Map - Whitsunday Island (Whitsunday Island)

Whitsunday Island (Whitsunday Island)
Whitsunday Island is the largest island in the Whitsunday group of islands located off the coast of Central Queensland, Australia.

Whitsunday Island was inhabited by the sea-faring Ngaro people for around 8,000 years prior to British colonisation. Captain Cook named the island while sailing through the area in June 1770.

The first of the logging camps on the island was set up by Eugene Fitzalan in 1861 to exploit the large hoop pine for construction of buildings at the new colonial outpost of Bowen on the mainland. Local Ngaro people laid siege to this camp, preventing work there for two weeks. A Native Police detachment was soon afterwards stationed on the island to protect the loggers.

By the mid-1860s leisure trips to Whitsunday Island from the port of Bowen were being organised by colonists.

In 1878, Captain McIvor of the vessel Louisa Maria was careening his boat on a beach on the western side of the island with some Ngaro people being employed to clean the hull. After these people had heard that some Aboriginal men at Bowen had been killed, they became agitated. They threw the captain into the sea, pelted him with various objects and then speared him in the face. The Ngaro then killed the only other crew-member on board and set fire to the ship, destroying it. Captain McIvor survived and he and the remaining crew were picked up by a nearby vessel and taken to the mainland.

Sub-Inspector George Nowlan of the Native Police, with his Aboriginal troopers and Captain McIvor, subsequently travelled to Whitsunday Island in order "to punish the blacks." Nowlan's party spent a week pursuing the Ngaro across the island, where they "had punishment dealt out to them" and concluded with the expedition "permanently dispersing" the Ngaro. The "policy of dispersal" was associated with the "indiscriminate slaughter of unoffending Aborigines." The Ngaro who survived, fled in canoes to the mainland near Mackay and were further pursued by Inspector Morisset and Sgt Graham and their troopers. A few months later, Captain McIvor was hacked to death by his Chinese cook.

 
Map - Whitsunday Island (Whitsunday Island)
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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of 7617930 km2, Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils. It is a megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east, and mountain ranges in the south-east.

The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south east Asia approximately 65,000 years ago, during the last ice age. Arriving by sea, they settled the continent and had formed approximately 250 distinct language groups by the time of European settlement, maintaining some of the longest known continuing artistic and religious traditions in the world. Australia's written history commenced with the European maritime exploration of Australia. The Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon was the first known European to reach Australia, in 1606. In 1770, the British explorer James Cook mapped and claimed the east coast of Australia for Great Britain, and the First Fleet of British ships arrived at Sydney in 1788 to establish the penal colony of New South Wales. The European population grew in subsequent decades, and by the end of the 1850s gold rush, most of the continent had been explored by European settlers and an additional five self-governing British colonies established. Democratic parliaments were gradually established through the 19th century, culminating with a vote for the federation of the six colonies and foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system and wealthy market economy.
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