Errol Flynn buys a girl for the price of two pigs and some mussels

This is the first of two published articles by Dr Robyn Smith based on her research into massacres and enslavement of women in the Northern Territory.

In the late 1920s, an Australian man from Papua New Guinea travelled to Sydney for treatment for “black pox” after having a sexual “relationship” with a child he described as “like a little puppy”, despite his “terrible feelings of guilt” over the child’s repeated rape.. Be The fault, as Patricia O’Brien wrote, lay in her race and not in her age or his predatory, criminal behavior.

From Early 1930s, He was back in New Guinea – presumably cured of gonorrhea – and strutted around as Manager of a tobacco plantation and leaves a trail of debt.

On this occasion he bought a “little woman or girl with downcast eyes” for two pigs, a few shillings and some shells.

Once again he kept her as his sex slave.

This man was the international heartthrob Errol Flynn.

Flynn was not an isolated case. was representative of white colonial men all over the world.

Back home, notorious mounted policeman William Willshire devoted much of his taxpayer-funded time as a police officer in the Northern Territory to raping and impregnating Aboriginal women. and girls in Central Australia and the Victoria River Region.

In both places practiced his fetish with impunity; IIt was his penchant for murder that brought him down.

Cattlemen, overlanders and ranchers had a similar sense of entitlement: their kidnapping of women and the subsequent sexual slavery were an essential part of the process of Border expansion.

Let us take for example William John ‘Nugget’ Morton, who held Broadmeadows Station in Central Australia.

As Justin O’Brien wrote, an investigation into Morton’s conduct by patrolman TGH Strehlow and Alice Springs in 1937-based Sergeant Koop introduced this notation by Strehlow.

“‘Nugget’ was…employment (Women) as ‘Stockmen’ (he has no male subscriptions. who work for him) one or two other small Girls aged 9 or 10 whom he had raped. Another little girl that he had given to his nephew ‘Shrimp’, who was about 17 years old,” wrote patrol officer Strehlow.

“Ben Nicker, who worked for Nugget, was also with a little girl, and both Ben and the girl were suffering from gonorrhea.'”

A brutal man, Morton was a neighbour of Randall Stafford of Coniston Station and took part in the reprisals at Coniston before he himself was attacked and wounded at Tomahawk Waterhole in August 1928.t The attack is said to have been the result of his abduction and abuse of Aboriginal women.

Benjamin Esmond Nicker, who was killed in battle in Greece during World War II, was the son of distinguished Central Australians Samuel Foreman and Elizabeth Nicker, after whom several places in and around Alice Springs are named.

Akidnapped women were often disguised as men and, as Ted Egan wrote, known as “the drover boy” in his song of the same name.

In the Camooweal Pub they talked about
The death of the drover boy,
They drank their rum with the stranger who had come,
From the Kimberley Track, Fitzroy,
And he told of the massacre in the West,
Mere details – guess the rest,
Shoot the bills, grab a gin,
Cut her hair, break her in,
And call her a boy – the drover boy,
And call her a boy – the drover’s son.

The young Will Coulthard, Visit William “Billy” Coulthard, nephew of the Willowie Pastoral Company, referred to his uncle’s contemporary, Alf Wallis, in his 1902 diary entry.

“(We) left the packhorses with a nigger and Gin Wallace (sic) took him. Gin is dressed as a boy and looks good. Sits splendidly on the horse,” Coulthard wrote.

Like most disgraceful Practices Methods Exercises across the border, thet The fetishization of Aboriginal women was well known and concealedj a number of euphemisms, most notably “black velvet”.

For examplehe follows Entry about the Pine Creek Goldfields appeared in the NT Times and Gazette in 1881.

It refers to none other than Wentworth D’Arcy watch (better known for his murderous Adventure in the Gulf States with the Queensland Native Assembly Police) and his business partner Mitchell Dare Armstrong.

The sentence was so widely known, Liz Connor wrote that Henry Lawson Incl.did it in his 1899 The Ballad of Rouseabout.

I know the route from Spencer’s Gulf and north of Cooper’s Creek –

Where the mixed breed falls to the strong, the “black velvet” to the weak –

(From the gold-studded Flossie in the beach to the mongrel and the gin –

If they had a brain, the poor animals! We would teach them how to sin.)

This is only part of the truth about the border.

What is not discussed is what happened when a woman managed to escape. The persecution, the beatings, Share-Whipping and inevitably violent sexual sFortune telling that followed are so obscene that they are removed from the cleaned narrative the “settlement” of Australia, which we are supposed to accept.

Our cities, towns, statues and constituencies bear the names of some of the worst offenders, but this detail too has been omitted from the sanitized Records of the award of high civic honor.

It is long past time to rethink things.

Dr. Robyn Smith is the author of License to kill: massacre of men in northern Australiawhich will be launched by Professor Reuben Bolt at Charles Darwin University on 18 June 2024 and at the NT Writer’s Festival on Sunday 30 June. It is the culmination of Dr Smith’s years of research into colonial frontier massacres in northern Australia, particularly in the Northern Territory, as part of the Colonial Frontier Massacres Mapping Team, University of Newcastle under the direction of the late Professor Lyndall Ryan.

License to kill: massacre of men in northern Australia available from Northern Territory Historical Society website.

Dr. Smith is also a Conjoint Fellow at the University of Newcastle, PhD (Political History), Master of Cultural Heritage and Bachelor of Arts (Journalism & Anthropology) from Darwin. She has a good knowledge of the history, heritage and politics of the Northern Territory and is currently researching the sites of the border massacres.