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... opened without sacrifice of one or more valuable lives ... Many a station has a little fenced mound that tells the same pathetic tale. Southern people and Exeter Hall [London] philanthropists, to whom the blackfellow is either a name or a bogie to scare children with, have got the impression that whites are often murdered because they interfere with the blackfellows' women. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the accusation is a contemptible slander ... Many of the outrages have been perpetrated upon harmless inoffensive people who had been travelling through the country for the first time ... It would be easy to multiply instances in which settlers have been ruthlessly murdered by the natives without a shadow of provocation. Three-fourths of the deliberate assaults are due entirely to innate bloodthirstiness ... One of the characteristic traits of the aborigines is that they look upon leniency and humane treatment at the hands of their enemies as products of fear ...
The writer was Aeneas Gunn, soon afterwards the genial, kindly and thoughtful "Maluka" of We of the Never Never. His latest publisher is CALM, the Department of Conservation and Land Management, Western Australia. Gunn's outburst against the indigenous people of the north first appeared in a series of twenty-four articles in Melbourne suburban newspapers in 1899, on his pioneering experiences during 1891-92.
They are the main component of Under a Regent Moon: A Historical Account of Pioneer Pastoralists Joseph Bradshaw and Aeneas Gunn at Prince Regent River, Kimberley, Western Australia, edited by Tom Willing and Kevin Kenneally, senior CALM naturalists (2002, $26). It is the first appearance of Gunn's articles in book form. Aborigines are only one of many aspects Gunn writes about, but the pieces are unique not only for the surprising frankness of his printed hostility, but also for the apparent literate and fine character of this willing member of a white punitive party.
The Gunn family story as a whole shows not so much the reminiscences of a "redneck", but, like so much else, how difficult, complicated and often contradictory life could be on the Australian frontier. All the people mentioned below had good personal reputations.
His views are those of only one man and he was not an expert anthropologist. He might have been biased by his life and times. And the anthropological and historical consensus these days is that while the tribal Aborigines fatally speared and waddied people, black and white, fairly freely, it was usually with reason.
Nevertheless Aeneas Gunn was there, he mixed with experienced northern hands--and he was a very good observer and writer. Gunn was a member of a party led by his cousin, Joseph Bradshaw, which established from...
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