Kalkatungu

[4] The idea of a large kangaroo, for example, was indicated by joining the tip of the forefinger to the thumb, with all other fingers remaining extended, while flicking the wrist forward (suggestive of the hopping motion).

[7] Walter Roth documented in some detail the intensity of indigenous trading passing through the Selwyn Range and Kalkatungu lands from Boulia to Cloncurry, which formed a transit point for exchanges of everything from the native medical anaesthetic and narcotic stimulant, pituri,[8] and ochre to stone knives and axes.

[13] The nearby Mayi-Thakurti tribe occasionally reported that the Kalkatungu were split into two major divisions, the Muntaba (southern) and the Roongkari (western) peoples.

[15] Though their journals make no mention of the tribe, their passing through is said to have been recorded in Kalkatungu oral history,[16] and in their language they coined the term walpala (from "white feller") to denote Europeans.

[citation needed] Ernest Henry arrived in 1866, discovering, with the assistance of Kalkatungu guides, copper deposits the following year,[20] and founded the Great Australia Mine.

According to this version, the Kalkatungu were by nature a hostile and bellicose tribe, exceptionally brave with "primitive" military cunning and guerilla-like tactics of strategic withdrawals to the mountains to evade reprisals for their savagery, who were vanquished and broken after a last stand against men like Kennedy who triumphed heroically in pursuing the moral and economic progress of Queensland.

[1][19] Over the following years, the Kalkatungu gained a reputation among graziers for tactical wiliness both in resisting police and settler forays against them, and in harvesting cattle found on their lands.

Kennedy pulled strings in Brisbane to get reinforcements that might guarantee greater immunity for people and property in the area, and the first Queensland Commissioner of Police D. T. Seymour is said to have given Kennedy a blank cheque to war down the tribe and to have dispatched the aristocratic Marcus de la Poer Beresford, a nephew of the Marquess of Waterford, as new head of the Cloncurry native police unit to that end.

After skirmishing with a group of Kalkatungu, they managed to corral a number, who appeared to give no resistance, into a gully nearby and post a guard over them for the night.

[25] In March 1884,[23] Sir Thomas McIlwraith sent Frederic Urquhart, a Sussex immigrant, employed in the Queensland Native Mounted Police Force to handle the crisis.

Urquhart was galvanized into action in August on hearing from a native boy, Jackie, who came in and reported that his employer James White Powell of Calton Hills, some 60 miles west of Cloncurry, at Mistake Creek, had been speared to death.

[27] In September, a Chinese shepherd from H.Hopkins's Granada Station[29] on the Dugald River [de] was speared to death in the foothills of the Argylla Ranges, and it was rumoured he had been eaten by "cannibals".

At one point the attackers under Urquhart tried a flanking movement, which caused the assembled Aborigines to charge straight down on them, only to fall in waves under the withering fire of the muskets,[30] called makini by the Kalkatungu.

In 1984 on the centenary of the massacre a plaque commemorating the Kalkatungu was unveiled by Charles Perkins and George Thorpe a Kalkatung elder, at the Kajabbi bush pub north of Cloncurry.