What makes the Myall Creek Massacre story of such significance is that it contains many of the major themes of Australian history. It illustrated the continuing dilemma of the treatment of Aboriginal people and the lack of recognition of their rights and traditional customs. It showed that the national prosperity originally built on sheep and property had some very sad consequences. The trial and executions showed the strength and weaknesses of the Rule of Law. It also demonstrated the difficulties in establishing a government imposed colony rather than those in the United States based on free emigrants with a strong religious base. It could also be said that those who were hanged or murdered were the victims of property expansion whose owners were safely ensconced elsewhere.
The British Influence
Australia, from its colonial birth, was a government-managed penal colony, subject to the policies of the government of the day and the Colonial Office, who administered them. Until 1843, with the establishment of a partly elected NSW Legislative Council, the British Government determined how life should be conducted in Botany Bay and its expanding districts. For nearly 50 years Britain had been ruled by a Conservative Government, and eventually in 1830 a more liberal Whig government came to power and remained in power till 1841. All through the 1830’s this shift in the political wind permeated through the policies toward transportation, the electoral franchise and the native peoples in their colonial possessions. Most significantly, the Select Committees on Native Tribes said that Aboriginal people had “a plain and sacred right to their own soil”. Each Governor since Arthur Phillip had been provided with similar instructions. However now there was a more sympathetic government. The Secretary for the Colonies, James Stephen, who had had a long association with the anti-slavery movement, determined the new Governor should act on these instructions. This led to the appointments of the new Governor of NSW, Sir George Gipps (1837-1846), and a new Attorney General, John Plunkett (1836-1856), the first Roman Catholic to be appointed to senior office in the colony. Plunkett not only introduced equality before the law for Aboriginal people in 1836 but also pursued a career-long campaign for the acceptance of evidence by Aboriginal people in criminal trials.
The winds of change however had not blown through all the ranks of government. Acting Governor, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Snodgrass had commissioned Major Nunn to organise a force “to suppress outrages in the Namoi Gwydir region”. Nunn’s instructions prior to the arrival of Gipps had seen a bloodthirsty swathe cut across the northwest, for which he was warmly congratulated by the press, the squatter fraternity and elements in the government including Snodgrass. It was in this setting that the actions of Gipps, Plunkett and Denny Day were endeavouring to bring justice for Aboriginal people in New South Wales, following the Myall Creek Massacre.
The Expansion of the Sheep Lands
Initially, New South Wales survived as a colony on the exports of whale oil and seal skins but was soon . Looking for an economic reason to exist it became evident that Australian wool was superior in quality to British, Spanish and German wool and this, coupled with perceived limitless acres of land and the availability of assigned convict labour who could work as shepherds and hutkeepers, directed the economic future of the colony.
With the recovery of the British economy after 1828, investment poured into Australia. The price of wool increased all through the 1830’s and peaked in 1837 and eventually collapsed in 1839-41. The agricultural property boom starting about 1834 was well under way in 1838, to reach its peak in 1840. With the speculative mindset well and truly in place by 1838 the development of the land, now known as the New England, was undertaken by many of Scottish descent who through the Highland Clearances of 1811 were not unfamiliar with the removal of people unable to protect themselves, so that sheep could flourish.
So while wool had a dramatically beneficial effect for the Australian economy, it also led to the forced removal of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands. The Massacre is therefore an emblematic movement in history in an industry which did so much to make Australia an affluent country, but also had dramatic negative impacts.
A Global Experience
The Australian experience was not unique. 1838 was a year in which a whole range of events illustrated the world in which the massacre took place. In June 1838, the “Trail of Tears” commenced when 16000 Cherokee Indians were escorted by the US Army from their traditional lands in Georgia, Tennessee to Oklahoma, some 1400 kilometres away, resulting in 4000 deaths on the journey. This was done by the United States Government despite a Supreme Court ruling affirming their rights to occupy their own land. In South Africa, December 1838 saw the “Battle of Blood River”, where 3000 Zulu warriors were killed by an armed group of Boers. This battle, in the third year of “The Great Trek”, outside the agreed limits of settlement, was enshrined in Afrikaner history and was extolled during the days of Apartheid. 1838 was also the year that Charles Dickens published “Oliver Twist”, illustrating the squalor and poverty that existed in England with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. It illustrated the social conditions and the way crime increased in England over the century to 1838 and the circumstances in which the convict population had left England.