Raid and attack on the 'Mill post'

Date: 25 May 1824
Place: Mill Post
As William Henry Suttor Junior described it, ‘after this [the Bathurst Massacre], the blacks commenced general depredations’. James Lowe was a ‘shepherd in the employ of a settler up the country’ (Richard Lewis). On Tuesday 25 May (Lowe later wrote), he was ‘very much surprised’ on his ‘return home at sunset’ when he ‘found the hut stripped of everything but a hammock and the hut-keeper killed at the mill’. According to Richard Lewis, the owner of the ‘Mill Post’, Lowe and another convict stockworker raced to inform him that they had made the gruesome discovery of ‘a man lying dead close by the Mills’. Tuesday 25 May 1824 was a dark night, with a waning crescent moon. Undoubtedly hastily gathering lanterns, arms and convicts – as well as his neighbour, John Tindale (variously Tindall, Tyndall, Tindle) – Lewis rushed out to the hut ‘close by the Mills’. He found the dead man as Lowe had reported, as well as ‘the Hut Robbed of all its contents’. On ‘looking around’ he also saw ‘the footsteps of a great number of Blacks’.

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Sources

  • Reverend William Horton, Wesleyan Missionary Papers, 3 June 1823, ML BT 52, V4, p. 1268; Deposition re death of James Buckley, suspected murdered by Aborigines, 29 May 1824, SRNSW, NRS 897, 6065, 4/1799, pp. 47–50.

Event mentions

  • Raid and attack on the 'Mill post'
    25 May 1824 — Mill Post
    As William Henry Suttor Junior described it, ‘after this [the Bathurst Massacre], the blacks commenced general depredations’. James Lowe was a ‘shepherd in the employ of a settler up the country’ (Richard Lewis). On Tuesday 25 May (Lowe later wrote), he was ‘very much surprised’ on his ‘return home at sunset’ when he ‘found the hut stripped of everything but a hammock and the hut-keeper killed at the mill’. According to Richard Lewis, the owner of the ‘Mill Post’, Lowe and another convict stockworker raced to inform him that they had made the gruesome discovery of ‘a man lying dead close by the Mills’. Tuesday 25 May 1824 was a dark night, with a waning crescent moon. Undoubtedly hastily gathering lanterns, arms and convicts – as well as his neighbour, John Tindale (variously Tindall, Tyndall, Tindle) – Lewis rushed out to the hut ‘close by the Mills’. He found the dead man as Lowe had reported, as well as ‘the Hut Robbed of all its contents’. On ‘looking around’ he also saw ‘the footsteps of a great number of Blacks’.
    Source: Reverend William Horton, Wesleyan Missionary Papers, 3 June 1823, ML BT 52, V4, p. 1268; Deposition re death of James Buckley, suspected murdered by Aborigines, 29 May 1824, SRNSW, NRS 897, 6065, 4/1799, pp. 47–50.