Topics: Events: North West

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1841 - view

Eventually members of all four communities intermarried

1841 - view

Threlkeld laments the closure of his mission,`the termination of the mission has arisen solely from the Aborigines becoming extinct in these districts ... The thousands of Aborigines ... decreased to hundreds and have lessened to tens and the tens will dwindle to units before a very few years they will have passed away'

1841 - view

Some “natives enquire most anxiously for their blankets” at Stroud. Dungog Magistrate, Thomas Cook , expresses fear that the large number of Aboriginal people in the district – who are without exception quiet and harmless – will get “discontented”

1841 - view

Members of the Maitland Tribe seek and are given asylum at Singleton from the “Paterson blacks” who are at war with them

1841 - view

Threlkeld later explains that the mission is closed “solely from the sad fact that the aborigines themselves had then become almost extinct…

1842 - view

Some townsfolk were reportedly wounded during the “affray”. One was “transfixed by a spear”. When the police arrived, all Aboriginal men quickly “decamped”

1843 - view

The Aborigines Evidence Bill fails to receive sufficient support at the second reading in the NSW Legislative Council

1843 - view

The Maitland Mercury is especially outspoken in support of reform to Acts of “rank injustice” that hold “the blacks…liable to all the pains and penalties of British law, while the protection they derive from it is extremely partial and uncertain”

1845 - view

Like the Brisbane Water report, it observes that the local Aboriginal population is diminishing. This effects young and old, with many children seldom living through their first winter and elderly people dying during the last winter of cold and hunger

1846 - 1864 - view

Aborigines are regularly or occasionally working throughout the Hunter Valley as farmhands, stockmen, domestic servants, trackers, timber getters and other such roles on many larger properties

1846 - view

Death of Biraban

1846 - view

Aboriginal population of the Hunter region is reported as sharply diminishing

1846 - view

“from the want of sufficient Legal Evidence owing to the testimony of an aboriginal unconverted to Christianity, not being admissible in a criminal prosecution, I found that it would have been useless to have committed the assaulter Hauttey for trial

1847 - view

Johnny is arrested near Sackville on a charge of being of unsound mind. Johnny “vent[s] his spleen in rather a novel fashion…by flooding the ear of one of his captors with…saliva”. Johnny is sent to the Hospital for the Insane , Parramatta

1848 - view

Jacky-Jacky returns south to a hero’s welcome, before returning to his people around Singleton

1848 - view

Jackey is honoured for his fortitude and loyalty to the explorer. Sir Charles Fitzroy , the governor of New South Wales, presents him with a silver breast-plate

1848 - view

Aboriginal man dives into a deep waterhole in the bed of Sugarloaf Creek (now South Creek) and finds the boy’s body

1850 - view

Numerous Aboriginal groups decide to try their hand at farming in pockets of vacant land existing within the mosaic of white settlement

1850 - view

The focus shifts from Wollombi to the Hunter River with the construction of the railway through Singleton and major flooding which causes severe hardship to people living in Wollombi region

1850 - view

Allowing for administrative anomalies, blanket lists record a diminishing number of Aborigines receiving blankets between the Hawkesbury River and Upper Hunter districts