Description
After Aboriginal people killed four shepherds on Mt Spencer Station, one the lessees, Henry Stormont Finch-Hatton is alleged by Tim Bottoms (2013, pp 87-89) to have poisoned 100 Aboriginal people at the Long Lagoon outstation. Carl Lumholtz (1889, p 373) mentions Long Lagoon in his memoir. Finch-Hatton's brother Harold gave details of the poisoning in his memoir:
'One day, when he [Henry Stormont Finch-Hatton?] knew that a large mob of Blacks were watching his movements, he packed a large dray with rations, and set off with it from the head station, as if he was going the rounds of the shepherds' huts. When he got opposite to the Long Lagoon, one of the wheels came off the dray, and down it went with a crash. This appeared to annoy him considerably; but after looking pensively at it for some time, he seemed to conclude that there was nothing to be done, so he unhitched the horses and led them back to the station. No sooner had he disappeared than, of course, all the Blacks came up to the dray to see what was in it. To their great delight it contained a vast supply of flour, beef and sugar. With appetites sharpened by a prolonged abstinence from such delicacies, they lost no time in carrying the rations down to the waterside, and forthwith devoured them as only a Blackfellow can.
Alas for the greediness of the savage! Alas for the cruelty of the white brother! The rations contained about as much strychnine as anything else, and not one of the mob escaped. When they awoke in the morning they were all dead corpses. More than a hundred Blacks were stretched out by the ruse of the owner of the Long Lagoon. In a dry season, when the water sinks low, their skulls are occasionally to be found half buried in the mud' (Finch-Hatton 1886, pp 132-133).
