Battle of Pinjarra - Background

Background

Robert Menli Lyon had commented on the fact that some of the soldiers from Tasmania would as soon shoot an Aboriginal as shoot a kangaroo and there had been Aboriginal payback attacks on settlers, including the killing of Nesbitt, a servant of Thomas Peel. Captain Frederick Irwin, the lieutenant governor in Stirling's absence, had inflamed the situation, adopting a soldier's attitude to crush a warlike group of Aborigines and reduce them to a state of subjection.

It was this unyielding, overbearing attitude that had alienated from the body of Swan River settlers and caused them to burn him in effigy on the eve of his departure. It was a narrow, regimented view of frontier problems and, perhaps, part of the blame for the Pinjarra massacre can be attributed to Irwin and his unsympathetic administration of Aboriginal affairs during James Stirling's absence.

Governor Stirling had been visiting the 400-km-distant seaport of Albany and bad weather caused his return to be delayed until September. In response to calls from Pinjarra settlers for protection against the increased hostility of local Binjareb Aborigines led by Calyute, Stirling organised a mounted force of police, bushmen and ex-soldiers. Their brief was to protect settlers, safeguard Aboriginal mail-carriers and confront the Binjareb on the Murray River. A small garrison at Dandalup had been withdrawn from fear of Aboriginal reprisals after they had shot some Aboriginal people.

The Binjareb tribe had a reputation with other local Aboriginal tribes for their aggression and attacks on other Aborigines and settlers. It is possible that their motives for attacking the local settlers were part of an attempt to assert their power amongst other local tribes and to take advantage of the political upheaval caused by the arrival of the British settlers, and the death of many Perth Wadjuk Aborigines. Stirling and others, drawing on the experience of Scottish clans and native American Indians of North America, were afraid of a possible alliance between the Binjareb and Weeip's Wadjuk people in the Upper Swan, and sought to prevent such an alliance by an attack on the Aboriginal people to the south. Stirling's attack at Pinjarra was specifically to collectively punish the Binjareb for their earlier individual attacks, to re-establish a barracks on the road to the south, and enable Thomas Peel to attract settlers into his lands at Mandurah. This followed an earlier failure by Surveyor General Septimus Roe and pastoralist Thomas Peel who had led an expedition to the area with the goal of improving security and negotiating peaceful co-existence. Stirling wanted a "decisive action" that would end the attacks "once and for all".