The event at Hornet Bank Station, inland from Maryborough on 27 October 1857 served as a catalyst for a violent European retaliation in South East Queensland upon a massive and merciless scale.
This letter by G.D. Lang is a vivid account of a cross-section of that reaction along the Hornet Bank — Maryborough axis, persisting for months after the original assault.
Maryborough, Wide Bay, 31 March 1858.
My Dear Uncle,
I write to you at the present moment.. . to make you acquainted with the proceedings of the Native Police Force in this district and of the inhabitants generally, in reference to the Blacks, and I am sure you will not only be astounded but indignant and disgusted with the details that I have to communicate to you.
When I first arrived in this district the topic of general conversation was the murder of the Frazer family on the Dawson by the Blacks of that district and the hope was universally expressed that the atrocious actors in that tragedy would meet with condign punishment. I joined in this hope believing in good faith that no illegal nor dishonourable not to say barbarous or inhuman means should be resorted to for that purpose.
On my way to the interior however, I was undeceived as to the proposed method of punishing the Blacks and I now know that nothing could have been more unworthy of human beings than the procedure both of the members of the Police Force and the white population than their horrid indiscriminate murders of the Blacks. I learned from various sources that a party of twelve — squatters and their confidential overseers — went out mounted and armed to the teeth and scoured the country for blacks, away from the scrubs of the murder of the Frazers altogether, and shot upwards of eighty men, women and children.
