Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 108

Macquarie was keen to make his mark with the Aboriginal community as well.

In October 1814, Macquarie wrote to Lord Bathurst in the Colonial Office, suggesting an Aboriginal school be established in Parramatta as part of an endeavour to win the hearts and minds of the younger Aboriginal generation, and to persuade the parents to allow their children to learn some of the European ways, of cultivation, literacy and sedentary ‘civilised’ society. On receiving Bathurst’s approval, the school was soon in place. (Parents, however, removed children from the school after they realised its aim was to distance the children from their culture and families.)

Macquarie’s attempt to conciliate Aboriginal peoples was also manifested a few months later, when he held the first of what would become an annual ‘gathering of tribes’ in Parramatta. Here, Macquarie played the ‘big chief’ (he fancied himself as a bit of a Scottish Highland chieftain), handing out gifts and good humour to Indigenous Australians who travelled up to three hundred kilometres to attend the gathering.

Macquarie wanted all those beneath him to prosper — both convicts and Aboriginal people — as long as they acknowledged they were beneath him in rank and authority. Macquarie wasted little time mounting punitive military expeditions when some Aboriginals seemed set to continue their ‘perverse’ hostility to his good intentions and the settlement at large. In 1816, after Aboriginal attacks on farms on the outskirts of the Sydney settlement, Governor Macquarie sent a party to arrest the offenders. This resulted in an attack on an Aboriginal camp at Appin, and the killing of 14 Aboriginal people, none of them known to have been involved in the initial incident.

Macquarie declared individual Aboriginals as wanted outlaws when whites and blacks clashed, and declared martial law on both Aboriginals and bushrangers when needed in regions where conflict was most rife.