The recent discovery of a memoir of the 1850s frontier offering graphic accounts of the slaughter of Queensland Aborigines casts a fresh and confronting light on settler history. It makes, at times, for painful reading.
The recollections are those of Thomas Davis, a former convict who worked on the Darling Downs and farther west around the town of Surat in the 1850s. His memoir was preserved, and no doubt polished, by his son Arthur Hoey Davis who, under the pen-name Steele Rudd, created the popular characters Dad and Dave in the stories published in 1899 as On Our Selection.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/books/inside-the-killing-fields-of-...
