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The South Australian Frontier and It's Legacies

Narrative: Frontier War on the Eyre Peninsula (Nauo and Barngarla Country)

In 1839, the British flag was planted at Port Lincoln, a young colonial settlement at the southern end of South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula. Eyre Peninsula was named for the colonial explorer Edward John Eyre, but this is Aboriginal Country: Nauo to the south-west, Barngarla to the east and north, and Wirangu to the north west. Well before the planting of the British flag, Nauo and Barngarla people had familiarised themselves with the presence of European whalers, who remained close to the coastline. Some interactions were accommodating, with one group returning for several years and employing local men to cart water and provide timber in return for goods, while others were violent and involved the abduction of Aboriginal women.i Throughout this period however, newcomers visits were transient, Aboriginal people remained in control of their Country and there were no major interruptions to traditional Aboriginal society.ii This tentative co-existence shifted in 1839 when permanent European occupation occurred, with colonists attracted by the natural harbour and fertile pastoral land. By 1840, roughly 220 Europeans had established a permanent settlement around the township of Port Lincoln, connected by ship to Adelaide.iii However, their numbers were small compared to the population of several thousand traditional owners who occupied the peninsula’s large hinterland and resource rich coastline.iv

The first sign of conflict came in October 1840 when the son of shipowner and merchant, 12 year old Frank Hawson, was fatally speared at an outstation on the family’s sheep run. According to Frank’s testimony (taken at his deathbed), a group of Aboriginal people had approached Frank requesting food, and when he refused to give more than minimal provisions, the encounter escalated to violence. As tensions simmered, Governor George Grey appointed a Government Resident to the district with instructions to ensure 'an impartial administration of justice between the Settlers and the Aborigines.'v However, as the permanency of European occupation became apparent and Europeans and their stock spread further inland, the conditions for a frontier war took root.vi

Over the coming year, Aboriginal resistance to encroaching dispossession proved to be concerted and strategic. Some of the methods Aboriginal people employed to drive settlers away were directed towards the destruction of pastoral property: for instance, vandalizing shepherds’ huts, seizing food and goods from huts, assaulting hutkeepers, spearing stock, destroying fences, digging up crops, and setting crops alight. In early March 1842, stock-owner John Brown and his hutkeeper Joseph Lovelock were fatally speared. In the wake of this, the Port Lincoln colonists petitioned the Governor, listing the increasing regularity of such threatening incidents and calling for ‘a Detachment of Military to be stationed here with about Twenty-five stand of spare arms for arming the inhabitants’.vii Without military intervention the settlement could be abandoned altogether, they warned.

Settlers’ requests for military support (implying they were fighting an enemy), were significant in light of the fact that all Aboriginal people in South Australia had been declared to be British subjects (although without treaties or Aboriginal people’s own consent) from the moment of the colony’s foundation. The imperial government’s hope was that the status of British subjecthood would endow Aboriginal people with legal protections from violence. More typically, across the continent and the island of Van Diemen’s Land, the legal fiction of their British subjecthood justified extraordinary measures of punitive policing against them.

The Governor, George Grey, initially refused the colonists’ entreaties.viii However, on receiving news of the murders of stockowner Rolles Biddle, his hutkeeper Elizabeth Tubbs and overseer James Fastins, Grey reversed his decision. Biddle, Tubbs and Fastins were killed at Biddle’s station in what colonial observers understood to be a planned attack. German missionary Clamor Schürmann had been appointed Sub Protector of Aborigines for the Port Lincoln district in late 1840. A talented linguist, he acted as interpreter for local Aboriginal groups from whom he learned that the recent killings (i.e. of Brown, Lovelock, Biddle, Tubbs and Eastins) were a political act, the result of ‘a tribal (national) decision’.ix The recipient of Schürmann’s reports was Adelaide-based Protector of Aborigines Matthew Moorhouse, who wrote: ‘The Natives are fully aware of their numerical strength and no doubt feel emboldened by it’.x The recently arrived Government Resident at Port Lincoln, Charles Driver, described the state of ‘general panic’ that descended on the settlement. Much farming activity beyond the safety of the township had been ‘suspended’, he wrote. Cattle stations were becoming ‘deserted and the Cattle running wild in the bush’.xi Houses in the settlement were barricaded and women and children removed to the safety of Boston Island.xii

Settlers at Port Lincoln were aware that threats against them were due to their occupation of the country, and they were also acutely aware of their own geographical disadvantage in the building state of frontier warfare. Located at the base of a peninsula, their tentative connection to Adelaide was by sea, 160 nautical miles across the lower Spencer Gulf, Investigator Strait and St Vincent’s Gulf. The longer overland route through the peninsula had not at that time been traversed by Europeans. This route crossed Nukunu and Barngarla country, which was as yet largely uncolonised. Writing from Port Lincoln, the Government Resident acknowledged that the geographical layout of the peninsula afforded Aboriginal people ‘so many advantages that the settlers must, for the present at least, confine their operations to the immediate vicinity of the Town’. Settlers’ fear of Aboriginal attack had, he said, ‘completely paralysed the industry of both the town and surrounding country’.xiii

Following the Governor’s approval of military support for the Port Lincoln settlers, a detachment of fifteen men of the 96th Foot Regiment arrived under the command of Lieutenant Hugonin. From 18 April until 11 July, a paramilitary force consisting of Hugonin and his soldiers, police and settlers, patrolled the region around Port Lincoln. On several occasions, Schürmann was persuaded to accompany the force to act as an interpreter and ensure only guilty parties were arrested. From Schürmann’s diaries and reports, it is evident that innocent and unarmed Aboriginal people were shot, and that a culture of collusion and concealment existed among Hugonin, his men and the Government Resident.xiv

It is also clear that the Aboriginal people encountered utilised their advantages and were not necessarily intimidated by the paramilitary force. On numerous occasions the pursuing party was unable to utilise their tactic of surprise attack. As Hugonin reported to Grey,

The nature of the country is such that foot soldiers with a heavy firelock and belts have little chance of coming up with the Natives. Their accoutrements also make the attempt to surprise at night almost a certain failure, and should I be unsuccessful in the now proposed push into the heart of their country I must regret to state that it is my opinion that a military force, except employed as a Guard at the stations of the settlers, is at present totally useless in this settlement.xv

Pastoralist James Hawker notes in his memoir that he spoke with spoke with the ‘officer in charge’ – i.e. Hugonin – of the ‘detachment of the 96th Regiment’ who had been sent to Port Lincoln. Hawker likewise describes ‘soldiers on foot in heavy marching order’, sent to capture Aboriginal people who ‘knew every inch of country and could thus evade any attempt to make them prisoners!’; ‘Every movement of the soldiers was watched by scouts from the tribes. It was a miserable fiasco’. Hawker was informed that

One day they [the soldiers] came to a swamp, across which they were unable to march. Fifty or sixty yards on the opposite side the natives mustered to look at them, having come out of a thick scrub a short distance in their rear. Shots were fired at them by the soldiers which, as the old Brown Bess musket would not carry effectively much more than half the distance, caused great amusement to the blacks, who danced and jeered at their adversaries for not coming across the swamp.xvi

During the 81 days he was on Eyre Peninsula, Hugonin reported a total of 13 fatalities. It is clear, however, that the presence and actions of the 96th did not necessarily have the intended intimidatory effect. By October, Schürmann was informed by cross-cultural intermediary Yutalta that ‘none of the murderers have died in consequence of the severe wounds which two or three of them had received’ from Hugonin’s men, that they were ‘not at all intimidated’ and ‘are bent upon hostilities against the white people’.xvii

The Port Lincoln colonists again petitioned the Governor, stating that Yutalta (spelt Uteltea) had informed them that

the Coffins Bay and Port Lincoln Tribes of Natives had coalesced for the express object of murdering all the whites in the Settlement, that they were endeavoring [sic] to prevail on another Tribe to join them also for this object, that they merely laugh at our Guns and say their spears are much better expressing the utmost confidence that before many moons are passed they will not leave a white person alive in Port Lincoln.xviii

Grey responded by sending Police Commissioner O’Halloran to Eyre Peninsula with instructions to ‘endeavour to capture any of the Aborigines who may be identified as having been concerned in the recent murders at that settlement’. The Governor made it clear that ‘no belligerent rights’ were to be exercised against ‘the Natives’ and no proceedings were to be adopted ‘but such as the Laws of England would authorise against Europeans who had been guilty of similar atrocities’. Grey entreated O’Halloran to demonstrate ‘humanity and discretion’ and provide a good example to the inhabitants of Port Lincoln.xix

During his time on Eyre Peninsula, O’Halloran did not succeed in sighting or capturing those responsible for the earlier murders. However, on two occasions his party pursued and frightened large groups of Aboriginal people that included women and children, causing O’Halloran to report

after having searchingly examined in all necessary directions the Country for a very considerable distance around Port Lincoln, & especially all the haunts of the “Battara Tribe”, & which will I feel convinced have a very happy effect in checking further outrages on the part of the natives generally, who were much alarmed at the rapidity of our movements, & are thus taught to dread our power.xx

Sporadic Aboriginal attacks continued on settlers’ stock and property over the next 12 months, and settlers were directly warned to leave.xxi But by early 1844, Protector Matthew Moorhouse was reporting that outbreaks of violence were ‘not characterised by so much fierceness and determination as they formerly were’.xxii Apart from the possible intimidatory effect of the 96th Regiment’s campaign and O’Halloran’s expedition, a possible reason for this shift was that settlers were starting to recognise the benefit of Aboriginal labour to the pastoral industry and had begun to employ Aboriginal people rather than drive them away from their own country. In his first report of 1845, Charles Driver commented on this point, noting that Aboriginal labour was becoming more prevalent on pastoral stations and that relations between Aboriginal people and Port Lincoln settlers were now more ‘conciliatory’.xxiii Yet mindful of the fragility of peace, he warned that hostilities could again be provoked by ‘more extensive occupation of their country’.xxiv

Contributors: Skye Krichauff and Amanda Nettelbeck

i South Australian Association, Outline of the plan of a proposed colony…1834 (Adelaide: Austaprint, 1978), 70-71; ‘Two English Lads’, The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 3 October 1835, 575.

ii Alan Pope, ‘The Battara Resistance: A Case Study in Aboriginal Resistance,’ History Teachers Association of SA 1976, 29.

iii The South Australian Register, 25 January 1840.

iv Calculated by the Deputy Protector of Aborigines Reverend Schurmann, cited by Protector of Aborigines Matthew Moorhouse, Quarterly Report of 30 June 1842, GRG 24/6/1842/483.

v Colonial Secretary to the Resident Magistrate, 27 September 1841, GRG 24/4/1841/308.

vi Pope, ‘The Battara Resistance’, 29.

vii Memorial from Port Lincoln inhabitants to Governor George Grey, 8 March 1842, GRG 24/6/1842/125.

viii Colonial Secretary to JB Harvey and gentlemen present on 8 March, Pt Lincoln, 7 April 1842, GRG 24-4-4(E1842), p.590.

ix Clamor Schürmann to Matthew Moorhouse, 27 July 1843, Protector of Aborigines' Letterbook, GRG 52/7.

x Matthew Moorhouse, Quarterly Report, 30 June 1842, GRG 24/6/1842/483.

xi Charles Driver to the Colonial Secretary, 4 April 1842, GRG 24/6/1842/152.

xii See for example Nathaniel Hailes’ account (Hailes was the Government Resident’s Clerk), in Allan Peters, Recollections: Nathaniel Hailes’ adventurous life in South Australia (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1998), 135.

xiii Charles Driver to the Colonial Secretary, 1 June 1842, GRG 24/1/1842/339.

xiv For example the shooting of Numma on 25 April 1842 and the treatment of Ngulga’s body by the men of the 96th Regiment. See entries ‘Shooting of Numma (alias Kappler) by a soldier of the 96th Regiment, 25 April 1842’ and ‘Fatal shooting of Ngulga and capture of Nurka by a mounted party led by Hugonin, 21 May 1842’, The South Australian Frontier and its Legacies, https://frontiersa-uofadel.hub.arcgis.com/pages/eyrepeninsula

xv Hugonin to Government Resident Charles Driver, 24 April 1842, GRG 24/6/1842/236.

xvi James Hawker, Early Experiences in South Australia, Second Series (ES Wigg & Son: Adelaide, 1901), 5.

xvii Schürmann to Government Resident Port Lincoln, 4 October 1842, GRG 24/6/1842/757.

xviii Hawson and memorialists to Government Resident Port Lincoln, 7 October 1842, GRG 24/6/1842/757.

xix Colonial Secretary to Police Commissioner, 4 November 1842, GRG 24/4/5 pp.174-5.

xx Police Commissioner to Colonial Secretary, 23 November 1842, GRG 24/6/1842/934

xxi Government Resident Quarterly Report, 27 May 1844, GRG 24/6/1844/561.

xxii Matthew Moorhouse, Quarterly Report, 10 April 1844, GRG 24/6/1844/361.

xxiii Charles Driver to the Colonial Secretary, 1st Quarterly Report of 1845, GRG 24/6/1845/408.

xxiv Ibid.

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Colonial violence. Links and references to historical sources may include racist attitudes and language.

In oral histories collected by Christina Smith one account relates that: In May 1849 a 'local shepherd, Patrick Dwyer, annoyed at Aboriginal people taking flour from his hut, laced some of his supply with arsenic. The flour disappeared and eight Aboriginal people became sick after eating it. Five of them died and three others became very ill and later died. Dwyer was arrested on suspicion of murder but released afterwards for lack of evidence.' He then disappeared to California (Foster et al, 2001, p 83).