George Francis Bridgman
Devonshire-born lawyer's son George Francis Bridgman was fourteen when he arrived in Sydney in July 1857. After working for his uncle, E. B. Cornish on a Macquarie River sheep station, he set out from the Snowy River bound for Fort Cooper in the newly-opened Kennedy Pastoral District with drover Isaac Arron and with 28,000 sheep in April 1860.
After they arrived in July 1862, Bridgman acted as manager of the Fort Cooper station and moved part of the flock to establish new stations at Cape Palmerston (1863) and Greenmount (1865). He managed the three properties for his uncle until Cornish died in 1869, then moved on to manage Homebush Station the following year.
In 1871, he persuaded the Queensland Government to gazette 14,080 acres between Sandy Creek, Bakers Creek and the coast for an Aboriginal Reserve — Queensland's first. However, Bridgman was not necessarily motivated by humanitarian or missionary motives. In May 1869 the Mackay Mercury reported he
"had allowed ninety Aborigines to "squat down" at Fort Cooper and engaged the forty males, mostly boys, at clearing scrub, ringbarking and cutting firewood in return for "an occasional sheep, a fig of tobacco, or some other trifling article"(Port Denison Times," (Port Denison Times, 8 May 1869; extract from Mackay Mercury and South Kennedy Advertiser.)
At Homebush, he continued in the same manner, drawing in "most of the natives from the ranges ... none of the neighbouring stations or plantations being willing to allow these people in.". Again, he extracted light work from them such as herding stock and tending small patches of sugar cane." (R. L. Evans, Queensland's First Aboriginal Reserve, p. 28.)
He was in the process of acquiring an interest in the region's growing sugar industry, and his Association for the Employment and Protection of Aborigines gathered the local tribes into superintended camps — three settlements that housed two to three hundred potential sugar workers, who knew him as Goonarra: the pseudonym he used when writing to various newspapers.
An inspecting committee of planters agreed that these Aborigines could work usefully during the crushing season, but added that only Bridgman's influence made them reliable; and most authorities agreed with Ewen Davidson that neither their physique nor their traditional way of life fitted them for anything except occasional light work, such as weeding. (G. C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, p. 85) Bridgman managed the Reserve until the Queensland Government appointed him as Protector of North Coast Aborigines in 1878. At the same time, he acquired pastoral stations — Fort Cooper, Lake Elphinstone and Burton Downs Stations — which stocked them with cattle and bred horses for the Indian Army. His interests in the North lasted until the 1902 drought when he disposed of all his holdings and moved to the Darling Downs, where he purchased part of a property forty kilometres southwest of Toowoomba where he had rested his flock en route to Fort Coop[er in 1861.After retiring from pastoral pursuits in 1916, he died in Toowoomba in 1923.
