Nineteenth century race relations: a sad story
What do we know of early relations between European and Aboriginal people in the Lower Hunter? There are a few known settler accounts, and the oral histories of Wonnarua and other people over which the Maitland area’s early European settlers had influence provide useful insights.
Insights can be also gleaned from distant locations: similarities in the nature of relations existed across Australia. Bruce Pascoe in Dark Emu notes that interactions between Europeans and Aborigines were often quite harmonious at first (though some Europeans were told forcefully to go away), but invariably they soon deteriorated and to the great disadvantage of Indigenous people.
Almost certainly the first Europeans to make contact with Wonnarua in what was to become the Maitland area were convicts who had escaped from the penal settlements of Sydney and Newcastle from 1790 and 1804 respectively. Some of these men probably joined local Aboriginal groups, including the Worimi, and took wives. It is possible that some were welcomed for what they brought with them skills, perhaps, or useful iron tools. But they would have needed Indigenous assistance to survive in an unfamiliar environment.
Positive relations
There were some notably benign interactions. One is noted in Ian Bowrey’s The Ploughman, which tells of George and Rachel Mead who farmed on the Bolwarra Flats from about 1848. Bowrey notes that local Aborigines, walking through the farmlands, peered at Rachel through the cracks in the walls of the Meads’ slab hut. They were curious about the strange newcomers; no harm was intended and none resulted.
George and Rachel Mead
Settlers on the Bolwarra Flats from 1848
There is evidence that some settlers were considerate of Aboriginal people who helped by imparting information. Cameron Archer notes in The Magic Valley that a settler (William Scott) regarded the Worimi people of the Port Stephens area as both courteous and kind to Europeans during the 1870s. No doubt some Europeans were kind in return. A few even learned their language and songs, as Abraham Unicomb of Goulburn Grove near Largs is said to have done. In the valley of the Paterson River Charles Boydell, James Webber and the Reverend George Middleton were others whose attitudes to Aboriginal people were positive as recorded by Brian Walsh in Before and after 1822. But these individuals were more the exception than the rule: many Europeans in the early years of their occupation of the Hunter Valley were far from positive about Wonnarua and other Indigenous people.
The underlying cause of declining relations
The Maitland Mercury, usually paternalistic in its comments on Wonnarua people, frequently used words like ‘mild’ and ‘inoffensive’ about them. But the general tenor of settler attitudes held Aborigines to be inferior, even non-people who did not own or have rights to territory: elsewhere in Australia this justified the doctrine of terra nullius (literally, uninhabited land). To the colonists, it was axiomatic that European civilisation with its science, economy, culture and religion was far superior, and Aborigines were no more than savages without meaningful title to the lands they occupied. Fortifying the colonists’ superiority was the knowledge, indeed the conviction, that England reigned over the largest empire the world had known.
The basis of this thinking was established long before Europeans settled in Australia. Indeed Joseph Banks, arriving at Botany Bay on the Endeavour with James Cook in 1770, called the Aborigines he encountered ‘treacherous’ and ‘extremely cowardly’ according to David Hill’s The Making of Australia. Such thinking underlay European attitudes everywhere the newcomers settled. It was not a recipe for positive relations.
In the Hunter once Europeans arrived, few settlers saw a need to respect or seek information from Wonnarua, Worimi or other Indigenous people. Accordingly there is little evidence of settlers having sought advice that might have been useful in terms of farming practices for example on seasons or floods and droughts. They thought the Indigenous people had no real knowledge of the land.
It is also said that local Indigenous people advised against building Maitland at the site at which the town took root, because of floods. Their input was ignored.
From the settlers’ superior attitude, mistreatment and exploitation followed. A souring of any early friendly relations was bound to occur: even if things started well, they soon deteriorated. The interactions virtually always had negative effects for the Indigenous people. Sometimes the impacts were appalling, as was shown when mass killings began during the 1820s.
Massacres
A marker of European-Indigenous relations in early Australia is the evidence of massacres of Aboriginal people. According to the map of massacres published in the Guardian Australia in 2019, about 270 sites saw at least six Indigenous people killed in confrontations between 1788 and 1928. The frontier wars of which these massacres were part, now known as ‘the Australian wars’, lasted for a long time.
Map of the massacre sites
According to the Guardian Australia, there were four such sites in the Hunter Valley: one in the Fal Brook (Glennies Creek) area near Singleton, one in the Paterson River valley near Gostwyk and two in the valley of the Williams. Walsh in Before and after 1822 has added two more from the Paterson. All told, about 60 Aborigines (and two Europeans), died in the encounters noted in the Guardian. Largely they were reprisals by Europeans for the killing of individual settlers or the theft of livestock and crops. The ratio of deaths (30:1) is instructive and tells of the advantage the colonists had in the encounters. The Aborigines were skilled in the use of spears but these were no match for the settlers’ muskets.
These Hunter massacres are not as well known or documented as some others in New South Wales (such as the Myall Creek massacre of 1838), but all killings of their people by Europeans must have generated Aboriginal resentment. There would have been cause for them to be angered even before the massacres. Doubtless some escaped convicts, starved of sexual opportunities, raped Aboriginal women. Elsewhere in Australia, Europeans are known to have been speared to death for this offence.
Edward Denny Day
(Maitland Hospital Collection)
Denny Day was the Maitland police magistrate who caught and prosecuted 11 Europeans for the killings at Myall Creek, near the Gwydir River. Seven were executed.
At Newcastle, according to Brian Walsh’s Voices from Tocal, there is evidence from the 1820s of resentment at the molestation of Worimi women by European men. Some convicts, escaping from the penal camp at Newcastle, were forcibly returned to captivity by Indigenous men.
Some Aboriginal people in New South Wales, and perhaps in the Maitland area, were shot dead for no real reason. Shooting could be wantonly easy and done with impunity. Some shootings were opportunistic, effectively sport to settlers.
Misunderstandings
Europeans and Wonnarua had little or no understanding of each other’s ways, and conflict occurred when corn and other crops were taken from settlers’ farms. To the settlers this was theft of private property, to Aborigines it was utilising the bounty of nature as was everyone’s right. Wonnarua and other Indigenous people were perplexed when Europeans simply took land for their own use, seeking no permission and effectively forcing the traditional custodians off it, and then objected when ripe crops were taken from farms.
The misunderstandings caused conflict. Wonnarua were more peaceable than the Europeans, but they became angry when treated badly. They did not generally initiate conflict but they were prepared to take revenge when their interests were damaged.
Disease and dispossession
There was also disease, especially smallpox but measles, influenza, diphtheria, typhoid and venereal diseases as well. These began to decimate Indigenous populations virtually as soon as Europeans arrived in New South Wales. Possibly Indigenous people travelling between the Hunter and the Sydney Basin, part of long-standing inter-regional commerce, brought introduced diseases back with them to Wonnarua Country as early as the late 1780s even before Europeans arrived there.
Responses to a government enquiry in 1846 into the condition of the Aborigines implied that the decline in population was rapid. One witness to this enquiry (the Reverend George Middleton, an early settler at Patersons Plains and later a resident of Morpeth), thought the Aboriginal population of the local area was only a third of that of a mere ten years earlier.
Hunting grounds disappeared as the floodplains were cleared and the lagoons drained. Native animals left as farming took over, and native food plants were cleared for the cultivation of wheat and other European crops. Wonnarua livelihoods were diminished and they were forced into areas the settlers did not favour including the upper reaches of the Paterson and Williams valleys, less productive of food opportunities than the floodplains downstream and along the Hunter. A few remained near Maitland, on the margins of towns and doing menial work for Europeans for food.
It would be unsurprising if Wonnarua people felt demeaned and effectively evicted from their own Country.
Underlying it all was the attitude of the colonising Europeans. That attitude was summed up by the Manchester Guardian, editorialising in 1857 about an uprising in India. The British, the MG asserted, must retain ‘unfaltering confidence in our right to rule over the native population by virtue of inherent superiority.’ The same attitude held in the Hunter and elsewhere in Australia, and indeed across the British empire. Evoking inherent superiority was an attempted intellectual justification of a racist imperial imposition. Terra nullius was carved from the same viewpoint.
Aboriginal societies were quickly disrupted, debilitated, dispossessed, displaced, marginalised and shrunken after European settlement began. Their people were later scattered in a locational sense too, especially when children were stolen: Hunter Valley Aboriginal children went to several places far distant from Country including Kinchela (on the Macleay River), Cootamundra (in the Riverina) and Sydney. Demoralisation inevitably followed from these things, and from demoralisation nothing good can come.
The story of the early interaction between Wonnarua and Europeans is overwhelmingly a sad one. As James Miller, of the Gringai clan of the Wonnarua Nation, put it in Koori: a Will to Win, ‘The land of the Dreaming became the setting for the . . . nightmare [of the Koori people]’.
European colonisation would have seemed barbarous to the Wonnarua, and it was. Colonisation is almost always a harsh process, often involving the subjugation of one people by another, and colonised people routinely suffer from it. For Aboriginal people in Australia the suffering went on and on. Indeed, generations living beyond the colonial period continue to feel suffering and to believe that the colonisation process has never ended.
In the words of Ted Egan, outback songman, former Administrator of the Northern Territory and friend of and writer on Aboriginal people, the treatment by Europeans of Indigenous people ‘denied and betrayed their very existence’. It was probably no less so in the Hunter than elsewhere in Australia.
References
Archer, Cameron, The Magic Valley: The Paterson Valley – then and now, ACA Books, Bolwarra, 2019.
Bowrey, Ian, The ploughman: the story of George and Rachel Mead and the family, NJ Mead, Cardiff, 1985.
Dunn, Mark, The Convict Valley: the bloody struggle on Australia’s early frontier, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2020.
Egan, Ted, Kulilkatima: seeking understanding, Kerr Publishing, Melbourne, 2022.
Hill, David, The Making of Australia: from a tiny struggling convict settlement to the remarkable nation it is today, William Heinemann Australia, North Sydney, 2014.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: A story of mistreatment and white exploitation’, Maitland Mercury, 4 June 2021.
Keys, Chas ‘Our past: Arrogant superiority of white settlers a trigger for frontier wars’, Maitland Mercury, 11 June 2021.
Keys, Chas, ‘Pioneers on the Bolwarra flats’, Maitland: Our Place, Our Stories, 13 January 2022.
‘The killing times’, Guardian Australia, last updated 16 March 2022.
Maitland Mercury.
Manchester Guardian.
Miller, James, Koori: A Will to Win, the heroic resistance, survival and triumph of Black Australia, Angus & Robertson, North Ryde, 1985.
Pascoe, Bruce, Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture, Magabala Books, Broome, 2014.
Walsh, Brian, Voices from Tocal – Convict life on a rural estate, CB Alexander Foundation, Tocal, 2008.
Walsh, Brian, Before and After 1822: Aboriginal and European people in the Paterson Valley, Paterson Historical Society, Paterson, 2022.
