Frontier “justice” in the Hunter Region, 1827
In August 1826 a British soldier, Lieutenant Nathaniel Lowe, of the 40th regiment, was charged with murdering an Aboriginal man at Wallis Plains (now known as Maitland). It was extremely unusual for a white to stand trial for a crime against a native, and to say the odds were stacked in the defendant's favour would be an understatement. Indigenous Australians were not allowed to give evidence in court, so if the only witnesses to a crime were Black, then there was effectively no crime. But even if there were white witnesses to a crime against a…
