Hornet Bank murders, 1857

"On 27 October 1857 at Hornet Bank, a property about two days ride over the Auburn Range west from Hawkwood, (Naraigen, on the Auburn River, a tributary of the Burnett) eight members of the Fraser family and three other Europeans were murdered in an attack by Aborigines. The retaliation for this event was planned and carried out by Murray-Prior and others from Hawkwood station. Many Aborigines were shot on the western side of Mount Narayen, to the north of Hawkwood homestead. According to one account, those captured alive were handcuffed around a bottle tree and shot. Aboriginal academic Eva Fesl claimed in her book, Conned, that the number killed was 500. Other accounts put the number at up to 150."

[Source: In the Steps of Rosa Praed and Tasma: Biographical Trails A lecture by Harold White Fellow, Patricia Clarke, at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1993]

"One of the bloodiest killing fields in Australia ..."

"Leichhardt, when he did finally get back to Sydney in early 1846, declared that the countryside around Taroom was magnificent and, within months, there was a grab for land. Even before Leichhardt's return to Sydney some of the local land had been taken up. As early as November 1845 a station named Taroon was being leased. However with the news of the richness of the soils the area boomed.

By the 1850s there was a popular camping site near the Dawson River which was known as Bonners Knob. This was the precursor of the town. In 1856, with the arrival of the post office, Bonners Knob was officially changed to Taroom which was an Aboriginal word probably meaning 'pomegranate'.

It was during the 1850s that the area around Taroom gained its reputation as one of the bloodiest killing fields in Australia. The local Aborigines, the Yeeman, fought for their land against the encroachment of European graziers. They fought with such determination that they were eventually wiped out. And in the process a man named Billy Fraser almost certainly killed over 100 members of the tribe making him the greatest mass murderer in Australian history.

The story of this sorry chapter in Australian history starts with the arrival of Andrew Scott in the area in 1853. Scott established Hornet Bank Station in the Upper Dawson some 40 km west of the modern day site of Taroom. The Yeeman started killing Scott's sheep and the grazier called in the hated native police to deal with 'the menace'.

In 1856 Billy Fraser took over the lease of Hornet Bank. On 26 October 1857, while Fraser was away in Ipswich, the Yeeman attacked Hornet Bank, killed Fraser's mother, raped and murdered his three sisters, killed his three brothers, and disposed of three other people who were working on the station. The result of this attack was a series of reprisals which resulted in a period of virtual frontier war which saw Aborigines shot at random. A woman was shot in the main street of a nearby town. An Aboriginal jockey was shot at a race track. It was random slaughter and within a decade it had wiped the Yeeman out.

Today Hornet Bank station remains much as it was in the 1850s. Nearby there is a cairn to the memory of those whites on Hornet Bank who were killed by the Yeeman. To visit the grave site you should contact the Taroom Historical Society who will, in turn, get permission from the Hornet Bank station manager. The graves, and a memorial to Andrew Scott and his family, are located on a rough flat some distance from the Hornet Bank homestead. There is no real road to the site."

[Source: http://walkabout.fairfax.com.au/locations/QLDTaroom.shtml]