| Narrative | Following the clubbing death of Travers in his camp, a reprisal was carried out by Nat Buchanan, Wattie Gordon, Sam Croker, Charles Bridson, Tom Hume and Brebner. Roberts (2005, pp 48-50) noted: 'Gordon Buchanan, Nat’s son, admitted that the murderers of Travers "met with just retribution", but he was critical of what he called "the ruthless and often insensate methods of Croker to awe the blacks". In 1911 James Beckett, the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the NT, was shown a remote cave north-west of the Limmen Bight River which contained forty to fifty skeletons of people of all ages. Beckett’s Aboriginal guide said they had been killed by lightning many years earlier. An aged Aboriginal man told Beckett he had been taken to the site by his parents the day after the tragedy. There was, apparently, no obvious evidence that those in the cave had been shot, but in the first years of contact in the Gulf country it was common for Aboriginals to attribute shooting deaths to lightning. Moreover, the cave was reported to be 100 metres long, 20 metres wide and only ‘2 feet’ (61 centimetres) high, which makes lightning an unlikely factor. In any event, news of the cave was published in the Argus, prompting an old-timer to write: "Somewhere in the locality indicated, in a somewhat similar cave, over 25 years ago, I saw probably 20 bodies of natives who had recently been shot by a well-known Queensland overlander".' |
