Taroom Aboriginal Settlement is a heritage-listed Aboriginal reserve at Bundulla, Taroom, Shire of Banana, Queensland, Australia. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 13 May 2011. It is also known as Taroom Aboriginal Reserve and Taroom Aboriginal Mission.
History The Taroom Aboriginal Settlement, also known as Taroom Aboriginal Reserve, was established as a government-operated reserve on a site on the Dawson River, east of the township of Taroom in 1911. The settlement was established under the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, which enabled direct government control over the lives of Aboriginal people in Queensland, including forced removals to designated reserves. Under the direction of a superintendent, the settlement housed Aboriginal people from different language groups and regions of Queensland, who lived within a highly regulated and tightly controlled institutional environment until its closure in 1927.
Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt led the first European exploration of the upper Dawson River district during his expedition north from the Darling Downs to Port Essington in 1844–46. Pastoral settlement in the area commenced soon after, with squatters attracted by Leichhardt's reports of its rich grazing land. By November 1845, Taroom Station had been taken up, and by the time the Leichhardt pastoral district of was proclaimed in 1854, most of the country had been taken up for pastoral purposes. The township of Taroom developed at a crossing point on the Dawson River at the junction of several tracks from Juandah, Gayndah and Roma, and developed slowly as a staging post between Roma and Rockhampton. A post office was established there in 1853, a courtroom gazetted in 1857, and the town was officially surveyed in 1860.
The spread of the pastoral frontier and its associated violent disruption of traditional Aboriginal lifestyles and land use inevitably caused conflict between traditional owners and settlers along the Dawson River. Conflict escalated rapidly following a retaliatory attack at Hornet Bank homestead in 1857, resulting in the death of eleven European inhabitants of the station. In the following months a vigilante "squatter's crusade", supported by sections of the colonial press, was waged throughout the Dawson and Burnett districts by small bands of squatters and Native Police. It has been estimated that several hundred Aboriginal people were indiscriminately killed during this period. Sporadic warfare continued in the Dawson River area to 1870, by which time numbers of local Aboriginal people had been significantly reduced.Evans:2007:74-75 By the beginning of the twentieth century, surviving Aboriginal people living in the district were residing in fringe camps around Taroom or on surrounding rural properties.L'Oste-Brown et al:1995:6
From the 1870s a small number of sites were reserved for the use of Aboriginal people by the Queensland government. Most of these were never formally managed and were generally short-lived. The first mission settlement set up by a religious organization was the Zion Hill Mission established in present-day Nundah, Brisbane in 1838. These types of settlements increased in number during the 1880s, particularly in north Queensland. The removal of over 300 Aboriginal people from more than 50 localities to the Deebing Creek Mission (near Ipswich) from 1894 heralded the beginning of a more systematic removal process.State Library of Queensland: 2010:1-30Evans: 2007:139
In 1895 self-styled "expert" Archibald Meston provided the Queensland Government with a plan to address the improvement and protection of the colony's Aboriginal people. Meston contended the reason earlier reserves operated by missionaries and others were unsuccessful all over Australia was poor management and control. Further, the location of such places had not adequately isolated Aborigines in a way that prevented their exposure to the vices and diseases contact with white people occasioned. A follow up report on Queensland missions for the Home Secretary reaffirmed Meston's belief that the government should be taking a direct role in establishing and maintaining reserves and effectively segregating Aboriginal people from white people. Meston ultimately recommended the establishment of three reserves to serve southern, central and northern Queensland; the appointment of a Chief Protector of Aborigines; and stronger government controls, including the power to remove Aboriginal people to these places and keep them there. Meston's proposals, and their influence in shaping subsequent legislation and its administration, marked a significant change both in Queensland and Australia in relation to government control of Aboriginal peoples lives.Blake: 2001:1-3
Meston's recommendations were brought to fruition in the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, the provisions of which gave the government substantial control over many aspects of the lives of Aboriginal people and extended its authority to establish, and then forcibly remove people to and keep them within reserves. Superintendents were in charge of these places (a title also given to those in charge of missions), and were responsible to the Chief Protector of Aborigines. The realities of "living under the Act" were to profoundly impact upon the lives of Queensland Aboriginal people. Queensland's legislation influenced other parts of Australia, becoming the model for similar legislation adopted in Western Australia (1905), the Northern Territory (1910) and South Australia (Aborigines Act 1911, to take control of the existing missions), the three places with the highest Aboriginal populations at this time.National Archives of Australia:2011
Settlements at Durundur (near Woodford, re-opened 1900), Whitula in western Queensland (briefly in operation in response to the 1902 drought) and Fraser Island (1897) were beset by a range of problems and did not last, with the latter experiencing a very high death rate among inmates. From 1905 the Barambah Aboriginal Settlement (from 1934 Cherbourg) in the South Burnett, first established in 1901, came under complete government control and operation. It was considered a more successful venture and gave the government confidence to establish more Aboriginal settlements.Donovan: 2002:121,132Blake: 2001:9,17-18
In the post-Barambah phase of direct government operation of settlements on reserves, the Taroom Aboriginal Settlement was the first to be established in Queensland. It was followed in the 1910s by the Hull River Aboriginal Settlement in north Queensland (1914–1918, destroyed by cyclone) and Palm Island in 1918. The site of the Taroom Aboriginal Settlement, located east of the town along the Dawson River was surveyed and gazetted as a Reserve "for the use of Aboriginal inhabitants of the State" in 1909. Previously the reserve area was within the boundaries of Markland Station, a pastoral run that had been established by 1860, parts of which had been abandoned in the early 1900s due to prickly pear infestation. Originally encompassing an area of , the reserve area was increased to in 1912 and further enlarged by another 3486 acres in 1915.L'Oste-Brown et al:1995:7-8Moreton Bay Courier: 7 December 1860:3Rechner: 2005:48
In May 1911 Taroom Settlement's first Superintendent George Richard Addison arrived at the reserve with the basic materials for establishing the place. Addison's first action was to "persuade natives in camps near Taroom to take up quarters on the reserve".QPP:1912:3:1016-1017 In the early months of the reserve the Aboriginal population drawn from the vicinity of Taroom was about 70. The arrival of groups of people removed from Bell and Roma and "a few from the north" boosted numbers, and by December 1911, 155 people were drawing rations at the settlement. In May 1912 "about 300" people were reported to be living on the settlement.Brisbane Courier: 9 May 1912:6
Over time, Aboriginal people from areas throughout Queensland (and a number of G/Kamilaroi people originally from northern New South Wales) were forcibly removed or "deported" to Taroom.L'Oste-Brown et al:1995:6-10,98-101Evans:2007:172 Archival government correspondence regarding proposed removals to Taroom reveal the distribution of locations from where Aboriginal people were sent. Such places included towns and pastoral stations in South West and Central Queensland, the Darling Downs and the Wide Bay-Burnett, jails at Brisbane, Roma and St Helena Island and other Aboriginal settlements and missions.Mackett:1998L'Oste-Brown et al:1995:89-97 In 1913, 45 men and 14 women had been removed to Taroom for "having given trouble in other districts, loafing about, or for being in a destitute condition".QPP:1913:1025 While operating, the settlement housed an average population of about 250–300 Aboriginal people.
By segregating Aboriginal people from the rest of the community, the removals process was highly effective in fulfilling the government's objectives of increased control and regulation of the state's Aboriginals, enforced on settlements through a range of administrative and disciplinary measures. While humanitarian concerns were used as a justification for removal by advocates of the reserve system, Aboriginal people were forcibly removed for a wider range of reasons including illness; lack of employability or refusal to work; old age; as punishment; and after a jail sentence had been served.Blake:2001: 36-49 While many groups had already been moved off their traditional land and were residing in fringe camps at settlements and stations, the removals program further severed many Queensland Aboriginals' capacity to maintain connections to country and traditional customary practices. Social and family networks were also profoundly altered, with children taken from their parents, wives from husbands and families split up and sent to different reserves.
By 1912, a 400-acre (161.87 ha) paddock had been enclosed, a vegetable garden, storage sheds, stockyards and temporary quarters for the Superintendent and his family had been constructed at Taroom.QPP:1912:1016-1017 In this initial establishment phase, the reserve was "laid out in a simple system of streets and a small area of ground allotted to each family". Inmates purchased galvanised iron from the settlement store and were building huts with bark and slabs. Throughout the early years of the reserve, Aboriginal people largely lived in humpies, increasing in size over time and assembled with a range of materials including bark, branches, felled timber, flattened kerosene tins and corrugated iron. Internally these dwellings were divided into three sleeping compartments with raised beds for parents, boys, and girls and external fireplaces.L 'Oste-Brown et al:1995:63