A house where 40 pairs of human ears were nailed up around the walls still stands in the bush of the Gulf of Carpentaria country, in a remote part of the outback most Australians have never seen.
The old homestead called Lawn Hill station – or Lorne Hill – is on a riverbend just south of Burketown in a tribal territory occupied by the Waanyi people in Queensland’s far north-west.
The house once belonged to Frank Hann, a pastoralist and explorer who later gained notoriety for collecting the heads of Aboriginal people. He was known for having young Aboriginal male companions, whom he referred to as his ‘splendid black boys’, and insisted dressing up in white gentleman’s attire.
Both Hann and his station manager, Jack Watson, are recorded in late 1800s newspapers as having cut off the heads of Aboriginal Australians, either as souvenirs or as a form of bounty.
At that isolated location – even now a nine-hour journey northwest from Mount Isa along sealed and unsealed roads – the two men got away with extraordinary brutality and crimes against the local Indigenous community.
But they are only a few of the sickening atrocities white settlers reportedly committed against First Nations people, as debate rages over the date of our national day for yet another year.
Australia Day, called ‘Invasion Day’ by Indigenous Australians, its January 26 date and the festivities held on the day are increasingly a point of division in Australian society.
January 26 marks the day of the 1788 landing of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove and the raising of the Union Flag by Arthur Phillip, the colony’s first governor.
Lawn Hill station (above) was run by two sadistic men Jack Watson and Frank Hann who had 40 pairs of Aboriginal ears nailed to the walls inside, as observed by Emily Creaghe in 1883

Frank Hann was a little man with violent reputation for killing or hurting Indigenous people and kept a series of slaves he called his ‘splendid black boys’
Sadists’ house with ’40 pairs’ of human ears nailed to the wall
The horrific violence alleged to have been perpetrated against the Aboriginal Waanyi people at Lawn Hill was carried out by two strange men.
Jack Watson was a daredevil from a wealthy Melbourne family who went bush out of boredom and kept a collection of Indigenous men’s heads, including one he used as a spittoon.
An eyewitness account of his collection of nailed ears at Hann’s house was recorded in the diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe, the first white woman to explore outback Australia, and was unknown until relatively recently.
Creaghe’s manuscript lay undiscovered and unpublished on the shelves of Sydney’s Mitchell Library for more than 120 years with her account of the home’s ghastly secrets.
In her diary entries, she used shockingly racist terms to refer to Aboriginal people—terms that have long been recognized as offensive.
On Thursday, March 8, 1883, Creaghe, a 22-year-old newlywed, wrote in her diary: ‘We slept again outside, but even then it was too hot to sleep. Mr Bob Shadforth went up to ‘Lorne Hill’ Mr Jack Watson’s and Mr Frank Hann’s station about 40miles away.

Emily Creaghe travelled to Lawn Hill in 1883 as the first white women to see the outback and her diary noting it ‘has 40 pairs of blacks’ ears nailed around the walls collected during raiding parties did not surface until 2004

Lawn Hill Station (above) in the Gulf of Carpentaria was a remote property where Frank Hann built a fearsome reputation for his brutality to the local Waanyi people
‘Very hot. No rain. Mr Watson has 40 pairs of blacks’ ears nailed around the walls collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks.’
A few days later, she wrote, ‘The blacks are particularly aggressive in this district.’
On February 20, she wrote: ‘The rainy season seems to have set in, in real good earnest; it has been raining heavily nearly all day. Mr Shadforth & Ernest Shadforth came home, but had to leave the dray at Gregory Downs as the roads were too heavy & the rivers too high.
‘They brought a new black (Indigenous person) with them; she cannot speak a word of English. Mr Shadforth put a rope around (their) neck & dragged her along on foot, he was riding. This seems to be the usual method.
And on the following day, Creaghe entered: ‘No rain this morning, but dull & cloudy. Rained all the afternoon in showers. The new (Aboriginal person), whom they call Bella, is chained up to a tree a few yards from the house, she is not to be loosed until they think she is tamed. Madame Topsey … got a threshing.’

Jack Watson was a Melbourne private schoolboy who delighted in killing Aboriginal people and who asked one man’s body be dried out do that he could use the skull for a spittoon in his garden
Creaghe’s account matches the stories passed down to Waanyi elder Alec Doomadgee.
His late grandfather, stockman Stanley Doomadgee was an oral history teller who related many stories of Frank Hann’s brutality and about others who perpetrated rape, child molestation, murder and revenge against the Waanyi people.
Historian Peter Monteath, who discovered and published Emily Creaghe’s diaries, puts the conflict between white and black Australians in the historical context of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In far north Australia and in Western Australia, the competition for resources as Europeans forged into Aboriginal lands, driving cattle across the Territory and settling had by then become fierce.
In the Gulf country and the Northern Territory, ‘very tense and troubled times in the northern frontier’ meant ‘explorers and pioneers … travelled in a state of paranoia’.
One story described Watson punishing an Aboriginal man, possibly for stealing, by impaling both palms on a sapling sharpened to a point at the top.
He boasted that he would lash them with a stock whip to which a piece of wire was attached, and at other times would drive a sharpened stick through their palms.
Journalist and author Ernestine Hill, a legendary outback traveller of the 19th century, wrote that Watson had set out to right a spate of cattle killing at a Burketown station.
‘Riding back in a week he threw eleven skulls on the table with a jaunty “There you are! No more trouble out there!”,’ she claimed.
Neck chains
In Western Australia, the Noongar people were forced off traditional hunting grounds and, faced with starvation, began killing settlers’ livestock and other animals, which, to them, belonged to the land, not any individual.
White settlers cleared the land and blocked freshwater springs, which meant medicinal plants, traditional vegetation and native animals in the hunting ground vanished within three years of settlement.
Aboriginal people started being arrested for theft and trespassing, and they were sent to prison, where they were put in neck chains to stop them from escaping.
They were imprisoned them at places like Wyndham Gaol and on Rottnest Island for years just for stealing a cow.

Rounded up and shackled with neck chains, these prisoners at Wyndham jail in the late 1800s are mostly cattle thieves who speared animals

Aboriginal prisoners in neck chains in Western Australia. Chains were deemed ‘more humane’ than handcuffs
Neck chains became the norm for shackling ‘native’ prisoners, which authorities claimed were ‘more humane’ than handcuffs, but their use drew worldwide condemnation and were the subject of a royal commission.
But their use continued, as did the conflict between white settlers and Indigenous people, culminating in incidents such as the Forrest River or Oombulgurri massacre, in which 20 Aboriginals were killed and their remains burnt.
Perpetrated by two policemen, the massacre occurred after Aboriginal men killed a pastoralist who had been molesting Indigenous women and complained of the spearing of cattle by men.
A royal commission was held, and the two constables were charged with murder, but the trial never proceeded, and denials continued until the early 2000s of this massacre, which had taken place in 1926.
Around 4,000 men and boys from all across Western Australia were imprisoned in the Aboriginal-only Rottnest Island Prison between 1838 and 1931, and hundreds of them died in custody and were buried there in a spot that is now a tourist attraction.

Around 4,000 men and boys from all across Western Australia were imprisoned in the Aboriginal-only Rottnest Island Prison (above) between 1838 and 1931, and hundreds of them died in custody and were buried there
Children beheaded
Between late 1837 and early 1838, south of Moree, a series of violent clashes referred to as the Waterloo Creek or Slaughterhouse Creek massacre occurred when Namoi and Kamilaroi people had killed stockmen and police retaliated.
Accounts of Indigenous deaths vary, but it was the Myall Creek massacre on June 10, 1838 on the Gwydir River that stands out in infamy.
Eleven convict stockmen and a pastoralist, John Henry Fleming, arrived at Myall Creek station where an Aboriginal encampment had been set up to protect 35 Indigenous people from slaughter by hangs of marauding whites.
The mostly women, children and elderly male Aboriginals had been peacefully camped for months, but when the stockmen arrived they were tethered to a rope, taken off to a gully and slaughtered with swords.
At least 28 were killed, including children who were beheaded.
At a trial in November 1838, the twelve accused of murder were represented by the colony’s most distinguished barristers whose fees were funded by a group of landowners.
After a second trial, just seven of the twelve colonists were found guilty and hanged, and Fleming was never captured and went on to live a tranquil life as a justice of the peace.
The Myall Creek massacre is one of the few in Australian colonial history for which justice was meted out to the perpetrators.
State with the ‘bloodiest history of massacres’
The colony of Queensland is said to have the bloodiest history of massacres and murders of Indigenous Australians years before Frank Hann and Jack Watson’s shocking body part souveniring in the 1880s.
In 1842 in Kilcoy, which is inland from the Sunshine Coast, and in 1847 in Whiteside west of Brisbane, colonists ‘donated bags of flour to local Aboriginal groups.
This flour was deliberately laced with strychnine – a toxin – killing about 70 Aboriginal people each in Kilcoy and in Whiteside.
In 1872, a massacre of Indigenous people by Queensland’s Native Police at Skull Hole, at Mistake Creek on Bladensburg Station near Winton, in central Queensland allegedly killed more than 200.
The national estimation of the number of Aboriginal deaths from frontier conflicts ranges between 20,000 and 65,000 with around 1,500 considered to have been killed in Queensland alone in the 19th century.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk