La Grange expedition
Encyclopedia
The La Grange expedition was a search expedition carried out in the vicinity of Lagrange Bay in the Kimberley
region of Western Australia
in 1865. Led by Maitland Brown
, the expedition searched for three settlers who had failed to return from an earlier exploring
expedition. The three men were eventually found dead, having been speared and clubbed to death in their sleep by Indigenous Australians
. A number of Indigenous people were subsequently killed by members of the expedition in a controversial incident that is often now referred to as the "La Grange Massacre", although the fairness of this term remains a matter of some debate.
named Henry Wildman
, who claimed to have found gold
near Camden Harbour. The expedition found no gold, but good pastoral
land was found, and as a result a small pastoral venture was later established at Roebuck Bay
. In November 1864, three settlers, Frederick Panter
, James Harding
and William Goldwyer
, set out from the settlement to explore the land around La Grange Bay. The expedition party had provisions to last only two to three weeks, so when they had not returned three weeks later, another settler, Lockier Burges, set out to find them. He tracked them as far as the mangrove
swamp around La Grange, but there lost all trace of them.
When news of the missing men reached the Government of Western Australia
in Perth
, a search party was immediately organised, with Maitland Brown
appointed leader. There was some speculation that the three men had been killed by natives, and there were calls for their deaths to be avenged. George Walpole Leake
, for example, wrote:
For this reason the expedition is sometimes referred to as a "punitive party".
on 16 February 1865. On 25 February, the Clarence Packet anchored at the mouth of the De Grey River. Members of the party visited Walter Padbury
's station
for news on the missing men, but there was none. The party then spent nearly two weeks waiting for a native named Dutchmanchum to be found. Dutchmanchum was said to speak the language of the tribes in the Roebuck Bay area, so he was desired to guide the party. When Dutchmanchum was eventually brought in, he related a story that three white men had been attacked and murdered at a river called Boola Boola in the vicinity of La Grange Bay. Over the next few days, a number of other Aborigines were encountered that corroborated Dutchmanchum's story.
On 13 March, the party sailed for Roebuck Bay, anchoring off Cape Villaret on the 18th. Four days later, Brown took a number of members of the party over the Race Course Plains, where they captured five more Aborigines. These Aborigines again corroborated Dutchmanchum's story, and one of them, Lear-a-ban, stated that some Aborigines who were involved in the killings were camped near Cape Latouche Treville. Brown then decided to seek out these Aborigines.
Brown's treatment of the Aboriginal people encountered up until then had been harsh, and at this point he wrote in his journal that he was prepared to arrest any Aboriginal people whom he thought guilty of the killings, but added:
The Clarence Packet was directed to proceed to Cape Latouche Treville, and Brown's landed party set out for the location on 27 March. Three more Aboriginal people were captured that day, and a large group the following day. Brown thought some of these men guilty of involvement in the attack, and sent ten of them aboard ship. One of the natives, Karimba, said that he could guide the search party to the remains of the murdered men, but after leading them to Boola Boola, he was unwilling to reveal any more, and guided them back and forth through the thickets for most of a day. Karimba had also managed to call to an Aborigine to bring men to rescue him, and the party found themselves being followed by a large group of armed Aborigines.
Eventually, Karimba was sent on board ship, and two other Aboriginal people, who were thought most likely to have been involved in the killings, were brought on shore to act as guides. These guides led them directly to the site of the killings. The three white settlers were found all dead. Two of them, Panter and Harding, had obviously been speared and clubbed to death in their sleep, as they still had their handkerchiefs tied over their eyes. The nature of Goldwyer's death was harder to interpret, but there were no signs of a struggle. The dead men's journals indicated that they had fought a number of battles with natives, and that they were expecting further hostilities.
Brown had the bodies wrapped and packed for removal to the ship. While this was being carried out, the two guides tried to escape and were shot dead by Tommy, one of the native assistants brought with the party to act as guides.
. On 6 April 1865, Brown's party became engaged in a conflict with a large group of Aboriginal people. Most accounts state that the party walked into an ambush, but at least one account2 asserts that they attacked a native camp. Regardless of the cause, the outcome is not in dispute: at least six, and possibly as many as twenty Aboriginal people were killed, whereas the expedition party suffered no injuries.
Cemetery, where the men were buried.
Maitland Brown returned home to public acclaim, both for successfully finding the men, and for avenging their deaths. Indeed, many settlers felt "the requital Mr. Brown had inflicted on the murderers utterly inadequate"3. The English
Government, however, expressed the view that "force had been exercised towards the natives without sufficient warranty"4 and urged the necessity of maintaining friendly relations with the Aborigines.
Maitland Brown died in 1904 and was buried at Karrakatta Cemetery, but in 1911 his remains were removed from Karrakatta and reinterred with the remains of Panter, Harding and Goldwyer at East Perth. Shortly afterwards, Pietro Porcelli
was commissioned to create a memorial to Brown. The result was the Explorers' Monument
, a bronze
head and shoulders statue
of Brown, on a granite
base to which is attached plaques portraying the murdered men and describing the circumstances of their death. During the 1990s, the biased nature of the original plaques were recognised, and another plaque was added that describes the circumstances of the murders from the point of view of the Aboriginal people.
Kimberley region of Western Australia
The Kimberley is one of the nine regions of Western Australia. It is located in the northern part of Western Australia, bordered on the west by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Timor Sea, on the south by the Great Sandy and Tanami Deserts, and on the east by the Northern Territory.The region...
region of Western Australia
Western Australia
Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...
in 1865. Led by Maitland Brown
Maitland Brown
Maitland Brown was an explorer, politician and pastoralist in colonial Western Australia. He is best remembered as the leader of the La Grange expedition, which searched for and recovered the bodies of three white settlers murdered by Indigenous Australians, and subsequently killed a number of...
, the expedition searched for three settlers who had failed to return from an earlier exploring
Exploration
Exploration is the act of searching or traveling around a terrain for the purpose of discovery of resources or information. Exploration occurs in all non-sessile animal species, including humans...
expedition. The three men were eventually found dead, having been speared and clubbed to death in their sleep by Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
. A number of Indigenous people were subsequently killed by members of the expedition in a controversial incident that is often now referred to as the "La Grange Massacre", although the fairness of this term remains a matter of some debate.
Background
In 1864, an expedition was organised to investigate the story of a convictConvict
A convict is "a person found guilty of a crime and sentenced by a court" or "a person serving a sentence in prison", sometimes referred to in slang as simply a "con". Convicts are often called prisoners or inmates. Persons convicted and sentenced to non-custodial sentences often are not termed...
named Henry Wildman
Henry Wildman
Henry Wildman was a convict transported to Western Australia in 1862, whose apparently false claims to have found gold in the Kimberley region of Western Australia prompted an exploring expedition to the area....
, who claimed to have found gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
near Camden Harbour. The expedition found no gold, but good pastoral
Pastoralism
Pastoralism or pastoral farming is the branch of agriculture concerned with the raising of livestock. It is animal husbandry: the care, tending and use of animals such as camels, goats, cattle, yaks, llamas, and sheep. It may have a mobile aspect, moving the herds in search of fresh pasture and...
land was found, and as a result a small pastoral venture was later established at Roebuck Bay
Roebuck Bay
Roebuck Bay is a bay on the coast of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Its entrance is bounded in the north by the town of Broome, and in the south by Bush Point and Sandy Point. It is named after HMS Roebuck, the ship captained by William Dampier when he explored the coast of...
. In November 1864, three settlers, Frederick Panter
Frederick Panter
Frederick Kennedy Panter was a police officer, pastoralist and explorer in colonial Western Australia. While exploring in the Kimberley region of Western Australia in 1864, he was murdered by Australian Aborigines....
, James Harding
James Harding
James Harding was a pastoralist and explorer in colonial Western Australia. While exploring in the Kimberley region of Western Australia in 1864, he was murdered by Australian Aborigines....
and William Goldwyer
William Goldwyer
William Goldwyer was a police officer and explorer in colonial Western Australia. While exploring in the Kimberley region of Western Australia in 1864, he was killed by Australian Aborigines....
, set out from the settlement to explore the land around La Grange Bay. The expedition party had provisions to last only two to three weeks, so when they had not returned three weeks later, another settler, Lockier Burges, set out to find them. He tracked them as far as the mangrove
Mangrove
Mangroves are various kinds of trees up to medium height and shrubs that grow in saline coastal sediment habitats in the tropics and subtropics – mainly between latitudes N and S...
swamp around La Grange, but there lost all trace of them.
When news of the missing men reached the Government of Western Australia
Government of Western Australia
The formation of the Government of Western Australia is prescribed in its Constitution, which dates from 1890, although it has been amended many times since then...
in Perth
Perth, Western Australia
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....
, a search party was immediately organised, with Maitland Brown
Maitland Brown
Maitland Brown was an explorer, politician and pastoralist in colonial Western Australia. He is best remembered as the leader of the La Grange expedition, which searched for and recovered the bodies of three white settlers murdered by Indigenous Australians, and subsequently killed a number of...
appointed leader. There was some speculation that the three men had been killed by natives, and there were calls for their deaths to be avenged. George Walpole Leake
George Walpole Leake
George Walpole Leake was a Western Australian barrister and magistrate and nephew of George Leake...
, for example, wrote:
- "They have fallen in the service of their fellow-subjects, and it is our bounden duty to ascertain how and where they have fallen: and if by violence, avenge them."1
For this reason the expedition is sometimes referred to as a "punitive party".
The search
A boat, the Clarence Packet was chartered, and the party left FremantleFremantle, Western Australia
Fremantle is a city in Western Australia, located at the mouth of the Swan River. Fremantle Harbour serves as the port of Perth, the state capital. Fremantle was the first area settled by the Swan River colonists in 1829...
on 16 February 1865. On 25 February, the Clarence Packet anchored at the mouth of the De Grey River. Members of the party visited Walter Padbury
Walter Padbury
Walter Padbury was an Australian pioneer and philanthropist.Padbury was born at Stonesfield, near Woodstock, in the English county of Oxfordshire. He arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia in the Protector with his father on 25 February 1830, but in the following July his father died...
's station
Ranch
A ranch is an area of landscape, including various structures, given primarily to the practice of ranching, the practice of raising grazing livestock such as cattle or sheep for meat or wool. The word most often applies to livestock-raising operations in the western United States and Canada, though...
for news on the missing men, but there was none. The party then spent nearly two weeks waiting for a native named Dutchmanchum to be found. Dutchmanchum was said to speak the language of the tribes in the Roebuck Bay area, so he was desired to guide the party. When Dutchmanchum was eventually brought in, he related a story that three white men had been attacked and murdered at a river called Boola Boola in the vicinity of La Grange Bay. Over the next few days, a number of other Aborigines were encountered that corroborated Dutchmanchum's story.
On 13 March, the party sailed for Roebuck Bay, anchoring off Cape Villaret on the 18th. Four days later, Brown took a number of members of the party over the Race Course Plains, where they captured five more Aborigines. These Aborigines again corroborated Dutchmanchum's story, and one of them, Lear-a-ban, stated that some Aborigines who were involved in the killings were camped near Cape Latouche Treville. Brown then decided to seek out these Aborigines.
Brown's treatment of the Aboriginal people encountered up until then had been harsh, and at this point he wrote in his journal that he was prepared to arrest any Aboriginal people whom he thought guilty of the killings, but added:
- "But I trust that throughout the whole trip there will be no necessity for capture — that not only amongst this lot, but also amongst all others we may meet, the guilty natives, if such there are, will either attack us or resist us in such a manner as will of itself justify us in exterminating them."
The Clarence Packet was directed to proceed to Cape Latouche Treville, and Brown's landed party set out for the location on 27 March. Three more Aboriginal people were captured that day, and a large group the following day. Brown thought some of these men guilty of involvement in the attack, and sent ten of them aboard ship. One of the natives, Karimba, said that he could guide the search party to the remains of the murdered men, but after leading them to Boola Boola, he was unwilling to reveal any more, and guided them back and forth through the thickets for most of a day. Karimba had also managed to call to an Aborigine to bring men to rescue him, and the party found themselves being followed by a large group of armed Aborigines.
Eventually, Karimba was sent on board ship, and two other Aboriginal people, who were thought most likely to have been involved in the killings, were brought on shore to act as guides. These guides led them directly to the site of the killings. The three white settlers were found all dead. Two of them, Panter and Harding, had obviously been speared and clubbed to death in their sleep, as they still had their handkerchiefs tied over their eyes. The nature of Goldwyer's death was harder to interpret, but there were no signs of a struggle. The dead men's journals indicated that they had fought a number of battles with natives, and that they were expecting further hostilities.
Brown had the bodies wrapped and packed for removal to the ship. While this was being carried out, the two guides tried to escape and were shot dead by Tommy, one of the native assistants brought with the party to act as guides.
The "La Grange Massacre"
Instead of returning to the ship, the expedition continued to examine the country. Brown described this as further "exploration", but most scholars now agree that the evidence points to a punitive expeditionPunitive expedition
A punitive expedition is a military journey undertaken to punish a state or any group of persons outside the borders of the punishing state. It is usually undertaken in response to perceived disobedient or morally wrong behavior, but may be also be a covered revenge...
. On 6 April 1865, Brown's party became engaged in a conflict with a large group of Aboriginal people. Most accounts state that the party walked into an ambush, but at least one account2 asserts that they attacked a native camp. Regardless of the cause, the outcome is not in dispute: at least six, and possibly as many as twenty Aboriginal people were killed, whereas the expedition party suffered no injuries.
Aftermath
The search party returned to Perth in May 1865. Panter, Harding and Goldwyer were given a public funeral. It was the largest ever seen in Western Australia; the funeral train consisted of some 750 people, and thousands of spectators lined the streets on the way to the East PerthEast Perth, Western Australia
East Perth is an inner suburb of Perth, Western Australia, located next to the Perth CBD.Primarily an industrial area in the early twentieth century, it was the location of the East Perth gas works, East Perth Power Station , the East Perth railway yard, and East Perth engine sheds.A considerable...
Cemetery, where the men were buried.
Maitland Brown returned home to public acclaim, both for successfully finding the men, and for avenging their deaths. Indeed, many settlers felt "the requital Mr. Brown had inflicted on the murderers utterly inadequate"3. The English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
Government, however, expressed the view that "force had been exercised towards the natives without sufficient warranty"4 and urged the necessity of maintaining friendly relations with the Aborigines.
Maitland Brown died in 1904 and was buried at Karrakatta Cemetery, but in 1911 his remains were removed from Karrakatta and reinterred with the remains of Panter, Harding and Goldwyer at East Perth. Shortly afterwards, Pietro Porcelli
Pietro Porcelli
Pietro Giacomo Porcelli was an Italian-born sculptor responsible for many statues in Western Australia, including the Explorers' Monument, and those of C. Y. O'Connor and Alexander Forrest....
was commissioned to create a memorial to Brown. The result was the Explorers' Monument
Explorers' Monument
The Explorers' Monument is a monument located on The Esplanade in Fremantle, Western Australia. It is approximately six metres high, and consists of a head and shoulders statue of Maitland Brown, sitting on granite pedestals on a granite base inset with plaques honouring three explorers, Frederick...
, a bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
head and shoulders statue
Statue
A statue is a sculpture in the round representing a person or persons, an animal, an idea or an event, normally full-length, as opposed to a bust, and at least close to life-size, or larger...
of Brown, on a granite
Granite
Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...
base to which is attached plaques portraying the murdered men and describing the circumstances of their death. During the 1990s, the biased nature of the original plaques were recognised, and another plaque was added that describes the circumstances of the murders from the point of view of the Aboriginal people.