Caledon Bay crisis

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The Caledon bay crisis refers to a series of killings in Caledon Bay in the Northern Territory of Australia in 1932-1934. They threatened to create even deeper rifts between Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians, but, largely because of one man, it instead became a turning point towards reconciliation.

In 1932, Japanese poachers captured and raped a group of Yolngu women in the Caledon Bay area of North-East Arnhem Land, and then attacked the Yolngu men who came to rescue them. In the resulting fight, five Japanese poachers were killed. In a further related incident on Woodah Island, two white men, Fagan and Traynor, were killed. An investigating policeman, Constable McColl, was subsequently also killed by the Yolngu people. According to eye-witnesses, Constable McColl had handcuffed and then raped a Yolngu woman, and had then fired his revolver at her husband, Takiara (or Dhaakiyarr), who had responded to her cries for help.

The killings triggered panic in Darwin (capital of the Northern Territory) and Canberra (capital of Australia), generating fears that the Aborigines might stage an uprising. A punitive expedition was proposed by the Federal Government to "teach the blacks a lesson"[1]. In a previous "punitive expedition" in 1928 (now known as the Coniston massacre), police had slaughtered 100 Aboriginal men, women and children at Coniston in Central Australia.

Many feared another such slaughter, and a party from the Church Missionary Society travelled to Arnhem Land and persuaded Takiara and three other men, who were sons of a Yolngu elder, Wonggu, to return to Darwin with them for trial. In Darwin, to the horror of the missionaries, Takiara was sentenced to death by hanging, and the three other men were sentenced to twenty years hard labour. On appeal, Takiara’s sentence was quashed, and he was released from jail, but disappeared. It was widely believed he had been lynched by police.

The resulting crisis threatened to bring about even more bloodshed. To defuse the situation, a young anthropologist, Donald Thomson, offered to investigate the causes of the conflict. He travelled to Arnhem Land, on a mission that many said would be suicidal, and got to know and understand the people who lived there. After seven months’ investigation he persuaded the Federal Government to free the three men convicted of the killings and returned with them to their own country, living for over a year with their people, documenting their culture.

He formed a strong bond with the Yolngu people, and in 1941 he persuaded the Army to establish a Special Reconnaissance Force of Yolngu men, including Wonggu and his sons, to help repel Japanese raids on the northern coastline of Australia.

As historian Henry A. Reynolds wrote: The Caledon Bay Crisis "was a decisive moment in the history of Aboriginal-European relations. The High Court condemned frontier justice, the punitive expedition did not ride into Yolngu country and there had been an unprecedented outburst of public sentiment demanding a new deal for Indigenous Australians."