| The Kalkadoon Wars | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
| |||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| 900 | |||||||
The Kalkadoon Wars were a series of violent encounters between European colonists and the Kalkadoon people of Australia.
Europeans started settling in the Kalkadoons' homelands around 1860. At first relations were peaceful, but as numbers of new settlers increased, things became more hostile and the Kalkadoons eventually resorted to guerrilla warfare. [1]
The first altercation between European colonists and Kalkatungu occurred in 1861 when three parties sent out to search for Burke and Wills, led respectively by John McKinlay, William Landsborough, and Frederick Walker, passed through the general area, and Walker, former commander of the Dawson native police, shot 12 natives dead, while wounding several more, just to the north east of Kalkatungu territory. Soon after in the early 1860s europeans started settling in the surrounding areas. [2] [3] Relations were said to me mostly peaceful at first, but as the number of new settlers increased, things became more hostile and the Kalkadoons eventually resorted to guerrilla warfare. [1]
As the number of new settlers in the Mount Isa region increased dramatically in the 1870s, hostiles between the European colonists and Kalkadoons escalated resulting in a number mainly of drays being ambushed and stock harassment. When European incursions into Kalkadoon country continued unabated, the response changed.
In December 1878, a settler called Molvo and three of his stockmen were killed near Cloncurry, at the Wonomo watering hole [4] on Suleiman Creek [5] as they camped with their herd. It appears the permanent waterhole may have been a sacred site. Their cattle were all either killed or dispersed. According to the Kalkadoon people, this was the starting point of the conflict, for Alexander Kennedy and other settlers in the district joined forces with native troops under Inspector Eglinton stationed at Boulia to war down the native tribes of the region. [4]
Soon after, Kalkatungu attacked the settlers at Stanbrook Station and Sulieman Creek. At Stanbrook the war party was driven off by a show of arms by the settlers. Police at Kennedy's Sulieman Creek homestead under Inspector Eglinton had anticipated the Kalkadoon attack and had organised a large force of troopers from Boulia to arrive before the Kalkadoons could launch a frontal assault on the homestead. [6] As many as 300 warriors are said to have been slain in this one encounter. Subsequent to this incident, scores of Kalkatungu in the surrounding hills were shot down. [7] [5]
Over the following years, the Kalkatungu gained a reputation among graziers for tactical wiliness both in resisting police and settler forays against them, and in harvesting cattle found on their lands.
In the 1880s Kennedy went to Brisbane in an effort to get government support to fight the Kalkadoons that might guarantee greater immunity for people and property in the area. Although he was not officially backed, the first Queensland Commissioner of Police D. T. Seymour in charge of not only police but other paramilitary forces as well informally gave Kennedy his full support. It is said that Seymour had given Kennedy a blank cheque to war down the tribe and to have dispatched the aristocratic Marcus de la Poer Beresford, a nephew of the Marquess of Waterford, as new head of the Cloncurry native police unit to that end. [6]
On 24 January 1883, Beresford camped with four of his troopers at Fullarton River in the McKinlay Range, while tracking down the Kalkadoon killers of a man called Britcher. After skirmishing with a group of Kalkatungu, they managed to corral a number, who appeared to give no resistance, into a gully nearby and post a guard over them for the night. Queensland historian Arthur Laurie suggests Beresford's error lay in "stupidly treat(ing) them like cattle". [8] It is presumed that they had a stash of arms prepared for the occasion, and rose up, and killed Beresford and three of his men. One, though speared in his side, managed to escape and cover the distance, some 20 miles, to Farleigh station the following day. [9]
For a year, the Kalkatungu managed to hold sway over their tribal lands, as both settlers and the police felt intimidated by their unbeaten territorial ascendancy. According to an anonymous person writing for the Queensland Figaro, nonetheless, sometime towards the end of 1883, the native police "wilfully murdered eight blackfellows and several gins" in the area. [10]
In March 1884, [8] Sir Thomas McIlwraith, a member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly and then former Premier of Queensland sent Frederic Charles Urquhart, a Sussex immigrant, employed in the Queensland Native Mounted Police Force to handle the crisis. [11] The Kalkatungu are said to have directly challenged him to fight, ‘him to come out into the hills, and that they would finish him off like Beresford’, [6] via a messenger called Mahoni. Urquhart, though based in Cloncurry, set up a forward camp 25 miles outside of the town, on the Corella River .
Urquhart was galvanised into action in August on hearing from a native boy, Jackie, who came in and reported that his employer James White Powell of Calton Hills, some 60 miles west of Cloncurry, at Mistake Creek, had been speared to death by local Kalkadoon and Maithakari people. [8] Powell was a business partner of Kennedy's, and the latter, together with Urquhart and A.F. Mossman from White Hills station buried Powell, with Urquhart composing a poem vowing vengeance:
"Grimly the troopers stood around
that newly made forest grave
and to their eyes that fresh heap mound
for vengeance seemed to crave.
And one spoke out in deep stern tones
and raised his hand on high
For every one of these poor bones
a Kalkadoon shall die." [12] [lower-alpha 1] [13]
The group responsible was tracked down to a gorge, where they were feasting on the cattle, and most were mowed down. [14] Over the next nine weeks, settlers and Urquhart's police tracked the Kalkadoons relentlessly in a war of retaliation, killing many. [12] In September, a Chinese shepherd from H.Hopkins's Granada Station [14] on the Dugald River was speared to death in the foothills of the Argylla Ranges, and it was rumoured he had been eaten by "cannibals".
Soon afterwards, an estimated 600 Kalkatungu warriors gathered on a rocky outlook to fend off the parties of well-armed settlers, the local constabulary and heavily armed and mounted native troopers. The site of Battle Mountain was chosen as it provided an excellent tactical advantage presented by the location, overlooking the plain below, the Kalkadoons had laid in large stocks of spears and boomerangs in advance for just such a siege. At one point the attackers under Urquhart tried a flanking movement, which caused the assembled Aborigines to charge straight down on them, only to cut down in wave after wave of the withering fire of the muskets, [15] called makini by the Kalkatungu. [16] Urquhart also performed a cavalry charge. [6] 200 Kalkatungu warriors are said to have died in this battle. Urquhart himself was knocked out, and this broke the back of organised resistance at a tribal level, and it was often touted that the Kalkatungu had been wiped out. The Europeans were ultimately victorious. [17]
Urquhart and his troopers stayed in the area on continuous patrol killing more Aboriginal people for a further nine weeks following the battle of Battle Mountain. [18]
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
The City of Mount Isa is a local government area in north west Queensland. The City covers the urban locality of Mount Isa, the administrative centre, and surrounding area, sharing a boundary with the Northern Territory to the west.
The Kalkadoon are descendants of an Indigenous Australian tribe living in the Mount Isa region of Queensland. Their ancestral tribe has been called "the elite of the Aboriginal warriors of Queensland". In 1884 they were massacred at "Battle Mountain" by settlers and police.
Shoalwater Bay is a large bay on the Capricorn Coast of Central Queensland, Australia 100 km north of the coastal town of Yeppoon and 628 km north-north-west of the state capital, Brisbane. Since 1966, the land surrounding Shoalwater Bay has been under the ownership of the Australian Defence Force, for the purpose of military training exercises. Shoalwater Bay is also a noted dugong habitat and is part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The bay is bounded by the Torilla Peninsula to the west and the Warginburra Peninsula and Leicester and Townshend islands to the east.
Australian native police were specialised mounted military units consisting of detachments of Aboriginal troopers under the command of White officers appointed by colonial governments. These units existed in various forms in colonial Australia during the nineteenth and, in some cases, into the twentieth centuries. From temporary base camps and barracks, Native Police were primarily used to patrol the often vast geographical areas along the colonial frontier in order to conduct raids against aboriginals or tribes that had broken the law and punitive expeditions against Aboriginal people. The Native Police proved to be a brutally destructive instrument in the disintegration and dispossession of Indigenous Australians. Armed with rifles, carbines and swords, they were also deployed to escort surveying groups, gold convoys and groups of pastoralists and prospectors.
The Hornet Bank massacre was the killing of eleven British settlers, which included eight members of the Fraser family, by a group of mostly Yiman Indigenous Australians. The massacre occurred at about one or two o'clock in the morning of 27 October 1857 at Hornet Bank station on the upper Dawson River near Eurombah in central Queensland, Australia. It has been moderately estimated that 150 Aboriginal people succumbed in subsequent punitive expeditions conducted by Native Police, private settler militias, and by William Fraser in or around Eurombah district. Indiscriminate shootings of "over 300" Aboriginal men, women, and children, however, were reportedly conducted by private punitive expedition some 400 kilometres eastward at various stations in the Wide Bay district alone. The result was the near-extermination of the entire Yiman tribe and language group by 1858; this claim was disputed, however, and descendants of this group have recently been recognised by the High Court of Australia to be the original custodians of the land surrounding the town of Taroom.
The Australian frontier wars were the violent conflicts between Indigenous Australians and primarily British settlers during the colonial period of Australia.
Frederic Charles Urquhart was a Native Police officer, Queensland Police Commissioner and Administrator of the Northern Territory.
George Augustus Frederick Elphinstone Dalrymple was a colonist, explorer, public servant and politician, member of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland. He founded the towns of Bowen and Cardwell, and pioneered the opening up of the Herbert, Burdekin, Johnstone and Daintree River regions to British colonisation. During this time he was responsible for many killings of Aboriginal people who lived in the area.
Duchess is a rural town and locality in the Shire of Cloncurry, Queensland, Australia. In the 2021 census, the locality of Duchess had a population of 53 people.
Wentworth D'Arcy Uhr was an officer in the paramilitary Native Police in the British colony of Queensland. After being demoted for poor conduct, he resigned from this force and became a drover, leading the first herds of cattle into the region now known as the Northern Territory. He later became, amongst other vocations, a gold prospector, butcher and hotelier. Throughout his life, Uhr actively engaged in multiple incidents of frontier violence including several massacres of Aboriginals. He was also the subject of numerous court cases defending charges which ranged from murder and assault to race-fixing and fraud. In later life he moved to Western Australia and became a business partner with Charles Kidman, brother of the famous pastoralist, Sidney Kidman.
The Border Police of New South Wales was a frontier policing body introduced by the colonial government of New South Wales with the passing of the Crown Lands Unauthorised Occupation Act 1839.
The Wakabunga are an indigenous Australian people of the state of Queensland.
Walter David Taylor Powell was an English mariner and paramilitary Native Police officer in the British colonies of New South Wales and Queensland. He played a significant part in the practical implementation of British colonial rule in the coastal areas of Queensland. His role as an officer in the Native Police was central in a number of important moments in colonial Queensland history including that of the brutal crushing of localised Aboriginal resistance after the Hornet Bank massacre, the foundation of Rockhampton and the creation of the Bowen settlement. He also had major contributions in the founding of Cardwell, the coastal and South Seas trade, and the British colonisation of the Torres Strait.
John Murray was a Scottish officer in the Australian native police in the British colonies of New South Wales and Queensland. He was an integral part of this paramilitary force for nearly twenty years, supporting European colonisation in south-eastern, central and northern Queensland. He also had an important role in recruiting troopers for the Native Police from the Riverina District in New South Wales.
The Eumeralla Wars were the violent encounters over the possession of land between British colonists and Gunditjmara Aboriginal people in what is now called the Western District area of south west Victoria.
John By Durnford Marlow was an officer in the paramilitary Native Police force in the British colony of Queensland. He served in this corps for fourteen years and was stationed at frontier sites such as the Maranoa Region, Port Denison and on the Burdekin River. Marlow, by leading armed escorts of troopers, was also intrinsically involved in the expeditions which led to the establishment of the towns of Cardwell and Townsville.
Kalkadoon may refer to:
Alexander Kennedy was a Scottish colonist who was at the forefront of the British occupation of the Cloncurry region in Queensland, Australia. He established large cattle stations around Cloncurry and participated in several massacres of Aboriginal Australians who were resident to this area. Kennedy was also involved in the creation of the copper mining industry in this region. In later life he became interested in aviation and was a founding investor and director of the Qantas airline company. Kennedy became the first passenger to fly on a regular air service route for the Qantas airline.
William Edington Armit was a soldier, sailor, Native Police officer in the British colony of Queensland, explorer, naturalist and colonial administrator in British New Guinea. Armit is regarded as one of the most violent officers of the paramilitary Native Police force.
