Frontier violence increases at Lake Macquarie

Frontier violence increases at Lake Macquarie. Threlkeld records: “The alarm of the Aborigines not only for the heads of their deceased friends and relations, but also for the personal safety of the living, was not without good reason. There are many stock-holders who have suffered severely from the depredations of the Aborigines, and….infuriated against the blacks…Not far from Newcastle, in one of the upper districts, a Settler saw a black stealing his growing corn….he caught the culprit, hung him by the neck….stuffed a corn cob into his mouth, and left his body to putrify as a scar-crow…to keep them away from his standing corn!...My black tutor [Biraban] saw the suspended body…Numerous cases of a similar description occurred about this time, all calculated to drive the Aborigines to madness, who retaliated upon the unfortunate settlers, created a bitter animosity, which increased the mischief. Our house [on Lake Macquarie] was surrounded by blacks as a place of safety. And about sixty of them belonging to two distinct tribes [Tuggerah Beach and Newcastle] were at this period employed by me…The blacks assembled to fight, we employed them, and the waging of war was postponed”. (Threlkeld’s remincences in Blair, 2003, 22).