WARWICK'S FIRST PEOPLES
This brief overview is based principally on the research of Professor Maurice French (University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba) and David Parsons' 2003 history, Waringh Waringh: a history of Aboriginal People in the Warwick Area and their Land. The challenges of writing about Indigenous history are addressed in the August 2018 essay by Anna Clark (UTS) at this link: https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-great-australian-silence-50-years-on-100737.In the 1960s, radiocarbon dating of a human skull* found in 1886 at Talgai, near Allora, provided the first definitive proof that there had been a settled population of Aboriginal people in the Warwick district for at least 11,000 years, dating back to the time when megafauna such as giant kangaroos and wombats grazed on the Downs.
When the botanist explorer Alan Cunningham arrived on the Downs in 1827, there was an estimated Aboriginal population of 3,000, sustained by plentiful sources of plant and animal food and reliable rivers and waterholes.
Unfortunately for both the Gidhabal people and the native animals, the area soon proved irresistible to European pastoralists and graziers. The Leslie brothers were the first to establish their station, Canning Downs, on the outskirts of modern Warwick in 1840, and within a decade, some 2,000 white men (and some women) had established 50 pastoral stations, stocked by 1,400 horses, 43,000 cattle and 600,000 sheep. As Maurice French says, "the environment – human and natural – was traumatised".
The Homestead, Canning Downs by Conrad Martens, 1854 (Image courtesy of QAGOMA).
The Gidhabal people initially retreated to the security of the mountains and scrub, but then began to resist. "Between 1842 and 1845, a ‘great fear’ descended on the frontier: shepherds were speared, stock were hamstrung or run off; squatters mounted hunting parties in search of the Indigenous guerillas" (French).
Area occupied by the Gidhabal people, the traditional owners of the area around Warwick
(Sharpe, M. (1995). Dictionary of Western Bunjalung. UNE.)
Despite the conflict, some European settlers were genuinely interested in the culture and language of the Gidhabal. A German settler, Dr Hermann Beckler, observed "a grand corroboree" in 1858 which involved hundreds of participants. He wrote down the music he heard, noting that it "moved me more than any other music I have ever heard in Australia". In the same year, another sympathetic early settler, Thomas Hall, observed the last bora ceremony ever held by people in Killarney, leaving us a detailed description of both the ring and the three-day ceremony.
'A Corrobbory', one of six drawings of the Darling Downs by Thomas John Domville Taylor (sketched from life, 1844).
There were many such positive stories from both sides of the conflict, and the Indigenous people were not without their advocates as can be seen in this excerpt from a lengthy editorial in The Queenslander on 1 May 1880:
Ultimately, the Indigenous people were defeated and demoralised, and their numbers drastically reduced through conflict, removal of food sources, and European diseases such as smallpox, influenza and syphilis. The survivors, estimated by some to be as few as 500, became casual station hands, domestic servants or fringe dwellers. By 1870, there were very few full-blood Aboriginal people still alive in the district; by the turn of the century, there were none.
The first 70 years of the 20th century were years when Aboriginal people were no longer regularly needed as workers on properties and were often forcibly moved to reserves and missions. There was a great deal of mistreatment of Aboriginal people at this time but, as early as the 1920s, public opinion had begun to change, leading ultimately to the 21st century moves towards reconciliation and redress.
In the Warwick district, some traces of the original Indigenous people can still be found. Parsons' history includes the photograph below of a tree on the Condamine River with a typical 'canoe scar'; a rocky creek bed west of Warwick still bears the marks of many years of shaping and sharpening stone weapons; the collection of the Warwick Historical Society's museum, Pringle Cottage, includes indigenous axe heads found by settlers in Emu Vale, Tannymorel, Yangan and other places; the Indigenous pathways from the Downs to the coast are followed today by our highways; and the disappearance of the the Pleiades constellation from Southern skies continues to mark the beginning of winter as it has since the ancestors of today's Indigenous people lived on the Downs, 11,000 years ago.
* Talgai skull: https://www.archaeologybulletin.org/articles/10.5334/bha.20202/)