RESULTADOS DE LAS ENCUESTAS DE OPINIÓN

When Horatio Wills left Victoria to establish a station in Queensland there was apprehension in the family. Amusing stories about Horatio’s experiences with aborigines were nervously exchanged in family letters. A boyish Horace inquired of his father if he had fought and been injured by the blacks. An uncompromising Emily commented that Horatio had a gun to ‘shoot the wild blacks’.360 In the year before Horatio and Tom left Victoria, the younger boys in Europe revealed the prevailing racial stereotypes they were taught in a recent school lesson in Germany:

Mr Thomas said the other day that the most wonderful thing in the world is that the Australian blacks climb up trees by sticking their big toe nails into the bark. And Mr Thomas gave a lecture about Australia and said the blacks were more like monkeys than anything else he said they had no calves to their legs and that they could kill … with their boomerangs.361

Horatio’s attitude to the aborigines was more complex than might be thought at first glance. In the western district of Victoria, Horatio was listed as having murdered several aborigines. However, his life circumstance and age were now different. In a letter to his sons before he departed from Victoria, he revealed a conciliatory attitude to the aborigines he might meet in Queensland. ‘Mr MacDonald (Peter) tells me that the

360

Horace and Emily were two of Tom Wills’ siblings. Letter from Horace, 13 July 1861, ‘My Dear mama and papa, I hope papa got on well about the station. You must tell if you had a fight with the blacks and if you were hurt by them’. Letter from Egbert, from Bonn, 1 July 1860, ‘I heard that in your last letter that Papa went to botany Bay to get a station there and I heard that he brought the little gun with him to shoot the wild blacks’. Letter from Egbert, writing from Germany, 22 October 1860, ‘I heard in Papa’s letter that they had great fun with the blacks and about the black trying to kill the gun and the gun went off and shot two of them. I should like to have been with them’.

361

Letter, Egbert and Horace to mother and sisters, 2 January 1860. Tom’s younger brothers were at school in Germany at the time. Popular literature and newspapers featured articles on the comparison of indigenous peoples to apes. This was at a time when scientific studies about ape anatomy were commonly discussed in the popular press, for example, see, Argus, 2 October 1871, p. 5; Bell’s Life in Sydney, 2 January 1858, p. 2, ‘The 150 yards spin between Moran and the Aboriginal, … Moran wore spiked shoes and the blackfellow only his toe nails’.

blacks he saw on a late excursion beyond our run were a fine lot of fellows and very kind to him and his party. We’ll try to keep friends with them’.362

Nonetheless on a preliminary trip to view the property he seemed wary of danger. To his family he cast himself as a vigilant and lone warrior against the odds, ‘… look well to their revolvers and keep their powder dry, 2 things of special moment in an enemy’s country’. He added, ‘We all had revolvers whilst I in addition had Tom’s gun slung loosely on my shoulder – a powder flask, shot belt and further we each carried a bowie knife’.363

Horatio’s attitude to indigenous Australians was complex and probably altered over his lifetime. There have been two widely divergent views of Horatio Wills. Both views seek to caricature him in different lights for their own reasons. In The Call, Horatio is caricatured as racist, a buffoon and a religious zealot. In so doing, Tom Wills can be sympathetically drawn in counterpoint as defiant and heroic. But these are crude caricatures and skewed in a manner fitting the approach of the novel. When the evidence is examined the pictures of Horatio and Tom are quite different to that used in the novel. The mythology in this novel requires complex portrayals to be reduced to symbolic caricatures. This is what occurs in The Call. Likewise, Perrin portrays an impossibly benign and pastoral Horatio in his relations with aborigines without an appreciation of the more unsavoury acts and libidinal aspects of his personality. Neither portrayal does Horatio Wills justice.364

362

7 January 1861, letter from Horatio to his sons.

363

Letter from Horatio Wills to sons, 12 July 1860. This is a detailed letter about a preliminary trip to Queensland. It has excellent descriptions of the privations of such a trip. It has several descriptions of encounters with aborigines which are a mixture of benign comment with some hint of condescension but no outright violent thoughts of wanting to kill them: ‘As I was descending a gap in the ridge I espied some distance below me a lot of blackfellows passing through the gap. There appears to be perpetual war between the whites and blacks in that district, so that as the blacks had not seen me I got back behind an old ironbark tree, as nimbly as you may suppose wither of you wants to do under the circumstances for I had no weapon with me, not even my Bowie knife … How stupid of me to forget my revolver but the blacks had not seen me ... But I never went out alone without a revolver or gun after that, you may be sure’.

364

See Flanagan, The Call, and Perrin, Triumph and Tragedy. The terminology of the day for indigenous Australians varied. Most typically they were referred to as Natives, Blacks and Aborigines. Many other less savoury and racist terms were employed depending on the context. See also, Banfield,

Like the Ark, pp. 26-33. This is one of several references that trace aspects of the early life of Horatio Wills. It is written in a romantic manner that underscores Horatio’s courage and adventurous nature but at the same time glosses over or is unaware of some of the more unsavoury incidents in western Victoria. Also see a short pamphlet in the possession of Mr. Tom Wills, Springsure, which offers a brief biography on Horatio Wills, No author noted, Life of a Pioneer. Adventures of H. S. Wills. First White Settler in Ararat District (Rockhampton: City Printing Works, undated).

Surviving family letters do not mention Horatio’s killing of local aborigines in Victoria but there is clear evidence that Horatio was implicated in the murder of local aborigines in the Mt William area. He also showed a capacity to understand colonial transgressions from an aboriginal perspective, and mused upon this with an honesty not borne from someone who can be easily dispatched as a single-minded racist murderer. His killing of local aborigines cannot be disputed but to portray this without examining the letters he wrote on the subject is to arrive at a narrow understanding of the man. In March 1842, Horatio wrote to Governor La Trobe complaining bitterly about the incursions by aborigines on to his land. His official correspondence to Governor Latrobe hinted at misdeeds he may have committed. He described a lonely remote district with little law where settlers, in the absence of protection ‘… are subjected to loss of life and property without redress unless we infringe the laws … we shall be compelled in self defence to measures that may involve us in unpleasant consequences’. This was as close as Horatio got in surviving documents, to admitting his part in any deaths of aborigines. Horatio recited a list of aggression by the aborigines. But he was not without the capacity to empathise with the aboriginal perspective and their resentment towards the intrusion on their hunting grounds. His language by and large was diplomatic, conciliatory and not without an uncomfortable self-reflection on his own capacity for violence.365

The violent clashes between aborigines and the Wills family are best recorded in the journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector. They portray an ugly landscape; a fear that robbed humans of their understanding of one another; and sickening violent retributions and dismemberment of aboriginal society. Robinson’s anger at the callousness of settlers who could boast about their assaults was given rhetorical voice in his diary.366 Robinson first mentioned Mt William, where Horatio

365

Letter, Horatio Wills to Governor Latrobe, March 1842. See discussion on another western district settler, Niel Black in Christie, Aborigines, p. 40. Christie notes that even the most open minded of settlers, in the context of the fear and predation of the time, could and would kill aborigines to survive. For a more moderate counterpoint to Christie, see B. Blaskett, ‘The Level of Violence: Europeans and Aborigines in Port Phillip, 1835-1850’, in S. Janson and S. Macintyre (eds), Through White Eyes

(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990), pp. 77–100. See also, B. Blaskett, The Aboriginal Response to White Settlement in the Port Phillip District, 1835-1850. Master of Arts, Thesis, Department of History, University of Melbourne, July 1979.

366

Several archival sources record the violence associated with the Wills family. George Augustus Robinson diaries, in Ian D. Clark (ed.), The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, vol. 1-IV (Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 1998). For more on Robinson, see Rae-Ellis, Vivienne, Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines (Carlton: Melbourne University Press,

and his family lived, on 14 December 1840 when he reported the death of a white man. Local aborigines plundered sheep for food. Assaults and counter assaults mirrored one another in their atrocity. Immorality and profanity pervaded the landscape. The language used by settlers was coarse and an affront to Robinson’s sensitivities. On Saturday, 10 July 1841 he referred to the Wills family. He rode to the neighbouring Captain Bunbury’s station at Mt William. The first entry without warning is rude and pithy. With Horatio absent from his property Robinson, was informed of the attempted rape and abduction of Elizabeth by aborigines.367

Over the next few years he documented numerous cases of aboriginal deaths and implicated Horatio Wills as one of a number of settlers responsible for these deaths. For example, while at Lynot’s station he was informed that ‘Wills, Kirk and Rutter shot two women who had infants and that the latter were left without milk … attack was made on the camp … after Wills’ man was killed’.368 Despite this, when Horatio wrote to Tom at Rugby in 1853 and made references to the local aborigines that had befriended his son, there was no suggestion of hostility or distaste in his writing. His attitude was liberal and open.