ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a crisis of conscience experienced by Richard Bligh, a British official administering a frontier district on the Macintyre River in Australia during the late 1840s. His distress was recorded in a large body of reports, justifications, confessions, accusations and counter-accusations. This outpouring in turn allows a brief glimpse of the experiences of the Pikampul people whose land was under attack. In October 1847, the Pikampul began a regular and central ritual in their society, the Bora, the initiation of young boys into adult manhood. Bligh had little awareness of the significance of these rituals in demonstrating and reaffirming Pikampul authority over land and society. The squatters on the Macintyre were, along with other colonists across the British empire, precursors of a rising, racially exclusive version of British law. Some Pikampul Murris took their own lessons from the failure of Queen Victoria’s law to offer them either protection or retribution.
