Terry Smyth

It's been way too long for such this book to garner a mention hereabouts. Circumstances have intervened which means I've got notes, review documents, and bits and pieces of things that should have been done stacked up to the ceiling and am now going to really make an effort to get my act together.

DENNY DAY is an account of the lawman who, amongst other things in his life, tracked down the perpetrators of the Myall Creek Massacre which occurred on the 10th June 1838.

Details of Denny Day himself might be a tad on the sketchy side, but that is more than made up for by the revelations that this book brings with it in terms of attitudes and beliefs. There's been a sneaking tendency on the part of some lesser public figures to suggest that we don't owe apologies for the past because "attitudes were different then". Well I'm sorry but not only is that appallingly shortsighted and unstatesmanlike, if the "attitudes" displayed by Denny Day and his companions in this account of the tracking down of killers anything to go by - a flat out lie.

For this reader it came across as well-researched with verified references, a true account, without gloss, in a readable style that's accessible and interesting. There's no attempt to dress up the story, or pad out what's missing - and there are details that would not have been available given the passage of time. This is history, told in an engaging manner, adhering to the need for accuracy and verification.

DENNY DAY combined with Mark Tedeschi's book MURDER AT MYALL CREEK (in that order) certainly gave me considerably more background and information than I had ever been provided with before and I'm very grateful for the chance to have read it - and come to understand just a little bit of the truth of our past.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/denny-day-life-and-times-australias-grea...… (meer)

Denny Day, the Life and Times of Australia’s Greatest Lawman is popular history written by a journalist, so you can expect a lively retelling of the life of ‘the forgotten hero of the Myall Creek Massacre’. Day (1801-1876) was the lawman who brought the perpetrators to justice at a time in Australia’s history when the frontier was a lawless place, but he has been so comprehensively forgotten that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry of his own. I found his birth and death dates at the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The ADB doesn’t have much to say about this pivotal moment in Australia’s legal history, just this:

In June 1838, under instructions from Governor Sir George Gipps, a party of mounted police led by Day was sent to arrest white men said to have killed at least twenty-eight Aboriginals at or near Henry Dangar’s station at Myall Creek on the Liverpool Plains. Eleven men were caught, tried and found guilty; seven were hanged.

Smyth is Denny Day’s champion, and he tells the story in much more detail. Although Myall Creek was certainly not the first massacre of Australia’s Indigenous People, those men who were hanged were the first to be executed for killing Aborigines. Denny Day was up against colonial attitudes so outrageous that a corrupt association was formed to pay for the defence of the men who were charged, and the third of three trials never took place because a crucial witness ‘disappeared’ and was never heard of again.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/08/24/denny-day-the-life-and-times-of-australias-g...… (meer)