Aborigines, Europeans and the criminal law (original) (raw)

2011, Aboriginal History Journal

On successive days in April 1888, James Comes and William Hugh Nicholls appeared at the Northern Circuit Court in Townsville, charged with violent offences committed against Aboriginal women. Although the two cases were unrelated, both men came from the mining community of Thomborough on the Hodgkinson River, and both trials resulted in convictions and prison sentences for the accused. At the time, the results of the trials were considered so extraordinary that they prompted the presiding judge, Mr Justice Cooper, to remark that he supposed Comes and Nicholls were the first two men in Queensland to be 'found guilty of an offence against a member of the aboriginal race'.1 An analysis of the trials in their social context not only offers some conclusions as to why the two convictions were obtained in 1888, but also provides insights into the workings of the legal system, the changing European attitudes to Aboriginal policy and the relations between black and white on the mining frontier during the period. The conviction of James Comes had its genesis at the Union Camp, where Comes had been living along with sixteen or seventeen other Europeans. The Union was about sixteen miles from Thomborough, a town which at the height of its economic prosperity in 1877 had a population of one thousand, as well as a school, two banks, a hospital and a school of arts. By 1888, however, Thomborough was in decline. In that year the combined European and Chinese population of the entire Hodgkinson field was estimated at three hundred and fifty one. This consisted of one hundred and four Chinese, of whom fourteen were miners and ninety were engaged in business and gardens, and the rest Europeanssixty-two quartz miners, five carters and timber-getters, thirty-four tradespeople and farmers, and one hundred and forty-six listed as women and children.2 Comes was one of the Hodgkinson's carters, although it is likely he was already in gaol when the above estimate was taken. He was born in England and had come to Australia in 1834, aged fifteen. After mining at Ravenswood, probably in the early 1870s,