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| TLM-P and his troop returned to their properties after the Redbank murders((memoir, p.41)) These murders in all are now thought to have a toll of around 300 Aboriginal people. TLM-P was also one of four magistrates who wrote to the Colonial Secretary demanding harsher penalties for Aboriginal resistance((Reid, A Nest of Hornets, pp.117-18.)) In his memoirs he also considered it reasonable that William Fraser, who had survived the Hornet Bank massacre of his family, embarked on a lifetime of indiscriminate killing of Aboriginal people. William Fraser became a folk hero among whites; he is also noted in the Wikipedia entry as 'one of the greatest mass murderers in Australian history'. He subsequently died of old age without facing prosecution or his murders.\\ | TLM-P and his troop returned to their properties after the Redbank murders((memoir, p.41)) These murders in all are now thought to have a toll of around 300 Aboriginal people. TLM-P was also one of four magistrates who wrote to the Colonial Secretary demanding harsher penalties for Aboriginal resistance((Reid, A Nest of Hornets, pp.117-18.)) In his memoirs he also considered it reasonable that William Fraser, who had survived the Hornet Bank massacre of his family, embarked on a lifetime of indiscriminate killing of Aboriginal people. William Fraser became a folk hero among whites; he is also noted in the Wikipedia entry as 'one of the greatest mass murderers in Australian history'. He subsequently died of old age without facing prosecution or his murders.\\ |
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| Information about the Hornet Bank massacre has been complicated not only by an unwillingness to acknowledge that it was a result of a war for the possession of land, but also by the unreliable recollections of Rosa Praed. As Reid (pp.iv,77) comments, Rosa in her memoirs((//Australian Life: Black and White//, London, 1885 and //My Australian Girlhood//, London, 1904)), was an unreliable witness. The problem was not so much Rosa, but that modern readers rarely appreciate that mixing memoir and fiction "was not considered a fault in Victorian Life-writing" (Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex, //Outrageous Fortunes:The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and Her Criminal Son George//, La Trobe University Press, 2025). Rosa had a novelist's imagination and needed her memoirs to sell. She did not write them as documentary evidence for future historians. \\ | Information about the Hornet Bank massacre has been complicated not only by an unwillingness to acknowledge that it was a result of a war for the possession of land, but also by the unreliable recollections of Rosa Praed. As Reid (pp.iv,77) comments, Rosa in her memoirs((//Australian Life: Black and White//, London, 1885 and //My Australian Girlhood//, London, 1904)), was an unreliable witness. The problem was not so much Rosa, but that modern readers rarely appreciate that mixing memoir and fiction "was not considered a fault in Victorian Life-writing - however annoying to the historian." (Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex, //Outrageous Fortunes:The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and Her Criminal Son George//, La Trobe University Press, 2025, p.33). That is, Rosa had a novelist's imagination and needed her memoirs to sell. She did not write them as documentary evidence for future historians. \\ |
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| TLM-P sold Hawkwood a year after the Hornet Bank massacre. The cause was an outbreak of scab among his sheep: he was apparently popular with his neighbours as they are said to have gifted him some 900 sheep to help replenish his flock.((Reid, A Nest of Hornets, pp.214-15.))\\ | TLM-P sold Hawkwood a year after the Hornet Bank massacre. The cause was an outbreak of scab among his sheep: he was apparently popular with his neighbours as they are said to have gifted him some 900 sheep to help replenish his flock.((Reid, A Nest of Hornets, pp.214-15.))\\ |