Black Armband 4: The Angepena Atrocities

Angepena Station is a pastoral run near Copley in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

It is currently the subject of a dispute between the Adnyamathanha people, who are the traditional owners, and “Operation Flinders”, an SA-based Foundation that runs a boot camp style program for young offenders and youth at risk.

This dispute will be dealt with in a later post.

This post looks at the disputes that arose from the unsettlement of the area by pastoralists in the 1850s, and at incidents that could only be described as atrocities.

An atrocity is a term used to describe crimes or excesses ranging from an act committed against a single person to one committed against a population or ethnic group.

In general use, an atrocity designates a politically or ethnically motivated killing of civilians.

I use the term “Angepena Atrocities” to describe such actions in and around Angepena station (see homestead, below).


The chief source is the writing of John Wrathall Bull, perhaps better known in South Australia as one of two claimants to the title of inventor of the Stripper (below, left), an agricultural implement that dramatically increased the productive forces of the farm sector in colonial times.

As a twenty-one year old, Bull took charge of a cattle-run owned by John Chambers, at Bobmoonie West, to the north of Oratunga in the Flinders Ranges in 1856. One of his first jobs was to drove seven thousand sheep from Oratunga to Franklin Harbour at Cowell on the Eyre Peninsula.

The droving was not without incident, and Bull recounts one incident in which a group of about two hundred Aborigines threatened his progress near Port Augusta. He shot some of the old rams in the flock within sight of the Aborigines in order to impress upon them the lethal nature of his weaponry, and then gave them some of the meat. The Aborigines followed him to Minbrie, about twenty kilometres due north of Cowell, and then left.

On arrival at Minbrie, James Shannon, the manager, asked Bull about Pongilta, an Aborigine, saying that if he was among those that had threatened Bull he would find him and shoot him as he had robbed a shepherd’s hut a month previously.

Bull confirmed Pongilta’s presence and recorded that Shannon “went after him but whether he got him or not I never knew.”

What he did know, beyond doubt, was that there were only Aboriginal women at Minbrie homestead. He was surprised and asked them the whereabouts of their men. He was told they were “crackaback”, or dead. “All about white fella shoot ‘em,” they reported.

On his way back to Oratunga, a 4-day horse ride, he stopped at Wilpena and Aroona in the Flinders Ranges and, as he had at Minbrie, only saw Aboriginal women and children in the camps.

“They told me, ‘White fella shootem all about blackfella,’” he wrote.

Thus, the dispossession of the traditional owners and the unsettlement of their societies were accompanied by atrocities directed mainly at the adult men.

It was targetted, genocidal murder.

But it was not only the men who were the subject of atrocities by the unsettlers.

That same year Bull went from Bobmoonie West to the neighbouring Angepena to arrange for a cattle muster. There he met John Stewart, who ran the place. It was late in the day, and he noticed a “native camp” not far down the creek from Stewart’s hut.

“Stewart took me down the creek,” he wrote, “and showed me a camp of lubras and children all cut to pieces with the stockwhips.

“The women’s breasts were cut open and little children six to twelve months old were bleeding all over.

“They said they were coming through Pernunna and went to a little spring to get a drink.

“They said ‘No bullocky there, master,’ meaning they were doing no harm, as there were no cattle there to be frightened away by them.

“They said Arkaba Charlie and Jack Morrow galloped down on them and ‘Whip give it’.”

Similar reports from other observers throughout South Australia make it clear that denying Aboriginal people access to water holes was a common practice at the time, and that in any case, sheep and cattle soon left natural water holes fouled and undrinkable.

Bull and Stewart went mustering cattle the next day, leaving Stewart’s hut-keeper James Mitchell in charge. When they returned several days later, they found that Mitchell had been killed by Aboriginal men enraged at the treatment of the woman and children.

Mounted police were sent to find Mitchell’s killers and an Aboriginal male named Warrioota was captured, fastened “with a dog-chain and a rope around his neck so (the troopers) could each take an end to lead him.” However, Warrioota escaped on the third day, rejoined his people and was never recaptured.

Undaunted, the troopers arrested a second man whom they believed to be Puttapa Bob, another of Mitchell’s assailants. The arrest wasn’t easy – “Puttapa Bob” resisted and was stabbed and cut by a sword and shot through the arm. Thus wounded, chained and handcuffed, the captured man was forced to walk to Mt Remarkable, a walk that took several days. He was seen there by Bull who recognised immediately that it was the wrong man!

Bull wrote that the innocent “blackfellow was ironed and chained down to a large ring-bolt in the middle and stank…He died a few days after I saw him and there was nothing said about it. I knew it was no use saying anything at that time.”

He commented that the Aborigines “look upon the white man as their general enemy taking the water and hunting grounds from them and giving them no recompense for it, but shooting them down.”

The situation in and around Angepena remained “unsettled” and a police station was maintained there for ten years until drought forced its closure in 1867.

When Prime Monster John Howard announced his proposal for a Constitutional “affirmation of the unique place of Indigenous Australians” at the Sydney Institute on October 12, he simultaneously reiterated his disdain for “shame, guilt and apologies”.

The truth will out. The facts are plain.

British colonialism was guilty of unsettling the traditional owners of the land, of dispossessing them, and of carrying out this unsettlement and dispossession with atrocities and massacres.

This is what is required to be stated in the Constitutional Preamble!