The Hawkesbury has a local heroine who had a significant part to play in the relationships between white settlers and Aboriginal people in the area in the early days of white settlement.
“My Hawkesbury hero is Mary Archer, who reported the 1799 killings of two Aboriginal boys,” Aboriginal historian Barry Corr told the Gazette this week, in an interview about his push to have a frontier war memorial erected.
Who was Mary Archer? The Gazette published historian Carol Carruthers’ account of Mary’s heroism in 2011. “The most impressive of Mary’s actions was in 1799 when she stood up to all her neighbours and the local government-men and workers over the murder of two Aboriginal youths,” Ms Carruthers said.
“Mary’s conscience had made her the only settler prepared to report the murders. The boys had been cold-bloodedly killed by her neighbours one night, the bodies hidden in a shallow grave on one of the Cornwallis farms.
“She went alone with the news to Chief Constable Thomas Rickaby. This led to her neighbours’ trial for the murder of the youths (whom Mary had known personally on the farms), and ultimately to the first European convictions in Australia for the murder of Aborigines.”
The mention of Mary Archer was part of a discussion with Mr Corr arising from the recent vandalism of the Macquarie statue in McQuade Park at Windsor. The graffiti appeared to refer to Macquarie’s actions in regard to the local Aboriginal people.
Mr Corr said he had already been working towards a re-interpretation of that period of Hawkesbury history and was looking for support for a new memorial to those who died in the frontier warfare, both Aboriginal and white people.
Mr Corr has started a Facebook page called ‘Venrubbin’, an early Aboriginal name for the Hawkesbury River, to gather ideas from the public of a suitable memorial to honour all those who died in the conflicts.
“The Hawkesbury has lost its own story. It’s lost its past,” Mr Corr said.
In this week’s Gazette podcast Mr Corr said his research on interactions between Aboriginal people and white settlers had to be drawn from a mosaic of sources – official accounts from the time, diaries, newspaper reports. He said he has drawn his description of what occurred as a ‘war’ from a document of the time written by Lachlan Macquarie which mentioned the ‘recent costs of warfare’.
“It’s crucial we understand we’ve got a shared history and there are many aspects of this,” Mr Corr said of the Hawkesbury community. “One important aspect is we have a lot of families, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal who have been here a very, very long time and family stories have been handed down or have been concealed, and some families still have a lot of bitterness.
“We have to take on board that the fighting on both sides was absolutely horrific – there are terrible stories, but also great stories. Naturally we all repel from the horror and it just gets buried. We do have to examine that. But importantly we also have to take on board that there were patterns to it.
“The other really important factor is that the relationships … were really complex and quite astounding. We know that some white families and some Aboriginal families got on very well. We know there were white families over the river, Ebenezer, Portland way who had absolutely no problems with their Aboriginal neighbours. They got on famously. Others had nothing but continual fighting and continuous strife.”
He said the conclusion he’d come to was that when drought hit – there were a whole series of droughts between 1799 and 1816 – there was much more stress on both white and Aboriginal people.
“During these droughts, the settlers found it tough going, and there were more and more settlers coming in. I think they expanded their farms, they expanded their settlements, and that’s when they ran into problems with the Aboriginal people who also were suffering during periods of drought and were fighting for their land.”
- Barry Corr’s history of the complex relationships between Aboriginal people and settlers in the Hawkesbury is at www.nangarra.com.au. The Facebook page discussing ideas for a memorial is at www.facebook.com/Venrubbin.”