ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Denny Day, the Life and Times of Australia’s Greatest Lawman is popular history written by a journalist, so you can expect a lively retelling of the life of ‘the forgotten hero of the Myall Creek Massacre’.  Day (1801-1876) was the lawman who brought the perpetrators to justice at a time in Australia’s history when the frontier was a lawless place, but he has been so comprehensively forgotten that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry of his own.  I found his birth and death dates at the Australian Dictionary of Biography.  The ADB doesn’t have much to say about this pivotal moment in Australia’s legal history, just this:

In June 1838, under instructions from Governor Sir George Gipps, a party of mounted police led by Day was sent to arrest white men said to have killed at least twenty-eight Aboriginals at or near Henry Dangar’s station at Myall Creek on the Liverpool Plains. Eleven men were caught, tried and found guilty; seven were hanged.

Smyth is Denny Day’s champion, and he tells the story in much more detail.  Although Myall Creek was certainly not the first massacre of Australia’s Indigenous People, those men who were hanged were the first to be executed for killing Aborigines.  Denny Day was up against colonial attitudes so outrageous that a corrupt association was formed to pay for the defence of the men who were charged, and the third of three trials never took place because a crucial witness ‘disappeared’ and was never heard of again.

As a police magistrate in those days, Day found his role more like a US sheriff: he rode out to gather evidence, make arrests and prepare the indictment.  He didn’t sit on the bench as a magistrate does these days, he was a witness in the trials.  On the one hand the case was doubly difficult because the unarmed Aborigines could not be identified; on the other hand the murderers were so sanguine about what they had done that they admitted it, because they were confident that there would be no penalty, and that they could expect to be admired for what they had done.  Frontier violence in NSW in the 1830s was commonplace because colonial stockmen regarded the Kamilaroi people as fair game – even though British Law was quite clear that murder of any kind was punishable by death.  Aborigines were hung for crimes of violence against white men, but white men were not even charged with violence against Indigenous People, much less sanctioned in any way.

Until Denny Day…

I’m no historian, but the book appears to be well-researched from original sources and there are plentiful endnotes.  (I was interested, however, to see that there was no reference to Henry Reynolds, who is Australia’s preeminent historian of frontier violence.)  There are photos, too, including a poignant one of Denny Day’s neglected grave, and the imposing monument to one of the murderers.

(For copyright reasons, I can’t share the image of Denny Day’s neglected grave, but you can see it in this article about the book in The Australian. )

Books like this serve a useful purpose.  Denny Day is written for the general public in an engaging way, and the heroism of Day against formidable odds makes a highly readable story.  And that, hopefully, will make it the sort of book that people will pick up at the airport or a chain store, and learn the truth about the fierce resistance of the Kamileroi People, and how, until Denny Day had the courage to confront the hunting parties, British justice was impotent to deal with the vigilantes who were intent on exterminating the indigenous people altogether.

©Lisa Hill

Author: Terry Smyth
Title: Denny Day, the Life and Times of Australia’s Greatest Lawman
Publisher: Ebury Press, published by Penguin Random House Australia
ISBN: 9780857986825
Review copy courtesy of Penguin Random House Australia

Available from Fishpond: Denny Day