Bonyi Bush Books

While 1997 was the bicentenary of mining in

Australia by people of European descent, the

history of mining in this country stretches back

much further.

For more than 40 000 years before the arrival of

the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour, Australian

Aborigines had been mining the land for ochre and

stone.

Aborigines depended on their stone implements to

gather and process their food; ochre was a vital

ingredient in art and religious practices; quarries

and ‘processing’ sites were developed to cater for

the demand for these products; and transport

routes were established to allow for their trade.

While ochre and stone of one sort or another can

be found almost anywhere in Australia, the ochre

and stone deposits that were exploited by

Aborigines were of particularly high quality.

The higher the quality, the larger the mining

operation and the greater the distance over which

the product was traded. Ochre from north western

South Australia and from eastern Western Australia

and stone axes from Mount Isa-Cloncurry were

traded far outside these districts. At times many

different clans would gather near a quarry site to

trade for the stone or ochre and to hold

ceremonies, initiations and other important cultural

events.

Ownership of mines rested with the clan on whose

land they occurred and access to them was

allowed only with the permission of these

custodians. Within a clan, the actual mining was

often undertaken by a smaller group who had

special knowledge of how to correctly extract the

resource.

Mines were gen

Part Two We will set out a terminological ecosystem of mass killing, develop a typology with semantics, and propose a methodology to investigate any instance of a mass killing event as a contextual referent within the process of enforced displacive occupation in Australia between 1788 and 1930. We will assert that a mass killing event can apply to a series of single homicides bound together by common purpose over prescribed time, scaling to the destruction of Aboriginal society across the continent, a testable hypothesis. We conclude that mass killing as a normalised pathological behaviour is not limited to homicide, but also includes ecocide. Australia’s unarticulated values – we don’t have a Bill Of Rights – are determined by collective behaviour and their motivations, giving rise to what we call our spaghettified rule-based order, a fragile bulwark against existential uncertainty.

Ray Gibbons, 2023

For Indigenous people today, breastplates have mixed meanings. While they are rare evidence of named individuals links to places across Australia, they are also linked to the dispossession of their land.

The Concept of Mass Killing in Australian History: 1788 - 1930 Abstract: We will set out a terminological ecosystem of mass killing, develop a typology with semantics, and propose a methodology to investigate any instance of a mass killing event as a contextual referent within the process of enforced displacive occupation in Australia between 1788 and 1930. We will assert that a mass killing event can apply to a series of single homicides bound together by common purpose over prescribed time, scaling to the destruction of Aboriginal society across the continent, a testable hypothesis. We conclude that mass killing as a normalised pathological behaviour is not limited to homicide, but also includes ecocide. Australia’s unarticulated values – we don’t have a Bill Of Rights – are determined by collective behaviour and their motivations, giving rise to what we call our spaghettified rule-based order, a fragile bulwark against existential uncertainty.

Ray Gibbons, 2023.

Deadly freestyle

My interview with Alex Easton went pretty good

10 minute preview

The greatest actor who ever lived

The murder of William Stephens in 1866 at Mooloolah

It is useful to set the scene. In February 1866 the Gympie gold rush was two years in the future and the Gympie Road did not exist. There was a settlement at

Mooloolah Heads started by William Pettigrew. It was largely a base for the shipping of timber cut in the hinterland. William Grigor and James Lowe ran a store there where the basic rations could be purchased. Pettigrew ran steamships on the coastal run between Brisbane and Mooloolah Heads, his major vessel at the time being the Gneering. The hinterland was divided into a few large cattle runs, with Edmund Lander and the Westaway brothers being the main

operators in this area. As the following will demonstrate at least two timbercutters, Charles

Kinmond and Robert Keely had huts in the area that is now Glenview. They lived in slab huts and there were no roads as such, only bush tracks with very few travellers. There were no other towns or settlements north of Caboolture. When reading contemporary accounts of the events there are frequent references to ‘Mooloolah’. This can lead to confusion as they refer to the port of Mooloolah Heads (now known as ‘Mooloolaba’) not the present township of Mooloolah which did not exist in 1866.

The local Aborigines, the Kabi Kabi tribe or language group were, in general,peaceful and some worked in the timber industry. There were often a few hanging around the store and the settler’s huts at Mooloolah Heads, doing odd jobs.

One such person was known as Captain Piper and he had apparently worked for Tom Petrie as a foreman in a gang of cutters in the Mooloolah and Maroochy River area. He was a large, strong man and one writer describes him as a Hercules in comparison to other members of his race.

In February 1866 botanist William Stephens was at Mooloolah Heads waiting for the Gneering

to take him back to Brisbane. He was employed by the Queensland Government Botanist Walter

Hill to collect botanical specimens for a display at the forthcoming Melbourne Exhibition.

Included in his collections were seeds of the bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii) which grows in the

area north and west of Mooloolah Heads. Stephens discovered that the Gneering would be some time before it arrived in port. Therefore he decided to travel on foot to Brisbane, a distance of about 84 miles, collecting plants along the way.

He purchased rations from the store and, in the

process, displayed a number of silver shillings which he carried to pay Aborigines for work they

carried out for him. One account suggests that Captain Piper, who was in the vicinity, mistook

these for gold sovereigns, perhaps providing an explanation for what was to follow.

The suggestion is that Stephens is alleged to have collected bunya seed from a tree which was

traditionally owned by Captain Piper, an act that would have made him an enemy of Piper.

Stephens hired Aborigine Tommy Skyring to guide him on the way to Brisbane. Skyring had

previously guided Stephens in the area. Local accounts describe Tommy Skyring as being

emaciated, weak and in poor health. He had consumption (tuberculosis) of which he died a few

months later. He declined offers by Captain Piper and Johnny Griffin to help carry Stephens’s

effects, but apparently these two followed Stephens and Skyring when they left on 24 February 1866. Robert Keely, a local timbercutter, was going in the same direction and joined Stephens and Skyring and they set out from Mooloolah Heads. One account says that Stephens intended to spend the night at the hut occupied by timbercutters Kinmond and Peter Campbell, but stopped at a waterhole on the Mooloolah River (later known as ‘Deadman’s Waterhole’) to boil the billy and cook some damper or johnny cakes for lunch. Keely declined an offer to stay and left them about 3:00 pm to carry on to his hut which was a little beyond Kinmond and Campbell’s hut, a few miles away.

Putrid inbred dawgs