Jack Watson (cattle station manager)

While returning to Lawn Hill from one of these journeys, Watson encountered another droving party whose horses had been speared by local Aboriginal people at a place called Skeleton Creek.

Watson took it upon himself and his "blackboys" to conduct a punitive expedition and spent two weeks tracking and hunting what fellow drover Charley Gaunt called "those niggers, shooting them down as he came up with them until there was not a black on the creek".

[13] Watson also led another punitive expedition in the Burketown region around this time, where after a week out hunting the "cattle-killers" he returned carrying eleven human skulls.

In a conversation with Alfred Searcy, Watson boasted that he would lash them with a stock whip to which a piece of wire was attached to the end, and at other times would drive a sharpened stick through the palms of their hands.

[14] By 1886, Jack Watson was working for the North Australian Pastoral Company, mustering and droving cattle from their massive Alexandria Station in the Northern Territory to markets in the south.

[16][17] In the immediate aftermath of William Hann's drowning in 1889, Watson decided to change employers completely and took on a contract with John Arthur Macartney to manage his Florida Station cattle property in Arnhem Land.

[18] Indigenous resistance here was fierce with the previous manager of the property, Jim Randell, having to bolt a swivel cannon to the verandah of the homestead to keep "the blacks...at arm's length".

[20][21] The wet season in Arnhem Land would sometimes flood the plains at Florida Station for months and Watson would spend these periods either shooting buffalo, lounging at the pubs in Darwin or travelling to Hong Kong or Shanghai to play polo.

He employed Watson to take apart the buildings, muster up the remaining cattle and overland them to Macartney's other property at Auvergne Station on the Victoria River in the north-western region of the Territory.

After interviewing Watson about them, the Administrator of the Northern Territory, Charles Dashwood, came to the conclusion that the drovers "shot the blacks down like crows along the route".

[25][26] Once at Auvergne, Watson took over operations there from Sam "Greenhide" Croker who had recently been shot dead during a game of cards by an Aboriginal stockman named Charley Flannigan.

[29] Not long after he started at Victoria River Downs, a group of Aboriginal people attacked a supply wagon travelling through nearby Jasper Gorge.

[30] An obituary in the local newspaper described Watson as "a fearless and clever horseman...a rough diamond...who was guided by a spirit of daring almost amounting to recklessness."

It goes on to say that "the natives more than once received terribly severe lessons" from Watson and that "his ideas of revenge for murders or station depredations committed by the blacks were scarcely orthodox but they were generally up to requirements.