#native police

In July 1845, Dana wrote to La Trobe about an armed encounter between his men and some Jardwadjali of the Choorite balug clan. The events leading up to this encounter, told from the perspective of settler Thomas Baillie, were detailed in a sworn statement enclosed with Dana’s letter. Baillie and his business partner Hamilton occupied land near a lake about 15 miles from Mt Arapiles. On Thursday 10 July 1845, while Baillie and his shepherd were attending the sheep ‘several Natives rushed from the Forest and took away the whole flock’. The station owner and his shepherd pursued them, recovering some sheep.

Hamilton fetched Dana and his native police who tracked the missing animals. After travelling 30 miles, they ‘came up with a number of sheep with their legs broken’. They found 200 sheep ‘in a bush yard’ and some Aborigines nearby. In the fracas that followed, Dana = explained how ‘the Ringleader of the party was cut down after a long resistance, by Yupton a corporal of the native police and made a prisoner of; he is badly wounded. I have ordered him to be marched to Melbourne as soon as his wounds will permit’. The ‘ringleader’ was Yanem Goona, also known as Yanengoneh (‘spring from the earth’) or Old Man Billy Billy. Dana justified opening fire, killing at least three Choorite balug men and wounding others, by claiming he and his men were at risk, but may have exaggerated the danger.

Robinson, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, claimed the native police openly boasted they ‘were not going to take prisoners but to shoot as many of the blacks as they could’. A history of retributive killings is evident in a newspaper report on the loss of Baillie’s and Hamilton’s sheep that stated ‘the tribe who committed this serious depredation is the same which Messrs Powlett and Dana at different times thinned of its fair proportions in a skirmish with the black rascals’."

* Fire a broadside.

The camp was deserted, but around the fires nearest to the township lay the scanty garments of men, gins, and piccaninies, many of them saturated with blood, while the track of the fugitives could be easily traced by the trail of blood leading from the fires in every direction. At the fire nearest to the Creek, which separates the camp from the township, and around which a number of blacks apparently had been sleeping, two pools of blood and brains showed where foul murder had been perpetrated.

June 4th.—On the Sanders Run, near the Expedition Range. The blacks dispersed towards the Comet Range.

June 5th—On the foot of the Comet Range; the blacks dispersed.

June 7th.—In a scrub near the Tryphinia Vale Station; the blacks dispersed . . .

Early on the morning of the 10th June a collision took place in the Expedition Range between the four detachments Native Mounted Police and a party of aboriginals, when the latter were dispersed.