Talk:Collet Barker

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Collet Barker has been listed as an explorer of WA? Is this because he hailed from there, or he explored there? I would suggest that unless he explored WA, the cat should be removed.SauliH 07:13, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Needs work

I think this needs a lot of work, first in its structure. Barker dies in the second paragraph, and then we have five paragraphs about him at Port Essington, when he was presumably still alive. And Sturt didn't name Mount Barker after him, someone else did much later. Sturt was confused about his longitude, and thought it was Mount Lofty he was looking at. Peter Bell (talk) 09:56, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Categorisation - Category:Murdered explorers

User:William Allen Simpson has just removed this article from Category:Murdered explorers, giving as his reason that Barker was "military, killed by natives in self-defense", and as part of a failed wider CFD discussion, where User:Marcocapelle commented that:

"Most people in this category weren't military and even for the few who were, like Collet Barker, it was not an assassination. He was murdered as an explorer, not as military."

While sources such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Dictionary of Australian Biography describe him as being speared to death, without using the word "murder" as such, the Australian National Maritime Museum's website provides additional details:

From accounts of people who were there on April 30 when Barker’s exploring party arrived at the Murray River outlet, Barker decided to cross it alone, clad only in his underwear. An eyewitness version tells of his last sighting: He "fastened his compass on his head, he plunged into the water, and with difficulty gained the other side; to effect which took him nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds. His anxious comrades saw him ascend the hillock and take several bearings; he then descended the farther side, and was never seen by them again".

Furthermore:

"Barker's reputation as an enlightened confidant of the Aboriginal people, a reputation won at the continent's northern garrison at Fort Wellington and at the western settlement of King George Sound, proved no shield against the spears of southerners incensed at the unbridled passions of Europeans."

(Source: R.M. Gibbs, 2013, Under the Burning Sun - a history of colonial South Australia, 1836-1900 p.8. ISBN 978-1-921601-85-9)

Although the exact details of the encounter and killing are unknown, Barker was alone, unarmed, in his underwear, and from his reputation, probably anxious to make amicable contact with the Ngarrindjeri people he met. So, describing his death as being carried out in "self defence" by the Aboriginal people he met seems unlikely, and possibly has more to do with encountering individuals who bore personal grudges against Europeans, due to prior encounters with sealers.

It is worth noting that the area of the Coorong was quite densely populated by numerous Ngarrindjeri clans, and that when the Maria massacre took place here less than ten years later, the survivors were apparently initially treated in a friendly manner, before being killed under more complex circumstances. Bahudhara (talk) 16:55, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

The CfD was Propose renaming Category:Murdered explorers to Category:Assassinated explorers. The result was no consensus. The comments were each had to be evaluated individually. I've done that in accord with consensus.

1. Sources do not agree that this was murder. We do not categorize when the sources cannot agree.
2. Sources indicate that he was a serving military officer. We do not categorize deaths of military officers on duty as murder. Dying is their duty.
3. Sources indicate that natives in that locale had been previously raped and enslaved by earlier white explorers. Killing your oppressor is always self-defense, not murder. Nobody cares that he stripped to his underwear for swimming, a common practice. Nobody cares whether in the past he had been kinder than other whites. They have no way of knowing about his state of mind or his reputation.
4. Nobody agreed with Marcocapelle during the CfD, either.
5. Yet Marcocapelle has since agreed that Barker "may be purged for not being an explorer in the strictest meaning of the word."

Therefore, I'm removing the errant category again.

William Allen Simpson (talk) 00:02, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Copied from User talk:Marcocapelle

Based upon your comments at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 January 5#Category:Murdered explorers, I've carefully moved over only those that appear to have been assassinated. Please prune any that you don't think belong.
William Allen Simpson (talk) 19:41, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

• @William Allen Simpson: I do not agree with purging Collet Barker, he is a perfect example of an explorer who was killed during and because of his explorations. Whether or not it can be considered an act of self defense does not matter. Marcocapelle (talk) 07:47, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

• Self-defense is never murder. In this case, against whalers and sealers who had killed and enslaved them. Also, he was military at the time. Deaths of military during recognizance are not murder. In fact, nothing he did meets the usual meaning of explorer. He was a long-time fort commander, using a ship to map inlets. The explorers would have been the whalers and sealers who came before him. His crew was merely mapping, a standard military exercize. Sometimes our article sources are puff pieces, and that POV gets sucked into the articles.
  William Allen Simpson (talk) 13:50, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

• At most he may be purged for not being an explorer in the strictest meaning of the word, but that is pretty far-fetched. Self-defense is definitely not a good reason to purge. Marcocapelle (talk) 14:19, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

@Good Olfactory, LaundryPizza03, RevelationDirect, Namiba, Dimadick, Carlossuarez46, and Peterkingiron: feel free to contribute, I've pinged you because you were involved in previous discussions. Marcocapelle (talk) 14:19, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

I've mentioned this discussion at Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board#Killing of explorer Collet Barker - can it be classified as "murder"? Cheers, Bahudhara (talk) 03:46, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

• some of these allegedly "murdered" explorers aren't really murdered defined objectively: John Charles Darke killed by Australian or Tasmanian Aboriginal people on whose land he was trespassing; the biography of Paul Crampel doesn't say he was murdered only that he was killed; the biography of George W. Hayward says "Controversy and mystery surrounded Hayward's death." suffice to say that beyond a reasonable doubt standard cannot be overcome; Edmund Kennedy also killed by Australian Aboriginal people on whose land he was trespassing; the biography of Alexander Gordon Laing was "killed" but only conjectures as to cause "He may have been strangled by Tuareg raiders ..." I think that using "murdered" is a loaded term and "killed" should be the norm for all these explorer categories. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 23:44, 26 January 2021 (UTC)