Australian Dictionary of Biography

So, yeah, 23 years.

So I was invited to go to... invited to do an entry for the dictionary of biography, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and I had been working on Maria Locke, who's a Darug ancestor of great significance, and then the editor at the time said, oh, well, you know, you... you're Tasmanian, would you like to do Mosquito? And I went, who the hell's Mosquito? And then I just found out all this incredible stuff about Mosquito and what an exciting and exhilarating life that he had and all of the people around him and this sort of incredible drama and also how small the community was at the time.

So I got really interested.

So I did a little entry and that wasn't very satisfying.

God had blessed the faithful evangelist's work to the extent that at the end of his life, Peyton wrote, on our New Hebrides, more than 12,000 cannibals have been bought to sit at the feet of Christ.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that Peyton Layton became a major advocate for the New Hebrides mission in Australia and internationally.

Peyton's faith wasn't nothing bad will happen to me because I'm serving Christ.

It was whatever happens to me, Jesus is still worth serving.

a man fully inside Wathaurong society, participating in it as a member, who was also James Buckley from Macclesfield.

The biographer who wrote about him in the Australian Dictionary of Biography noted that he has generally been represented as a person of low intelligence.

and then added, with the particular precision of a well-placed sentence, that his easy assimilation into an unfamiliar way of life may also suggest that he was intelligent, shrewd and courageous.

Intelligent, shrewd and courageous.

John Morgan published a book in 1852, four years before Buckley's death, called The Life and Adventures of William Buckley.

It was based on Buckley's own account of his 32 years.

A careful investigation of this account suggests it is close to fact, the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes.

Not entirely uncritical, not perfectly reliable in every detail, but essentially honest.

How did you first come across him?

Oh, well, I was asked to write a couple of pieces for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which is...

National publication of some prestige.

And I had done an essay on an Aboriginal ancestor called Maria Locke in my honours year at Macquarie.

And on the strength of that, I was invited to do a formal entry for her, what was called a missing persons volume of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

And the editor at the time said, well, you're Tasmanian.

Would you like to do one on mosquito? And I went, well, who's mosquito? And I didn't really know.

Sir Ronald wasn't a doctor, but he had been one of Australia's leading accountants since the 1930s, so presumably he knew how to crunch numbers, how to read statistics.

This man's entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography includes this, quote, tirelessly Irish attacked what he saw as biased medical research into the consequences of a habit that was pleasurable and part of the social scene.

So, according to this, he was acting because he was against junk science and all for a good time, a voice of truth and an advocate for freedom.

In reality, he was undermining science for corporate profits.

In 1891, Constable Wilshire was tried for ordering the murder of two Aboriginal people, but he was acquitted.

In 1893, he was sent to the Victoria River Wave Hill district so, as his Australian Dictionary of Biography entry states, he could, quote, "commit mayhem at will." While Constable Wilshire hated paperwork, he loved writing about his exploits, and in 1896, he published The Land of the Dawning, a book that was subtitled Being Facts Gleaned from Cannibals in the Australian Stone Age.

In this book, he wrote about the majestic sound of carbines talking, that is, rifles being used to shoot natives, those, quote, "Aborigines who plot and contrive to take the heart's blood of white men." Constable Wilshire's police successors in the 1900s, and we're talking right into the 1930s here, were also sadists who tortured Aboriginal people by chaining them to trees and setting dogs upon them.

So it's against this backdrop that the events of Wave Hill should be understood.