Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/367
had been taken from them; warlike or peaceful they were
to be shot in districts whose boundaries were undefined;
and if, when starving, they crept into corn-fields at night,
the same doom awaited them. They were cumbering the
earth in the eyes of the invaders, and were to be cut down.
It may be remembered that Pemulwy, in 1790, speared the
convict gamekeeper employed by Governor Phillip, and
that a party of soldiers vainly sought him. He must have
lived the life of a hunted tiger. Collins recorded that in
May 1795, under Paterson's brief rule—
"An open war seemed about this time to have commenced between the natives and the settlers; that a part of the New South Wales Corps was sent from Parramatta with instructions to destroy as many as they could meet with of the Bediagal tribe (Hawkesbury), and in the hope of striking terror, to erect gibbets in several places, whereon the bodies of all they might kill were to be hung."
The military party was no sooner withdrawn, after obeying this order, and sending a few women, children, and one reputed cripple, to Sydney,[1] than the hunted savages wreaked vengeance upon a settler at Richmond Hill. "In consequence of this horrid circumstance another party of the corps was sent out. This duty now became permanent, and the soldiers were distributed amongst the settlers for their protection; a protection, however, that many of them did not merit." In another passage (March 1795), Collins declared: "All these unpleasant circumstances were to be attributed to the ill-treatment the natives had received from the settlers."
Pemulwy was still at large in 1795, and when the military were shooting his countrymen at Richmond, Collins wrote, that Pemulwy "or some of his party even ventured to appear within half-a-mile of the brickfield huts and wound a convict. . . . As one of our most frequent walks from the town was in that direction, this circumstance was rather unpleasant." Again, in 1802, but for the last time, we hear of the hunted Pemulwy. In replying to Lord Hobart's despatch respiting the Hawkesbury murderers, King[2] told the end of the bold leader who with wooden weapons kept up for years some kind of warfare with those who outlawed him on his native soil. He was described as the terror of