22nd June 1832

In 1832, Allan Cunningham was called up to give some particulars of Moreton Bay, to a Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, he said that the task set for Captain Logan’s soldiers, stationed at Point Danger, to intercepting runaway convicts had been given up as a result of ‘a rupture with the natives’, adding that ‘some pine and cedar gangs employed near the spot had to retire, as the natives attacked them also, and obliged them to leave that part of the country and make the best of their way to the settlement’.

Mr Cunningham also informed the committee that “a general hostility on the part of the natives towards Moreton Bay convicts had been induced specifically by “liberties having been taken with the women”. ¹

1. Evidence of Allan Cunningham, 22 June 1832 (Questions 284-5), ‘Report from the Select Committee on secondary punishments’. House of Commons Papers, British Parliamentary Papers (Crime and punishment and transportation, I) (Dublin, 1969, Irish University Press reprint), p. 40.[↩]