Австралиядағы қырғын оқиғалары: Каледон шығанағы трагедиясы

Series of killings in Australia

The Caledon Bay crisis refers to a series of killings at Caledon Bay in the Northern Territory of Australia during 1932–34, referred to in the press of the day as Caledon Bay murder(s). Five Japanese trepang fishers were killed by Aboriginal Australians of the Yolngu people. A police officer investigating the deaths, Albert McColl, was subsequently killed. Shortly afterwards, two white men went missing on Woodah Island (with one body found later). With some of the white community alarmed by these events, a punitive expedition was proposed by Northern Territory Police to "teach the blacks a lesson". However, it was feared that a punitive expedition would lead to an event similar to the 1928 Coniston massacre (when a number of innocent Aboriginal people were killed by a white patrol group after a murder). A party from the Church Missionary Society travelled to Arnhem Land and persuaded Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda and three other men, sons of a Yolngu elder, Wonggu, to return to Darwin with them for trial. In Darwin in April 1934, Dhakiyarr was sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of McColl. The three other men were sentenced to 20 years' hard labour. After a seven months’ investigation, the Federal Government freed the three men imprisoned for the killings. On appeal to the High Court of Australia, in a case known as Tuckiar v The King, Dhakiyarr's sentence was quashed in November 1934, and he was released from jail, but disappeared on his way home.

There had previously been killings of Japanese fishermen in 1921 and 1926. On 17 September 1932, five Japanese trepangers were killed by Aboriginal men in the Caledon Bay area of northeast Arnhem Land. (Evidence was later given that the Japanese men had taken several Aboriginal women.) In separate incident, two white men, William Fagan and Frank Traynor, had been reported missing some months earlier after they had not returned from a fishing expedition. In June 1933 a police party arrived in the area from Darwin, to look for suspects.

After the news of McColl's death reached Darwin on 11 August 1933, many in the community became alarmed. A punitive expedition by police was proposed on 29 August by Administrator RH Weddell There were protests against this idea, peaking in early September, and Interior Minister John Perkins quashed the idea. In May 1934, a Northern Territory Ordinance was amended so that a death sentence would not be mandatory in Aboriginal murder convictions. Clergyman and anthropologist A. P. Elkin and others argued for the need for a separate system of native courts. Evidence was offered that the Japanese men had assaulted the Yolngu women before they were killed. Gray was prepared to return the Aborigines to their community in his boat, suggesting that a lecture would be sufficient. On 1 August 1934, the three men convicted of murdering the Japanese trepangers were sentenced to twenty years' hard labour, and on 3 August 1934 Dhakiyarr was sentenced to death by hanging in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory by Judge Wells and 12 person jury. NT newspapers supported Judge Wells' sentence, but there were protests from many quarters, not only about the sentence, but about the fairness of the trial and the Judge's comments during the trial. after numerous irregularities in the first trial were pointed out,
and he was released from jail and taken to Kahlin compound, but was never seen again. Oral tradition has it that he was murdered by friends of McColl.

The resulting crisis threatened to bring about even more bloodshed. To defuse the situation, a young anthropologist, Donald Thomson, offered to investigate the causes of the conflict. He travelled to Arnhem Land, on a mission that many said would be suicidal, and got to know and understand the people who lived there. After a seven months’ investigation, he persuaded the Federal Government to free the three men convicted of the killings and returned with them to their own country, living for over a year with their people, documenting their culture. In the course of his negotiations, he wrote of Wonggu sending a message stick to his sons, at that time in prison, to indicate a calling of a truce. In etched angles, it showed people sitting down together, with Wonggu at the centre, keeping the peace. The message stick is now housed in the Buku Larrnggay Mulka Centre at Yirrkala. He formed a strong bond with the Yolngu people, and in 1941 he persuaded the Army to establish a special reconnaissance force of Yolngu men known as the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, including Wonggu and his sons, to help repel Japanese raids on the northern coastline of Australia. The historian Henry Reynolds has suggested that the Caledon Bay crisis was a decisive moment in the history of Aboriginal European relations.