By Heather Burke and Lynley A. Wallis
The Cook Pastoral District occupies the whole of Cape York Peninsula (CYP), extending south to about 120km north of Hughenden. Surrounded by water on the north, east and west, CYP is bisected by the Great Dividing Range, with myriad rivers flowing west into the Gulf and east into the Pacific. Major waterways include the Wenlock (formerly the Batavia River, renamed in 1939), Gilbert, Staaten (temporarily known as the Ferguson in the late 1860s), Archer and Mitchell Rivers, all of which empty into the Gulf of Carpentaria. The coastal plains are narrow and the soil relatively poor, apart from small concentrations of farming land around the Cooktown and Butcher’s Hill/Lakefield areas, extending to Laura and the Hann River (Lack 1962). The Cook District was gazetted in 1864 and includes islands in Torres Strait, since by 1879 the Queensland border extended more than 100 km beyond the tip of the mainland at Cape York (Loos 1980). Still sparsely populated even today, the major towns include Cooktown, founded in 1873, and Cairns, established in 1876. Laura is a smaller town centre that began as a staging post for the Palmer after 1873, with the railway officially reaching there in 1888 (by which time the goldfields were in decline).
White Exploration
Several intermittent contacts between Aboriginal people and Europeans took place as a result of maritime voyagers either deliberately charting the coast or using it as a convenient place to overhaul boats or obtain fresh water. The earliest known European boating party to come ashore on CYP were the 1606 Dutch Duyfken mariners, led by William Janszoon/Janz, who landed near Port Musgrave on the west coast. This was followed by the Pera, under the command of Jan Carstenszoon in 1623, which stopped at several points along the west coast from the Mitchell to the Ducie Rivers, and the Rijder, the last Dutch VOC ship to visit western Cape York, in 1756, near Weipa (Heeres 1899).
James Cook was the first European to land on the east coast, when he stopped to repair the Endeavour in 1770 at the river he subsequently named for his ship. He was followed by four open boats from the H.M.S. Pandora in 1791, which, after its wrecking 140 km offshore, called at Orford Bay for fresh water before continuing on to Timor. Other mariners who sailed the east coast included Matthew Flinders, who charted the northern passage through the reefs in 1802 and Philip King in the Mermaid in 1819 and 1820.
Land exploration of the Cook district followed much later with the expeditions of Leichhardt (1845), Kennedy (1848) and the Jardine brothers (1864/65). Of these, Leichhardt’s route only took in the southern portion of the Cook district, travelling along the Mitchell River and passing through what would become Fossilbrook, Gamboola and Highbury stations before moving south and down the west coast on his way to Port Essington in the Northern Territory (NT). On the Gilbert River Leichhardt described encountering an Aboriginal man with “a singular weapon, neatly made, and consisting of a long wooden handle, with a sharp piece of iron fixed in at the end, like a lancet. The iron most probably had been obtained from the Malays who annually visit the gulf for trepang” (Leichhardt 1847: online). Unlike Leichhardt, both Kennedy and the Jardines traversed south to north through the interior of CYP to the tip. Edmund Kennedy and 12 others set off from Rockingham Bay in 1848, reaching as far north as the Escape River where Kennedy was speared and killed in December. Alexander and Frank Jardine, with a party of eight others, left John G. Macdonald’s Carpentaria Downs near Rockhampton in 1864 with cattle to establish a station to support the new government outpost at Somerset, set up by their father, John. They reached Somerset in March 1865.
Other exploratory trips were linked to the search for new pastoral runs and mineral resources to establish the settlement potential in Cook, or routes for infrastructure once settlement had commenced. Pastoralist William Hann travelled from the Lynd River north to the Palmer through the Princess Charlotte Bay basin and then the Stewart River, before returning south in 1872. In doing so Hann identified the mineral potential of what, in the following year, became the Palmer River goldfield. The geologist Robert Logan Jack travelled the length of the Cape in 1879 and again in 1880, reaching Somerset. The Cape York Telegraph line, begun in 1884 and completed in 1886, was preceded by an expedition led by J.R. Bradford, a telegraph surveyor who had worked on the line from Cooktown to Palmerville and Maytown between October 1874 and July 1876. He, along with six others, from Cooktown to Somerset in 1883 to chart a route for the northern line to Thursday Island (Bradford 1962). Although the party went well armed, Bradford claimed to have had no “serious trouble with the Aborigines” and never saw any people (Bradford 1962:1018).
NMP Presence
Cook had the largest number of NMP camps of any pastoral district in Queensland (Table 1). In total, there were 48 camps established over a 33 year period, commencing with a detachment sent to Somerset in 1868. The latter settlement was largely abandoned by 1872, when John Moresby of the H.M.S. Basilisk described it as having:
… but six white settlers … the Government police magistrate, and his boat’s crew; the other fifteen or twenty men resident here are native troopers and pearl-shell divers; and most of the wooden houses are falling into decay from the ravages of the white ant. The gardens cultivated by the marines have now grown wild, and the small cleared spaces before the inhabited wooden houses, alone are free from primeval forest or bush. (Moresby 1876:online).
Somerset was completely abandoned in 1877 when Government functions were transferred to the settlement on Thursday Island.
Other NMP camps in the Cook district were associated with mineral rushes to the Etheridge, Palmer and Hodgkinson fields, as well as the Gulf and Cape York telegraph lines. At least 10 NMP camps were located on the Palmer River or the access routes to and from the Palmer and Cooktown alone (given in red below). The last operating NMP camp in Queensland, at Coen, was in the Cook district, and only ceased operation in 1929.
Conflict Events
Conflict in Cook began early, with the first European mariners to reach shore along western CYP in the Duyfken in 1606. There are no direct accounts from the Duyfken itself, since the ship’s logs no longer exist, although the log from the subsequent Dutch expedition down the west coast by the Pera and the Arnhem, led by Jan Carstenszoon in 1623, noted metal in a hut and knowledge of muskets amongst Aboriginal people around Cape Keerweer, both of which were attributed to the earlier presence of the Duyfken (Burningham 2000). The notation for Cape Keerweer recorded that the awareness of firearms resulted from the “terrible effects they learned in 1606 from the men of Duyfken who landed here” and for Port Musgrave that “in 1606 the men from the jacht Duiffken went up with a boat, on which occasion one of them was killed by projectiles of the natives” (Burningham 2000: np). The crew of the Pera attempted to kidnap Aboriginal people from the beach, as did the crew of the Rijder in 1756. The crew of the Pera failed to take anyone, but the crew on the Rijder succeeded after having plied local people with arrack (Heeres 1899:211; Loos 1974:6), abducting two men and taking them to Batavia (Mulvaney 1988:45). Conflict ensued as a result of all of these activities.
Conflict also arose for land exploring parties, often centring on the Mitchell River where John Gilbert, the naturalist on Leichhardt’s expedition, was killed by Aboriginal people in June 1845 and where the Jardines engaged in a large-scale encounter. The event at the Mitchell River later became colloquialised as the “Battle of the Mitchell”, where approximately 37 Aboriginal people were killed, although various iterations of Frank Jardine’s diary disagree on the precise number. According to Frank himself,
From a rough estimate there were at least 400 men jumping about and yelling like madmen on the opposite bank, and as the distances used were from sixty to ten yards; almost every shot told. I saw one shot—I think from S.—take three men who were coming out on one of the projecting logs. During the scrimmage a total of 222 cartridges were used, and in all likelihood, not including eighty-four on shore, the blacks lost at least half their number; but as the greater proportion were killed in deep water the bodies could not be counted; but in the second attack at short range no doubt the result would be one for each cartridge. I fired but two shots during the row, reserving my ammunition and keeping my barrel cool for any who on the wings might try to get round behind us, which evidently was their intention; but by spreading out along the bank we burst it up by vigilantly watching and carefully shooting the horns off their semi-circle front and keeping it a straight line.
Under the banks there were large numbers of logs and land-slipped trees projecting far into the water, and along these, in their excitement and anxiety to get at us, the blacks would run and jump into the water to swim over; but very few reached within ten yards of our bank. One of my shots was at a man coming across the water a little above me, and about ten yards from the bank. The sights of my Terry rifle with constant friction and wear had worked loose and slipped up, so that I fired through the 200 yards nick, consequently high, when Alex., who was stationed a little below, turned to me with an expression of disgust on his face, which said as plainly as words could “you muff,” and stopped him with a round 16. And, during the fight I heard some one call out angrily, “D—m it, B—, hold straight, and shoot carefully—cartridges are scarce!”. After it was over the surface of the water was literally covered with hundreds of spears.
Over 200 shots were fired, and the carbines were well hot, and revolvers would necessarily have been resorted to had the blacks upheld their end for a few minutes or shots longer; but they suddenly ceased spearing, and disappeared as if by magic in the long grass, and in a few seconds there was not a soul to be seen. In the background I noticed many gins “making good time” east. “I am sorry for the poor wretches that necessity compelled us to pump this lesson into, but perhaps it may serve as one that in the future they may respect, and teach them to keep at a safe distance, and not to wantonly seek for fight with those who would willingly pass them by unmolested.
As an example of either their ignorance or enmity, one chap who had got across and hidden himself in the weeds, suddenly sprang out and shied a spear at S, who was walking unsuspiciously, along the bank, but his hand was shaky, and aim untrue—S’s wasn’t. (Queenslander, 11 August 1906, p45)
In all, the Jardines had at least six known encounters with Aboriginal people between the Staaten River and Bertiehaugh, although several of them resulted in no casualties.
There were at least 966 conflict events in Cook between 1623 and 1911: the most of any pastoral district in Queensland. Most events took place in the late 1870s (1875 = 52; 1877 = 54; 1878 = 68), with lesser peaks in 1885 (n=64) and 1887 (n=52). This is unsurprising, given that large scale colonisation did not begin until 1874, but when the Palmer River goldfield opened in that year thousands of people flooded into that area. Where it can be known, events were spread fairly evenly across agricultural selections, mineral fields and pastoral runs, occurring less frequently on road or travel routes or in towns.
Key Pastoralists and Stations
John Jardine took the first cattle to the Cape, when he established Port Vallack near Somerset with cattle brought overland by his sons (Francis [Frank] and Alexander [Alick]) on their expedition in 1864–65. He later took up Lockerbie and Galloway stations in the 1890s. After the failure of Somerset, further pastoral occupation of Cook did not materialise until the 1870s in tandem with the Palmer River goldrush. Alexander Charles Grant, George Skene and George Henderson (the latter two being brothers-in-law) took up Wrotham Park, between the Mitchell and Walsh Rivers in 1873 or 1874. They were quickly followed by a slew of runs near the Palmer and around Lakeland, including Henry Russell Jones’ Boralga (1874) and Koolburra (1880 or 1883), Maurice Fox’s Olive Vale (1877), James Earl’s Butcher’s Hill (1877), Donald Mackenzie’s Lakefield (1882), Thomas Morris’ Springvale (1881) and Peter McDermott and Fergus O’Beirne’s Laura (1879) (Lack 1962).
Other key properties to the north were Edward Palmer, John Stevenson and Walter Reid’s Gamboola (1879) Patrick Fox’s Pine Tree (1887) and Palmervale/ville (1891), James Burne’s Batavia Downs (1882), Glenville, Oscar (Harry) and Charles Massey’s Lalla Rookh (1882) (renamed Silver Plains) and Rokeby (1884), and Ebenezer, Alan and Harry Nott’s Langi on the Archer River (1883). Leopold, George and Grandison Watson took up Merluna in 1883, and Robert Sefton, an ex -prospector, York Downs in 1885. The Bowman brothers, Frank, Archie and Arthur, established Rutland Plains on the Mitchell River in the early 20th century, subsequently selling it in 1912 to Marmaduke and Montague Curr from the Burdekin region. Subsequent generations of Currs took up Inkerman Station on the Staaten River and took over Rutland Plains in 1912 (Lack 1962).
At least some of these men had been packers to the Palmer, earning sufficient to subsequently purchase pastoral interests, including Pat Fox, James Earl and Thomas Bostock, who took up Highbury on the Mitchell River in the early 1880s. Pastoral lobbying for greater, more frequent or closer NMP activity came from several of these squatters throughout the1880s and 1890s, including Fox, the Nott brothers, the Bostock brothers and the Massey brothers, all of whom had urged for an NMP detachment to be sent to the Archer River.
Conflict events occurred in association with several of these men, including Charles Massey, Ebenezer Nott, Edmund Watson (younger brother of Leopold, Grandison and George) and Frank Bowman, all of whom were speared by Aboriginal people, Massey, Watson and Bowman on their or neighbouring pastoral stations, and Nott near Princess Charlotte Bay. Reprisals are hinted at following Massey’s death (Traralgon Record 15 May 1888, p3) and certainly followed Watson’s (Morning Bulletin, 28 May 1889, p5; Townsville Daily Bulletin 10 July 1953, p9). The Masseys had been subject to several attacks on their homestead at Rokeby, following which they had conducted reprisal raids on Aboriginal people:
In a paragraph which affords painful illustration of the need for some alteration in the present method of dealing with the blacks, as well as of increased protection to outside stations, the “Torres Straits Pilot” says:— “Mr. G. Massy had received a letter from his brother, Harry, dated from Rokeby station, Cape York Peninsula, 20th May, which states that the station was attacked by blacks a few days previously. The station was unexpectedly attacked by night; but both Mr. Massy and his blackboy were true in their aim as they retaliated with blue pills and the myalls were driven off. Daylight revealed two corpses near the house, and another with two balls through it near the lagoon a short distance from the house. Determined to follow up his success, Mr. Massy followed the blacks on horseback to the junction of the Coen and Archer Rivers, and there further chastised them. Mr. Massy is, like many more Peninsula squatters, sickened of calling for police aid, and has dealt with his would-be murderers in a summary way. They will keep clear of Rokeby station for some time. They have on two occasions attacked the station during the day, but this was the first instance in which they stuck it up by night, and they were handsomely repelled. (Courier 9 July 1895)
Henry Russell (‘Harry’) Jones was renowned for his reprisals against Aboriginal people for spearing his stock. He supplied the Lower Laura NMP camp with meat in the late 1870s and was killed at Koolburra in 1890 by a young Aboriginal male either named Harry (8) or Joker (14) (details of the Aboriginal male vary depending on which newspaper account is believed). Although this was represented in the newspapers as ‘treachery’ on the part of his employee, Jones was well known for hunting Aboriginal people off his runs using violence whenever necessary. In the mid-1880s Jones had had problems with Aboriginal people spearing cattle, and noted in early 1885 that “I have had two very narrow escapes of being speared by the Blacks lately” (QSA847153 1885 Letter from Harry Jones to Colonial Secretary 16 February, Colonial Secretarys Office In Letters, In letter 85/3053). In response Jones destroyed Aboriginal camps in retaliatory raids:
On Monday Mr. Jones, of the Laura, brought in 14 native spears, captured by him in his defensive fights at Booralga and along the Deighton, while the native police under Marrett were reposing calmly in camp, or playing dominoes. Harry has proved himself a practical civilizer by burning over 500 spears, waddies, &c., within a month, and if the necessity is forced upon a man to defend his property through the Inefficiency of legal representatives, he ought to be applauded and rewarded instead of being sneered at by the incompetent chiefs of the police. (The Bulletin 3(105), 16 May 1885, p13).
NMP officer Hervey Fitzgerald described Jones as:
… notoriously untruthful, coarse and vindictive, but unfortunately is always able to find sympathizers, notably the Editor of the Cooktown Independent whose character as an unprincipled lying journalist in the North is too well known to need comment, or further notice on my part (QSA847153 1885 Report from Hervey Fitzgerald to Commissioner of Police 5 March, Colonial Secretarys Office In Letters, In letter 85/3053).
Fitzgerald also noted that Jones regularly kidnapped Aboriginal children and held that “This matter must speak for itself and in some way account for the native hostilities he so often refers to but never reports to the police”. After his death Jones was referenced by the German naturalist Richard Semon as someone with a reputation for killing Aboriginal people “wholesale”. According to Semon,
I had heard that in the neighbourhood of Cooktown a quantity of blacks had been slaughtered for some reason or another by the black police, and that their remains had for a long time been left to bleach in the open bush. … I therefore communicated with several people likely to know the whereabouts of the slaughter, but all in vain. The bones had been scattered or covered up some way or other—in short, we were not able to find anything. At this point one of the people to whom I had turned for information said to me: “A pity that H. is dead, he would have procured you as many skulls as you might have wished for.” I asked how H. would have managed this, and received the cool answer, “Oh, he would have shot them.” The man in question was generally known to kill the blacks in the bush wholesale. But some years ago he himself was found killed in his hut about 70 miles from Cooktown. The suspicion first fell on his white mate, who, however, declared he was not in the neighbourhood at the time. Then it was proved that a little black boy whom he kept as a servant had killed him. One evening he had said to the child, “To-morrow I shoot you,” and then had laid himself down to sleep. The boy, knowing his master, and finding the situation critical, had thought, as he owned later on, “Me shoot him first,” and had killed his dangerous master with his own gun. Justice did not punish the child for murder, as everybody who knew the murdered man declared that his remark of the evening before might just as well have been meant in earnest as in jest, and that the boy was quite right in anticipating the solution of the riddle. The boy had to be removed from that neighbourhood, lest he should fall a victim to the revenge of the friends and sympathisers of the murdered man, for the fact of a black killing a white, even in self-defence, is an enormity in the minds of these people. (Semon 1899:266–267)
Key Mineral Rushes and Other Industries
The Cook district experienced several mineral rushes, both major and minor, over the course of the nineteenth and early 20th centuries. Gold on the Palmer drew thousands of hopefuls in the second half of the 1870s, many of whom shifted peripatetically to subsequent rushes at Coen (1876), Hodgkinson (1876), Starcke (1890), the Batavia River/Wenlock (1892) and Ebagoolah/Hamilton (1899), as well as other minerals at Herberton (1879, tin) and the Annan River (1886, tin). Much later in the 20th century iron and bauxite mining commenced on western CYP around Weipa.
Many of these population centres were abandoned once the readily accessible mineral deposits were exhausted, although considerable antagonism was generated between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people before this took place. Coen, for example, was deserted by 1883, apart from a handful of Chinese “fossickers” (Bradford 1962:1020) and Batavia River/Wenlock was largely abandoned within a year. Approximately 177 conflict events can be linked explicitly to mineral fields in the Cook pastoral district, including 72 on the Palmer alone; undoubtedly these numbers are fewer than the number that actually took place, given that most would never have been reported.
The other major industry that caused considerable friction between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Cook was bêche-de-mer and pearl shell fishing, both industries that relied on Aboriginal people as a cheap source of labour, and often worked them under restrictive and poor conditions. Bêche-de-mer fishing possibly began as early as the 1820s–1840s by Japanese and Indonesian fishermen (Pearce 2000:12), although this would have been on a relatively small scale and may have been conducted on a more equal footing that later forms of the industry once Europeans took over. Bêche-de-mer fishing increased in scale from the 1860s onwards, moving further south down the coast and operating on numerous islands and reefs to the east and the north. Pearl shell fishing was established in Torres Strait from 1870 onwards.
Although, unlike pastoralism, mining and agriculture, fishing didn’t necessitate displacing Aboriginal people from their country, the recruitment of Aboriginal labourers was often a source of potential conflict, as was the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by fishermen, even after regulation of the trade developed in the first half of the 1880s. According to Loos (1980:150), protecting Aboriginal people was less of a priority for the Queensland government than ensuring the revenue generated by the industries continued to boost government coffers, and various Acts were more intent on protecting the fishermen than their labour force. Although the industry was located on the reefs and offshore islands of Torres Strait and the Queensland coast, Aboriginal men and women were often recruited into the industry, if not abducted outright (Loos 1980). Approximately 29 conflict events are known to have been associated with the bêche-de-mer trade in Cook.
Political Representation
The Cook electoral district was first represented in the state legislature in 1876. Unlike other pastoral districts, the politicians representing Cook were largely businessmen or professionals, including John Walsh (1878–1883), John Hamilton (1888–1904) and John Hargraves (1904–1907). Charles Lumley Hill, who represented Cook between 1885 and 1888, was the only squatter, having taken up runs on the Barcoo and Thompson Rivers far to the south in the 1860s and 1870s. He had previously been the member for Gregory.
References
Bradford, J.R. 1962 The Cape York expedition of 1883. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 6(4):1014–1028.
Burningham, N. 2000 Duyfken: Charting a sea of misconceptions. Maritime Heritage Association Journal11(2):15–17.
Heeres, J.E. 1899 The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765. London: Royal Dutch Geographical Society.
Lack, C.L. 1962 History and potential future of Cape York Peninsula. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 6(4):942–1013.
Loos, N.A. 1974 Aboriginal-Dutch relations in north Queensland, 1606–1756. Queensland Heritage 3(1):3–8.
Loos, N.A. 1980 Queensland’s Kidnapping Act: Labourers Protection Act of 1884. Aboriginal History 4(1/2):150–173.
Moresby, J. 1876 Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea and the D’Entrecasteaux Islands. London: John Murray. Available online at https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1301151h.html
Mulvaney, D.J. 1988 Aboriginal Australians abroad 1606–1875. Aboriginal History 12(1):40–47.
Pearce, H. 2000 Lakefield National Park Cultural Heritage Report. Volume 2. Lakefield-Laura Station. Historical Heritage Places Survey. Unpublished report prepared for the Cultural Heritage Branch, Environmental Protection Agency.