Beltana killings in 1863 a clash of civilisations – between Aboriginal and European – in the north of South Australia
Beltana sheep station manager Captain Robert McKay led the attack on the Aboriginal red ochre traders in South Australia's north in November 1863.
A clash of civilisations – Aboriginal and European – brought bloodshed to Beltana in South Australia’s north in November 1863. The Aboriginal men killed on November 27, 1863, were part of a civilisation with not only tradition, social structures, national borders, sacred beliefs and rituals but also a well-developed economic trading system.
As with many generations before European settlement, those killed on November 27 were using the network of well-defined Dreaming trade routes stretching across the Australian continent.
This November 1863 group was on its journey home on the trade tracks along Warioota Creek through the Kuyani ranges after visiting Parachilna/Bookatoo in the northern Flinders Rangers where they had traded for and mined its much-prized Yarrakina red ochre, owned by the Adnyamathnha (rock people), descendants of the Kuyani, Bilaluppa, Jadliaura and Wailpi families.
On their way home from Parachilna/Bookatoo with their ochre, the November 1863 group of traders gathered at a waterhold hole on Warioota Creek when white shepherds arrived with 1,300 sheep. The sheep belonged to Thomas Elder, one of the most powerful businessmen in the early South Australian colony. Elder had taken over crown lease of John Haimes who bought the first sheep to the Kuyani hills in 1856. As Elder Smith and Co. invested more capital on sinking wells and fencing paddocks, sheep grew fat on saltbush while drinking from Kuyani waterholes, on the station property called Beltana – an Anglicised version of the Kuyani name for Palthanha, a site along Warioota Creek.
The November 1863 confrontation between Aboriginal ochre traders and the shepherds employed by Thomas Elder escalated when the traders stopped the sheep from getting to the waterhole, killing three with boomerangs and driving the rest away “saying that [the] water was theirs”. They Aboriginal group eventually followed the shepherds to the Beltana Station station kitchen. Here, the Beltana manager, Captain Robert McKay, horsewhipped one Aboriginal man.
Tensions grew over nine days with rumours circulating among settlers that “between 200 and 300 natives [are] coming down.” On November 27, settlers with guns confronted the ochre traders at Warioota Creek. A witness later testified that “Captain McKay got off his horse to fire at the natives, as they were all about the creek.”
The colony’s newspapers reported the deaths of only three Aboriginal traders whose corpses remained at Warioota Creek when police arrived. This omittid the “forty or fifty others [who] died of their wounds before they reached their own territory,” according to Kuyani records. On December 2 1863, the jury of eight settlers returned the unanimous verdict of “justifiable homicide.”
By 1867, Beltana was operating as a ration depot, issuing tobacco, blankets, and flour to Aboriginal people as “compensation” for having their land taken. Rations also became a substitute to wages for Aboriginal work such as tracking dingoes and other animals that were threatening sheep. The Pondi family was noted around Beltana for their tracking skills.
On the evening of July 2 1881, more European “progress” arrived at Beltana in the form of the first steam train on the new Great Northern Railway. Aboriginal ochre traders from the north watched its arrival from a nearby hill.
The new train technology and another outside transport influence – camels introduced by Elder with their “Afghan” cameleers (who closely interacted with Aboriginal people) – were used by Aboriginal traders to continue the passage of Parachilna red ochre northwards. The Great Northern Railway, the 1970s Overland telegraph line between Port Augusta and Dawin, as well as the cameleers, all followed the Aboriginal trade routes.
Taking red ochre from Parachilna by train or camel had to become a smuggling operation with the ochre having to be concealed to avoid being detected by another element of European civilisation – the Christian missionaries.