A Very Ugly Side to Frontier Killings – Roma, QLD

A Very Ugly Side to Frontier Killings – Roma, QLD

When I was researching Blood on the Wattle (my book about the massacres and maltreatment of First Nation people) in 1987 I became acutely aware that 

(i) the whole country had experienced massacres – if the definition was broadened to simply involve killing local First Nation people i.e. where the frontier of European settlement was (as it slowly moved across the continent) then there was the killing of the local indigenous people and

(ii) that the killing of First Nation peoples was endlessly ugly and enterprising. Most killing involved nothing more than a property owner asking his hired help (often convicts) to go and “move those Aborigines on” and waving an arm at a campsite down by the river or a billabong. The common solution was to ride down to the camp with shotguns and shoot up the camp killing indiscriminately.

But then there was also the flour mixed with arsenic which was given to the local community who, unaware they were being poisoned, believed that it was suitable to make damper. 

The explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt, reached Kilcoy Station in 1842 and found that somewhere between 30 and 60 local Aborigines had been killed by arsenic-laced flour. He also witnessed, in the hills behind the Sunshine Coast, a corroboree where Aborigines from the Central Downs area, painted in ghostly white, re-enacted dying from arsenic poisoning.

But one thing I didn’t come across in my studies was the “man trap”, an evil device banned in Britain as early as 1827 and certainly used in the Caribbean and the United States, which was on display at the Meadowbank Museum 12 km west of Roma on the road to Charleville when I visited there in 1988. 

The Museum has one of the most unusual collections of memorabilia in the country including the deadly 'man trap' which was used to trap Aborigines who were stealing cattle. It is a huge and ugly variation of a rabbit trap devised to break the leg and almost impossible to open once caught in it. 

It should not be unknown. It should be part of our history, albeit an ugly part. There are people who want to celebrate, endlessly, our sun’sand’surf lucky country of affluence and general happiness but it really is necessary to remember that our success came at a price … and that price was brutal, racist and violent.