Aboriginal Resistance to Colonial Encroachment

The Moreton Bay penal colony was established by the British government to make transportation to Australia a real terror for all classes of society. This brutally harsh settlement was an oppressive home to 3,000 male and female convicts, focused around what are now Queen and William streets. There were also smaller outstations at Dunwich, Eagle Farm, Limestone (which is Ipswich), and Coopers Plains.

When Europeans arrived in 1824 to establish this penal colony, thousands of local Aboriginal people suddenly found themselves sharing their land with convicts and soldiers. The colony was essentially "an island in Aboriginal lands," as historian Ray Kerkhove described it. He designed a map of inner-city Brisbane as it would have been settled then, showing that the convict settlement existed within a pre-existent Indigenous landscape of campsites, pathways, sacred areas, and burial areas. The map included the naming of these areas to show that the convict settlement didn't exist in isolation; it functioned within an Indigenous world and was, in fact, hugely outnumbered by the Indigenous world at the time.

Initially, the local Aboriginal people were amazed by the Europeans and kept their distance. Dr. Kerkhove said it was like Martians had landed, bringing new technologies and life patterns. But this didn't last. From 1825 until the end of 1842, there was trade, with items like steel and glass quickly moving across the continent. There are accounts that almost daily, the penal settlement received fish, oysters, honey, bark, and firewood from the local people, and there are even accounts of hunting trips together.

However, the isolated penal colony was the furthest north European settlement at the time and relied on supplies from Sydney by ship. When settlers started clearing land to grow crops, it became problematic. They cleared large areas of what had been rainforest and resource areas for Aboriginal people, particularly at South Bank and Kangaroo Point. South Bank had been a complex area of rainforest, woodland, and swampland—basically the breadbasket for the local people, who maintained semi-gardens there. Cutting down these forests and planting crops became a source of conflict. The settlers wanted their crops, and the Indigenous people thought, "We don't have our rainforest anymore, but we have these crops, so why can't we take them?"

This led to small, occasional raids on gardens and fields by Aboriginal people. The situation grew so worrying for the colony’s commander, Patrick Logan, that he sent soldiers to attack their villages. It became an organized effort by Aboriginal groups, with 50 or 80 warriors descending on fields as crops ripened or at dusk. They planned well, and the amount they took wasn't just for their own food; it was to see if they could starve out the colony. Dr. Kerkhove noted that real large-scale conflict began when free settlement started, and lands were opened up with settlers' huts everywhere.