Talk:Skeleton Creek (Queensland)

problems with the article content

@Donama: A reader drew my attention to this article. Firstly there is no information on when the massacre occurred (ok, maybe the exact date isn't known, but surely there is some vague sense of when it occurred). There also seem to be some issues with the citations. The first citation appears to be about a massacre at Skeleton Creek in Western Australia. The second citation does not mention either Skeleton Creek (talks about "near Cairns" and "in the Far North") nor a massacre (talks more vaguely about "brutal and turbulent times" and "contact and conflict"). The third citation is to a book but without full bibliographic information (e.g. page number or quote -- see Wikipedia:Offline sources#Usage) so it is difficult to verify. There are 8 different Skeleton Creeks in Queensland alone including one one in White Rock (but not in Woree) and there is one near Port Douglas, see [1], even more in Australia more generally. Could you please check your sources to confirm when and where this massacre occurred and update the citations to better support the claim or relocate the content to the location where the massacre occurred. Thanks Kerry (talk) 08:42, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

I checked the Djabugay article in case it had more information and it mentions a massacre at Speewah and shootings at 3 other locations but none of them appear to be near any Skeleton Creek (although maybe there is a creek with that name locally but not officially) and all are west of the Great Dividing Range, so seems unlikely to be the Skeleton Creek at White Rock which is on the coast. Kerry (talk) 09:14, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

@Kerry Raymond: I half-remember simply duplicating scarce detail about the massacre from List of massacres of Indigenous Australians and the sources linked there, because the two articles were poorly linked. Would be very happy to see this event properly sourced. Given the current groundswell it seems more important than ever to make the effort. Donama (talk) 02:07, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

I had a look at the Uni of Newcastle project item where I originally remembered reading this (refers to the same Bottoms source) and it doesn't even call the location Skeleton Creek (possibly edited since), but to answer the particulars, the year was 1884, the location was at present-day Yungaburra on the Mulgrave River and the people affected were the Yidinydi not Djabugay as I apparently guessed. The event is casually referred to as Skeleton Creek battle in this article (referring to the same Bottoms source) so possibly Bottoms describes it as this and Skeleton Creek is the name of some tributary of the Mulgrave at Yungaburra -- I'm not local so don't know. It looks like this content should be removed or merged with similar content already in the Yungaburra article. Donama (talk) 02:47, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

@Donama: I found this online work by Timothy Bottoms (slightly different title, but clearly on the same topic) and looking at the page numbering appears to be a chapter or other excerpt from a larger work, see [2]. Take a look at page 15 (of the PDF, not the numbering of the printed pages) where there is a map marking Skeleton Creek as being around White Rock area, which seemed promising. But then if you read the bottom of that page over onto page 16, you see a description of events at Skull Pocket. This is definitely the Yungaburra massacre of the Yidinydji, as Skull Pocket is just north of Yungaburra (see this map). But then it goes on to talk about Michael O'Leary talking about Skeleton Creek with the skulls, and this is cited as "[54] 'Coyyan', Cairns Post Jubilee Supplement, 1 November 1926, p. 19.". Now that should be available on Trove, and here is that issue. The problem is that while there is a piece by Coyyan, it is on page 11 and concerns tragic deaths in Smithfield (but not massacres of Indigenous people at Skeleton Creek or White Rock or ...). But that issue has 20 pages in total, 16 for the regular edition and 4 at the end for the Jubilee Supplement (numbered 1 through 4) so, while there is no page 19 as such, given the total of 20 pages, I would presume that since the citation explicitly mentions the supplement, then p19 must refer to the 3rd page of the supplement. The problem is that there is nothing there about massacres; it's just history of local businesses and that seems the general (promotional) tone of the whole supplement. There is a mention of Skeleton Creek on page 9 but that is about establishing a race course. So the citation provided by Timothy Bottoms doesn't check out. And nor do the others -- OK, a person can get a citation wrong, accidents happen and all that but none of these citations check out. I really wonder if there was a creek up near Yungaburra locally known as Skeleton Creek but never officially called that and that Timothy Bottoms has confused that creek with the officially-named Skeleton Creek in the White Rock area and marked it on his map and everyone has assumed it to be correct? Kerry (talk) 05:17, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for hunting this down, Kerry. Your assumption seems quite plausible, and so as editors we should just leave it alone. There is no justification for any mention of a massacre in this particular article. I'll vote to leave it as is in the Yungaburra article, but remove from here. Donama (talk) 03:12, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Just to finalise this conversation, I have emailed Timothy Bottoms about all this but have received no reply after several months. Kerry (talk) 02:25, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

OK,here goes. The massacre is said to be the final stage of a week long patrol by one of the Queensland government's death squads (Native Mounted Police) and settlers. It began at what is now called Skull Pocket on the shores of what is now Lake Tinaroo, directly across from Kauri township. It proceeded down the range to what is now Gordonvale where, according to the local rangers from the Malanbarra Yindinji Council, (pers comm) another massacre took place in what is now a cane field next to the Bruce Highway at the turnoff to the Gillies Range. The death squad then continued onto Four Mile, which in 1914 was renamed Woree, where the final massacre occurred. (Don't bother with google maps as it is mislabelled. Google calls it Chinaman Creek then Skeleton, then Chinaman, then Skeleton again. Best to use actual maps.) This transpired over the course of a week in 1883/84. The informant, Jack Cane, took part in the massacres. Bottoms (pp147-8) Despite the confusion over place names, which is very easy to determine once you understand that places change their names constantly, and the apparent lack of comprehension about the landscape around this area and the mobility of Aboriginal Peoples up and down the range, it really isn't that hard to follow the train of events. Moreover, this area was constantly criss-crossed by death squads. Gordonvale, where the second massacre occurred, got its very own death squad base just 2 years later. The death squad responsible for the three massacres, Skull Pocket, Gordonvale and Skeleton Creek, is unconfirmed but was possibly based at Nigger Creek just south of Herbeton...one of the seven Nigger Creeks still to be found in Queensland...but it could have been another death squad as they would regularly combine for operations and there were 'flying squads' which could be moved in and out as needs be. I guess that's the real issue here. People are quibbling about exact dates and locations but ignoring the big picture. Queensland operated about 80 death squads out of 150 to 200 bases from 1859 right up until 1915 (when we needed our death squads somewhere else as you may recall). Those death squads had one simple function, wherever they found a group of blacks they were to "disperse" them. Dispersing them meant taking a Snider carbine, which fired a .577 calibre bullet, and shooting them. That is what they were paid to do and that is what they did....everywhere. For the record, a Snider is a breach loading rifle that can fire about 8 rounds per minute, multiplied by six or seven rifles, plus revolvers, plus scrub knives, aka machetes, which in the hands of trained, highly mobile killers on horseback makes for an awful lot of deadly force. The 19th Century Australian equivalent of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen. There is an excellent resource available. Frontier Conflict database. Inform yourselves of your real inheritance.