| Narrative | Following the Wiradjuri killing of seven workers in a 24 hour period on the Bathurst frontier, a detachment of the 40th regiment and an unknown number of armed and mounted settlers, overseers and stock keepers, set off in revenge. According to historian Stephen Gapps, the posse found some of the Wiradjuri people at Eight Mile Swamp Creek. '[A] volley was discharged in their midst; and ... some of them dropped, but whether males or females then they did not know.' One of the perpetrators thought that 'one was an old woman, but of the age or the sex of the others, they pleaded ignorance' (Gapps, 2021 p 145) The bodies of three women were found.
In the aftermath, six of the men who discharged their muskets were arrested and charged with manslaughter and five of them were sent to Sydney for trial. The Attorney-General Saxe Bannister, said that the action against the women was not an act of self-defence and that the law held no difference between individuals white or black. (Gapps 2021, pp.164-5). At the trial in early July 1824, magistrate William Cox said that the killing was justified because 'the natives may now be called at war with the Europeans, and that in his opinion, resistance is justifiable.' (quoted in Gapps 2021, p.166). He also argued that Governor Macquarie's Proclamation of 1816 which said that Aboriginal people must stay away from the frontier, was still in force. The jury said they did not find enough evidence to convict the accused and acquitted all five men (Gapps 2021, p.166). |
