Taroom

Taroom
Small rural service centre.
Taroom is a small service centre located 464 km west of Brisbane via the Warrego and Leichhardt Highways.

The first European into the area was Ludwig Leichhardt who not only passed through but actually carved his initials in the old coolibah tree which stands right in the middle of the main street. Not surprisingly the town sees the Leichhardt tree as one of its premier attractions. On this tree, on his dubious and ill-fated expedition from Jimbour to Port Essington, Leichhardt carved L L 44 (Ludwig Leichhardt 1844).

Unfortunately the bark began to grow over the marking and a worker was sent along to chip the bark away so that everyone could see the L L 44. The worker, so the local story goes, didn't quite understand his instructions, took to his job just a little too enthusiastically, and managed to chip the L L 44 off as well.

Today all that is left is a very healthy, if unmarked, tree and a large photograph of the original tree (in its proper condition) on the wall of the Westpac Bank.

Apart from carving the tree Leichhardt, when he did finally get back to Sydney in early 1846, declared that the countryside around Taroom was magnificent and, within months, there was a grab for land. Even before Leichhardt's return to Sydney some of the local land had been taken up. As early as November 1845 a station named Taroon was being leased. However with the news of the richness of the soils the area boomed.

By the 1850s there was a popular camping site near the Dawson River which was known as Bonners Knob. This was the precursor of the town. In 1856, with the arrival of the post office, Bonners Knob was officially changed to Taroom which was an Aboriginal word probably meaning 'pomegranate'.

It was during the 1850s that the area around Taroom gained its reputation as one of the bloodiest killing fields in Australia. The local Aborigines, the Yeeman, fought for their land against the encroachment of European graziers. They fought with such determination that they were eventually wiped out. And in the process a man named Billy Fraser almost certainly killed over 100 members of the tribe making him the greatest mass murderer in Australian history.

The story of this sorry chapter in Australian history starts with the arrival of Andrew Scott in the area in 1853. Scott established Hornet Bank Station in the Upper Dawson some 40 km west of the modern day site of Taroom. The Yeeman started killing Scott's sheep and the grazier called in the hated native police to deal with 'the menace'.

In 1856 Billy Fraser took over the lease of Hornet Bank. On 26 October 1857, while Fraser was away in Ipswich, the Yeeman attacked Hornet Bank, killed Fraser's mother, raped and murdered his three sisters, killed his three brothers, and disposed of three other people who were working on the station. The result of this attack was a series of reprisals which resulted in a period of virtual frontier war which saw Aborigines shot at random. A woman was shot in the main street of a nearby town. An Aboriginal jockey was shot at a race track. It was random slaughter and within a decade it had wiped the Yeeman out.

Today Hornet Bank station remains much as it was in the 1850s. Nearby there is a cairn to the memory of those whites on Hornet Bank who were killed by the Yeeman. To visit the grave site you should contact the Taroom Historical Society who will, in turn, get permission from the Hornet Bank station manager. The graves, and a memorial to Andrew Scott and his family, are located on a rough flat some distance from the Hornet Bank homestead. There is no real road to the site.