Thomas Coutts (11 December 1797 – 14 January 1868) was an Australian colonist who emigrated from Scotland during the 19th century, establishing various enterprises including whaling and pastoral farming businesses.
He and several other squatters took the opportunity of purchasing and droving herds of livestock to the Clarence River region where they could occupy supposedly vacant crown land.
They were guided by an ex-convict in Richard Craig who had previously lived with the Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung people in this area after he escaped from the Moreton Bay penal settlement.
Initially Coutts set up a sheep station called Bald Hills in the New England region which was at the start of the track down to the Clarence River valley.
[5] In 1840, Coutts, led by Richard Craig, brought around five thousand head of sheep and around eight hundred cattle down the track from Bald Hills to the Clarence River valley.
[6] He laid claim to a region of open and lightly wooded country south of the river and named this leasehold Kangaroo Creek.
[7] In late November 1847, Coutts invited the Aboriginal people living around Kangaroo Creek to come to his homestead for the possibility of obtaining work.
Coutts was observed to have put the powdery contents of a paper sachet, believed to have been arsenic, into the bag of flour before giving it to the group of Gumbaynggirr.
[8][9] A couple of days later, several reports emerged of a large number of Aboriginal people becoming violently ill and dying in the hills behind Kangaroo Creek.
In 1851, Coutts looked to gain further property by taking a large flock of sheep further north to squat on land near to Camboon on the Dawson River.
In 1859, Coutts decided to retire from the violent yet profitable frontier pastoralist lifestyle and bought a mansion in the waterside Sydney suburb of Balmain where he stayed until 1866.
[11] In 1866, Coutts decided to return to the land and purchased the North Toolburra property near Warwick in the recently established Colony of Queensland.
By this stage, this area was hundreds of kilometres within the frontier of European colonisation but Coutts still managed to meet his death at Toolburra soon after moving there.