In February 1838, Lieutenant George Cobban led a detachment of Mounted Police up from the Peel River onto southern New England. According to an article in the Sydney Gazette, the expedition aimed “to employ coercive measures” against local Aboriginal people, whose armed resistance efforts had “at length roused the attention of the Government”.
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Defending their lands and lives against the onslaught of British invasion and occupation, Aboriginal warriors were killing colonists, and destroying stock en masse.
Those responsible for raiding a depot formed by Surveyor Heneage Finch were of particular interest to Cobban, along with the killings of several shepherds in the service of Frederick Cruickshanks on the Mihi Creek run and the Allman brothers of Yarrowitch station.
Aboriginal warriors reportedly “came down in great numbers”, dispatched Finch’s two assigned servants with their mūgūŋ (tomahawks), and sacked the stores they’d been left to watch over.
The three shepherds were attacked whilst out in the bush, and their flocks were seized. Given the locations of Mihi Creek and Yarrowitch on the southeastern edges of the Tableland, coupled with Cobban’s suggestion that they belonged to “the same tribe”, the Aboriginal guerrilla fighters resisting the incursions of these pastoral enterprises were probably Ambēyaŋ.
This is the name of one of the distinct clan-groups whose members spoke what is now commonly referred to as the ‘Anaiwan’ language.
The Lieutenant reported that, after spending “nearly three weeks” pursuing the alleged assailants, they were eventually tracked down and ambushed. This was only possible, however, thanks to the intelligence extracted from local Aboriginal people “by threats and the promise of rewards”, as well as to the help of an Aboriginal guide they managed to co-opt into their search.
Cobban and his troops “came in view and charged them and succeeded in taking the whole party”, with at least two Aborigines killed in the attack.
Survivors were marched down to Port Macquarie for committal, and then to Sydney to face trial; although officially deemed by colonial authorities as criminals, they were effectively prisoners taken in an undeclared war.
There was likely more to the Lieutenant’s activities than he reported to his superiors.
Historian Roger Millis points out that much of the time that Cobban had spent on the Tableland was “virtually unaccounted for”, intimating that he may have engaged in additional, unsanctioned hostilities.
The Sydney Gazette also documented how local vigilantes carried on Cobban’s punitive action following his departure from the region: “...several of the natives have since been shot by the whites, who have been for some time past, out in search of the murderers.”
Arriving in New England a year later, George James Macdonald, the district’s inaugural Commissioner of Crown Lands, found there to be “a general and pervading terror of the Mounted Police” among the Tableland’s Aboriginal population, “a feeling instilled probably at some former period from having been pursued by them”.
Such comments are a glimpse into the lasting ramifications of Cobban’s dealings with local Aboriginal people in 1838, which clearly played a significant role in establishing a reign of fear and oppression over them and their descendants.
The expedition took place just a few months before the infamous massacre at Myall Creek, where a posse of 12 stockmen brutally murdered 28 Aboriginal people – women, children, and old men. After a second trial, seven of the perpetrators were found guilty, and they were hanged for their crimes.
Questioning what he saw as a double standard exercised by the government of New South Wales, parliamentarian Stuart Donaldson pointed out that George Cobban “had slaughtered the blacks as cruelly as the men who were executed”.
Rather than being brought to trial and punished accordingly, the Lieutenant was merely transferred to a post in another district.
The lives of seven convicts and ex-convicts were essentially expendable, the spectacle made of them supporting the facade of an evermore progressive and humane colonialism.
Meanwhile, the violent exploits of government-sanctioned operatives like Cobban were evidently exempt from prosecution.
The death, destruction and whatever ‘collateral damage’ that these military men inflicted, simply written off as byproducts of pastoral expansion, were the necessary means by which the colonization project could proceed.
One hundred and eighty years on from Lieutenant George Cobban’s New England expedition, we remember those who fought and died for kin and country.
By reclaiming this history from the colonial archives and telling their story, we honour our ancestors’ fierce resistance, their sheer resilience in the face of having the world they knew so violently disrupted. Lest we forget.