By Timothy Bottoms, November 2023
Do we shoot them? Of course we do. The popular idea is to disperse them by firing over their heads. Bah! only people who know nothing about wild myalls would imagine that they would be afraid of that sort of thing. One thing is certain. If you point a gun at a nigger (sic) to frighten him you had better let him have it straight, or you are very likely to find a spear sticking in your back as soon as soon as you turn away.
Queenslander (27 January 1877)
Harsh racist views were obviously convenient to a community engaged in dispossessing a native people and perhaps some such doctrine was psychologically necessary to the pioneer or to those aware of conditions on the frontier of settlement.2
William Kracke, who arrived on the Palmer Goldfields in 1882 as a would-be miner, and lived in the area for the next 22 years, stated that:
The North Queensland blacks, or better called Myalls, are acknowledged to be the lowest class of human beings under the sun, nothing can be lower than they are – in fact, lower than most animals. They are cannibals of the worst type.4
is some indication that cannibalism was rare before the coming of the white man, who, however, was ready to credit the Aborigines with man-eating and soon found proofs which appeared to carry conviction.5
In the light of Rainforest Aborigines mortuary practices, Bolton’s interpretation seems quite apt. Nevertheless there appears to have been a form of non-gustatorial cannibalism, which when it did occur, involved the eating of a tiny portions of thigh and kidneys. Typically the portion was very small and enable the deceased to share a part of his spirit and knowledge (as a medicine-man or well-known warrior).6 The evidence is too contradictory to be very precise. Generally, it would appear that misunderstandings of Bama mortuary practices gave Europeans the impression that cannibalism was rife, when it likely was not. To what degree Europeans were capable of distinguishing between supposed human remains, preserved mummies or parts thereof, and local animals, such as the cassowary, merely adds to the uncertainty of the debate. In this regard European’s had trouble in distinguishing between a Cassowary thigh bone and a human femur.
The Governor, in his reply to the Secretary of State for Colonies in August 1875, described the Aborigines of the North as ‘numerous, savage, treacherous, and very commonly cannibals’ – a conclusion that was readily supported by the violent culture contact apparent by that time on the Palmer mining frontier.7 However, there is no evidence for being ‘very commonly cannibals’ – although we know that food resource’s were scarce on the Palmer as Mulligan noted that “fish will not bite at all this moon, and the birds are scarce and hard to kill…”8 and that this might have ostensibly led to cannibalism. But again, there is no proof that this was the case, and nobody is taking into account Aboriginal culture and religious beliefs which would be aghast at eating people. But we don’t know whether with scarce resources on the Palmer, that there might have some Indigenous people who might have resorted to eating people, however, we don’t have any primary sources that reflects this.
Archaeologist’s interpretations of how long Aboriginal people have occupied the Australian continent, varies between 65,000 and maybe as long as 120,000 BP.9 Settler’s in the 19th century considered that Aboriginal people had been here for a couple of hundred years when in fact they are the oldest living culture in the world.
In 2017, The National Geographic Magazine, wrote: “when Columbus came back [to America], the indigenous people who had previously been classified as friendly were suddenly described as cannibals, so you could do anything to them. You could enslave them, take their land, murder them, and treat them like pestilence. And that’s exactly what happened, … The idea of cannibalism as a taboo was used to de-humanize the people encountered on these conquests.”10 In a similar vein the after effects of and continuing detrimental diseases of cannibalism led to degenerative brain disorders, such as kuru and mad cow disease, which were nearly always fatal. If this had been practised over 65,000 years there would have been clues to it in their DNA and would work against their longevity.
During my research and writing over the last 30 years I could not find any primary source documents that actually witnessed cannibalism. What I did find was that the Rainforest Bama practised ritualistic, but not gustatory cannibalism. The white intruders needed to have an excuse for their own barbaric behaviour to lay at the Indigenous people’s door – the trouble is that we do not have any primary source documents that support this historical impression of outright cannibalism. You will notice in the primary sources, where they claim ‘cannibalism’ – it’s nearly always third hand, no one actually witnesses the act of a cannibalistic feast. If you wanted to take the land, the Indigenous people had to be portrayed as less than human. All this was to prejudice settler’s against the traditional owners, by the promulgation of ‘cannibalism’ by Europeans, which helped to justify the great land theft.
Remember: “No Australians today is responsible for what happened on our colonial frontier. But we are responsible for not acknowledging what happened. If we do not, our integrity as a nation is flawed and we are shamed as a people for perpetuated a lie.”11