Social history since colonisation: Buffalo hunters
By the 1880s the number of buffaloes released from early settlements had increased to such an extent that commercial harvesting of hides and horns was economically viable. The industry began on the Adelaide River, close to Darwin, and moved east to the Mary River and Alligator Rivers regions.
The first buffalo hunter to operate in the Alligator Rivers region was Paddy Cahill, who came to the area in the 1880s intending to establish a cattle station and farm and to shoot buffalo for hides. He pioneered the practice of shooting buffalo from horseback.
Most of the hunting and tanning was done towards the end of the dry season, when buffaloes congregated around the remaining billabongs. During the wet season hunting ceased because the ground was too muddy to pursue buffalo and the harvested hides would rot. The buffalo-hunting industry became an important employer of Aboriginal people during the dry-season months.
Aboriginal men on foot were employed to stalk and flush the animals out of dense vegetation onto open floodplain, where shooters on horseback could run down the animals, shooting them in the spine. Hides were taken to local waterholes and cleaned before salting. Salting was primarily the task of Aboriginal women and was done repeatedly over a number of days. The hides were then dried, folded and transported to a river landing to await shipment by lugger to Darwin. Until World War 2 Aboriginal workers throughout the Northern Territory were paid in supplies, usually of the most basic kind-tobacco, flour and tea.
The fortunes of the buffalo industry fluctuated over the industry's 70 years of operation for a number of reasons, but its final collapse is attributed to poor processing of the hides, the development of synthetic substitutes, and the disruption to shipping caused by the 1956 Suez crisis (Press et al.1995).
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