page_title: Hornet Bank massacre
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Hornet Bank massacre / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Andrew Scott was born in Newcastletown, Scotland about 1815, and Married in East Maitland, New South Wales in 1860. He died at his property, Hornet Bank Station 5 June 1892. (Description supplied with photograph.).
context_page_description: The Hornet Bank massacre involves the killing of eleven British colonists and one Aboriginal station-hand, by a group of Iman Aboriginal Australians. The massacre occurred at about one or two o'clock in the morning of 27 October 1857 at Hornet Bank station on the upper Dawson River near Eurombah in central Queensland, Australia. It has been moderately estimated that 150 Aborigines succumbed in subsequent punitive missions conducted by Native Police, private settler militias, and by William Fraser in or around Eurombah district. Indiscriminate shootings of "over 300" Aboriginal men, women, and children, however, were reportedly conducted by private punitive expedition some 400 kilometres eastward at various stations in the Wide Bay district alone. The result was the believed extermination of the entire Iman tribe and language group by 1858; this claim was disputed, however, and descendants of this group have recently been recognised by the High Court of Australia to be the original custodians of the land surrounding the town of Taroom.
context_section_description: Squatters had begun to occupy Iman land from 1847 following Ludwig Leichhardt's 1844–45 journey through the area on his expedition to find an overland route to Port Essington on the north coast of Australia.
  The westernmost European appropriation of the area was named Hornet Bank station, seized by Andrew Scott, who arrived in the early 1850s. In 1854, he leased the station to Scottish-born John Fraser, who took his wife, Martha, and a large family ranging in age from young children to the early twenties, to live in this area, isolated from other European settlements. Two years later, John Fraser died of dysentery while on a droving trip to Ipswich and his eldest son, William, then aged 23, took over management of the station in collaboration with the lessee, Andrew Scott. (1)
  The stations on the Dawson River were on the land of the Iman people who bitterly resented the invasion of these European squatters, who were attempting permanent residency without permission or negotiation. With their flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, to the Europeans, the Iman were an impediment to the expansion of their pastoral empires. Disrespect and then regular cruelty towards the Iman people inflamed their already overwhelming sense of injustice, being barred access to their land. They made the surrounding country dangerous for the European migrants. Shepherds in boundary huts were attacked and killed and others feared leaving their wives and children unprotected.  Although contemporary reports of the events stressed the bloodthirsty nature of the Iman, contrasted with only kindness shown to them by the Fraser family, it has been claimed that the killing of the Frasers was in retaliation for the recent deaths of 12 Iman shot for spearing some cattle and for the deaths nine months earlier of an unknown number of Iman who had been given a strychnine-laced Christmas pudding, allegedly by the Fraser family.
caption: Andrew Scott, circa 1880
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