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In 1928 a trooper of the Northern Territory Mounted
Police cold-bloodedly shot down more than seventeen
natives (his own admission) in what was supposed
to be a round up of witnesses for criminal investigation.
He was compared in an Adelaide newspaper to the Canadian
mountie: "always rides alone, always gets his man".
Interwovenwiththe ’scientific’ notion of Aborigines being
less than human was a theological argument.
In the following section, there will be an examination of
theorizing that Aborigines had no ’souls’, a theorizing that permitted
the massacre of Aboriginal people on a scale wide enough to see
extermination as being countenanced on the part of policy makers,
who remained passive in the face of wide-scale killing of Aboriginal
people. That is, the earlier conceptual nihilation of the existence
of Aborigines was carried to an ultimate conclusion in their physical
nihilation.
8.42(i)
(a) Theological legitimation of physical nihilation
Archbishop Polding (quoted in Thorpe, 1950:262), appearing
before a Parliamentary Committee on the Condition of Aborigines,
1845, gave as his opinion concerning the reasons for the great
decrease in the numbers of the native people, "the aggressive manner
of taking possession of their country".
I myself have heard a man, educated and a large proprietor
of sheep and cattle maintain that there was no more harm
in shooting a native than in shooting a wild dog. I have
heard it maintained by others that it was in the course of
Providence that the blacks should disappear before the white,
and the sooner the process was carried out the better for
all parties. I fear such opinions prevail to a great
extent. Very recently, in the presence of two clergymen, a
man of education narrated as a good thing that he had been
one of a party who had pursued the blacks in consequence of
the cattle having been rushed by them and that he was sure
they had shot upward of a hundred. IVhen expostulated with
he maintained there was nothing wrong with it, that it was
preposterous to suppose that they had souls.
The people were given damper poisoned with corrosion sublimate,
