The Brutal Truth: What Happened in the Gulf Country
______________________________________________________________________________________________________ THE BRUTAL TRUTH What happened in the gulf country BY TONY ROBERTS Sir John Downer, who twice served as premier of South Australia (1885-1887 and 1892-93). © National Library of Australia NOVEMBER 2009 In the last six months, my curiosity about the extent to which governments in Adelaide condoned or turned a blind eye to frontier massacres in the Gulf Country of the Northern Territory, up until 1910, has led me to fresh evidence that has shocked me. It has unsettled the world I thought I knew. I was born in Adelaide, a fourth-generation South Australian, and have resided there for much of my life. The city’s cathedrals and fine old buildings are very familiar to me. When I was young, I heard or read in newspapers the names of the old and powerful families, but took little notice. Even now, I feel uneasy revealing all that I have uncovered. In 1881, a massive pastoral boom commenced in the top half of the Northern Territory, administered by the colonial government in Adelaide.1 Elsey Station on the Roper River – romanticised in Jeannie Gunn’s We of the Never Never – was the first to be established. 2 These were huge stations, with an average size of almost 16,000 square kilometres. By the end of the year the entire Gulf district (an area the size of Victoria, which accounted for a quarter of the Territory’s pastoral country) had been leased to just 14 landholders, all but two of whom were wealthy businessmen and investors from the eastern colonies.2 Once they had taken up their lease, landholders had only three years to comply with a minimum stocking rate.
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