Invasion, retaliation, concealment and silences at Dead Man's Flat, South Australia: A consideration of the historical, archaeological and geophysical evidence of frontier conflict

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of historical research, as well as archaeological and geophysical surveys, in order to explore a number of frontier conflict events at Dead Man’s Flat in South Australia (SA). The historical records reveal the cruelty and complexity of the period and expose the concealments, contradictions, euphemistic language, denials and silences that are typical of the Australian frontier. Further disparities are revealed in more recent commemorative efforts. Archaeological investigations in the study area provided an ‘absence of evidence’. Whilst the geophysical survey revealed that there are potential graves located on the flat, no interment was located in the area commemorated by local non-Indigenous community members. The combined results of this multi-method approach uncovered new dissonances, raised new questions and provided new exegeses about the frontier in this region. For traditional owners, the sum of the evidence reveals a history of invasion, killings and massacre, theft, deceit and cover-up – Dead Man’s Flat is, therefore, a place to be approached with deep respect in order to honour the experiences of their ancestors.

KEYWORDS:

• Frontier conflict
• Murray River
• history
• archaeology
• ground-penetrating radar
• unmarked graves

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant LP170100479. Dr Ian Moffat is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award [DE160100703]. Thank you to the RMMAC members who provided cultural advice and assisted during fieldwork and to Jennifer Grace for her comments on this manuscript. We acknowledge Catherine Morton for her assistance with field work. We thank the local landowner for supporting this project and allowing us access to the area. Thanks also goes to the anonymous reviewers of this paper and the Editors for their guidance.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The frontier conflict relating to the Overland Stock Route traverses a number of Aboriginal territories. Dead Man’s Flat is located in the border region for the Ngawait and Ngaiawang groups (e.g. see Tindale, 1974: although it is acknowledged that Tindale’s narrower group ‘boundaries’ are not without issue an interrogation of all relevant sources is beyond the scope of this paper). RMMAC members are the traditional owners of this area and other adjacent territories.

2. Edward John Eyre, also an overlander at the time, does not mention this attack in his accounts of August 1838 or March 1839 (see summary in Burke et al. [2016: pp. 151, 154]).

3. Although note that in the public version of O’Halloran’s journal, published 63 years later, he did not name Young, but described the murdered man as ‘Mr. McKinnon’s brother having been killed here by this very tribe, and in this flat the man lies buried’ (O’Halloran, 1904, p. 79).

4. See https://jenwilletts.com/convict_ship_speke_1821.htm.

5. Coincidentally, the executioner in Glasgow who undertook the executions of Andrew Hardie and John Baird, the leaders of Bonnymuir, was himself named Thomas Young. However, he apparently retired to America as an old man (Mackenzie, 1890, pp. 304–305).

6. See https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/introduction.php.

7. It is also possible that the events of the period have been conflated. Issues concerning intergenerational transmission of memories and trauma are the focus of a separate forthcoming article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [LP170100479]; Australian Research Council [DE160100703].