The murder of Melaityappa and how Judge Mann succeeded in making ‘the administration of justice palatable’ to South Australian colonists in 1849

Abstract

On 17 September 1849, Henry Valette Jones and Henry Thomas Morris appeared at the Criminal Sittings of the Supreme Court charged with the wilful murder of Melaityappa, a Narungga man from Yorke Peninsula, South Australia.1 Described as ‘pale, wasted and thoughtful’, Jones and Morris were ‘very different from the ruddy, reckless, dashing young fellows’ who appeared at their Police Court trial three weeks earlier.2 Jones and Morris’s incarceration and Supreme Court trial occurred during a crucial stage of Indigenous‒settler relations in the 13-year-old colony’s history. Disturbing news of outbreaks of violence and fatalities on Yorke and Eyre peninsulas had been reaching Adelaide since January 1849.3 For numerous reasons, the trial was unprecedented. It provided a unique opportunity to test the much-vaunted, consoling perception held by many South Australian colonists that, in their colony at least, Aboriginal people were protected and treated as equals under British law. Government officials, pastoralists and newspaper editors had strong and diverse opinions on who was to blame for settler‒Aboriginal violence and how conflict could be avoided. The case bought to the fore the tension – or rather incompatibility