'Unspeakable atrocities': The 1857 Hornet Bank massacre, interracial rape and white femininity on the Australian colonial frontier

Despite settlers' immediate and visceral reaction to the 'barbaric' rape and murder of Martha, Elizabeth, and Mary Fraser by Yiman men at Hornet Bank station in Queensland on 27 October 1857, in mid-nineteenth-century settlers' recollections and newspaper representations of the e...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLilith (Fitzroy, Vic.) no. 29; pp. 117 - 239
Main Author Smith, Zoe
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Wollongong Australian Women's History Network 01.01.2023
Subjects
Archives & records
Gender-based violence
Native peoples
Patriarchy
Rape
Sexual abuse
Violence
Women
Queensland Australia
Australia
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Summary:Despite settlers' immediate and visceral reaction to the 'barbaric' rape and murder of Martha, Elizabeth, and Mary Fraser by Yiman men at Hornet Bank station in Queensland on 27 October 1857, in mid-nineteenth-century settlers' recollections and newspaper representations of the events that morning the identities of Martha, Elizabeth, and Mary were quickly overlooked. Instead, they were diminished purely to their reproductive, gendered roles of 'wife', 'daughter' and 'betrothed', and their rape was described in euphemistic terms that obscured the reality of the sexual violence they had suffered. This article explicitly aims to draw Martha, Elizabeth, and Mary's experiences of rape out from the archives, revisiting mid-nineteenth-century settlers' recollections and newspaper representations in order to demonstrate how these women's stories have been overlooked historically, and were coopted and distorted by male settlers in line with the colonial and transnational racialised and gendered discourses around interracial rape. The euphemistic descriptions by white settlers of Martha, Elizabeth, and Mary's rape were deployed in a sensationalised image that was circulated throughout the colony-an image which, in literally shrouding the violated bodies and obscuring the identities of the raped mother and daughters, was used to justify subsequent settler violence against Indigenous people, enacted under the guise of 'patriarchal protection' of all white women. In this article, the victims of the 'unspeakable atrocities', Martha, Elizabeth, and Mary, are reinserted back into the Hornet Bank narrative, no longer purely euphemistic bodies to be co-opted by white settlers and overlooked by historians.
ISSN:0813-8990