2011 - Theses - Flinders University

Did Jim see such a vision in his dark night, or did others watch him in the flickering shadowsof firelight, and wonder?Coniston Station, 1928Jim, Will, and Iris are hidden from the world for the next four months. 98 The roar of rifle fireechoes through Australian history: to the north of them, Mounted Constable William GeorgeMurray and his party massacre at least thirty-one, maybe fifty-two, seventy or two hundredIndigenous people, including women and children, up and down the Lander River in thevicinity of Coniston Station, in a battle that shocks the nation. The Federal Enquiry hearsjustifications, hears of natives so hungry they murdered Fred Brooks for his stores, hears thatFred had more than flour under his lock and key. 99 Another UAM missionary, Annie Lock,stationed further north at Barrow Creek, is called as a witness in the investigation and saysthat white men had ‘stolen native girls and hunted natives away from waterholes’, althoughshe would not name names.The massacre provokes a flurry of concern regarding white men and aboriginal women. 100Bro. Reg Williams, another of the missionary colleagues, has his permit to enter the CentralReserves cancelled by the South Australian Advisory Council of Aborigines, who minute: ‘inview of the temptations presented by native women in the reserves that Mr R Williams as ayoung single man be not permitted to enter them …’ 101 Annie Lock, not surprisingly, comesin for more overt criticism. The Board vilifies her as an ‘unattached Missionar[y] wanderingfrom place to place, having no previous knowledge of the blacks and their customs andpreaching the doctrine of the equality of man’, 102 and the Lutheran missionary fromHermansberg tells the Enquiry ‘Miss Lock had told him she would be happy to marry ablack'. 103 Newspapers across the country take up the sensation: photographed beside an59