In the previous post I quoted from the article in Aboriginal History 1988 by Carol Liston on “The Dharawal and Gandangara in Colonial Campbelltown, New South Wales, 1788-1830.” I said of the article that it “offers a much more nuanced and detailed account of the 1816 Appin Massacre — by no means justifying it, but showing much more context and depth of field — to borrow a photography term.”
I have posted on the Appin Massacre before. In that post I included this graphic:
I also posted not long ago in an Australia Day post this song by a local singer, which tells the story.
So I was interested to read the version given in Carol Liston’s article. This took me also to an excellent entry in The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (my copy 1st ed 1995) — “Aboriginal Armed Resistance to White Invasion.” Quite properly saying invasion too — show me the invitation we latecomers and our ancestors received, and I will happily not use the term! I should say my ancestors — or more accurately most of my ancestors. I feel the editors of the Oxford Companion were judicious in the last paragraphs of that long entry when they cautioned on the one hand against “the myth of peaceful settlement” but on the other against “universal massacre” or seeing Aborigines as “defenceless victims.” They also question what may ultimately be Eurocentric distortions which seize on such as Pemulwuy or Yagan as guerrilla commanders, risking “turning Aboriginal resistance into a cardboard-cutout story every bit as one-dimensional as the Anzac Legend.”
There is a lot to unpack there already, and yes it is a while now since that was first written. I have not seen the second (2008) edition. Carol Liston’s article is even older, but still has much to commend it. For one thing it includes much information about known Dharawal and Gandangara individuals, and about confusion among the officials, soldiers and settlers at times in 1816 about who was actually who.
Like other parts of the County of Cumberland, it is usually assumed that with the arrival of the Europeans all information about the individual identities of the district’s Aboriginal inhabitants was lost. Whilst the tragedy of the Appin massacre of 1816 irrevocably destroyed the traditional community life of the Dharawal, it did not destroy them as individuals. In Campbelltown a few settlers maintained close contacts with individual Aborigines. The records of these settlers, combined with scattered newspaper references, government correspondence and various lists compiled by magistrates allow individual biographies to be compiled for several Aborigines from c.1800 through to the 1840s. Despite conflicting evidence of recurring names and inconsistencies in ages, it is nevertheless possible to assemble enough detail to establish individual identities for some of the colonial Aborigines. This process cannot reconstruct their pre-invasion world but it at least uncovers more of their relationship with the Europeans in the earliest decades of colonial settlement.
Brief biographies of some colonial Dharawal and Gandangara follow a general account of European and Aboriginal relations in colonial Campbelltown.
Campbelltown there really being shorthand for The Cowpastures or the whole district, as shown in the map in my previous post. I commend Liston’s article to you for its wealth of detail, but here is a core part:
Warby [a convict stockman], refusing to act as a guide any longer, disappeared for a few days. [Captain James] Wallis decided to follow up reported sightings of Aboriginal warriors in the more populated Minto area near Redfem’s farm, Campbellfield, but found the overseer who had reported the sightings was absent. Wallis accused him of wanting to help the Aborigines and frustrate the military. For a few days Wallis and his men searched the rugged banks of the George’s River at East Minto and Inglebum. News then came that seven outlawed Aborigines were camped at Broughton’s farm at Appin. Wallis marched his soldiers through the night. They were met by Thomas Noble, a convict, who led them to the camp. Fires were still burning but the camp was deserted. A child’s cry was heard in the bush. Wallis formed the soldiers into a line and pushed through the thick bush towards a deep rocky gorge. Dogs barked in alarm and the soldiers started to shoot. By the moonlight, the soldiers could see figures bounding from rock to rock. Some Aborigines were shot; some met their end by rushing in despair over the cliffs. Two women and three children were all who remained ‘to whom death would not be a blessing’. Fourteen had died, among them Durelle, Cannabayagal a well-known mountain warrior whom Caley had met at Stonequarry Creek [later Picton] in 1804, an old man named Balyin and some women and children. The bodies of Durelle and Cannabayagal were pulled up the cliff to be hung from trees on Broughton’s farm as a warning to others. It was too difficult to recover any of the other bodies from the rocky gorge. Kennedy provided a cart so that the captured women and children could be taken to Liverpool.
The Appin Massacre of 1816 is traditionally regarded as the annihilation of the Aboriginal people of Campbelltown and Camden. Durelle was probably a Dharawal but Cannabayagal was a Burragorang man. Their association in death suggests that some Dharawal, who had previously attempted to manipulate the Europeans against their traditional rivals, had when faced with indiscriminate European attacks sought new allies from among other Aboriginal groups….
Compare an excellent resource from NITV.
Dharawal man and local historian Gavin Andrews and his wife, Frances Bodkin, a descendent of one of the men killed that night claim the men’s camp was first attacked however there were also women and children nearby. A report for the NSW Heritage Council declares that ‘among the 14 known dead were old men, women and children’.
It is difficult to ascertain exactly how many people were killed however Wallis’s account suggests that the death toll may indeed have been much higher than fourteen. At least five prisoners were also taken including Doual who had been a guide to explorer Hamilton Hume.
Liston has this sketch on Doual — spellings vary:
Duall was Hamilton Hume’s Dharawal guide on his first exploration journey south to Berrima in 1814. During the months of conflict in 1816, Duall sought refuge at the farm of Hume’s uncle, John Kennedy and was captured there by the soldiers in April 1816. Four months later he was again arrested and sentenced to seven years transportation to Van Diemens Land for encouraging his people to rob the settlers. Whether this sentence was carried out is not clear as a Dharawal named Duall guided Charles Throsby across the
mountains from the Wingecarribee to Bathurst in 1819 and again guided Hume and Kennedy to Lake Bathurst and the Shoalhaven in 1821. On Throsby’s recommendation he was given an inscribed medallion for his services to the explorers. Duall, aged 40 with a wife and child, was listed on the return of the Cowpasture Aborigines for 1833.
Hamilton Hume (I was at Sydney University in 1960 with a descendant, Stuart Hamilton Hume — we were 16 or 17 then) was 16 or 17 when he and Duall made that journey to Berrima in 1814! Did you realise? Bloody teenagers!
I hope some of that depth of field I referred to yesterday has emerged even in the scant offerings I make here.
And yes, I have documented another Dharawal country story of a massacre: 201 years ago at Minnamurra River. (Now 203.)
And check this map:
Neil's Commonplace Book 