Zoe Smith explores the history of the Hornet Bank Massacre in the context of white settler masculinity and sexual violence in colonial Australia.
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this blog may contain the images and names of people who have since passed away.
In the early hours of October 27, 1857, approximately fifteen Yiman men attacked Hornet Bank station on the upper banks of the Dawson River near Taroom in central Queensland. These men raped Martha, aged 43, mother of the Fraser family who resided there, as well as her two eldest daughters, Elizabeth, aged 19, and Mary, aged 11, before murdering them as well as the remaining five family members, the family tutor, and two station-hands. This single occasion of sexual and physical violence perpetrated by Yiman men was committed in response to an unknown period of months or years in which the older Fraser sons – William, John, and potentially Sylvester – members of the local Native Police, and other settlers raped Yiman women and girls.
When he reached Hornet Bank after a three-day ride from Ipswich upon hearing news of the massacre, William Fraser’s first action was to go to the makeshift graves of his mothers and sisters. There, he:
vowed at the graveside … with an uplifted tomahawk in my hand, that I would never rest until I had sunk it in the head of the blackfellow who was the cause of the murder.
The image of William Fraser, tomahawk in hand, indiscriminately massacring Indigenous peoples in order to avenge the rapes and murders of his mothers and sisters, has dominated public, media and academic representations of the Hornet Bank massacre in the years following the events of October 27,1857. These representations have generally focused on the subsequent actions of William and Sylvester Fraser – the only surviving members of the Fraser family – who led the ‘18 months of warfare’ resulting in the massacre of hundreds of Yiman people, and which often framed their ruthless violence in line with ideals of white masculinity from the period. This emphasis generally obscures the identities of Martha, Elizabeth, and Mary Fraser, who were raped and murdered that night. It has also diminished the place of interracial rape within the events, minimising or excluding the actions of William Fraser and others in repeatedly raping Yiman girls and women.
Histories of interracial rape in the context of both Hornet Bank and the mid-nineteenth-century Queensland frontier more broadly have generally focused upon the Indigenous and white women who were the victims of such assaults, which is a necessary and timely focus particularly considering that their experiences have often been obscured or minimised. However, it is also necessary and important to focus on the men who committed such assaults, considering them in line with the brutal violence they enacted in order to understand how and why they perpetrated such violence towards women. Openly condemning and labelling white male rapists as explicitly such is a key aspect of revisiting histories of interracial rape, particularly as the identity of the Fraser men as rapists has been obfuscated by white settlers who characterised their behaviour as adhering to vaunted hegemonic ideals of masculinity.
This masculinity was bolstered upon the construction and violent usage of both Indigenous and white women as bodies devoid of identity outside of their racialized and sexualised ideals of femininity. In this blog, I argue that the rape of Indigenous women by white settlers served to assert the violent masculinity that characterised the frontier and became a ‘critical feature of the experience of the colonised’, as sexual domination of the ultimate ‘Other’ bolstered masculine ideals of expansion and conquest. Additionally, white male settlers also committed acts of violence against Indigenous men, who they constructed as inferior and whose own acts of sexual domination were deemed unacceptable, under the guise of fulfilling their patriarchal duties towards white women, positioning the ‘ravished’ bodies of white women as property to be violently protected and avenged.
Sporting manliness and sexual violence
Men who committed these acts were considered all the more manly by their fellow men, in their physical assertion of colonial power and domination. Comparatively, in a stark drawing of racialized sexual boundaries, Indigenous men’s acts of raping white women was framed as emasculating to white men, both due to white men’s inability to protect their ‘property’ and the wider threat to the power imbalance between coloniser and colonised it posed.
Euphemisms used by white settlers on the Dawson such as ‘rushing the gins’ likened the abduction and rape of Indigenous women to manly sporting pastimes that were appropriate for middle-class white men to participate in, and therefore minimised the severity of white men’s acts of rape. Ideas about white manliness derived from British Victorian ideals, where middle-class manliness was linked to sporting prowess which was then translated to the Australian frontier, whereupon sporting prowess could be demonstrated via horsemanship and displays of physical and sexual violence. The testimonies published in the 1861 Select Committee report into ‘the Native Police Force and the Condition of the Aborigines’ offer significant insight into how white manliness was idealised and performed by settlers on the Upper Dawson frontier, particularly in relation to physical and sexual violence.
Indeed, the supposed paragon of white frontier masculinity, William Fraser, was identified in the testimony of president of the Legislative Council and former commissioner of crown lands Captain M. C. O’Connell as one of ‘the young men who owned the station’ who, most likely alongside his brothers John and Sylvester, participated ‘in the habit of…rush[ing] the gins on the camps of the aborigines in the neighbourhood’. Granted the status of ‘men’ due to their ownership of the station, and patriarchal control over the family residing there, their propensity for raping Yiman girls and women was minimised by other male settlers, who phrased it as a ‘habit’ and made minimal effort to dissuade the Fraser boys from engaging in the ‘manly’ sporting pastime of ‘rushing the gins’. Within this context, Indigenous women’s consent was considered irrelevant, as was the case in many frontier and military contact zones. For white settlers, the act of raping Indigenous women was inextricable from other acts of violence they performed in their attempts to consolidate colonial power and domination.
Physical violence and vengeance
The hegemonic code of white masculinity on the frontier therefore was saturated with militaristic elements, bound up in violence displayed in the supposed ‘war’ between settlers and the Indigenous inhabitants, and with such value placed on their marksmanship to the extent that some men would adorn their rifles with notches tallying the number of Indigenous people they killed. For example, a companion of Thomas Murray-Prior, pastoralist Frank Jardine, who was renowned throughout Queensland for his punitive expeditions and who personally claimed to have killed 47 Indigenous people on one such expedition, ‘had a rifle with 58 notches in it each one representative of a blackfellow that he had killed’.
The language white men used when discussing the events of October 27 reflects how they interpreted the events as a direct challenge to their masculinity, evoking concerns about their courage and ability to protect themselves and their property which were inherent to constructions of manliness on the frontier. Despite knowledge of his acts of rape and indiscriminate murder, William Fraser’s ‘reputation as an avenger spread far beyond the Dawson tribes’ to the extent that ‘there was no person who was looked upon with greater respect by the Ipswich boys when he came into Ipswich than “Billy” Fraser’. If settlers disagreed with the nature of William and other settlers’ ‘retributive’ violence, they rarely questioned the extent to which it was justified when white men mentioned the rape and murder of the Fraser females. As Murray-Prior expressed, ‘there is little doubt that many fell to their rifles that were never officially known but who could blame them’.
William Fraser himself constructed his actions in line with the idealised masculine role of the patriarch, arguing how his actions were driven by a desire to avenge the rape of his mother and sisters, and how ‘manly’ coloniser violence was his best recourse to do so. When interviewed by The Queensland Times for the ‘Ipswich during the Sixties’ series, which was part of the celebrations of the Jubilee year of Queensland in 1909, William described his graveside confession to avenge his mother and sisters with a bloody tomahawk, in which he took great pride in admitting he ‘did it’. This interview presented Fraser as an exemplar patriarch, who had avenged the defilement of vulnerable white women through violent retributive justice.
Masculine avengers or mass murderers?
This imagery, and the narrative of William Fraser as the heroic avenger, has dominated representations of Hornet Bank, obfuscating and minimising the consequences of white men’s actions as both rapists and murderers, as well as obfuscating the realities of the interracial rape perpetrated against both the Yiman and Fraser women and girls. This illustrates how the actions of white settlers following Hornet Bank were motivated by an ideology of violent frontier masculinity that called for the protection of white women and the sanctity of the colonial project by any means possible and at any cost.
This blog is based on a journal article available in the ANU Historical Journal II.
Zoe Smith is a PhD candidate and gender historian in the School of History at the Australian National University. Her doctoral research is a feminist, social, and cultural history of domestic violence in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria between 1880–1914, with a focus on both colonial women’s divorce petitions and the fiction and non-fiction writings of Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, Louisa Lawson, and Rosa Praed. She has published and presented prize-winning research on histories of sexual violence, domestic violence, Australian literature and film, colonial literature, masculinity, and gender and race in the context of nineteenth-century Britain and Australia.
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