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MONTAGU, GEORGE (1843–1904), policeman, was born in Ireland on 14 February 1843. After marrying,
he migrated to Australia and joined the South Australian Police Force on 16 July 1868 as Third-Class Trooper.
He served at several locations in South Australia between 1868 and 1872. He was posted to the Northern Territory
on 8 August 1873 and was stationed in Darwin for twelve years.
Montagu was promoted to Corporal on 1 August 1884. The manner in which he carried out his first major
assignment as Corporal gained him notoriety. In August-September 1884, Aborigines in the Daly River region
killed four miners, Harry Houschildt, Thomas Schollert, Johannes Noltenius and John Landers. It is a persistent
belief among Aboriginal people of the region that the murders were in retaliation for assaults on Aboriginal women.
The immediate response in Darwin and Adelaide was of outrage and indignation and newspaper editorials called
for revenge. Corporal Montagu was placed in charge of an official police party in ‘pursuit of the Daly River
Murderers’ and the South Australian Minister of Justice approved two other ‘unofficial’ reprisal parties.
The actual number of innocent Aborigines shot by these hunting parties will never be known, but unlike many
other reprisals, the extent of the killings did become public knowledge. Robert Morice, one-time Protector of
Aborigines for the Northern Territory, who was ‘got rid of for doing his duty in defence of the blacks’, wrote to an
Adelaide newspaper stating: ‘It is difficult to say how many natives have been killed for the Daly River outrage,
but from all I have heard from different sources, I should say not less than 150, a great part of these women
and children... ’ Morice’s allegations were hotly denied in the South Australian Parliament and there the matter
may have rested if it were not for the fact that Corporal Montagu’s official report was tabled in Parliament on
17 November 1885. This report described the destruction of ‘a camp of natives on the east side of the McKinlay’
(about 200 kilometres from the site of the Daly River killings). The women and children were said to have escaped
while between 20 and 30 men ‘retreated to the water’. Montagu estimated that ‘none of these who took to the
water are known to have got away’ and that one of the results of the expedition had been to convince him ‘of the
superiority of the Martini-Henry rifle, both for accuracy of aim and quickness of action’.
There was an immediate about-face in the southern press. Justice was called for and an inquiry demanded.
An ex-Northern Territory policeman, James Smith, who had been in the barracks when Montagu’s party returned,
gave their descriptions of the massacre to an Adelaide newspaper. ‘MacDonald... was regarded as about the
worst shot, and he cut fourteen notches on the butt of his carbine...’ Darwin newspapers vehemently defended
the massacres. Corporal Montagu ‘was entitled to the thanks of the community’. ‘As to the shooting of blacks,
we uphold it defiantly.’
The controversy raged in the southern press and finally an inquiry was held in Darwin. The Register labelled
it a sham. Chaired by Baines, a member of one of the unofficial shooting parties, it included relatives and friends
of the implicated Darwin officials. Behind closed doors they discovered that Montagu’s report was ‘incorrect and
misleading’, that those Aborigines who took to the water had, in fact, escaped and that Montagu was mistaken in
his presumption that he and his party had shot any.
Thus, a brutal massacre received the seal of official approval. The perpetrators were heroes and Aborigines and
their supporters had good cause to believe that, if there had not been before, there was in the Northern Territory
after 1885 a licence to kill.
Shortly after these events, Corporal Montagu was posted back to Adelaide from the Northern Territory.
He served in several police stations in South Australia until his resignation on 31 October 1902. No reprimands
are recorded on his police file. Upon retirement he went back to live in Victoria where he carried on a business as
auctioneer at Lilydale. He died in 1904 in Fitzroy, a suburb of Melbourne.
A Markus, From the Barrel of a Gun, 1974; Montagu’s Report, SAPP (HA) 170/1885); Adelaide Register; Northern Territory Times and
Gazette; North Australian.
JOHN HARRIS, Vol 1.MOO, KENNETH (KEN) (also GIM NGYEN) (1927–1980), medical practitioner, was born in Darwin on
12 March 1927. He was a third generation Territorian, the youngest of 14 children born to Chinese parents
Moo Tam Bing (known as Pompey Moo Bing) and Heung Shui Geow (known as Heung See). Kenneth’s paternal
grandfather, Moo Yet For, came from the lower Yellow River region in Northern China to the Northern Territory
in the early 1880s to work on the construction of the railway line from Darwin to Pine Creek. He had married
Wong See in Hong Kong. His wife gave birth to their first son Pompey Moo Bing in 1878. Pompey and his
mother came to Darwin in about 1888. The family lived in Brock’s Creek for some years. Pompey Moo married
Heung See in 1904 following a traditionally arranged matchmaking. Heung See’s family also came to Hong Kong
from northern China. Their four eldest children were born in Brock’s Creek. After moving to Darwin in 1911,
10 more children were born, Kenneth being the youngest. Pompey Moo was a carrier in Darwin with a team of
24 horses. Not until the 1930s did he own an International one-ton truck.
Kenneth Moo attended Darwin Primary School where he attained the highest mathematics score recorded
from that school. His brother Clarence (12th child) won a scholarship from the Darwin Primary School in 1937
to All Souls School in Charters Towers, North Queensland. His sister Mavis (13th child) became a boarder at
St Margaret’s Girls School, Albion, Brisbane, also after winning a scholarship. No doubt the excellent teaching of
the headmaster of Darwin Primary School, Ern Tambling (father of Senator Grant Tambling) must have prepared
good students for scholarships as Kenneth Moo (the 14th child) also won a scholarship to All Souls.
The family lived at that time in Gardens Road, Darwin. The father, Pompey Moo, suffered a stroke in 1941 and
was bedridden. With the threat of a Japanese invasion, some of the family were evacuated in the ship Zealandia to
Townsville and then travelled by train to Longreach where they set up a market garden. Pompey Moo died at their