| Narrative | Gordon Reid (1990) wrote that a soldier, Pearson, was unhorsed and wounded while another, FH Litchfield, was struck and disabled. Two horses were speared. Going to their aid in a party, Alaric Ward shot an Aboriginal man and the Aborigines retreated. Col BT Finniss, who was in charge of the settlement, appointed his son Frederick as the head of a mounted and foot party. ‘As they set out on 8 September eastwards towards Chambers Bay, William McMinn, who had charge of the foot party, asked Frederick Finniss what was to be done. Young Finniss replied: “Shoot every bloody native you see”. When asked later by the royal commission whether he understood that the orders implied an indiscriminate massacre of the natives, McMinn replied: “Everyone could interpret the orders in his own way”. He could see “from the feeling coming from them” that his men would slaughter the Aborigines. Three of them trapped an Aborigine behind some scrub and, instead of taking him prisoner, one of them shot him dead. The whites then went to the native camp, recovered stolen property and destroyed the camp. They then encountered the surveyor, JWO Bennett, who “ordered them not to kill a native within fifty yards of his camp”, apparently because he feared the Aborigines would associate him with this action. It was too late; they had already done so. ‘When the party returned to Escape Cliffs, Finniss complimented his son by saying, “Well done, Freddy, I thought you would let them see”. Some time later, Alaric Ward was out of the whites’ camp and was killed by the natives’ (Reid 1990, pp 32-33).
Finniss, responding to F Rymill during the Northern Territory Commission of Inquiry, said: ‘The government had sent the party to occupy their territory without regard to their wishes, and if we were to remain there we were to overcome their hostility; and this, as we had proved, could not be done by means of conciliation and forebearance’ (cited in Reid p 34). |
