History

On a morning in August 1826, at Wallis' Plains, in the district of Northumberland, 80 miles north of Port Jackson, three shots rang out in quick succession, followed closely by a fourth. 1 When the smoke from the muskets cleared, one Aboriginal man, slumped over from the weight of the chains that bound him to a gum tree, was dead. When one 'ball hit him in the back of the neck, the black turned round his head' and looked at his assailant. Another soldier 'fired and the bullet cut along the jaw and broke the bone'. The third shot missed the prisoner. The Aboriginal man turned his head again and 'another Soldier stepped up, fired and blew his head to pieces'. 2 The soldiers who fired the fatal shots, accompanied by their commanding officer, Lieutenant Nathaniel Lowe, 3 left the bloody body in the dust and returned to their barracks for breakfast. 4 Later that evening, Lowe ordered his sergeant, Lewis Moore, to find two or three men to dig a grave. Sergeant Moore found William Constantine, who worked as a messenger in Wallis' Plains and asked him to assist in the burial. Constantine agreed, and found two more men, William Salisbury and Thomas Newton, to aid him. The men dug a shallow grave near the remains of a disused latrine at Government House in Wallis' Plains. 5 Afterward, the body of the Aboriginal man, referred to as 'Jacky Jacky', was thrown in and quickly covered up. 6 This article explores the political, colonial and social environment in the period leading up to the Supreme Court trial of Lieutenant Nathaniel Lowe for the murder of Jacky Jacky in 1827. Whites had been tried for the murder of Aborigines prior to Lowe,

Governor Arthur Phillip did not magically extend British sovereignty over the continent of Australia when he read his orders to the assembled convicts and members of the military in January 1788. To the international community, this act of declatory sovereignty claimed Australia for Britain. Gaining practical legal authority over the indigenous population, however, took years and a number of court cases to obtain. The British established their sovereignty over the Australian Aborigines by integrating them into the British legal system. This legal incorporation eventuated in stages. Three important stages were: first in 1790, when the British attempted to punish Aborigines for the murder of white men, secondly in 1827, when the British tried to punish white settlers for the deaths of indigenes, and lastly in 1836 when the British decided to punish indigenes for murders committed amongst themselves. Previous colonial experience influenced British officials' dealing with the indigenous population of Australia. Many of the colonisers who settled in Australia, Britain's penultimate colony, had lived in other parts of the British Empire. This prior colonial experience shaped the views and outlooks of legal policy towards the Aborigines.