Description
In a lecture on 'The Kamilaroi Blacks' the Rev. William Ridley reported that on the 29th September, 1853 stockmen told him of a massacre of 19 Aboriginal people killed by the Native Police near Mr Pearce's station on Mooni Creek, now Mooni or Moonie River.
'At the Brothers [a pastoral station near the Barwon River] I heard the details of a lamentable and recent slaughter of blacks. Some stockmen who were driving a herd of cattle down from Mooni Creek to the Murrumbidgee, related that on coming to a station of Mr. Pearce's on Mooni Creek, they saw nineteen blackfellows "doubled up," that is lying dead in the writhing attitude of their last agony. They had been killed the evening before by a party of black police and some white men belonging to the station.
The stockmen who described the event, said that the wild blacks who were shot were coming down to attack the station; chiefly for the purpose of killing the blacks who had settled there; so that the charge which laid them prostrate was a necessary act in defence of those blacks who had a claim on the protection of their employers. It is quite true that the wild blacks often entertain bitter enmity against those of their race who have become somewhat civilised by association with the whites; just as among our own forefathers, when the savage Danes found their kindred tribes the Angles and Saxons bereft of their ferocity by the influence of Christianity, they hated them with intense hatred for their softness.
But in this case I afterwards heard, on better authority, that the wild blacks had made no attempt on the station, or on the lives of the blacks connected with it; that the only plea for this act of butchery was that they had been spearing cattle, and it was surmised that they meant to attack the station; so the police and their instigators, having tracked them to a spot near the station, came unawares upon them, and poured their death volley into the midst of them.
Even those who sought to justify the deed by the plea of necessity, spoke with such undisguised gratification of the result, as to show plainly that they welcomed it as a gain instead of enduring it as a dire necessity. The murderous spirit-no other epithet would correctly describe it-the murderous spirit in which not a few rejoice at the frequent slaughter and anticipated extinction of the blacks is appalling. If, while the brutalized and ferocious delight in such deeds, and resolve to repeat them, those who have still the feelings of men keep silence on the subject and so wrap it up, will not the Lord, the Righteous Judge of all, make inquisition for blood, and be avenged on a nation where such crimes are winked at?' (Empire, 3 Dec 1853 p 3).
A much earlier article in the Morning Chronicle indicates that Mr Pearce's station on the Moonie River was 'Gnoolamata', north of the intersection of the Moonie and Barwon Rivers (Morning Chronicle, 4 Fed 1846, p 2). This is most likely the same run as is marked on a map of pastoral runs as 'Cholamatta' just over the Queensland border (Reuss & Browne, 1860).
While the Rev. Ridley, wrote the massacre was 'recent' in September 1853, Patrick Collins, a historian of the Maranoa District frontier, speculates that this occurred in 1852 and was carried out by Sergeant Dempster leading a contingent of Native Police from Wandai Gumbal. According to Collins, this could explain why Aboriginal people from the Moonie River had travelled east to carry out attacks south of the Callandoon Native Police Barracks, around Carbuckey Station and Boobera Lagoon (Collins, 2002, pp 198-199).
