The 1843 resistance campaign from Multuggerah and his men near Toowoomba was about standing up and saying ‘No more’

Battle of One Tree Hill: remembering an Indigenous victory and a warrior who routed the whites

The other day a few hundred gathered on a windy hill at the edge of Toowoomba to do what happens in few places in this country: commemorate war on the frontier. It was early and vicious round here. Then forgotten.

The hill drops sharply to the Lockyer Valley. Somewhere beyond the smoke lie Ipswich and Brisbane. Across the valley is a flat-topped hill – the scene of a rout nearly 200 years ago that’s the focus of the ceremony.

This is not like the commemoration each year at Myall Creek where the descendants of the killers and the killed meet to remember an iconic slaughter. This crowd on the edge of Toowoomba is meeting for the fifth time to remember the battle of One Tree Hill in 1843 where whites were routed by a local warrior whose name was Multuggerah.

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“The thing about Myall Creek and other massacre sites is that they memorialise crimes against humanity,” says Mark Copland, one of the organisers of the Toowoomba commemoration. “The thing about the Battle of One Tree Hill is that on this one day in this one place, the people stood up and said ‘No more’.

“There was an organised resistance campaign, an act of defiance with bravery and sacrifice on display. And on this occasion the foe recognised and recorded the strength of this resistance. They accorded honour to the warriors they faced. In a sense we are just bringing this back to light.”

The commemoration hasn’t exactly captured the town’s imagination. That morning in the local paper, there wasn’t a word. On its high escarpment, Toowoomba is the Bowral or Mount Macedon of Queensland. The air is clear, the gardens are beautiful and the churches huge. There’s been money in this town for a long time. Toowoomba Grammar takes up not a block but a suburb.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People gather on the hill at the edge of Toowoomba to commemorate the One Tree Hill battle. Photograph: Sebastian Tesoriero

Six years ago, Darby McCarthy was asked to advise the Toowoomba council on commemorating its Indigenous past. McCarthy was a local elder and an old jockey still famous in the racing world. He enlisted Copland, who was then with the Social Justice Commission of the local Catholic diocese.

What they found shocked them. “We got this spreadsheet that showed the city had 14,000 streets and not one of them was named after an Aboriginal – after local places and creeks, but not people.”

So they began the Friends of Multuggerah. “We took our PowerPoint presentation to every Rotary Club, every organisation that would have us.” And they found a Multuggerah admirer in the Brisbane historian Ray Kerkhove.

“I’m tired of massacre mania, of presenting Aborigines as always incapable of organising against white people,” Kerkhove told me. “The opposite was the case. They had victories. They kept on for decades because they got land back, they got resources back. They had victories.” The greatest was One Tree Hill.

The nub of a long story is this: trouble began the moment whites moved down into the Lockyer Valley. But the 1842 poisoning of 50 or 60 people on Kilcoy Station provoked an uprising across this stretch of Queensland. One of its leaders was Multugerrah, a diplomat, strategist and warrior who gathered nearly all the mountain clans to deal with the invasion of their land.

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Multuggerah realised the road up the escarpment was the key to the pastoralists’ survival. They would be in a perilous position if he could block the food going up and the wool coming down. So after announcing his intentions, he began ambushing the drays that lumbered up that difficult road.

In a show of force in September 1843, 18 armed men guarded three drays dragged by as many as 50 bullocks. But they were stopped by Multuggerah’s men on a steep and boggy stretch of the road that cut through thick bush. The armed men fled.

A vigilante party then pursued Multuggerah forces up One Tree Hill. The Aboriginal warriors put aside their weapons and began hurling rocks down on their pursuers. Boulders followed. The squatters and their men withdrew.

How many died on either side that day has never been clear. Perhaps none. Before it was forgotten, the Battle of One Tree Hill was celebrated in newspaper reports, books and heroic bush ballads not as a bloodbath but a humiliating defeat of the pastoralists at the hands of the blacks.

Among the hundreds of citizens gathered on the opposite hill a few days ago to remember the battle were preachers, priests, nuns and school children. A coffee cart stood by. The Aboriginal Medical Service ran a sausage sizzle. Private school girls in straw hats handed out Sturt Desert Peas, the poppies of the frontier wars.

Ancient musician Kev Carmody sat by a tree with his grandsons. There were Bonners in the crowd, for the nation’s first Aboriginal senator Neville Bonner was a Multuggerah descendant. The local LNP member for these parts, John McVeigh, made it back from Canberra just in time.

Some believed Multuggerah lived to a great age but he was almost certainly killed in 1846 in the fighting that raged across this landscape for years. Every white casualty was reported then but it was dangerous, so soon after the hanging of the murderers of Myall Creek, for black deaths in the aftermath of One Tree Hill to be acknowledged. They were left carefully unrecorded.

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The remembering round here began in the schools and churches of Toowoomba about a decade ago. In the stone barn of St Luke’s Anglican church, a new cross was placed in 2016 in the chapel that commemorates the local dead in every war since the Boer War. The plaque on the cross reads: One Tree Hill.

The commemoration ceremonies, driven largely out of the Catholic community, began the previous year and have grown ever since. They’ve evolved into a kind of dawn service – wreathes and a minute’s silence plus smoke, song and speeches.

Historians evoked the memory of Bill Stanner, the anthropologist who condemned half a century ago “the great Australian Silence” that descended on frontier killings. Honoured also at the microphone were Henry Reynolds, the pioneer scholar of the frontier wars, and the histories written in his wake.

The latest was launched at the ceremony: The Battle of One Tree Hill written by Kerkhove and Frank Uhr – a cousin of mine – whose family was in the thick of things down in valley in the time of Multuggerah. Their book comes wreathed in praise from Reynolds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Local elder Darby McCarth talks to school children at the commemoration ceremony. Photograph: Sebastian Tesoriero

The wind was getting up. Carmody stood with his sons and grandsons as their new song Multuggerah was played:

A barrage of spears and boulders

Ploughed on to this hapless crew

Down the mount in fear for their lives

The first boat people flew

Huge applause. Kookaburras were shrieking. As he sat back down, Carmody remarked to no one in particular: “I’m thinking of a reggae version.”

That this was, in a sense, a religious service was never far from the surface. Joshua Waters, a Gamilaraay Indigenous support officer with the Catholic diocese of Toowoomba, led the crowd in a pledge. It sounded a lot like the creed: “To recognise and dismantle systems of privilege and power which continue to marginalise Aboriginal people in this country.”

A few days before the commemoration of the battle, the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, was in Toowoomba to open a massive bypass round the town. It’s been in the works for 30 years and cost $1.6bn.

McCarthy, Copland and a good chunk of Toowoomba lobbied for years that the new road be called the Multuggerah Way. Their hopes were high. Down in the valley the Darren Lockyer Way celebrated a guy who knew how to play football but had nothing to do with the place.

The plan didn’t quite come off. After much consideration, Multuggerah was given a viaduct – a spectacular piece of engineering – but as leaked to the local paper a few days before the ribbon was cut, the official name of the Toowoomba bypass would be The Toowoomba Bypass.

Still, it’s something: a stretch of road designed to save the town from a few thousand trucks a day honours the memory of a warrior who set out to stop the traffic once and for all under One Tree Hill.