about thirty men, women, and children with over a thousand sheep. Desailly reported that he was ‘obliged to fire on them to recover the sheep’ as the Jardwadjali, he said, had a ‘disposition to fight – one of them having thrown a tomahawk at the head of one of the party which he narrowly escaped.’ Typical of the frequently opaque nature of evidence given regarding frontier violence in western Victoria, Desailly told police that he ‘did not see any of the natives killed, but supposed there must have been one or two men shot.’ After returning what sheep he could recover to Fulham, Desailly went in search of the shepherd John Hickey, whose body he found with ‘a large gash in the back of his head inflicted by a tomahawk.’30 The Colonial Observer in Sydney reported that the ‘lifeless body’ of Hickey had been ‘discovered in a state of nudity … the body was much mutilated, being covered with spear wounds, and the back of the head laid open.’31

A year before this, as recalled by John G. Robertson in a letter to Charles La Trobe, the Whyte brothers had slaughtered the Konongwootong gundidj clan of the Jardwadjali in 1841. ‘Three days after the Whytes arrived, the natives of this creek, with some others, made up a plan to rob the new comers, as they had done the Messrs. Henty before,’ he said.

They watched an opportunity, and cut off 50 sheep from Whyte Brothers’ flocks, which were soon missed, and the natives followed; they had taken shelter in an open plain with a long clump of tea-tree, which the Whyte Brothers’ party, seven in number, surrounded, and shot them all but one. Fifty-one men were killed, and the bones of the men and sheep lay mingled together bleaching in the sun at the Fighting Hill.32

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.