Battle Camp
When the Queensland government's roads engineer A. C. Macmillan led the first party — which included goldfield commissioner and police magistrate Howard St George, ninety miners and eighteen others including an unknown number of Queensland Native Police troopers with thirty-one horses — to leave Cooktown bound for the new Palmer River golffield at the end of October 1873, it seems the hundred-man party expected trouble en route. It ccame within a week of the party's departure. At a lagoon on the Normanby River in the location subsequently known as Battle Camp, the party killed between eighty and one hundred and fifty Kokowarra, although numbers vary according to who was telling the story — the Cooktown Herald (19 August 1874) put the figure as low as thirteen.
An eye-witness account in a letter to the Brisbane Telegraph described the incident this way:
November 3rd - Started over the spur of the range running to E; came to Normanby River (15 miles); started a mob of blacks; shot four and hunted them; fine river; November 4th - Started, 15 miles. Surprise Lagoons; camped 5th for spell; November 6th - Blacks surprised us at daybreak, about 150, all were armed; got close to camp before anyone heard them; great consternation; shot several; they ran into the water holes for shelter, where they were shot; travelled then unmolested for 2 or 3 days to Kennedy River...good country about Kennedy; came over ridges next day to Palmer, 12 miles below diggings; plenty of game and fish; camped one day; fishing; came to diggings on Friday. (Brisbane Telegraph, 22 January 1874.)
Sixteen members of the party subsequently denied some of the details included in the report but confirmed the attack on the party, claiming:
The blacks were rounding up our horses to take them away and we heard there was one black shot in the dispersion but did not see any one shot. The Native Police did not follow the blacks but saddled up immediately and went on to the Palmer. And we believe that there was not a single black followed or shot by any one.
This account is unsatisfactory in a number of ways. It would be surprising, to say the least, to find that a Native Police detachment would have the restraint to refrain from reacting in the manner which they usually employed to punish depredations when the particular incident involved an attack on their persons.
The use of the word "dispersion" in bloodless circumstances also represents a departure from the norm, and doubts on the matter can only be increased by the comment of the Cooktown Police Magistrate that:
at that spot, the natives, wholly ignorant of the terrible power of fire arms and confiding in their numbers, showed a ferocity and daring wholly unexpected and unsurpassed. Grasping the very muzzles of the rifles they attempted to wrest them from the hands of the whites, standing to be shot down rather than yield an inch. This was the beginning of a series of attacks that at first were daringly open; but as the knowledge dawned on their minds that the white race had a fatal superiority of weapons, these attacks became stealthy, cautious, and only made at great advantages of numbers and situation. (Cooktown Herald 8 December 1875.)
The locality retained a bad reputation with an attack on the Palmer gold escort, (Cooktown Herald 3 June 1874) the murder of the Macdermott brothers in 1874 (reported as rumour Cooktown Herald 28 October 1874; seemingly confirmed Cooktown Herald 29 May 1875.) and an attack on the district mail carrier, John Hogsflesh in 1876. (Cooktown Herald, 26 January 1876.)
William Hann's expedition had been attacked in the same area in 1872, though Hann had acted provocatively by detaining an Aboriginal boy in his camp.
The attack on Hann's party and the events just over a year alter may be linked, but it is more likely that some provocative action prompted the attack on Macmillan's party. In 1878 it was claimed that members of the party
thievishly took and wantonly destroyed the fish that had been secured by labour and preserved with diligence by the unoffending blacks at that time, and when they showed signs of displeasure, shots were fired to intimidate them, which were responded to with spears, their only means of revenge. (Cooktown Herald, 6 April 1878.)
As well, it may be significant that it was the end of the dry season, the time of year when the Aborigines gathered around permanent waterholes. The fact that the party was camped by a lagoon may have been amply provocative.
