Boandik people cut by disease, poisonings in conflict with European settlers in southeast of South Australia
The home nation of the Boandik people (shown as Buandig on the map) around future Mount Gambier became the setting for frontier clashes between the Aboriginal traditional owners and European farmers moving in during the 19th Century. Inset: A Boandik group camped at Kingston SE in 1890.
Inset image courtesy State Library of South Australia and map courtesy Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
Christina Smith in her 1880 book The Boandik tribe of South Australian Aborigines described how the “once numerous and powerful tribe of south-east natives was now represented by a miserable remnant”, ruined by contact with European settlers.
First contact between the Boandik (Bungandidj), who’d lived on South Australia’s southeast coast for at least 30,000 years, and Europeans was in the 1820s. Boandik clan member Panchy told Smith the first ships were sighted at Rivoli Bay in 1822 or 1823 when his mother was abducted for three months before escaping when the ship put in at Guichen Bay near Robe.
When South Australian governor George Grey led an expedition of surveyors from Adelaide to Mount Gambier in 1844, diarist and painter George French Angas, who was with them, noted that they found, from Woakwine Range onwards, many tracks, old encampments with abandoned wurlies, and heaps of banksia cones used to make sweet drinks, mud weirs in swamps to catch fish, wickerwork traps to snare birds, and raised platforms for spotting emus and kangaroos to hunt.
Grey's expedition reported encountering very few Aboriginal people; no more than groups of two or three. The many of signs of previous land use with few sighted Aboriginal people was explained as due to the smallpox, introduced by Europeans in the north and spread, after devastating the Murray tribes, to decimate Aboriginal people further south.
After Edward Henty settled near Portland in Victoria, European settlers and their sheep, cattle, horses and bullocks started moving across the western plains of Victoria and the south east region of South Australia. Their settlement was rapid over the next two decades with significant frontier conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people. In 1843. Henry Arthur joined his brother Charles to set up a sheep run at Mount Schank near Mount Gambier. Trouble with the Boanik people and dingoes drove the brothers to sell up in 1844. The Hentys also had problems with their Mount Gambier runs with sheep stolen and shepherds speared to death in 1844. The next year, the Leake brothers on Glencoe Station reported losing 1,000 sheep from their 16,000 flock .
Also in 1845, the police commissioner drew attention to Aboriginal people being killed by "damper poisoned with corrosive sublimate … [and] driving the Natives from the only watering places in the neighbourhood. The Native women appear likewise to have been sought after by the shepherds, whilst the men were driven from the stations with threats".
In 1848, the Avenue Range Station massacre in the Guichen Bay region saw at least nine s Boandik Wattatonga clan people allegedly murdered by the station owner James Brown. Brown was charged but the case dropped for lack of European witnesses. Christina Smith's was told by a Wattatonga tribe member that 11 people were killed in this incident by two white men after sheep were stolen for food.
An 1851 report by Christina Smith’s pastor husband to Matthew Moorhouse, the protector of Aborigines, said that "the natives belonging to the Rivoli Bay Tribe (Boandik) are all quiet, and most of them usefully employed in one way or another by the settlers." The report also raised concern that "infanticide has been and is still practised among the natives here" and "relations existing between native women and the Europeans are very discreditable."
As late as 1854, settlers on Boandik land still feared being attacked. The Leake brothers of Glencoe Station in 1854 built their “frontier house” described by local historial Les Hill a “large homestead with slits in the walls through which rifles could be used against any likely intruder”.
By 1865, the Boandik population had declined rapidly due to disease, conflicts and people removed from their lands. Boandik people, who remained on their land began working as station hands, shearers and domestic servants.
