Author and journalist Paul Daley is one of Defending Country's distinguished Supporters and was a long-time supporter of Defending Country's sister site, Honest History. He contributed a chapter, 'Our most important war: the legacy of frontier conflict', to The Honest History Book (2017). The chapter's powerful opening captures the atmosphere of the killing fields in Queensland and lists the names these and other massacre sites were given by the White people who committed these crimes. The words in the title of this post, 'Say their names', apply as much to the people who died at these places as to the places themselves. This extract from Paul Daley's chapter (pp. 240-44 of the book) is used with his permission.
I know the spirits are out here. And when the wind starts to howl across the plain in great booming gusts, it might just be the sound of them crying. I’ve visited many massacre sites in Australia. But usually I’ve been in the company of a local Indigenous custodian, someone who rubbed their scent on my face and hands and chanted to warn the spirits that this white man comes in peace. While it feels like I’m anything but alone, I’m by myself in the long grass that is blowing sideways. All around, the fields shimmer in kaleidoscopic gold, russet, black and India green as the sun strobes through the storm clouds scudding across the sky. The rain arrives horizontally in icy needles, stinging my bare legs and arms as I plod around looking for the creek I’m assured is here somewhere. I’m vigilant for the prolific black snakes. It’s a spring Saturday.
Names are important
In contemplating the creek, I’d had in my mind a treacherous torrent running through a great black ravine, so imbued is this place with malevolence, right down to its name, Butchers Creek. But it’s scarcely a creek at all – more a gentle furrow padded with grass and lichen through which a stream trickles. A little ramshackle goldmining town once sprang up near the creek but it has long ago ceased to be. The town was named Boonjie, an Indigenous word, after the creek whose banks had been a meeting place for countless thousands of years for a tribe of the Ngadjon rainforest people. The Ngadjon were a physically diminutive mob, perhaps because they thrived mainly on native plants and nuts in a place where protein, mostly tree kangaroo, was tough to bag. Thanks to the rainforest canopy that sheltered them they were also lighter skinned than the tribal people of the coastal plains and continental centre.
In 1887 white miners and ‘black police’ (Indigenous recruits from elsewhere who had little compunction about killing other Aboriginal people at the behest of white so-called settlers) massacred a big group of Ngadjon camped near Boonjie. This was a reprisal for the murder of a Swedish goldminer, Frank Paaske. Among the tablelands mining and pastoral community there was much pioneer boasting (some of it apocryphal) about the massacre. One settler, Fred Brown, detailed a ‘dispersal’, including the stake-out of the Aboriginal camp overnight. He told of shooting a man with his ‘old Schneider rifle’ ('makes a bigger hole leaving the body than on entering it’) and of ‘protecting’ a Ngadjon boy who survived. By some accounts the child’s name was Poppin Jerri. The child was apparently snatched from the hands of a black tracker about to dash the child’s brains out against a tree ...
[T]he killers replaced the name Boonjie with Butchers Creek. Today the name Butchers Creek applies to the creek itself and to the small, largely non-Indigenous community around it, with its modest hall and school. The renaming of Boonjie is disquieting enough. But dozens, perhaps hundreds, of places across the continent have been named or renamed, not to conceal but to commemorate terrible acts of violence against Indigenous people. There is a Skull Creek in each of Gippsland, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland. There’s a Massacre Bay in Victoria, a Massacre Waterfall in Borroloola, a Slaughterhouse Creek in New South Wales and another Butchers Creek in Victoria. There were massacres in each of them. Twelve places in Queensland (where colonial and post-Federation violence against Indigenous people was most pronounced) are named Skeleton Creek but official records fail to reveal how many of these names commemorate massacres ...
[W]hat happened to Poppin Jerri’s people at Butchers Creek was replicated in an unknown number of battles, skirmishes, guerrilla attacks and reprisals as the pastoral and mining frontier crept further north and west. These conflicts killed countless – because uncounted – Indigenous people. The deaths of police, soldiers, settlers, shepherds and convict labourers are more quantifiable; they were quantified because those doing the counting thought these deaths mattered.
Picture credit: A sign to Butchers Creek, where the Ngadjon were murdered (Paul Daley/The Guardian). Butchers Creek is on the eastern edge of the Atherton Tableland, south of Cairns, Queensland.
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