From Killing for Country (David Marr, 2023) pp128-30
In June, two German missionaries were exploring the Bunya Mountains when their native guides suddenly refused to take them further. Pastor Karl Wilhelm Schmidt made a note in his diary: “A large number of natives, (about 50 or 60,) having been poisoned at one of the squatter’s stations. The neighbouring tribes are going, we are told, to attack and to kill the whites, wherever they meet with any.” Schmidt, fearful, did nothing. But it was his duty every year to submit his diaries to John Dunmore Lang. Appalled by what he read, Lang sent the diary to Government House. It was returned, he said, with those few lines about the poisoning underlined in red. Gipps still did nothing.
Lang’s views on the blacks were tangled. He saw the colonisation of Australia as a great work of God but from the pulpit and in the pages of his newspaper, The Colonist, he condemned the ruthless way it was being carried out. Lang attacked the failure to compensate those people who lost their land and the refusal to share with them the inexhaustible bounty of the country. Above all he condemned the bloodshed on the frontier.
Not only have we despoiled them of their land, and given them in exchange European vice and European disease in every foul and fatal form, but the blood of hundreds, nay of thousands of their number, who have fallen from time to time in their native forests, when waging unequal warfare with their civilised aggressors, still stains the hands of many of the inhabitants of this land!
Lang had seen Kilcoy coming. After Myall Creek, The Colonist reported squatters recommending poison as a safe and swift way of ridding their runs of blacks. One of these men the paper called a “vampire of hell” With The Colonist now defunct and the Governor unresponsive, Lang gave Schmidt’s diary to The Colonial Observer to “stir up His Excellency’s pure mind by way of remembrance’. The story of Kilcoy finally broke in the press ten months after the massacre. Schmidt was attacked viciously for making such wicked accusations, but there was horror, too, as the Colony learned of this scarcely imaginable crime. The Australasian Chronicle took aim at everyone who had known of the poisoning but said nothing for so long. “We have no words to express our sense of their conduct in allowing this deed of darkness to sleep for so long a period. They have all to a man chosen to be either actively or passively partners in the crime.” The new Sydney Morning Herald demanded an investigation. “If so foul a murder has been committed, we trust the guilty parties will be found out, prosecuted, and meet with the punishment due to the perpetrators of so diabolical an act.” Every squatter in the vicinity of the killing should, the paper said, come forward for questioning. “It will not be difficult for all who feel confident in their own innocence to unite in denying any knowledge of the transaction.’ Gipps’ only response was to ask Dr Simpson to speak to the missionaries. Schmidt tried to claim he had no duty to do anything about the poisoning because he was not a Protector of Aborigines. But Simpson discerned the real reason: “It is Very evident that the disinclination to follow up the investigation, has been caused by the fear of offending the squatters generally”
Kilcoy reignited Plunkett’s determination to have Aborigines give evidence. There were so many eyewitnesses to the poisoning that day but none could appear in court. The Conservative government of Sir Robert Peel recognised such reform was “indispensable to the protection of the Natives’, but declined to pass one law in London that would open the courts to every subject of the Empire. Instead, the Conservatives left the task to each individual Colony. It was a profound betrayal. When Plunkett brought a bill to the Council in Sydney, all the squatters were opposed. That great windbag of liberty William Charles Wentworth said, “It would be quite as defensible to receive as evidence in a Court of Justice the chatterings of the ourang-outang as of this savage race.” The bill was defeated by fourteen votes to ten. Not until 1876 would the sworn testimony of Aboriginal people be heard in New South Wales and Queensland. British justice was ceaselessly applauded for protecting black and white alike, but through the bloodiest years in those colonies no Aboriginal person could bear witness in court to the truth about life and death on the frontier.
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