Caledon Bay crisis

Killings There had previously been killings of Japanese fishermen in 1921 and 1926. Reaction After the news of McColl's death reached Darwin on 11 August 1933, many in the community became alarmed. A punitive expedition by police was proposed on 29 August by Administrator R. H. Weddell There were protests against this idea, peaking in early September with a unanimous resolution by the Council of Churches, and Interior Minister John Perkins quashed the idea. In May 1934, a Northern Territory Ordinance was amended so that a death sentence would not be mandatory in Aboriginal murder convictions. Clergyman and anthropologist A. P. Elkin and others argued for the need for a separate system of native courts. On 1 August 1934, the three men convicted of murdering the Japanese trepangers were sentenced to twenty years' hard labour, and on 3 August 1934 Dhakiyarr was sentenced to death by hanging in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory by Judge Wells and a 12-person jury. ==Aftermath==

The resulting crisis threatened to bring about even more bloodshed. To defuse the situation, a young anthropologist, Donald Thomson, offered to investigate the causes of the conflict. He travelled to Arnhem Land, on a mission that many said would be suicidal, and got to know and understand the people who lived there. After a seven months’ investigation, he persuaded the Federal Government to free the three men convicted of the killings and returned with them to their own country, living for over a year with their people, documenting their culture. In the course of his negotiations, he wrote of Wonggu sending a message stick to his sons, at that time in prison, to indicate a calling of a truce. In etched angles, it showed people sitting down together, with Wonggu at the centre, keeping the peace. The message stick is now housed in the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre at Yirrkala. He formed a strong bond with the Yolngu people, and in 1941 he persuaded the Army to establish a special reconnaissance force of Yolngu men known as the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, including Wonggu and his sons, to help repel Japanese raids on the northern coastline of Australia. The historian Henry Reynolds has suggested that the Caledon Bay crisis was a decisive moment in the history of Aboriginal-European relations. ==References==