Talk:Fighting Hills massacre

Australia: Victoria / Crime / Indigenous peoples Low‑importance

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Anonymous letter printed in 1860 from one of the participants to be added to wikisource:

In 1860, the following account of the massacre titled 'Shooting Blackfellows' was published. The anonymous author was presumed to be either Benjamin Wardle, Daniel Turner or William Gillespie. The names of the squatters are fictitious - the 'Parks' being pseudonyms for the Whyte brothers:

'Why' said one of them, the elder of the two, 'I can remember when they used to shoot down the blacks in this colony as you would do kangaroos, all because they sometimes killed a few sheep. I remember down in the Port District, when the four Parks and three other men, I was one of them, shot sixty-nine in one afternoon. The devils had stolen about 100 sheep and driven them away to the ranges. When they got them there they broke their legs to prevent them escaping, and were killing them and eating them at leisure... We all mounted horses, and armed with rifles set off in hot pursuit. It was early morning when we started, and about the middle of the day we came up with the black rascals, and a rare chase we had of it. They set off like mad, about one hundred and fifty of them, never showing fight in the least. The ranges were so rocky that we had to dismount and follow them on foot, and after two or three hours chase we got them beautiful - right between a crossfire, a steep rock on one side they could not climb, and rifles on each of the other. Well we prepared them pretty, they stood up firm and stiff to be shot and we dropped them one by one. We were expecting to cook the lot of them, when Mr George... fired a shot too high and sent a bullet through one of his brothers face... we all knocked off firing and ran to him. In an instant the blacks were off, and we were too much engaged over Tom Park to think of following them... We counted sixty-nine victims, including half a dozen or so that were not quite dead, but these were put out of their misery with the butt-end. The blacks carried off a few wounded ones but as we fired at the body we pretty well spoilt all them as we hit. My word! But they were rascals among the sheep in them days, they aint so bad now; a few goes like that soon thin'd em. Why they even killed a shepherd on Tompkins station only because he wanted one of their lubras; but the two Tompkins were even with them for that matter, for they shot down every blackfellow they met for three years after'.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060912081935/http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/encounters/Journeys/Robinson/Fighting_Hills.htm

"PARLIAMENT". Gippsland Guardian. Vol. V, , no. 254. Victoria, Australia. 6 July 1860. p. 3. Retrieved 23 March 2019 – via National Library of Australia.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

Tony Grgurevic (talk) 12:30, 9 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]