A journey into Downer's dark past
By Alan Ramsey
June 1, 2005
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JONATHON ("Jack") Watson was a man known as "hard on the blacks".
Originally from Melbourne, Watson died in 1896 trying to swim the
flooded Katherine River, south of Darwin. A newspaper obituary
described him as "never wanting in generosity, kindliness of heart,
and bravery", but Watson had 40 pairs of black ears nailed to his wall
at Queensland's Lawn Hills cattle station.
Tony Roberts, a former Canberra public servant and ministerial
adviser, writes about Watson in his extraordinary book, Frontier
Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900, published by
Queensland University Press. Roberts writes about many others, too,
from a truly brutal, originally suppressed period of Australia's
history. Much of the savagery by stockmen such as Jack Watson occurred
during what was known as "dispersing the natives".
In 1889 a member of the South Australian Parliament, V.L. Solomon,
remarked publicly: "[Police] gave them a lesson - 'dispersed them' I
think is the term used in official re****ts - and the natives have
given very little trouble since that day." In 1885 a police inspector,
Paul Foelsche, said out loud what pastoralists had well known for
years: "The system 'dispersing the natives' simply means shooting
them." Five years earlier The Queenslander wrote in an editorial: "The
word has been adopted into bush slang as a convenient euphemism for
wholesale slaughter."
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Constable William Will****re was someone else well versed, it seems, in
"dispersing the natives". Will****re headed an Alice Springs unit of
young Aboriginal troopers. Roberts writes: "[In the 1880s] they made
dawn raids on countless Aboriginal camps, shooting occupants either in
'self-defence' or while they were 'attempting to escape'. Their young
recruits were enticed (and retained) by the guns, horses, generous
amounts of tobacco and equally generous op****tunities for *** with
captured Aboriginal girls."
In 1891 Will****re became so brazen he was arrested and tried for
murder. A ****t Augusta jury acquitted him, "despite the strong
evidence against him and no witnesses being called by the defence". He
was transferred to the Northern Territory's remote Victoria River
district under Inspector Foelsche in 1893, "where, buoyed by his
acquittal for murder and working closely with station managers, with
whom he formed friend****ps, he shot a great many more Aboriginal
people".
Will****re was recalled to South Australia two years later. In 1898 he
resigned from the police force and fittingly took a job as night
watchman at the Adelaide abattoirs. He died in 1925, aged 73. Alice
Springs would later name a street in his honour.
I know all this only because of a letter the other day which said, in
part: "I'm amazed by Alexander Downer's sudden interest in [the
political] history [of World War II]. You may be interested in some of
Mr Downer's own family history in Tony Roberts's excellent book
[which] tells of the notorious Constable Will****re."
And indeed I was.
The patriarch of the Downer family was Henry Downer, an immigrant
tailor who arrived in Adelaide from England in 1838. Henry had several
sons, among them John William, born in 1843, Henry Edward, and George.
John William went on to get free secondary schooling by scholar****p at
Adelaide's Collegiate School of St Peter, "where he proved brilliant",
according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
John William was later articled to brother Henry Edward, admitted to
the South Australian Bar in 1867, and, with elder brother George, a
prominent pastoralist, founded the "leading legal firm, J. and G.
Downer". John entered state politics in 1878, became attorney-general
in 1881 and was twice premier of his state - 1885-87 and 1892-93. At
Federation in 1901 - by then Sir John Downer - he became one of South
Australia's six original senators but resigned in December 1903 after
missing appointment to the founding High Court.
John Downer died in 1915. He was twice married and survived by a son
from each marriage. The son of his second marriage was Alexander
Russell Downer, later a cabinet minister in the Menzies government in
1949 and, as Sir Alexander, Australian high commissioner to London in
1964. He, too, sired a son, Alexander John Gosse Downer, briefly
Opposition leader in 1994 and John Howard's Foreign Minister for all
of the last nine years as his reward for stepping down for Howard.
And what is it we learn of this distinguished family history in
Roberts's book on this country's ruthless savagery by 19th-century
pastoralists towards indigenous people? On pages 133 and 134 Roberts
recounts how the notorious Constable Will****re, at his ****t Augusta
acquittal on multiple murder charges in 1891, was defended by the
Foreign Minister's grandfather, "Sir John Downer, QC, former attorney-
general and premier, with funds contributed by more than 60 sup****ters
from Central Australia".
Most of it probably from our early land barons and their hirelings.
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