Hornet Bank Massacre

TLM-P's property Hawkwood was relatively isolated and he went there at a time of bitter war between the white settlers and the Aboriginal people who had lived there for some 50,000 years. A flashpoint occurred in 1857, in what is now known as the Hornet Bank massacre. The definitive research into this massacre is a thesis and subsequent book by Gordon Reid.¹⁾ A succinct summary is at Colonial massacres - Hornet Bank aftermath. The Hornet Bank massacre was the murder of 11 members of the Fraser family and staff who lived on Hornet Bank station; the women were also raped. The murders were by Yiman (variously Jiman or Iman) language group as well as some men who had belonged to the notorious Native Police. The massacre was reputedly in retaliation not just for the seizure of Aboriginal land, but also for the rape of Yiman women by the young men of the Fraser family - which took place despite the pleas of their widowed mother. More information about this massacre is in the private section of this website.

One of the most unusual things about this massacre is that its aftermath was recorded: it was just one of the ways that TLM-P supported his daughter's Rosa Praed's desire for Australian material for her novels.²⁾ When he dictated his memory of this time to his second wife Nora to send to Rosa,³⁾ TLM-P justified his actions by stating the Hornet Bank murders were part of an Aboriginal conspiracy to exterminate the whites. Other settler families were threatened when there was a gathering of Aboriginal people some six weeks after the Hornet Bank tragedy. Hawkwood employed three unnamed Aboriginal men and one woman (from the coast, not from the local area), as well as Ernest Davies, Sydney Ling, a German doctor, and 'one or two others'. They had 'plenty of arms and ammunition'.⁴⁾ TLM-P states that a group decided on a preemptive strike against the local Aboriginal people. Leaving shearing to others, a vigilante troop of 13 or 14, including TLM-P and two of his Aboriginal employees, set off. He claimed that the Aboriginal men in the party wanted to kill women and children as well, but he prevented that by stating he would withdraw the Hawkwood group if he saw any woman or child hurt. In his reminiscences, Ernest Davies stated that in their six-week 'hunting' expedition, in the name of 'rough justice', they killed as many men of the Upper Dawson 'tribes' as they could.⁵⁾ According to TLM-P, 'The war was kept up for 18 months, during which there were continually one or two parties out, and gradually a good many of the ringleaders were accounted for [killed] … These 18 months of warfare were an anxious time for us. Business often took me then a good deal from the station. When I came home I used to canter pretty sharply to the top of the ridge from which the place was visible with my heart in my mouth, for there was always the fear that all hands might have been massacred.'⁶⁾. For sample pages of TLM-P's description of the massacre, click on Hornet Bank.

TLM-P and the rest of the vigilante group returned to their properties after the Redbank murders.⁷⁾ Eventually, their actions are believed to have resulted in the deaths of some 150 Aboriginal people: some 80 shot by the original vigilante group; 70 by the Native Police. Later retaliations are thought to have added another 150 to the overall number killed. Queensland at the time was very much a frontier settlement, with minimal consequences for taking Aboriginal lives.⁸⁾ Going to a magistrate would have been of little use: TLM-P was not only a magistrate, he and three other magistrates wrote to the Colonial Secretary demanding harsher penalties for Aboriginal resistance.⁹⁾ In his memoirs, TLM-P shared the common view that it was reasonable that William Fraser, who had survived the massacre of his family, embarked on a lifetime of indiscriminate murder of Aboriginal people. William Fraser became a folk hero among whites despite being 'one of the greatest mass murderers in Australian history'.¹⁰⁾ He subsequently died of old age without facing prosecution.

Information about the Hornet Bank massacre has been complicated not only by an unwillingness to acknowledge that it was a result of a war between white and black for the possession of land, but also by the unreliable memory of Rosa Praed when later writing Australian Life: Black and White, London, 1885 and My Australian Girlhood, London, 1904. As Reid (pp.iv,77) comments, Rosa was a novelist rather than an accurate recorder. As well, Rosa was only 7 years old when she left Hawkwood, and she wrote about that time 27 years later.