| Narrative | At the end of March 1828, Oyster Bay warriors killed Henry Beames, stock keeper to settler William Robertson on the Elizabeth River. James Simpson, the magistrate at Campbell Town, ordered a party of soldiers from the 40th Regiment along with stock keepers and field police to pursue the culprits. In his report to the Colonial Secretary a few days later he said that: 'it is believed that 17 Aborigines were slaughtered' (Simpson to Col. Sec. April 1, 1828, TAHO CSO 1/316/7578, p 137). The killing of Henry Beams was reported in the Hobart Town Courier on April 5, p 3, but did not mention the reprisal massacre. At the hearings of the Aborigines Committee two years later, Gilbert Robertson, the Chief District Constable at Richmond, testified that 'great ravages were committed by a party of constables and some of the 40th Regiment, sent from Campbell Town; the party consisted of five or six; they got the Natives between two perpendicular rocks, between which there was a sort of shelf on which the Natives got; has heard and does believe that 70 of them were killed by that party; ...the party killed them by firing all their ammunition upon them, and then dragging the women and children from the crevices in the rocks and dashing out their brains; ...believes, from Dugdale's account, who was one of the party, that the whole tribe was destroyed.' However, settler Mr Robertson disputed the massacre and said that 'no bodies were found' (BPP, 1831, pp 48-49). In 1835, Henry Melville, in The History of Van Diemen’s Land, (1835, pp 71-72) provided an account of the incident from an eyewitness: 'A mob of some score or so of natives, men, women, and children, had been discovered by their fires, and a whole parcel of the Colonists armed themselves, and proceeded to the spot. These advanced unperceived, and were close to the natives, when the dogs gave the alarm; the natives jumped up in a moment, and then the signal for slaughter was given, fire-arms were discharged, and those poor wretches who could not hide themselves from the light thrown on their persons by their own fires, were destroyed...One man...was shot, he sprang up, turned round like a whipping top, and fell dead; - the party then went up to the fires, found a great number of waddies and spears, and an infant sprawling on the ground, which one of the party pitched into one of the fires.' |
