Footprints: Along the Cape York Sand Beaches

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FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the people of the Cape York region who provided their inspiration, their kindly assistance, their knowledge and their strength.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1992 BY

Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601 The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Australian Institute of Abonginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies @ NONIE SHARP 1992

Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA CATALOGUINGINPUBLICATION DATA:

Sharp, Nonie Footprints along the Cape York sandbeaches Bibliography ISBN 0 85575 230 0 [l] Aborigines, Australian History I Title

- Queensland - Cape York Peninsula -

COVES PHOTOS: Paradise rifle bird, photographer/NPlAW Turtle and milkwood trees, courtesy David Horton Dugong, Gaynor MacDonald, courtesy AIATSIS Pictorial Collection Crocodile, courtesy J and G Rrry Headdress, courtesy of t h e Trustees of the British Museum

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TYPESET in 9/14 Compugraphic Century Schoolbook by Jackie Covington, Aboriginal Studies Press DESIGNED by Denis French, Aboriginal Studies Press PRINTED on 115gsm matt art by Southwood Press, Sydney, NSW

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations PART I

PART I1

PART I11

PART IV

vii IX

xiii

SEAFARERS OF THE CAPE YORK REGION Introduction - Footprints 1 Before the Conquest: Seafarers of the Cape York Region

3 11

THE INVASION: BEGINNING OF AN ENDING? 2 From Contact to Occupation 3 The Gudang: From Friendly to Hostile Relations: 1864-66 4 Missionaries and Settlers: 1867-68 5 Terror at Somerset: August 1868-December 1870 6 An Ending? 1870-77

25 35 45 65 77

IDENTITIES OLD AND NEW 7 A Community at Injinoo-Cowal Creek: Making a New Life 8 The Warrior People of Waubin 9 A Return? Wilderness, Tounsm and Customary Land Ownership A STORY OF LOVE AND DESTINY 10 Through a Glass, Darkly... 11 One of Ours: The Story of Nicholas Bibliography Index

85 105 137 155 185 221 229

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

Fishing scene, an Islet off Cape York cl845 Cave painting a t Albany Pass Cowal Creek: the first years At Cowal Creek, 1911 Wees Nawia, Chairman, Kubin Community Council, holding bazdamal baba The catch: Evans Bay-Podaga 1980 Making ashes damper at Evans Bay-Podaga 1980 Reclaiming Rabau Nguki, Muralag 1989, Elders Eselina Nawie and Maleta Luta Reclaiming Rabau Nguki, Muralag 1989, Elder Billy Wasaga Reclaiming Rabau Nguki, Muralag 1989, Roney Wasaga, chairman of the Muralag Tribal (Torres Strait Islander) Corporation The milkwood tree at Utingu after fifty years Utingu after fifty years, under the milkwood tree (znset J McL, 1911) Nicholas Wymarra, cl967

11 35 85 86 124 137 139 145 146

147 159 160 217

MAPS 1. The Cape York Region and its Neighbourhood (znset the Range of the Double Outrigger Canoe on Cape York Peninsula) 2. The Northern Cape York Peninsula with Language Localities and Place Names 3. The Islands of the Kaurareg-Muralag Tribal People, Prince of Wales Islands 4. Muralag, Pnnce of Wales Island

XlV

12 106 128

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The idea for this book goes back to 1979 when I first visited the community at Kubin Village, Moa Island, where Wees Nawia, the chairman there, told me the story of his people, the Kaurareg, of their close ties with the people of northern Cape York Peninsula (NCYP), of the destruction of the tribes close to Somerset, and of his own life. Soon after, Ted Wymarra gave me the story of his own family, his father and mother Nicholas and Marjone Wymarra, his grandfather, Jack McLaren who lived at Utingu (Simpson Bay) from 1911 to 1919, his grandmother, a Gudang woman named Wandihnu, and his relative, Billy Wymarra, a Yadhaigana man. He asked me to write their story and make it known widely. This work was given a major fillip early in 1988 when Roney Wasaga, the President of the then newly-formed Muralag Tribal Committee, approached me to assist Muralag tribal people with work on the history of their dispossession in the context of their current determined and organised attempt to take charge of their affairs, their lands and their culture. Nobody could d o that for them, they concluded at the inaugural meeting of their organisation on 29 November 1987, 'they must stand up and fight for what is rightfully theirs' In August and in December 1980 I visited Injinoo-Cowal Creek Community, the site to which most of the survivors of t h e groupings of NCYP gravitated around 1913 to 1916. With Marjone Wymarra I also visited Somerset, Evans Bay, Cape York and Utingu. Snowy Woosup recorded the unpublished story of the origin and voluntary formation of the Cowal Creek Community. Accounts were also given to me by Larry MacDonald, Colina Pablo, Edward Wymarra, Alick Pablo, Tina Pablo, Arthur Woosup, Andrew Peters, Muen Lifu, Mae Mara, Sammy Mara, Raina Peters, Wilfred Bowie and Sepi Woosup. I would like to thank the Injinoo Community Council and the Chairman, Daniel Ropeyarn, for their assistance, especially in making their files of the 1980s available to me in 1989 and 1990. David Byrne gave me most helpful information on recent events, directing me to significant documents and answering my questions. Many people of the Cape York region helped in creating this book. To Lizzie Nawia, who always made me welcome at her home a t Kubin, I am deeply grateful; Sepi Woosup, Millie Tamwoy, Alice Tom, each kindly took me into their homes. Marjorie Wymarra contributed to the story of her late husband, Nicholas; she also acted as guide and friend. I would also like to thank the late Jenna Shibashaki and Manji Abu at Thursday Island, who contributed to the story of Nicholas Wymarra. People at Kubin, Nurupai, Townsville, Weipa South and Thursday Island made important contributions: Eselina Nawie, Maleta Luta, Isaiah Wigness and IX

X

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

the late Manu Wigness; Annie Wigness and Osa Bosen; the late Newcamp Wasaga, Saila Miskin and Knsmas Young; and Billy Wasaga, Mackie Rattler, Lila Eseli, Adie Paul and Napia Bana. Roney Wasaga, president of the Muralag Tribal (TSI) Corporation, gave mqor assistance and encouragement towards completion of the manuscript. Flo Kennedy acted throughout as confidant and friend. In 1989 we travelled together to Injinoo to research current developments in the northern Cape York Peninsula. David Moore not only encouraged me to complete the book; he also took time to read it carefully; for his criticisms and suggestions I am most grateful. Bruce Rigsby made helpful suggestions on language and other matters. Peter Pinney's and Estelle Runcie's imaginative and hard hitting account of Frank Jardine's years at Somerset provided an early inspiration for this book; Peter Pinney's critical comments on Part IV are highly valued. Annie Holden's comments on t h e manuscript, especially on the period at Injinoo in the second half of the 1980s, are greatly appreciated. Noel Loos, F'iona Mackie and Helen Sharp each made valuable suggestions to preliminary drafts of Part IV. I would like to thank Steven Mullins and the University of New England for allowing me to read his Ph D thesis, 'Tbrres Strait 1864-84: A History of Occupation and Culture Contact', and to quote from it in various places; the staff of the Queensland State Archives for their valuable assistance; the Mitchell, Dixson and Oxley libraries; the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Tbrres Strait Islander Studies; Mr Ted Done for making available the dianes and personal papers of his father, Rev Canon John Done; and Bishop John Bayton. I am especially indebted to the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University. The Research and Travel Committee made funds available in 1989 explicitly for the completion of this project; its earlier assistance with my research work in the Tbrres Strait Islands, which began in 1978, contributed to this book. The secretarialstaff of the Department of Sociology made an invaluable contribution in typing drafts of the manuscript. I wish to thank particularly Beth Robertson who took major responsibility for the manuscript, not only typing most of it with the kind assistance of Therese Lennox, but always taking a personal and concerned interest in it. Judy Carr and Noelle Vallance kindly assisted with its final production. I wish to thank the Mitchell Library for permission to publish Fishing Scene, An Islet off Cape York cl845 (Plate 1)reproduced from Harden Melville, Sketches in Australia and the Adjacent Islands.. . (Plate 12, ML, Q980M); David Moore for permission to reproduce Somerset Cave One (cd(3)-11), (Plate 2); and the Carpentarian (Plate 3). Plate 4, At Cowal Creek 1911 (Enclosureto Despatch

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDEMENTS

xl

No 41,20 July 1911, Vol IV, Folio 863, QSA GOV/53) is published with the permission of the Queensland State Archives (Visit of Sir William MacGregor to the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula. Plate 5, the late Wees Nawia, is published with the permission of Lizzie Nawia, his widow and the Muralag tribal people. Plates 8, 9 and 10 are reproduced from photographs by Billy and Fbney Wasaga; Plates 11 and 12 are reproduced from photographs taken by Kay Wymarra. Marjorle Wymarra kindly gave permission to publish the photograph of her husband, the late Nicholas Wymarra (Plate 13). Photographic work was greatly assisted by Russel Baaden and Lindsay Howe. I am grateful to Terry Crowley for the use of his map showing language divisions in the Northern Cape York Peninsula (see 1980,242). Map 1 is a modified version of a map of the 'Ibrres Strait Islands and their neighbourhood drawn by John Waddingham (see Sharp 1984, Map 1). Finally, I would like to mention that my work is done in association with people in the circle around the quarterly Arena, who have been concerned for many years with the cultural identity and the social and political rights of indigenous peoples.

ABBREVIATIONS

ADC AIATSIS ATSIC BPA CYALC DAA DAIA DOS DL DNA DOGIT KLY LMS MAW ML MM MTC NCYP NPA

Aboriginal Development Commission Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Bush Pilots Airways Limited Cape York Aboriginal Land Council Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Canberra Department of Aboriginal and Island Affairs; Department of Aboriginal and Islanders Advancement, Brisbane Department of Community Services, Brisbane Dixson Library Department of Native Affairs Deed(s) of Grant in Trust

Kala Lagaw Ya London Missionary Society Moa-Adai-Waibene [Housing Co-operative] Mitchell Library, Sydney Menam Mir Muralag Tribal Corporation Northern Cape York Peninsula [land north of the twelfth parallel] Northern Peninsula Area [a term used for the administrative area covered by five Aboriginal and Islander communities] Prince of Wales Island [Muralag] POW QLD V&P Queensland Votes and Proceedings Qpp QsA SL B SPG TI TUP TUPOW

Queensland Parliamentary Papers Queensland State Archives Somerset Letter Book Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Thursday Island Tbrres United Party Torres United Prince of Wales

Map 1

The Cape York Region and its Neighbourhood (inset the Eange of the Double Outrigger Canoe on Cape York Peninsula) 0

10 20

30 40

50

Kilometres

-Major Linguistic boundary m Mir, Kala L a p w W .

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- - - - Major Group bound an^ (Eastern, Central, Western)

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..

Coral Sea

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Boundary of Queensland

PART I SEAFARERS OF THE CAPE YORK REGION

INTRODUCTION

FOOTPRINTS This book concerns the seafaring Aboriginal peoples of Cape York Peninsula north of the twelfth parallel, and the Kaurareg, an island people who inhabited the Prince of Wales group of islands of Endeavour Strait. The Kaurareg, who were related both to other island peoples especially those at Moa and to the groupings within northern Cape York Peninsula (NCYP), today refer to themselves as the 'Muralag tribal people' (see Map 1). The setting is the period of major contact, from the beginning of occupation m 1864 at Somerset on Albany Passage, until today. Its focus, on the two sides of the frontier of contact, seeks to redress a lack of balance historically by presenting Aboriginal and Islander accounts on the period as part of the text: 'Today you've got people digging up stories about certain pioneers, but they don't indulge in the Aboriginal side of things. Yet it is a two-sided story...', as Ted Wymarra, one of the descendants of the Aboriginal groupings of the Cape York area, explained recent1y.l The book describes and discusses a process through which people in the Cape York-Somerset area either died or were forced to move away from lands which were of central importance to them: the Kaurareg from their mother island, Muralag (Pnnce of Wales [POW] Island) and later from Kirriri (Hammond Island), and the northeast groupings, from the Somerset area to the western side of Cape York. In the period prior to occupation, the tribes of the area existed as distinct identities, many of them speaking dialects of a common language, all of them linked by warfare and exchange relations, some of them joined by marriage ties. While a process of destruction emanating from Somerset occurred at such a pace, and, as we shall see, in such a way, that conditions were unfavourable for an early, self-preserving peace between different groups, within perhaps ten years of settlement in 1864 new alliances were beginning to form. From 1867 onwards, Cape York people began moving westwards along the sandbeaches towards traditional camp sites at Red Island Point, Alau and Cowal Creek (Injinoo). According to both Aboriginal and Kaurareg sources, many of them swam across Albany Passage, making their way via Muri (Mt Adolphus Island), where they had relatives and exchange partners, to join the Kaurareg. Two generations later, an active move came from among the people of the Cape York area for an association which united previously separate and

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FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

often hostile groupings. Noteworthy here is the community which established itself at Injinoo-Cowal Creek in the period before 1918 from among groupings whose customary lands lay north of the twelfth parallel. Leaders were thrown up who could effect a reconciliation between groups, and help to create more embracing ethnic-cultural identities than had existed before. At Injinoo, Alick Whitesand, particularly, is remembered as an active mediator between the various groupings, and as a leader of the new community there. It will be suggested here that at a fundamental level, the processes which led to the near annihilation of the people in the Cape York-Somerset area are of the same character as those which induce a thorough-going forgetfulness about the rights or even the existence of the survivors and their descendants today. Scholars have focussed on Christian missionary endeavour a t Somerset (Bayton 1965), on the ethnography of the Cape York peoples (Moore 1979),on the languages of the area (Hale, Crowley, Rigsby, Sutton 1960s, 1970s, 1980s on the traditional languages; Shnukal 1980s on creole language), and on culture contact and occupation in the area from 1864 to 1884 (Mullins 1988). No one has recounted the fate of the local people who seemingly vanished from their sandbeach countryand from the pages of history. That is the intention of this book. In the 1980s, the northern Cape York Peninsula was in the process of being declared a wilderness. At the beginning of that decade, the Queensland Premier, Mr Joh Bjelke-Petersen claimed that Cape York may become a wilderness within several generations, a forecast supported by Gary Player, a leader of World Wilderness, who announced during his visit to Australia in 1980 that the Aborigines of northeastern Cape York were already e ~ t i n c tIn . ~the first half of the 1980s, a Wilderness Lodge was built near the tip of Cape York on land belonging to customary owners centred at Injinoo community, a signal event in the settlement of a proclaimed wild and vacant 'top Australia'. Without reference to Aborigines, who used the area for hunting and fishing, Bush Pilots Airways obtained a lease of 3,000 acres in 1979 for the Lodge, the lease including Evans Bay (Podaga), the traditional lookout point and meeting ground of the Cape York (Gudang) people with the K a ~ r a r e gTbday, .~ at the beginning of the 1990s, the notion of wilderness, promulgated against the wishes and ignoring the presence of local Aborigines, is itself being threatened by plans for a much widened tourism in the 'remote Cape' and offshore islands. In 1988, Muralag (Prince of Wales Island), the mother island of the Kaurareg became the focus of plans for international tourism in the Endeavour Strait-Torres Strait area. The group behind the proposal was seeking financial support through an international consortium capable of undertaking a 'total redevelopment' of Muralag, which would include both an international tourist

INTRODUCTION

- FOOTPRINTS

5

resort and a new Torres Strait city with freehold blocks for up to 16,000 Islanders.4 Plans included use of the water source at a sacred site known as Rabau Nguki.5 The Muralag Tribal Committee, formed in 1987, protested vigorously against the acqmsition of the heartland of the Kaurareg and the proposed desecration of Rabau Nguki. The project was shelved in 1989.'j While the focus here is on peninsula land north of the twelfth parallel and on the islands of the Kaurareg, it should not be thought that plans for tounsm there are atypical. In many parts of Cape York Peninsula, leased land declared 'empty' by reason of decimation or forced dispossession of Aborigines and then used for tourism or mining, is now being reappropriated in a more secure form of freehold, a practice which developed a vogue in Queensland in the second half of the 1980s. Line Hill Station, formerly leasehold and now owned by Farndale Pty Ltd, which lies close to the Lockhart River Community, is a case in point; objections to a 'reef and rainforests' tourist resort on part of this station by the Lockhart River Community Council were upheld by the High Court of Australia in November 1990. Forced exclusion of Cape York people from their lands has combined with official forgetfulness to make the voices of the customary owners go unheeded: yet in 1989 and 1990 Muralag tribal people began insisting vigorously on their right not only to Muralag but to other islands associated with the Prince of Wales group - the island of Mun (Mori1ag)-Mt Adolphus being one - and the Injinoo community, which represents the customary owners of all lands north of the twelfth parallel, has explicitly 'resumed responsibility' for 'traditional lands' 7 At the end of 1989 the Muralag Tribal (TSI) Corporation (MTC) and the Muralag Cultural Association began mapping sites of sacred and historic significance at Muralag, and in the course of 1990 boundaries demarcating customary land associated with different groupings were actively drawn up and negotiated. In January 1990 the MTC launched a trochus fishing enterprise based on Muri. This book seeks to break the silence on the land nghts of the customary owners m the northern Cape York Peninsula and the Pnnces of Wales Islands. Given the similarity of the processes which erased awareness of customary rights to land throughout Cape York Peninsula, in the new context of large-scale redevelopment plans for many parts of that area, its message may have a larger generality. The study is divided into four parts. The first focusses on the fate of the groupings of the Cape York area following the formation of a government settlement a t Somerset in 1864. I refer to the country belonging to mainland groupings north of the twelfth parallel as the northern Cape York Peninsula (NCYP), and the customary land-owning groupings as NCYP people and groups. At the beginning of Chapter 1, I shall describe the seven main named groupings of the

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FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

NCYP, which are themselves part of one language group, whose country stretches from the Temple Bay (Chatungun)-Shelburne Bay (Whitesand)area to Batavia River (Map 2).8 Parts 11, I11 and IV describe and discuss the new alliances and regroupings which took place among the survivors; how various strands of experience became woven into their history and identity; and their current situations, programs and possibilities for the future. In recording the destruction of most of the NCYP people in the years 1864 to about 1874 m the Somerset area, the study attempts to clarify how it came about that 2,000 to 3,000 Aborigines were reduced to about one hundred over a period of some thirty years. Integral to that account is the persistent resistance against encroachment and settlement by one large NCYP grouping known as the Yadhaigana. While the remnants of the three named groupings in the SomersetCape York area coalesced and soon appeared to accommodate to the settlers after one provoked attack on the settlement in 1864, the Yadhaigana, a large grouping of some 1,500people or more, who were responsible for Edmund Kennedy's death in 1848, sustained a war of resistance for which they became widely known as the 'wild tribes' or 'bad blacks' Their continuing resistance to the settlers was the decisive factor in the decision t o sell the government assets at Somerset to a former police magistrate and pastoralist, Frank Jardine, when the government settlement moved to Thursday Island in 1877 Somerset was selected by Sir George Bowen, Governor of Queensland in 1862 as the site of a permanent settlement to protect imperial commercial mterests in the area. In Aboriginal collective memory it is seen as a centre of terror. Central to that memory is a figure associated with Somerset not only as pastoralist and police magistrate but also as pearl shelling entrepreneur from 1865 until his death in 1919: Frank Jardine, also known as Marmouchy (or Marmie, meaning earnest and determined) by his subordinates. Today, a wide range of Muralag tribal people and NCYP people firmly believe that Frank Jardine was the villain of the piece at Somerset, where he lived until his death at the age of seventy-seven. As the accounts published here illustrate, he was regarded as responsible for attacks on their camps and armed surveillance of Albany Island; their accounts abound too with acts of darmg and bravery against him by lone Yadhaigana and small bands. No one today is able to account in any precise way for the deaths of most of the NCYP Aborigines; this is not surprising, since they were not killed as part of some legal process of trial and execution: they were 'dispersed' However, five witnesses at Somerset provide written accusations against three successive police magistrates in charge of the Somerset settlement for their maltreatment

INTRODUCTION - FOOTPRINTS

7

of Aborigines; telling information on the beleaguered and often terrorised situation of the local Aborigines between 1864 and 1868 (see Chapters 2 and 3). Of material relevance in this regard is the way in which the Government stood behind its senior civil servants at Somerset in each case. In this way it strengthened the hand of the officials, culminating in the replacement of European police with Queensland Native Police at the end of 1868, a decisive event in sealing the fate of the NCYP people. In presenting the reader with the evidence, the intention is to clarify the nature of the processes which not only drove the indigenous people from their lands but also their 'shadows' from the thoughts of the 'driving' culture, so that people today cannot see the footprints of the survivors along the Cape York sandbeaches. The fundamental assumption of government policy and settler thinking through to this day remains more or less the same as the position adopted by the Executive Council of Queensland on 4 July 1865 that the various tribes of the Australian Aborigines cannot be said to claim any proprietary right in the soil over which they wander, but which they never occupy or cultivate. .?O Because the Aborigines of the Cape York region did not live the settled lives of cultivators of the soil as did many of the Tbrres Strait Islanders, they were regarded as wandering tribes, primitive people who could not justifiably be seen as owning land or having any rights. It is this same assumption that the Aborigines of Cape York are 'primitive nomads' that underlies the idea of Cape York as wilderness untouched by modifying hands, a conception which, often unintentionally, leaves the way open for appropriation of 'no man's land' for tourist lodges." Only in the past ten years or so has this assumption been challenged. As others have noted, the Cape York Peninsula has not existed as a wilderness since Aborigines arrived there long ago, leaving their gentle imprints on the ecosystems of which they formed a part, so that '... the entire Peninsula is a highly humanised landscape in Aboriginal terms'12The Peninsula is an area of named places, linked by trade routes. It is also an area which, far into traditional times, consisted of a web of managed ec0systems.1~The ecosystems' richness, their extent and their systems of rivers meant that the people did not need to cultivate in any major way; their lives in each named country followed the two basic seasons of rainy time and dry timeJ4At times they planted the tops of the yams, and the sandbeach people far down at Lockhart River will tell you in Kuuku Ya'u language of the New Guinea yam, chzzchala, which they continue to plant in the manner of their forebears: 'Plant chzzchala in the wet, dig it in the dry time.'15 Planted at vegetable harvest time, this yam was an insurance against scarcity.

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FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

As will be seen in Part 111, in the post-Second World War period, the Queensland Government has acted as though the northern Cape York Peninsula area is unoccupied land available for settlement by people from other areas. In this attitude, the presence of the customary owners of the lands north of the twelfth parallel at Injinoo (and other places), is merely incidental and without any prior significance. In practice, the failure to acknowledge even implicit customary rights m land has meant ignoring the special standing of the Injinoo community in relation to the lands of the NCYP. In recent years equal rights have been accorded to immigrant Islander and Abonginal communities living in northern Cape York Peninsula at Bamaga (Ichuru), Seisia-Red Island Point (Ithunchi), Umagico (Alau) and New Mapoon (Mandingu), through the issuing of Deeds of Grant in Trust (DOGIT) to former reserve lands created for these communities. In addition, as outlined in Part 111, administrative measures have been taken which seek to absorb Injinoo identity into a larger structure under the Torres Strait Administration. This treatment contrasts sharply with government policy towards the Torres Strait Islanders who live just across the water from the NCYP and who have mythological, historical and familial ties with Injinoo people. Since the beginning of occupation Islanders have been accorded names which signify a recognition of their traditional ties to their respective islands - names such as Mabuiag Islanders, Badu Islanders and so on. This recognition has been reaffirmed since the mid-1970s when Islanders defeated a move to shift the border with Papua New Guinea, and demonstrated the integral association of their identities with their respective home islandsJ6In the manner of this recognition of identity, the original NCYP people might be called Injinoo Mainlanders, as compared with say Aurukun Mainlanders, Mapoon Mainlanders, and so on; but such recognition as those names imply has not been accorded mainland people.

This study draws upon the sources of two cultures: correspondence and reports located in public archives and in personal papers; oral accounts given by NCYP Aborigines and by the Kaurareg (whose historical experiences are generally similar but also different in important respects, which stems in major part from the fact that settlement occurred in the NCYP not in the islands of the Kaurareg). The oral accounts convey folk memories of destructive forces emanating from Somerset; they also place emphasis upon the integrative role of many Aboriginal figures who possessed the vision, the confidence and the practical skills to help bring the several groupings together in one community by the second

INTRODUCTION - FOOTPRINTS

9

decade of the century these had come to be known as the Red Island people (the east-coast, mainly 'fadhaigana people), the Seven Rivers people and the MacDonald River people. Alick Whitesand, also known as Alick Pascoe, is central here. A man belonging to the east coast in the area of Shelburne Bay known as Whitesand (country occupied by the Wuthathi, who are part of the same broad language group as Red Island people and MacDonald or Gumatlu people), he had also been adopted into the Pascoe grouping. According to Aboriginal sources, he was also related to people from Seven Rivers, whose country was centred to the southwest of the Jardine River. Whitesand had worked in the pearling industry and was well acquainted with the ways of European and other cultures. He helped the Red Island and Seven Rivers groupings overcome their fears and suspicions of one another and make common cause at Injinoo-Cowal Creek about 1916; in the 1920s he was given authority by the Queensland Government to round up and bring the MacDonald River people to Cowal Creek. Billy Wymarra, head of one of the few remaining Yadhaigana families, the powerful warrior people who had fought a war of resistance against the settlers in the Somerset area, became a folk hero among NCYP people as the 'lone ranger' against Frank Jardine. Pablo, a man from Wuthathi country, who was closely associated with the remaining Yadhaigana, Tommy Dodd, a Muri man, Solomon Woosup from Seven Rivers, Willie Somerset (Gudang grouping), Larry MacDonald (Gumathi-MacDonald grouping), and many others, are remembered among the first generation at Injinoo. An important influence in the process of coalescence of the remaining groups was Jack McLaren, a traveller, seafarer and writer from Melbourne, who began the first coconut plantation at Simpson Bay, named Utingu by its customary owners, on the western side of Cape York. In this he was assisted by the people of the area, and in turn, befriended them and facilitated their progress in making a purposive life together. The local people, known as the 'Red Island tribes' who first worked at Utingu, were visited by the Seven Rivers and MacDonald groupings. After eight years, it is recorded, ninety acres at Utmgu had been cleared and planted with some 4,500 coconut trees valued at £1,200and there was half a mile of two-foot wire fencing, a two-roomed house with two verandahs, kitchen, toolhouse, bathroom and water closet and a well." McLaren's experiences of the years from 1911 to 1919 and his changing perceptions of the local Aboriginal people, recorded in his book My Crowded Solitude, are a significant source of information on the part played in the respective and reciprocal transformations of Jack McLaren and the NCYP Aborigines. Ted Wymarra and the Wymarra family, whose relative Billy Wymarra was McLaren's man-in-charge of work at Utingu, have contributed the basic story contained in Through a Glass, Darkly. .. and The Story of Nicholas which form Part IV of this book.

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

10

NOTES 1. Cassette 037/TW/CN/1/80. 2. See Mark Baker, Anger in the Wilderness, 77w Age, 13 May 1980. 3. Moore 1979,2-3; see Jukes 1847, Sweatman of the Bramble (Alien and Corns 1977). 4. Torres Strait Redevelopment, Australian Financial Review, 14 September 1988. 5. Torres News, 19 August 1989; B. Wasaga from Muralag Tribal Committee to Torres Shire Council, September 1988. 6 Verbal statement to R. Wasaga by Torres Shire Council spokesman. 7 Cowal Creek Community Council to Minister for Northern Development and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, 28 September 1984, Council Office, Injinoo. 8. Crowley 1980, 242. 9. J. Douglas to Governor of Queensland, Bnsbane, 3 December 1877 10. Extract from the minutes of proceedings of the Executive Council of Queensland, Bnsbane, 4 July 1865, enclosed in Bowen to Secretary of State, 5 July 1865, Enclosure 3, Despatch No 41, in QSA GOVl24, Somerset Letter-Book (SL-B), 305. 11. Rigsby 1980, 2, gives one criterion of a wilderness area as land which 'is free of human occupation and commercial use- except for '%traditional" occupation and use by Aboriginal people in some instances' 12. Rigsby 1980, 3. 13. Hams 1975, 90, 91, 145 and 96-97 14. Thomson 1939,209-21, provides a seminal account of the ordering of the lives of the Wik Mungkan of Cape York Peninsula according to the seasonal cycle. 15. Cassette 123lLRSlAS and JBlLRl1183. 16. See for instance Griffin (ed) 1976, passim Griffin 1977, 217-40. 17 See deed of grant of land, Queensland, acquired by agricultural selection, No N10,056, William John Graham and John McLaren, as tenants in common, Registrar of Titles, 28 September 1920.

CHAPTER

BEFORE THE CONQUEST: SEAFARERS OF THE CAPE YORK REGION The sandbeach people of the Cape York Peninsula are unique among Australian Aborigines, being fisherfolk and dugong hunters and often great seafarers?In the days before white settlement, they spent the whole of their lives in and out of their double outrigger canoes obtaining their food supplies from the seas and the surrounding sandbeach country2 (see Map 1 inset). The territories of the mainland sandbeach people extend from Pnncess Charlotte Bay and Port Stewart to the Pascoe and Lockhart Rivers, to Margaret Bay (Macan), Cape Grenville and Shelburne Bay, to Cape York, and along the west coast to Port Musgrave and Mapoon. Donald Thomson connects their seafaring prowess with their warrior status, describing the sandbeach people of Cape York as 'a splendid seafaring people - great adventurers and great fighters' Writing of the Yintjingga, who are typical of the dugong-hunting peoples of the Cape York sandbeaches, who belong to the Port Stewart-Princess Charlotte Bay area, he observes that prowess in hunting dugong and turtle was the peak of honour and the title of 'dugong man' ~elongingto the dugong' - was a prized one. Hunting dugong was a dangerous

Plate 1

Fishing scene, an Islet off Cape York, cl845

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

12

Cape York

Pangin

Red Island PoinfJSeisia Ithunchi

SCALE 1:250 000 KILOMETRES 0

Map 2

25

50

75

100 KILOMETRES

The Northern Cape York Peninsula with Language Localities and Place Names

BEFORE THE CONQUEST

13

adventure and a matter of skill and courage, 'undoubtedly the most dangerous and spectacular occupation practised by any Australian aboriginal ... a fitting occupation for a warrior people' For the dugong man was not only the best hunter and harpooner. The wide sweep of his special knowledge of the ways of the dugong, the rhythm of the tides, the movements of the stars, the signs of the seasons, the elements and atmosphere were integral to his skill with the harpoon. He must prepare himself to create the right kind of feeling of mind and body, to become imbued with that same power of the gods which steels the heart as warnor. In so doing he becomes 'matched' with the dugong, and when he 'sings' the dugong, 'the dugong must die' The languages or dialects spoken by peoples of the northern peninsula are believed to descend from a mother language, Proto-Northern Paman,6 and Crowley describes three languages- Yadhaykenu, Angkamuthi and Atampaya which have survived to the present. Map 2 delineates the sub-group denoted by the three languages, and shows the likely original locations of all the constituent languages and dialects of this sub-group.6This sub-group of languages corresponds very closely with the northern Cape York Peninsula (NCYP) as delineated in this study, which is itself based upon the area occupied by seven or eight socially defined groupings from the Wuthathi on the southeast coast extending northwestwards and as far as Seven Rivers and the MacDonald River groupings on the southwest side. These groupings are given in lower case on Map 2. The difficulty encountered by scholars in 'distinguishing ... between small tribes and local groupings, clans and slightly differentiated linguistic groups' in the Cape York P e n i n ~ u l aalso , ~ occurs in 'locating larger tribes McConnel is right in holding responsible for this difficulty, 'the shifting sands of culture change - not only between tribe and tribe, but also internal change within the tribe itself' This process of culture change has been accelerated and distorted in the northern Cape York Peninsula: in the post-invasion period the sands have not merely shifted; in the early period they were turned into a swirling storm. Both within and between groups social structures have been shattered in varying degrees and many of their linguistic variations and social identities have disappeared. Given the problems of matching socio-cultural units with linguistic groupings today, a subject currently being investigated by people at Injinoo community, we have done the best we can in the present study. The dozen or so original components of the sub-group may be regarded either as a collection of closely related languages or, alternatively, as dialects of a single language, since linguistic differentiation within this sub-group is limited.10 Descendants from a vanety of places within the area delineated testify today that many of the languages spoken are more or less intelligible from one to the other.

14

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

The Kaurareg, who occupied the islands forming the bridge into the Torres Strait - including Muralag (Pnnce of Wales), Mun/Morilag (Mt Adolphus), Waibene (Thursday Island), Kirnn (Hammond Island) and Nurupai (Horn Island - spoke a related Austronesian language known today as Kala Lagaw Ya, common to the Western and Central Islands of the Torres Strait. Aboriginal people today say that the territory of the east coast people who came to Injinoo - the Yadhaigana and the Wuthathi - began in the Chatungun-Temple Bay, Macan-Margaret Bay area 'right up to Somerset before these white fellows come in', that they were related to the Kaurareg through intermarriage with the Mun people of Mt Adolphus; and that they travelled westwards by canoe: 'That's how they travelled and that was part of the whole sort of cycle of activities, depending on the time of the year. This lot [the east coast Aborigines] married girls from Seven Rivers on t h e other side of the Jardine River t o Batavia and Musgrave - that's where the Mapoon people are - so that's how they were related.'" As Thomson has shown, like the Torres Strait Islanders, allied clans of Aborigines of the coastal areas of the Cape York mainland lived in settled camps for months at a time especially during the northwest season. Like the Islanders, the sandbeach Aborigines made sea voyages in their double outrigger canoes. Their fighting power was embedded in the myth of the Aboriginal warnor hero, Kwoiam, which enshnned the might of the Australian spear among the people of the western islands of the Torres Strait, raising an Aborigine 'to t h e rank of a warrior culture hero'12 Kwoiam linked the mainlanders with the Islanders and beyond the Torres Strait t o Kiwai and Tugen country of the land mass to the north they knew as Mugie Daudai (the island of New Guinea). Even as far south as Lockhart River, the people may show you Kwoiam's footprints. Both Thomson and McConnel equated Kwoiam with Siven and Nyunggu, the heroes of the sandbeach people of the northwest peninsula area.13 Cults centring around these heroes were associated with secret ceremonials with masked dancers, which reaffirmed the identity of large interclan and intertribal groups as warrior peoples.14 There is fairly close agreement among the early observers who had the most sustained contact with the Aborigines in the northern Cape York Peninsula region from the 1840s to the 1860s, with respect to the identities and the social divisions between the groupings there. Brierly (1849), MacGillivray (1852) and William Kennett (1868) all agree that the country was divided between four main groupings: the Gudang ('Somerset tribe'), a small grouping belonging to country from Cape York to Fly Point whose relations with the Kaurareg were so close that despite their distinct identity they could be regarded almost as an outpost of the latter; the Unduyamo, on the northern side of Newcastle Bay, who, at the time

BEFORE THE CONQUEST

15

of occupation in 1864, were on friendly terms with the Gudang; the Gumakudin, whose country ran southwest from the Gudang border through Utingu, Alau and Injinoo to the Jardine River; and the very large grouping known as the Yadhaigana whose territory lay between Escape River and Newcastle BayJ6 This social division into four groupings has been followed in most of the contemporary literature - see Bayton (1965), Moore (1979) and Mullins (1988); to a large extent, the divisions already referred to, which are made in linguistic anthropology, have been developed independently and ovelap these older social divisions. This study of northern Cape York Peninsula includes the four groupings listed above and three others - the Wuthathi, the Seven Rivers and the MacDonald River groupings - a total of seven in all north of the twelve degrees parallel. There are, however, two modifications and additions to be made here which relate to changing boundaries and ethnic-cultural entities. First, according to older Yadhaigana people today, their southern boundary is not Escape River but Pudding Pan Hill further south, a place of fresh water twenty miles inland from the sandbeach. Second, after hostilities between the Yadhaigana and the Gumakudin in the early years of European settlement, the few remaining latter were absorbed into the Yadhaigana. Thus Yadhaigana people today have good reason to claim that their country stretches from Pudding Pan Hill on the east coast to country on the southwestern side of Cape York - Utingu, Red Island Point, Injinoo and Muttee Head - which was Gumakudin country before these final hostilities. Both before and particularly after colonisation, alliances were changing in northern Cape York Peninsula, and all the groupings were subject to fission and fusion both among themselves and with neighbouring groups. Thus, while most early observers found the Yadhaigana and the Gudang hostile to one another, Haddon writes of them as alliedJ6 That the Gumakudin were a sub-clan of the Yadhaigana is suggested by the fact that the Kaurareg called them both Yegilli (Kangaroo faces)J7 After occupation, marriage ties developed to a point where some Wuthathi joined the remnants of the Yadhaigana. Given the shattering, and in some cases, disappearance of some of the Cape York groupings, a northern peninsula-east coast identity was re-created, consisting of Wuthathi, Yadhaigana, Gudang and Unduyamo people. They gathered a t Red Island Point and came to be known as 'the Red Island tribes' The linguistic divisions which point to the existence of sub-groups of one very large tribe is consistent with the idea of the seven groupings being subgroupings of a larger NCYP entity. As will be seen in Parts I1 and 111, today the descendants of all the seven groupings north of the twelfth parallel identify as one overall grouping with Injinoo as its centre.

16

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

In seeking t o understand the social world of the peoples of northern Cape York Peninsula we need to bear in mind both the character of t h e sandbeach people as a warrzor people and the ways in which boundaries between groups were (and are) continually being redrawn as a result of failed alliances and consequent wars and further successful alliances. These warrior peoples were able to traverse vast distances in their canoes both to fight, to collect skulls and to exchange. Consistent with this is the idea that Injinoo on the western side of Cape York was the northwest camp both for northeast coast people and for t h e groupings of the major nvers south of Injinoo as far as the Dulhunty River. These pre-contact Abonginal and Islander groupings, which lacked either state structures or hereditary chiefdoms, were held together in an often quasi-stable unity, a very different process to the unity of modern nation States with rigidly defined b0undanes.1~ Abonginal accounts today tend to lay stress on pre-mvasion marriage and permanent relationships between exchange partners (known as tukzap among the Kaurareg)lo which had resulted from past hostilities between the Gudang, Unduyamo and the Kaurareg, as well as with people from Seven Rivers, especially Cockatoo River; they also mention Kaurareg ties with east-coast people, presumably Yadhaigana and Wuthathi. In local tradition, two places of prime importance in the tie between the Cape York groupings and the Kaurareg are Mun or Morilag (Mt Adolphus Island) - hereafter Muri - and Podaga (Evans Bay) on Cape York Peninsula. Reference is frequently made to Mum m Aboriginal accounts as the 'half-way house' between the island and mainland peoples. Bnerly refers to Mun as 'a kmd of neutral ground' at which Tones Strait Islanders exchanged gifts.20Evans Bay-Podaga, southeast of Cape York, country belonging to the Gudang, was the main centre at which different groups of Aborigines gathered in the northeast trading season, and in the years 1844 to 1845both Jukes on the Fly and Sweatman on the Bramble sighted 'quite large mixed parties of Abongines and Islanders' there. Carbon dates taken in the area suggest Podaga was a well-used campsite, that subsistence patterns of the people of the area remained relatively unchanged for at least 700 to 800 years and 'that occupation was particularly intensive' a century or so before European occupation and between 600 and 700 years ago.21 Kaurareg men frequently found wives on the mainland; and mainland men found wives among the Kaurareg. Thus, for example, Tbmagugu, one of Brierly's principal informants, was the son of Rhiako, a leading mainland Aborigine; the latter's mother was living on Muralag where he was born, and the land he inherited from his father was on Mun. Yet lkhiako was the leading man of Podaga-Evans Bay and its n e i g h b o ~ r h o o d . ~ ~

BEFORE THE CONQUEST

17

'It is fortunate', writes Moore, 'that all the early surveying expeditions also used Evans Bay as their rendezvous and recouping place' 23 This meant 'that the first prolonged contacts with the peoples of the area' occurred a t the most important meeting point on the mainland for Cape York and Kaurareg peoples. Muri, fifteen kilometres northeast of Cape York, was 'a refreshment stop' on voyages made by Torres Strait Islanders to places further south.24It appears to fill the role of what the Menam of the eastern islands of the Torres Strait call a kebz deudaz, a centre of trade and exchange of garden produce.25Muri people grew garden produce, notably yams;26thus Mun was attractive as a refuelling and 'provisioning point' for men on trade voyages and warfare raids from the eastern and central islands en route to and from the sandbeach country of the Kuuku Ya'u speakers as far south as Cape D i r e c t i ~ nSaibai . ~ ~ Islanders, Murray Islanders, men from the central islands like Masig (Yorke Island)28and even from Papua came together a t Muri from time to time.29Muri was also a good place for mangrove oysters in the northwest season.30 Kennett refers to the Gudang visiting Muri on a turtling expedition in June 1867;31 and Mullins observes that in the same month the initiation ceremonies of the Gudang and the Unduyamo were held a t MU^.^^ We do not know whether this was a regular event, or whether it was contingent upon the occupation of Gudang land at Somerset which was reputed to be close to the Gudang's sacred ceremonial ground. Muri, a high island at the entrance to the Torres Strait and to Cape York was the centre at which tukzap or tebud, the Kaurareg and the Menam names for the permanent friendships established by the sacred cone shell (conus millepunctatus) or wazwz (KLY) and waurz (MM) exchanged drums, shields, ornaments - with each other and with the Gudang.33 Mun is of central importance in the myth cycle of Kwoiam, the main augud (god) of the Kaurareg, for Kwoiam's maternal grandmother belonged to Muri.34 Kwoiam's mother and brothers migrated from Muri to Mabuiag.35 While so little is known by students of the Cape York region about the myths and the sacred ceremonies among the NCYP people, we do have a little information on the initiation ceremonies of the Yadhaigana about whose social organisation and culture the least is known of any of the NCYP groupings. In presenting details of the initiation custom of the Yadhaigana as given to him by four Yadhaigana men whom he met through Jimmy Matauri, a Yadhaigana policeman a t Thursday Island, Haddon remarks: 'So little is known about the tribes that inhabit the district about Cape York that any observations, however slight, have some value.'36Nearly a hundred years later, with few Yadhaigana people left,

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

18

his remarks have added importance. Haddon refers to the tera or taboo ground of the Yaraikanna [Yadhaigana] 'which corresponds with the kwod of the islanders'37 He does not mention where the tera was, but he describes and reproduces a figure of their bull-roarers (umbalako) made for him by four Yadhaigana men, who had come to Thursday Island on a pearl-shelling boat, in return for several items including a tomahawk and a knife. The umbalako (now in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) were five-and-ahalf inches m length, made from the wongaz tree and painted red, black and white, the colours the uninitiated boys (langa) were painted during the initiation ceremonies. About the end of the southeast season or the beginning of the northwest season, the l a m a were taken into the tera inside the bush for a month to a year where they were not allowed to play or even talk. During this time each boy was cared for and prepared for the real ceremonies - yampa, the first initiation ceremony and okara, test of endurance ceremony - by his future brother-in-law. In the okara ceremony there was dancing in front of a crescent-shaped screen which the boys sat facmg during the first ceremony. The dancers' heads and bodies were completely covered with leaves; four white sticks were attached to their hands to each of which a white feather was joined; bunches of leaves were held in the hands and the dancers wore white leg bands; and drums similar to those of the Torres Strait Islanders were beaten.38 The four men also illustrated a dance which seems reminiscent of the Menam kapkar, 'which consisted of a slow walk, strongly flexing each leg alternately ...'.a9 The four Yadhaigana men explained how an individual's territory over which he has hunting and root and fruit collecting rights was determined. After the swinging and display of the bull-roarer in the closing phase of the yampa ceremony, a front tooth is knocked out. While the tooth is being tapped the names of the countries owned by the boy's mother or by her father or other relations are given in order, and the country to which the initiate will belong is that said when the tooth breaks away. The son inherits land from his mother, while a father's land goes to his nephews and nieces. Haddon then describes the art, a personal 'totem' which is not transmissible having nothing to do with marriage regulation, but rather being associated with the individual identity of a man or woman: the shape of the first blood spat after the tooth is extracted as divined by the old men - a natural object, plant or animal - is taken to be a person's art.40

NOTES

1. Thomson 1933, 457 This chapter, which seeks to identify the seafarers of the NCYP area and the Prince of Wales islands, their

BEFORE THE CONQUEST

19

cultures and interrelationships relies heavily upon the work of previous scholars of the area as acknowledged. 2. Moore 1979,268-77 On their canoes, see Haddon and Hornell 1937, Thomson 1952.

3. Thomson 1934, 238. 4. Thomson 1934, 238. 5. Hale 1964; Hale in Sutter (ed) 1976; cf Crowley 1980, 252. 6. Crowley 1980, 241-42. Bnerly, following Barbara Thompson, makes the following conflicting statements on the 'fadhaigana: they occupied territory south of Newcastle Bay (1849, in Moore 1979, 84); Yegillie is the Kaurareg name for Gumakudin and Yadhaigana (340). Moore (1979, 120), equates the Yegillie with the Gumakudin. Haddon (1904, 221), states that the Yadhaigana are allied to the Gudang as mentioned by MacGillivray. All these statements are consistent with there being subgroups of one group with a common language and tribal centre. 7 McConnel1939-40, 59 is here noting Sharp's comments on the Gulf area (Sharp 1939, 265fn). 8. McConnel 1939, 59. 9. 1939, 59-60. 10. Crowley 1980, 242. 11. Snowy Woosup, together with Cowal Creek people, Cowal Creek, 2 August 1980 (Cassette 065/SW/CC/1/80). On the Wuthathi, see Thomson 1972, Chapter 5. 12. Thomson 1934a, 238. 13. Thomson 1934b, 232-34, see also McConnel 1936, 77-78; Moore nothing is known of the myths of the most 1979, 288, wrote that northerly Cape York tribes' l...

14. The Kwoiam cult, Haddon suggests, 'is essentially a cult of war' (1904, 371). 15. Moore 1979, 259. 16. 1904, 221. 17 Brierly 1849, in Moore 1979, 84, 120, 128; Moore 1979, 259, 340. In his map of Cape York and the Neighbouring Islands, Kennett shows Yadhaigana country extending across to the western side of the peninsula (bound in with Kennett to SPG, 23 October 1868, reproduced in Bayton 1965a, 34. 18. On comparable exchange relationships between Torres Strait Islanders, see Sharp 1984, Chapters 1 and 2. 19. See Bnerly 1849, in Moore 1979, 212; Moore 1979, 263. 20. 1849, in Moore 1979, 233.

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

20

21. Moore 1979, 1-3, 14-15. 22. Bnerly in Moore 1979,91, see p 100 o n the use of Muralag canoes by Tomagugu and twelve other mainlanders. 23. Moore 1979, 21. 24. Moore 1978, 321-22. 25. See Au Bala, Book of Islanders 1984, B148. 26. Brierly 1849, in Moore 1979, 110. 27 Moore 1979,21. See Moore 1978,320, Figure l, Cape York-Torres Strait trade routes. 28. Moore 1979, 172. 29. Moore 1979, 21. 30. Brierly 1849, in Moore 1979, 151. 31. Kennett Report, 245. 32. Mullins 1988. 33. Bnerly 1849, in Moore 1979, 233. O n tukzap see Brierly 1849, in Moore 1979, 212; Moore 1979, 263. 34. Haddon 1904, 80. 35. Haddon 1904, 81. 36. Haddon 1904, 221. 37

1932, Figure 9, 97

38. 1904, 221. 39. 1932, 98. 40. 1932, 99.

PART 11

THE INVASION: BEGINNING OF AN ENDING?

FROM CONTACT TO OCCUPATION AN OVERVIEW By the mid-nineteenth century hundreds of vessels seeking pearl shell, trochus and bsche-de-mer began to arrive in the Torres Strait and Cape York areas in increasing numbers. The Torres Strait Islanders were not driven from their lands or exposed t o unstemmed violence; they stopped resisting the invasion with weapons, and under missionary influence after 1871 peace was made among previously warring interisland groups. The message of peace brought by men of the London Missionary Society (LMS) was given moral support and practical backing by the official administration of the Islands. In 1885, looking back over nearly a decade and a half, the Government Resident at Thursday Island, the Honourable John Douglas praised the missionaries' work in bringing peace to the Islands.1 In the islands close to the Australian mainland and in the Cape York area, the train of events was quite different; the pattern of occupation was similar to that on the continent as a whole. The people of this region had had contact with Europeans in the 1840s, and as Moore concludes of the Kaurareg, they bore the brunt of new activity in the Torres Strait after 1850.2 Yet contact between 1844, when Barbara Thompson was picked up by a Kaurareg canoe party clinging to the wreck of the cutter America, and the period 1848 to 1850, when artist OW Bnerly and naturalist John MacGillivray visited the area on HMS Rattksnuke, was marked by friendly interchange of knowledge and other gifts. Brierly's artistic soul was touched by the beauty of Kie Marzna, a fifty-two foot (15.86 metre) canoe belonging to Manu of Muralag, marvelling at both its 'beautiful workmanship' and 'the taste shown in the different modes of ornamenting it' Just as the great sailor, Matthew Flinders had marvelled at the original qualities of the Menam's seamanship, so Brierly's aesthetic sensibilities were aroused by the canoe as an artistic creation: 'I had long admired but I had never till now seen anything that realised so much the idea of beauty' (p 48). In similar vein Brierly noted the Kaurareg's selection of a site of the greatest natural beauty for their kwod or sacred initiation ground (p 130). Aesthetic appreciation became reciprocal as when one Muralag woman expressed delight at Brierly's sketch of Manu's canoe (p 132); or when Biledi, a Cape York man deftly repositioned a lizard for Brierly to draw, moving it from the ground to the side of a tree-trunk and 'arranging the head with an attention to nature and life ...' (p 54). Bnerly and MacGillivray were also greeted happily by Aborigines at Evans Bay who showed delight at their return on 2 October 1849. Brierly recalls how many of them rushed up and threw their arms round

26

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

his neck (p 57). Firm invitations to visit neighbouring islands were made in that way by Manu on 30 November 1849 (p 122). The settlers appointed by the Governor of Queensland and the British Crown as Police Magistrate and police officers, who arrived on the beaches of Cape York in 1864, saw the local people in a different light. Their hope was for a great city at t h e tip of the Australian continent and the men who founded the settlement saw themselves as the trail-blazers of a new civilisation on the shores of the NCYP The first Police Magistrate, John Jardine, and his party had been there less than two months when the mood of the local people, the Gudang, changed from a friendly to a hostile one. These white settlers were not arriving with gifts; they were unceremoniously expropriating the land for a developing settlement. As one writer observed recently 'There is no evidence that the colonial government made any provision in the settlement's stores for gifts for Aborigines ...'.4 The settlers apparently did not have enough tools even for themselves, and on 6 September 1864 John Jardine commented to the Colonial Secretary on the 'lamentable deficiency of the commonest and most necessary to01s'~ There being but four axes brought by t h e marines, which Jardine supplemented by a few sandalwood axes from Captain Edwards of the Bluebell and a few of his own, the Police Magistrate repeated his request for such articles to 'be sent by first opportunity' At first the local Aborigines of Somerset 'made themselves useful in carrying timber, cutting scrub', but this was on the basis of exchange of work for goods, in this case biscuit and tobacco - peaceable exploitation not reciprocal exchange between equals. A month after he arrived Jardine concluded that 'like all of their race' they are 'persistent beggars and incorrigible thieve^'^ - a very different conclusion to that of Bnerly and MacGillivray a few years before and, as will be seen shortly, to that of the two missionaries FC Jagg and William Kennett three years later. There were sound reasons for the appointment of John Jardine as Police Magistrate. A well-connected man, being the cousin of Sir WiUiam Jardine of Applegarth, Dumfrieshire, he had served twenty years as a civil servant. In 1856 he had become a Commissioner for Crown Lands and in 1861 Police Magistrate at Rockhampton where he had developed firm attitudes towards Aborigines. As Mullins writes: after a massacre at Cullinlaringo, John Jardine 'believed that in outlying districts Aborigines should not be allowed up to stations or be treated with too much familiarity' This practice he introduced in the early days of the Somerset settlement. About a year after the establishment of the settlement at Somerset in 1864, John Jardine displayed an entirely negative attitude towards local people:

FROM CONTACT TO OCCUPATION

27

Of the aborigines at Cape York I can say little more than has already been so often repeated in descriptions of the natives of other parts of the Australian continent. The only distinction I can perceive, is that they appear to be in a lower state of degradation, mentally and physically, than any of the Australian aboriginal tribes which I have seen.9 Sentiments of this kind echoed through the Western Pacific Royal Commission on indigenous peoples in 1883, which described the Aborigines of Queensland as the lowest, most degraded and barbarous race in the regi0n.1~Such findings provided the ideological justification for wanton destruction. The very fighting prowess of the Yadhaigana probably hastened the arrival of their tragic ending. More than 1,500 Yadhaigana inhabited the coastal area around Escape River to Pudding Pan Hill; in 1867 the Police Magistrate, Captain Simpson recorded an occasion where Frank Jardine came upon nearly 400 armed Yadhaigana at the end of August that year." If each of these men had a wife and two children this would mean a total of 1,600 people. To the settlers at Somerset, the Yadhaigana were 'hostile and warlike blacks' who cut across the peaceful path of their progress. Within a quarter of a century they had almost disappeared. In 1896 a report on the condition of the Aborigines of Queensland by Archibald Meston, commissioned by the Queensland Government, concluded that of the Aborigines who had inhabited the area from Newcastle Bay (near Escape River) to Cape York, (presumably the Yadhaigana, Unduyamo and Gudang groupings) whom officials estimated at 3,000 with an effective force of 800 to 1000 fighting men, only about 100 remained.12 By the turn of the century Dr W Roth, the first Northern Protector of Aboriginals, reported a continuing rapid decline in the numbers of Aborigines from the northeast of the Peninsula and as far down the west coast as Port Musgrave. Cape York Aborigines, he concluded, were 'a doomed race'l3 Meston reflected the 'humane' view that the obligation and solemn duty of 'a humane and Christian nation' was 'to guide them [Aborigines] kindly across the period which spans the abyss between the present and the unknown point of final departure'14 A number of factors combined together to destroy or shatter most of the clans of the region: so-called 'punitive expeditions' and acts of 'dispersal' emanating from Somerset, such as that headed by the Police Magistrate, HM Chester m 1870;15terror tactics sanctioned by officials and earned out by Aboriginal mounted police who replaced marines at Somerset in 1868;16the unrestrained carrying off as 'food for the fisheries' of many of the most vigorous young men and women into lives aboard boats often '...unspeakably squalid and dirty';17and,

28

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

it was alleged by the two missionaries at Somerset m 1867,the deliberate fomenting of the enmities between the clans of the area, a cruel means of reducing 'the Aboriginal problem'?S As Loos has shown, by direct means, or as a consequence of the unremedied ills associated with prolonged exposure to conditions of semislave labour within t h e pearling industry, the people of the northern Cape York region were de~troyed.1~ They appeared to be a doomed people and there was little to dispute the consensus that they were 'dying out in obedience to a law of nature.. .'.20 Rare voices of protest against the brutal treatment of t h e Cape York people by government officials - for example, those of the two Anglican missionaries Rev F Jagg and William Kennett, who were stationed at Somerset in 1867 and 1868 - were soon silenced. Within eighteen months they were forced to leave Somerset. Events moved rapidly and wars between Aboriginal groups were soon replaced by declarations of hostilities on the settlement at Somerset by local people. On one critical occasion in 1868, three of John Jardine's four trusted 'troopers' allied themselves with the Somerset Aborigines declaring war on Police Magistrate Frank Jardine by sacking his cattle station at Vallack Point, and a state of seige existed briefly. In these circumstances it became quite impossible for the missionaries to continue their work. In the first phase of the settlement it became abundantly clear that whatever the lip-service paid to the desirability of missionary endeavour by the Governor of Queensland and the Cabinet, the Government always supported its own in the face of missionary critique, or criticisms by others present - the Commander of a detachment of Royal Marines, Lieutenant Pascoe for instance. In the eyes of the Government, the authority of its appointees was supreme. The attitudes and practice of Jagg and Kennett ran counter to those of the Administration. In the same manner as men like Brierly, MacGillivray and Jukes, they saw the Aborigines of the area as 'a kind and affectionate people';21 they were learning their customs and their language, and Kennett soon began a school of eight pupils. They made friends with the Kaurareg leaders and Kennett became the adopted son of a prominent Kaurareg named Teepotti (Passiwapod). The diametrically opposed policies and practices of missionaries and settlers at Somerset were associated with differences in ways of seeing the Aborigines which themselves sprang from divergent purposes and general outlooks. Ib the missionaries they were a potentially kind and peaceable people with the intelligence and the will to develop both their understanding and their customs; the Police Magistrate saw them as degraded and barbarous, without 'civilising' potential, at best a nuisance with some utilitarian value, a t worst a vermin to be eradicated.

FROM CONTACT TO OCCUPATION

29

A hundred years elapsed before the rapid, short-lived progress made by the two Anglican missionaries, carried out under execrable conditions at Somerset, became public: in 1965 John Bayton made an evaluation of their work in Cross over Carpentaria, and in 1979 David Moore included the two missionaries' reports to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in his book Islanders and Aborzgznes a t Cape York, based upon the journals of OW Brierly and information given to Brierly by Barbara Thompson. Yet there are important grounds for concluding that had the missionaries been allowed to pursue their work alone with the background legislative support against kidnapping that came to exist in the 'Ibrres Strait Islands after the 1870s, the Aboriginal and Islander groupings of the Cape York region would have remained more or less intact. As it was, immediately before the influenza epidemic of 1918-20 claimed many of them, less than 200 people remained in the Cape York area,22and these consisted of the remaining Yadhaigana who had consolidated themselves with the Red Island people with whom they were related, as well as members of two tribes from Seven Rivers and MacDonald River.23 The Kaurareg numbers at the island of Muralag had been estimated at 100 by Brierly in 1849. If this figure is accurate then the Kaurareg may have been a group about the size of the Gudang at the beginning of the occupation; their numbers had been thinned out presumably by the B a d ~ l a i g Barbara .~~ Thompson estimated the numbers of people on Muralag at about fifty in 1849. In 1900, John Douglas claimed that 'a formidable tribe' had inhabited Muralag in pre-settlement times, 'numbering about 400 or 500' 25 One scholar of the area has since concluded that this estimate was based upon an unverified incident described by Archibald Meston in 1897, and that in reality the Kaurareg numbered no more than 100 in pre-contact times.26However, a list of ninety-five names of Kaurareg given to Bnerly by Barbara Thompson in October 184927suggests a higher figure. Allowing for the fact that the Kaurareg belonged to at least ten islands and many islets, most of the former with permanent water, it is unlikely that they were all present at Muralag when Barbara Thompson was taken there. When the Rev Canon Done of the Anglican Mission counted the Kaurareg for the first time in 1919 there were eighty people in the Kaurareg community at Kirnri (Hammond Island) which included descendants of some Cape York people who joined them after 1867 'It is obvious', Moore wrote in 1979, 'that there was a considerably greater slaughtering of the Prince of Wales Islanders than was mentioned in the official reports. The result of all this was that the Kaurareg were decimated and the survivors scattered elsewhere...'28This view is disputed by Mullins.29

FROM CONTACT TO OCCUPATION

31

the reports and correspondence of the missionaries stationed at Somerset in 1867 and 1868. During the Second World War Major Sheldon, son-m-law of Frank Jardine, took forty-one volumes of the diaries of John and Frank Jardine to the Am Islands which he buried in the sands there before he was captured by the Japanese and beheaded. Official letters and reports to the Colonial Secretary and the Commissioner of Police of successive police magistrates in charge of Somerset, which sought to justify actions against local people, also contain revealing and often contradictory statements about their writers, about each other and about their actions. In addition, there are five eye-witness accounts which contain revealing critical comments about the actions of the police magistrates against the Aborigines between 1864 and 1868: the letters of Lieutenant Pascoe, commander of the Royal Marines stationed at Somerset from August 1864 to August 1867; a retrospective book by Dr Richard Cannon, the surgeon resident at Somerset in 1864, the comprehensive reports and correspondence of the two missionaries, Rev FC Jagg and Mr William Kennett, written in 1867 and 1868; and complaints of Constable Ginivan to the Commissioner of Police, written at Somerset in 1868.33

NOTES

1. The course of a rather different sequence of events and patterns of occupation in the Torres Strait is discussed in Sharp 1980, 47-86; 1991, 39-71. 2. 1979, 11. 3. Brierly 1849, in Moore 1979, 46. 4. Mullins 1988, 109. 5. John Jardine to Colonial Secretary, 6 September 1864, in QSA COLIA59, in-letter 2744 of 1864. 6. Ibid, see Farnfield 1975, 69. 7

Ibid, n 5.

8. Mullins 1988, 109. 9. John Jardine to Colonial Secretary, Somerset, 1 March 1865, in Byerley (ed) 1867, 82. 10. Report of the Western Pacific Royal Commission, 16 October 1883, Qld V&P 1884, Vol 11, 952. 11. Simpson to Colonial Secretary, General Report on Settlement at Somerset, 10 October 1867 12. Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland to the Home Secretary, QLA, V&P Vol 4, Part 1, 1896, 724.

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

32

13. Report of the Northern Protector of Aboriginals for 1899, V&P, Vol V, 583. 14. Meston 1896, 724. 15. An account of the expedition to the Minister is given in the correspondence, HM Chester to Colonial Secretary, 10 August 1871, in QSA COLIA160, in-letter 2499 of 1871. For an annotated version of the letter, see Carroll 1969, 35-42. 16. Chester refers to 'the terror inspired by the Police stationed at Somerset' (Carroll 1969, 41). 17 John Douglas, Report of the Government Resident at Thursday Island for 1892-93, V&P 1894, Vol 11, 914, 913. For an informative and closely documented account of the effects of the sea frontier on Aborigines in the northern frontier region, see Loos 1982, Chapter 5. 18. This charge was made by the Anglican priest, Rev FC Jagg, who was stationed at Somerset from February to December 1867, against Captain S Simpson, acting Police Magistrate at Somerset, 1867 (Jagg to Under Colonial Secretary, February 1868, in QSA AI119). 19. 1982, Chapter 5. 20. Jack 1921, see Meston 1896. 21. The Jagg Reports, 1867-68, in Moore 1979, 254. 22. Aboriginals Department - Information contained in Report for the Year ended 31 December 1920, QPP, 1921, Vol 2, 7 23. Snowy Woosup, 6 December 1980 (Cassette 065/SW/CC/1/80).See Chapter 7 24. Kennett Report 1868, 247 25. Douglas 1899-1900, 31. 26. Mullins 1988, 181. 27

Moore 1979, 315-16.

28. Moore 1979, 12-13. 29. Mullins 1988, 497, n 92, claims that the estimate of the pre-contact Kaurareg population was grossly exaggerated by John Douglas; see also 180-81 on the absence of decimation of the Kaurareg; 479 on 'the myth' about the size of the Kaurareg population, consisting of some 400 to 500, a view propagated by Archibald Meston. 30. See for instance Swan fed) 1921,176-77; this remains the emphasis today see Prideaux 1988. 31. 1933, 454. 32. The work of Bayton 1965 and Loos 1982 have begun to fill this important gap.

FROM CONTACT TO OCCUPATION

33

33. Ginivan's complaint for the information of the Commissioner of Police, Brisbane, nd, forwarded with F Jardine, 2 September 1868 (letter 26-68), to Commissioner of Police, Brisbane, 2 October 1868 (45-68) and 15 October (49-69, contradicting Ginivan's charge on the shooting of two of Jardine's private aboriginal police, was located in the Dixson Library with the assistance of the State Archivist of Queensland, who informed me of a volume of uncatalogued manuscripts which had been located in the Dixson Library, which 'appears to be the first letter book kept at Somerset which, from references in papers relating to the Settlement, was missing for some time from TI [Thursday Island]' (Outgoing Correspondence, 2 September 1868-30 December 1871, Official Records of the Settlement at Somerset, DL, reference Spencer 6).

CHAPTER

THE GUDANG: FROM FRIENDLY TO HOSTILE RELATIONS: 1864-66 In a cave below Somerset, rock paintings of dugong, turtle, fish and canoes depict the way of life of the northern peninsula sandbeach people. These paintings are the work of the saltwater people of the northeast sandbeaches, who, as already described, are fisherfolk and seafarers as well as land hunters. On the same cave walls a much newer story has been drawn: of an Aborigine being flogged by a white man.l This painting tells a story of the beginning of the occupation of the Cape York region, which began on 2 August 1864 when the Golden Eagle arrived at Somerset with twenty-eight men, including twenty Royal Marines commanded by Lieutenant Pascoe. Her Majesty's representative, John Jardine, the Police Magistrate, and his party were empowered by the Governor of Queensland to found a harbour of refuge for sailor^.^ No more drawings have been made on the rock faces of the cave. From the standpoint of the conquering culture the artistic silence is the sign of an ending. Within that silence lies the tragic story of the brutal dispossession of the Cape York people - an integral part of a larger Australian tragedy.

Plate 2

Cave painting at Albany Pass

36

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

It was soon after the arrival of the government party in August 1864. The sound of an axe rang out from Somerset. Some Gudang people were assisting the small party to begin a new settlement. The Gudang's initial cooperation with the settlers came both from their recent experience of men such as MacGillivray, Jukes and Bnerly, with whom they had established relationships of trust and reciprocity, and from their need to make alliances against their traditional enemies. The newcomers were themselves aware that men of the F'ly and Rattlesnake had had good relations with Cape York people; and that twenty years earlier the shipwrecked Barbara Thompson had been recognised as the spirit (markai)of a leading Kaurareg's daughter, Giom, and had been given kindly treatment over the five years she had lived with the Kaurareg.3 The settlers, however, bore no gifts or g ~ o d w i l land , ~ the early scene of cooperation was a prelude to tragic events. The Aborigines at Somerset, who assisted the newcomers, were innocent participants in the first act of their own destruction. 'Thus', as Dr Cannon, the surgeon attached to the settlement reflected later, 'the natives began the work which is to end in the destruction of their race'.5 Less than a month after the settlement began, an incident with local Aborigines set in train a series of acts of retaliation at Somerset. The Police Magistrate, John Jardine charged a n Aboriginal lad of about twelve years with stealing a tomahawk and caned him soundly. As an example to all the Aborigines present a t the caning, Jardine's son, Johnny, whipped a couple of others nearby with his stockwhip, a weapon with a thong some twenty feet longs6 On 13 September, the Gudang, seeking avengement, staged a revolt against the settlers in which two marines were wounded, one later dying of his wounds. According to the Executive Council's summary of the accounts forwarded, the Aborigines 'surrounded the settlement in f ~ r c e 'This . ~ was a signal event in relations between the settlers and the Somerset peoples. According to Lieutenant Pascoe, this event, which signalled a reversal of relations between the Gudang and the settlers, was a consequence of the Police Magistrate's punishment of the young Aboriginal boy. In a letter to Jardine on 30 November 1864, Pascoe gives the cause of the collision as the 'injudicious conduct of the civil residents, in chastising one of their [the Gudang's] number on suspicion of his having stolen an axe'* The Rev Jagg concluded in 1867, after some investigation, that the axe was not in fact stolen by the boy9 Far from eliciting the slightest government reprimand or caution of the Police Magistrate for his brutal treatment of the youth or his son's vicious demonstration of settler power, Pascoe's criticism of Jardine only had the effect of consolidating government support behind the latter. Upholding the Colonial Secretary's assurance to Jardine 'of the entire approval and continued confidence

THE GUDANG - FROM FRIENDLY TO HOSTILE RELATIONS

37

of the Government of Queensland' in the Executive Council declared its full support for Jardine's action with the following statement of unqualified praise: 'There is probably no European now living who has had more practical experience of the Australian Aborigines, or who has dealt with them more successfully.'l~ Jardine, a former British army officer, had migrated to Australia twenty-five years before, and had been employed since then in such capacities as Police Magistrate and Commissioner of Crown Lands. The Ministers proceeded to contrast Jardine, t h e seasoned practitioner of colonisation, with Pascoe, 'a young Officer of the Marines', who 'had literally never seen one of that race until he landed at Cape York a few weeks before he took it upon himself to criticise the conduct of the Civil Magistrate in his dealings with the aborigine^'^^ This position is taken directly from John Jardine who emphasised to his superiors that Pascoe knew 'little or nothing of what took place before or at the time of the attack, and in fact is totally ignorant of the Natives or their habits and the mode of dealing with them'.13 Governor Bowen simply accepted Jardine's explanation that the uprising against the settlement was not a retaliation against his actions, but a longplanned trial of strength, for which purpose the fighting men of all four tribes of the northern peninsula were gathered together?* He exonerated the Police Magistrate in a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies:15'. .. the Natives of Cape York only waited for the departure of HMS Salamander to commence the inevitable trial of strength with the settlers'16 The net effect of this incident was to consolidate Jardine's position. It also happened that the resolution of a difference between Jardine and Pascoe on another matter was to strengthen the hand of the Civil Magistrate vis-a-vis the officer in charge of the Royal Marines. Immediately prior to Pascoe's letter criticising the actions of the Police Magistrate, a disagreement had occurred between the two men over Lieutenant Pascoe's subjection to regulations prescribed by the Queensland Parliament. Under these rules he was required to apply for his colonial pay by signing abstracts provided to him by the Police Magistrate. Lieutenant Pascoe saw this procedure as calling his honour in question. His letter of 30 November 1864, together with Jardine's report of the attack on the settlement, raised the question of the power of the civil authority at Somerset, a settlement founded 'for the protection of British Commerce in Torres Straits'17 Under no circumstances was power at Somerset to be divided; the civil authority was to reign supreme. As the correspondence between Jardine and the Colonial Secretary reveals, the misunderstandings between Pascoe and himself had been rectified with Jardine in the ascendance. Pascoe had 'seen his mistake', the misunderstandings were regretted, 'by no one more than myself', but 'it was none

38

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

of m y doing', wrote Jardine, and 'a clear understanding' had been reachedJ8 The Government, and in particular members of Cabinet, had perused Jardine's reports of 1 January 1865, and conveyed 'the assurance of their continued approval and confidence' The proximity in time of Jardine's correction of Pascoe on administrative protocol with their divergence over t h e treatment of the Aborigines was totally unfavourable to the Government's consideration of Pascoe's viewpoint on t h e caning incident.19 Pascoe had been subordinated on one score and defeated on another, an event detrimental not only to himself, but also to Cape York people. Severe retribution against the Gudang for their revolt on 13 September, was t o set the pattern of their dispossession. On 15 October 1864, the Police Magistrate headed a retaliatory attack on a Gudang party who were caught in a trap in their canoe on Albany Pass. A grim scene is depicted by an eye-witness, Dr Richard Cannon, surgeon to the Somerset settlement. In 1885, in Savage Scenes from Australia, he recalled the bitter events of 15 October which had preyed upon his mind over some twenty years. The Police Magistrate, his son Johnny and a party of Royal Marines hid insilence as four Gudang were taking a spell after their turtling expedition on a sandbeach on Albany Island, before creeping down behind the beach within gunshot range. Cannon accompanied Jardine 'with his long rifle on his shoulder' ' "...we've got them this time", said Jardine, "a supper for the sharks my boy" ',20 as the Aborigines made for their canoes, paddling desperately out to sea pursued by the Marines: 'Now for it' gasped old Jardine as he cocked his rifle.. .

...we saw one of the natives topple over, grasp frantically at his paddle and bound into the air. The blue waters closed over him and the sharks rejoiced. Now, flash, flash, flash, from the [marines'] boat and three black figures are only to be seen, delving furiously into the sea with frantic paddles. See the boat is on them ... Fancy a long dive for life! When will they come up, never, they are shot or drowned ... bang, bang, bang from the boat, but the head is down again. 'Duck shooting by Jove', cries Johnny. Again and again, hither and thither pulls the boat whilst flash, flash, flash comes from our crew and ... far away on the tide drifts the tenantless canoe a melancholy ~ r e c k . ~ l The Police Magistrate's account of this incident, written as part of his report on the progress of the settlement and sidelined, 'Attacked by aborigines' by his superior, makes no mention of the original provocative caning of the young boy. He makes reference to the fact that local people were excluded from Albany Island (part of their country) where a manne was posted to guard the settlement's sheep. The Gudang turtling party on the sandbeach were breaking a white man's

THE GUDANG

- FROM

FRIENDLY TO HOSTILE RELATIONS

39

rule. On 15 October, the Police Magistrate and his party, having put ashore on the northwest end of Albany Island, saw six Aborigines taking off in a canoe: For the safety of our sheep and shepherd on the Island the natives were given to understand that they must not go there ... I therefore hastened to the camp as quickly as possible and requested Lieutenant Pascoe to go round the Island in the boat with the crew armed, for the purpose of intercepting them, which was successfully done, and the canoe taken.22 The last four words are a shorthand way of stating that the Aborigines were shot. According to Jardine, the man who had speared the marine, together with three others, were 'identified as principals in the late attack...'. He concludes, 'The agressors [SW] were however repelled and met with severe and just punishment' 23 The Police Magistrate's account of the whole affair begins only with the mention of one or two 'serious agressions [szc] by the Aborigines', detailing this incident on 13 September. He noted 'more than the usual number of Blacks about', some of them with spears which were banned in the settlement; after being spoken to by the Police Magistrate they took their spears outside the precincts. Shortly afterwards, two marines were speared and Aborigines were seen 'stealing up through the scrub in all directions' 24 A party of marines was then sent into attack in an attempt to dislodge them. In addition to Cannon's eye-witness account, the Rev Jagg, who, while not himself there at the time, made a careful examination of 'different statements' in 1867 His summary corresponds with those of Cannon and Pascoe: that the Somerset Aborigines, initially friendly and ready to exchange goods and services, were suddenly provoked into hostility by the caning incident described by Dr Cannon, and how about three weeks after the spearing six Aborigines were pursued in their canoe and shot.25 Cannon's graphic description was of 'the last vengeance we wreaked on the Gudangs' Over a period of twenty years, he was to listen at nights to 'the solemn sounds of the woodlands mingled with a most unearthly shriek, the outcry of human nature, the wail of women and orphaned children', of a bereaved people who found 'a responsive echo' in his troubled soul.26 This occasion, described by Moore as a 'catalytic event' for relations between the settlers and the aborigine^,^^ led directly to the drawing of sharp battle lines between the Aborigines, 'the latter not being allowed nearer the settlement than a certain boundary on pain of being shot', as the missionary, Rev FC Jagg noted in 1867 John Jardine had concluded after a massacre at Cullinlaringo, long before he came to Somerset, that Aborigines should not be

40

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

allowed in government settlements or be on familiar terms with officials; and as he wrote to the Colonial Secretary on 2 December 1864, the Gudang were required to give a loud 'cooee' before approaching the ~ e t t l e m e n t . ~ ~ It would b e wrong to conclude that the Gudang gave in at this point. The events of September 1864 forced them to change their tactics, moving from open warfare to quiet theft and careful surveillance of the Police Magistrate and his officials. As Jardine observed to the Colomal Secretary, he sensed he was being followed.30 'The settlement', as Mullins concludes, 'was virtually under seige' 31 In official opinion, the period of quiet and the apparent return to friendliness on the part of the Gudang was a sign of recognition of defeat: '... finding themselves the weaker party', the Somerset Aborigines, 'according to the normal custom of their race, resumed peaceable relations with the settlers' 32 That the Gudang would seek some accommodation with the settlers is underlined by the combination of the latter's blatant display of firepower and the Gudang's wish to protect themselves against their traditional enemies, especially t h e Yadhaigana. At the centre of the collapse of Gudang resistance was the settlers' armed occupation of their sandbeaches, the site of their food reserves. The arrival of two of John Jardine's sons, Frank and Alexander, in March 1865, from their eighteen month overland journey from Rockhampton with their four former Aboriginal mounted troopers from the Wide Bay-Rockhampton area, brought with it the double certainty that hostilities with local Aborigines would mcrease, and that the weaker and smaller groups would eventually be cowed into submission. Of Frank Jardine's four 'native police' Dr Cannon wrote later, '... there was no crime under Heaven that they would not commit a t his slightest bidding' 33 Frank himself, who boasted of the nicks on his rifle collected on the long journey, had the attitudes of a frontier man: 'Frank used to say', wrote Cannon, 'that some enterprising colonists were wont to mix arsenic with the flour served out to the natives in order to clear this vermin from the land' 34 The brothers arrived boasting of their exploits and 'the determined hostility of the Natives' along the way, those a t the Mitchell River 'opposing so obstinately', John Jardine reported, 'that a considerable number were shot before they would give way' 35 In the time leading up to the brothers' arrival, accommodation with the settlers by Cape York clans was in the ascendance. At the Police Magistrate's behest local people brought his sons in the last twenty miles to Somerset. The older man had worried about his sons' long overdue appearance. Given Aborigines' own first-order loyalties and personal make-up, the arrival of Jardine's sons was seemingly a moment of understanding between himself and the local people. It was not long before that moment passed. Given Frank Jardine's 'defence' of the family cattle station at Vallack Point, two miles from Somerset,

THE GUDANG - FROM FRIENDLY TO HOSTILE RELATIONS

41

by his four armed police ('ferocious fellows', as Dr Cannon described them),36he became a prime target for Yadhaigana warriors, who, from 1866 onwards, came into the picture not only by way of hostilities against the Somerset Aborigines, but also against the settlers. On the night of 7 July 1866, a party of Yadhaigana 'made a daring attempt on Mr Jardine's life', they stole up to Point Vallack station, throwing several spears, one of which passed across Frank Jardine's chest penetrating deep into the slab on the other side of the bed.37 In recording the spearing of fifty-one head of cattle at Point Vallack station between April and August 1866, the Police Magistrate, Captain Simpson, also intimates the Aborigines' motives for the attempt on Jardine's life. He notes without surprise collisions with the Aborigines, concluding: 'I do not see how they can be prevented or in what other way Mr Jardine can protect his property.'38Simpson is implying that Jardine's way was to shoot them; and although one would expect few records of such actions, the Yadhaigana were certainly seen as the 'enemy number one' to be eradicated. In 1867 Frank Jardine's Aboriginal stockmen killed ten Yadhaigana at Turtle Island while he was absent, claiming that the Yadhaigana were t h e enemies of everyone at the ~ e t t l e m e n t . ~ ~ In government circles one effect of the Gudang attack on the settlement was to increase Governor Bowen's pressure for the establishment of missions and industrial schools in Queensland which he had raised repeatedly over the previous five years. In a letter written on 5 July 1865 to the Secretary of State, he refers to John Jardine's (attached) report in which he had written 'of the field now opened to missionary enterprise among the Aborigines at Cape York and the neighbouring islands' 40 Yet the note being sounded by John Jardine in relation to missionary activity in the Somerset-Cape York area itself was a negative one: he saw this area as 'but a barren field for missionary labours', the 'unsettled nature' of its occupants being given by him as 'one great obstacle to successful work' This viewpoint had accompanying it the convenient belief that the Torres Strait Islanders, especially those who cultivated yams, bananas and coconuts, like the Darnley Islanders, displayed a greater intelligence than the mainland people. Thus the Kaurareg, wrote Jardine, through 'constant communication with the islands to the northward, have acquired a higher degree of intelligence than the pure Australians' Among the Islanders, Jardine concluded, 'a successful experiment could be made' 41 This conclusion was eminently suited to the aims of the settlers at Somerset: missionary efforts were doomed to fail among the Cape York people. This was the atmosphere in which two lone missionaries began work at Somerset early in 1867

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

42

NOTES 1. The painting is reproduced in Moore 1979, 304, Plate 15b. 2. As noted in Qld V&P, Vol 11, Session 2 of 1879, 937-39. 3. Moore 1979, 8. 4. In a formal sense John Jardine transmitted to other officials the need for keeping on fnendly terms with the Abongines. Thus he wrote to Lieutenant Pascoe to instil in the marines 'the positive necessity of keepmg on fnendly terms with the Abongines, and carefully to avoid giving them the slightest offence.. .' (Jardine to Pascoe, 6 August 1864, enclosed in Jardine to Colonial Secretary, 6 September 1864, in QSA COL/A59, in-letter 2744 of 1864). 5. 1885, 10. 6. Cannon 1885, 23. 7 Extract from the minutes of proceedings of the Executive Council of Queensland, Brisbane, 4 July 1865, enclosed in Bowen to Secretary of State, 5 July 1865, Enclosure 3, Despatch No 41, in QSA GOV/24, Somerset Letter-book (SL-B), 305. 8. Lieutenant Pascoe to J Jardine, Somerset, 30 November 1864. 9. The Jagg Reports, 1867-68, in Moore 1979, 252. 10. Proceedings of the Executive Council of Queensland, 4 July 1865, 304. 11. Proceedings of the Executive Council of Queensland, 4 July 1865, 306. 12. Proceedings of the Executive Council of Queensland, 4 July 1865, 306. 13. John Jardine to Governor Bowen, Brisbane 21 June 1865, Subenclosure No 1 in Enclosure No 3 in Despatch No 41 in QSA GOV/24, 313. 14. John Jardine to Governor Bowen, Brisbane 21 June 1865, Subenclosure No 1 in Enclosure No 3 in Despatch No 41 in QSA GOVl24, 313. 15. Governor Bowen to Secretary of State, Brisbane, 4 July 1865, Despatch No 41, in QSA GOV/24, 300-01. 16. Proceedings of the Executive Council of Queensland, 5 July 1865, 305. 17 Proceedings of the Executive Council of Queensland, 5 July 1865, 307 18. J. Jardine to Colonial Secretary (second letter), 20 May 1865, enclosed with letter 1450 of 17 June 1865, in QSA COL/A67 19. These are J Jardine's words in Jardine to Colonial Secretary (first

THE GUDANG - FROM FRIENDLY TO HOSTILE RELATIONS

43

letter), 20 May 1865, m-letter 1449 of 1865, m QSA COLlA67; see Bowen to Secretary of State, 5 July 1865, 300. 20. Cannon 1885, 27 21. Cannon 1885, 28. 22. Police Magistrate, Report on Progress of the New Settlement, etc, to Colonial Secretary, Somerset, 2 December 1864, in QSA COLlA63. 23. Police Magistrate, Report on Progress of the New Settlement, etc, to Colonial Secretary, Somerset, 2 December 1864, in QSA COLlA63. 24. Ibid. Jardine's version is the only one given in the account of Somerset by Pndeaux 1988, 12-15. In an interview with John Jardine's great grandson, Elizabeth Johnston quotes Cannon's account (Rough Justice of the Jardines, Weekend Australian 19-20 July 1986). 25. The Jagg Reports, 252. 27 1979, 252fn. Here Moore suggests that the cave painting near Somerset of a white man wearing breaches, a hat and belt with revolver, 'flogging a dark crouching figure' probably commemorates the 'canmg incident' 28. Reports, 252. 29. J Jardine to Colonial Secretary, Somerset. 30. J Jardine to Colonial Secretary, Somerset. 31. 1988, 115. 32. Proceedings of the Executive Council of Queensland, 306.

35. J Jardine to Colonial Secretary, 1May 1865, in QSA COLlA67, inletter 1451 of 1865. 37 Captain H Simpson to Colonial Secretary, 18 August 1866, 3 describes the Yadhaigana as 'the most troublesome' tribe, in QSA COL/A83, in-letter 2491 of 1866. 38. HG Simpson to Colonial Secretary, Somerset, 18 August 1866, in QSA COL/A83, in-letter 2491 of 1866, 2. 39. General Report on the Settlement at Somerset, etc, Simpson, late PM, Somerset to Colonial Secretary, 28 July 1868 (also published as a parliamentary paper, V&P, First Session 1868, 10 October 1867, 519-23). 40. These are Bowen's words; see Bowen to Secretary of State, 5 July 1865, 301. 41. Report, attached to Bowen to Secretary of State, 5 July 1865.

CBAPTER

l

MISSIONARIES

4.1 AND SETTLERS: 186 7-68 THE MISSIONARIES' CHALLENGE Sir George Bowen, the Governor of Queensland, came t o see the settlement at Somerset as his 'personal project'? He had sailed to the area in August 1862 and selected a site with suitable anchorage and fresh water on the western shore of Albany Island (Pabaju), which had good grazing land. Captain Richards of the surveying vessel Hecate recommended that the township be located on the mainland opposite Albany Island following his inspection of the site in 1863.2 Governor Bowen continued to take a close interest in the establishment and development of Somerset as a military outpost commanding the Torres Strait, a centre for geographical research and missionary enterprise 'and the eventual colonisation of northern Australia, New Guinea and the Indonesian archipelago',3 The Imperial Government assisted with twenty Royal Marines and a Royal Navy vessel carrying supplies and mail three times a year. Bowen and the Queensland Cabinet believed that Somerset would be self-supporting in three years through the projected operation of a mail-steamer service between Australia and Java via the Tbrres S t ~ a i t . ~ Governor Bowen had requested that the officer in charge of the marines be a man who could ensure that the Aborigines were treated humanely.5 He also asked the Secretary of State to persuade a London-based mission to provide a missionary. In seeking missionaries with 'experience, zeal, tact, and above all, "knowledge of mankind" ',6 Bowen could scarcely have foreseen how important such qualities would be at Somerset. As we have seen, Lieutenant Pascoe was defeated by powerful forces in his attempt to have the Aborigines treated fairly. In this chapter it will be shown how the two missionaries sent to Somerset by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) were likewise thwarted in their efforts to have Aborigines and Islanders treated by Somerset officials as people with any rights. On 16 April 1866 Bowen gave his support to a proposed missionary station at Somerset in a letter to Rev WT Bullock, Secretary of the Society for the Propagat'ion of the Gospel in London. On 24 July 1866, Rev PC Jagg, Curate of Thorington near Colchester, was chosen as Priest Missionary in charge, and William I Kennett, a young man who had been assistant master and master at the National School at St Mary Street, London, and Highbury College, was appointed Industrial Schoolmaster to the Aborigines of North Australia, his salary paid by the Government. The two

46

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

missionaries, together with Mrs Jagg, her two children and a servant, arrived in Sydney in January 1867, reaching Brisbane by the end of that month. From that moment events began to follow a downward course for the missionaries personally. The Governor, who had personally recommended the establishment of the mission (without executive approval it was later claimed), informed Rev Jagg 'that as there was but seven-and-a-half pence in the State Treasury' there was nothing he could do to assist him with the cost of the voyage he had just undertaken from England. Moreover, Governor Bowen successfully advised against the idea of Mrs Jagg accompanying her husband to Somerset. The missionaries left Moreton Bay on the colonial government's vessel HMS Salamander on 8 February. Three weeks later the mission of two, assisted by a lad named Pigardeen, began a t the Somerset settlement, which at that time included a police magistrate, a naval surgeon, eleven marines and 'the squatter', as Kennett described Frank Jardine.7 The Queensland Government had acceded to the Governor's request to provide comfortable quarters for the two missionaries in the public buildings and a sum of money for school materials and tools.8 As Kennett reports, the two main difficulties the missionaries encountered in commencing their work were the 'great timidity' of the local Aborigines and the Police Magistrate's ban on their presence in the settlement. As Jagg concludes in his reports, the two are intimately connected with one another. From the beginning, their efforts were undermined by the acts of brutality we have described on the part of the settler-government appointees over the previous two-and-a-half years (and in particular, the vengeance wrought upon the Gudang). Having convinced the Aborigines that their intentions 'were at any rate friendly' by visiting their camps and offering gifts, soon after their arrival the missionaries opened a school with eight children in attendance. Following the instruction of Sir George Bowen, the English words in common usage were taught first, Kennett quickly learning many words in the local language. After two hours of school each morning, rice and sugar were served to each child, and carpentry and sewing began at 10.30 am with much the same course in the afternoon. The children were given rice or biscuits to take back to the camp, the schoolmaster having quickly learned the local custom that each pupil was expected to contribute to the family's evening meal. Numbers gradually increased, many adults being induced to attend. Word passed quickly across Endeavour Strait and on 17 May, two-anda-half months after the missionaries' arrival at Somerset, a party of Kaurareg came over asking the missionaries to return with them to Muralag. Again, on 30 May, the Islanders returned, earnestly renewing their invitation, emphasising 'that their

MISSIONARIES A N D SETTLERS

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children were far more numerous than those of the Gudangs [of Somerset]', and asking for a school.10 The missionaries agreed to accept their invitation and the Islanders returned to Muralag. On 4 June, Kennett, assisted by one European and one Aborigine, made off for Muralag in a canoe with food and water for the journey and appropriate gifts of tomahawks and tobacco. Kennett was assisted on this journey by a group of Kulkalaig from Nagir (Mt Ernest Island), but the party had to split up and he was left alone. Upon his eventual arrival, he received a hearty welcome. At a ceremony, Kennett was adopted by a leading Kaurareg named Passiwapod, also known as Teepotti, and his son, who shared his hut with him, provided him with food and became 'exceedingly jealous of any attention' paid to Kennett by other KauraregJ1 Moreover, a Kulkalaig man paid Kennett the highest honour of making him tukiap, like a brother. As Kennett reports, this was done by presenting him with a belt of braided grass, instructing him in the use of fire signals, and by exchange of names between himself and the leading man of the tribe named Genetcha, by which name he was known throughout t h e whole of his stay at Somerset. He sensed he was being awarded a gift of the highest honour: this name bestowal assured him of the assistance and protection of the whole tribeJ2 In the space of three months, he had won the confidence and friendship of a large section of the people of the area; by September 1867 he was acting as interpreter. While Kennett was absent at Muralag, Rev Jagg had actively continued the schoolwork and the school recommenced and prospered with increased numbers for a time?3 Kennett's gifts were not only useful and sought after, especially the tomahawks; gift-giving was the idiom with which local people were intimately familiar - their means of coming to terms with their neighbours, of turning enmity to friendship. They wanted certain goods - notably iron tools - and they wanted new knowledge, and two white men had suddenly arrived at Somerset who were prepared to offer these in exchange for their goods and their goodwill. In the second quarter of 1867 Jagg and Kennett were becoming important mediators of changing relationships between appositional neighbouring groups on the mainland and the off-shore islands: their new message was beginning to create a peace between neighbouring groups and between these local people and selected white men. At the beginning of August 1867, Kennett reported the ending of hostilities among all the tribes in far northern Cape York PeninsulaJ4 This achievement had followed a series of three events: an attack on the Kaurareg by the Yadhaigana early in the year with the death of ten men; the approach to Kennett for a school by Passiwapod on behalf of the Kaurareg; and the Kaurareg request for Kennett to visit Muralag. In this conciliatory vein, both the Kaurareg

48

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and t h e Somerset Aborigines had provided assistance to the barque E l k e r e , and Rev Jagg reported later in February 1868 'the great services rendered by the Blacks to two vessels, that were in distress, viz. t h e Brig Ziska and the Barque Ellesmere'J5The acting Sub-inspector of Police, WHD Howe confirmed as 'perfectly correct' Rev Jagg's 'statement that the Kaurareg rendered great assistance to the Barque Elksmere.. .'.l6 From the beginning, Kennett appears to have had the courage, the understanding and a necessary component of realism to help settle and contribute towards putting an end to intertribal clashes. A month or so after the missionaries arrived, a small fishing party of Somerset men, women and children were surprised by Yadhaigana and Gumakudin warriors and two women and children were carried off. Kennett joined in pursuit. His decision to take gifts to exchange for the prisoners - knives, tomahawks and bright handkerchiefs - was an enlightened one. Nor was he foolhardy, taking firearms as a precautionary measureJ7 Not only was Kennett responsible for developing friendly relations between the missionaries and the Somerset Aborigines and the Kaurareg; it was also h e who acted as mediator between the Kaurareg and the Badulaig who were longstanding enemies. On 4 October 1867 he crossed to Muralag to find 'one of the largest gatherings of natives' he had seen, with the majority of six tribes, including the Somerset tribes assembled. Arriving a t Kirriri (Hammond Island) from Waibene (Thursday Island), the oldest Kaurareg man braved the Badu warriors, who were camped on the northern side of the island, followed by most of his tribe, returning with the greatly feared Badu Islanders. Interestingly, the old Kaurareg man put fear into the Badulaig convincing them 'of the hopelessness of continuing war with a tribe possessing such powerful allies'J8 They were pleased with several gifts presented to them, although they remained fearful until next morning when a peace was formally made. Something resembling a mock battle between two powerful enemies followed by gift-giving was then observed by Kennett; a plaited grass belt at the end of a four-pronged spear was offered to and accepted by the Badulaig, followed by each Kaurareg offering traditional and new-style gifts a spear, throwing stick, tomahawk or glass bottle. In return, the Badulaig gave the Kaurareg bows and arrows, stone-headed clubs, seed necklaces and turtle shell. And the ceremony of 'giving the belt' concluded with a grand feast and dancing. Kennett had acquitted himself in the manner of the best missionary tradition. He had come to Somerset as a volunteer missionary; he quickly learned the Gudang language; he formed egalitarian relationships of trust and reciprocity with the various local peoples. His achievements in the difficult and often dangerous circumstances of Somerset more than justified the high regard in which

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he was held by his former employers. For some of his activities he was, like Jagg, regarded by Captain Simpson, the acting Police Magistrate, as f ~ o l h a r d yas ; ~I ~shall outline shortly, dismissive critique of him moved to open disciplinary action by Frank Jardine for breaking the rule of having Aborigines in his house. Yet no one has contradicted his matter-of-fact and modestly worded report of his activities to the SPG. In one sense this is hardly surprising since the officials at Somerset were not in touch with actions which gave expression to a belief in a common humanity, and which offered to Aborigines the knowledge to help them adapt to new events and circumstances. Such an angle of vision was totally eclipsed by the assumed need for their expropriation from the Somerset-Cape York area in the name of civilisation. In these circumstances, Aborigines took on the character of 'less than human'. In less than a year the missionaries at Somerset had made visible progress towards creating a three-way peace. A peace was being established between local people who were longstanding enemies; and in the presence of the missionaries they demonstrated a friendly relation to the men of foreign vessels. These two conditions created a climate in which acts of violence against local people by the settlers became harder to justify. In practice, this meant that the missionaries were forced to leave Somerset. As we shall see, the differences which soon emerged between the missionaries and two successive police magistrates went far beyond the need to stick up for the Aborigines as Pascoe had done. It had become a life and death issue for the Aborigines.

CLASHES: THE MEANING OF 'NON-INTERFERENCE' The Rev FC Jagg's time at Somerset seems to have been one of continuous frustration and disappointment. For most of his nine months or so at Somerset, he was at loggerheads with Captain Simpson, the acting Police Magistrate, Finally, after both his own and Simpson's departure from Somerset, things came to a head, and following the publication of the Police Magistrate's report on the settlement as a parliamentary paper, the priest called for a Commission of Inquiry into 'the assertions made by Captain Simpson to my prejudice', in which request he was supported by Mr Kennett.20 The missionaries' attitudes ran counter to those of the Somerset administration and they were totally at cross-purposes on policies and practices towards the Aborigines. Jagg's parting comments, a condemnation of the attitudes and conduct of the Police Magistrate, are testimony to the depth of the difference: The Aborigines have been described as the most degraded, treacherous and bloodthirsty beings in existence by the present

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Police Magistrate and those whose only idea is to shoot them down whenever they are seen.21 Jagg's differences with the Somerset officials and the extent and nature of his criticisms of administration policies and conduct are clearly visible in his letter refuting statements made in Captain Simpson's 'General Report on the Settlement of Somerset etc'. It can reasonably be argued too that the Government's failure to hold a Commission of Inquiry into Simpson's allegations is directly related to the seriousness of the missionary's counter-charges and the Government's determination to uphold the policies and stand by the practices of its officials right or wrong. Jagg had called for 'a full and impartial inquiry' in order to accomplish a 'complete refutation' of Simpson's charges against him. The written reports of two eye-witnesses of the events he describes, those of William Kennett and WH Howe, the acting Sub-inspector of Police, verify the important substance of his counter-allegations. The controversy had at its centre the missionaries' perception of 'Captain Simpson's policy of non-interference' in hostilities between Aboriginal tribes. The point of real difference with the Police Magistrate centred upon the underlying purpose and meaning of 'non-interference with native quarrels'.22 Theoretically, the differences were slight, Jagg wrote in response to Simpson's Report; in practice a veritable chasm separated them: Reduced to practice, however, Captain Simpson's policy of noninterference i s rather to render the 'native element' less formidable by fomenting internecine enmities between the several tribes, and i t i s on this point, we have really differed.23 The missionaries' approach to Aboriginal needs and welfare was founded upon a desire to bring the Gospel of Peace to frequently warring groupings. For the two SPG men this meant first the demonstration of a kindly attitude to all local people with whom they came in contact: friendly Aborigines and Islanders would be welcome in the settlement, and the children's educational and spiritual needs would be catered for by a school and Sunday school. Second, in addition to the re-educative function of kindly persuasion, where necessary, 'a judicious interference' in 'native quarrels' would be 'supported by the assurance, that unprovoked aggressions, whether committed by one tribe against another, or otherwise would be punished "by authority" '.24In other words, the missionaries were calling for firm insistence upon peaceful behaviour on the part of the local people towards one another and towards the European settlers. Failure to interfere would lead to the destruction of the local people, Jagg went on to explain to the Colonial Secretary: 'an utter and absolute non-interference' would mean the

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unrestrained play of 'their untamed passions' with the consequence 'of letting them (the Blacks) go to destruction their own way...'. It was this policy of 'absolute non-interference' which the government representative was advocating, and Simpson's Report gave expression to this basic and unchanging settlement policy which inexorably came into conflict with the missionaries' policy and practice of supplementing moral persuasion with a judicious use of armed authority to bring about intertribal peace. Underlying the policy of 'absolute non-interference', and 'as nearly as possible absolute neutrality' were quite different priorities and purposes: to further the pioneering aims of the settlement and the cattle station to which the Aborigines were both a threat, and in minor ways, a source of assistance. A few docile Aborigines were all they needed. Given the hostility which had been built up over the preceding three years, and the intrusion into their food-producing lands, the surrounding Aborigines were at odds with the settlers: sheep stealing, threats against the squatter and the cattle station, and the pilfering of food stores and iron tools were claimed to be rife. Given their different purposes, Jagg was in the firing line for malicious innuendo as well as open criticism. Thus on the former, Simpson wrote that the man who had taken Mr Kennett's gun during an interchange between the Gudang and the Yadhaigana was 'a favourite black of his [Jagg]', and that some Aborigines had reported the priest as saying 'that it was good [for them] to kill the men but not good to kill the women and children'.25 In the same report, Simpson also made direct criticisms of Jagg's attitude to his authority including 'favouring me with his opinion as to the manner in which I conducted the affairs of the Settlement and ... the manner in which they ought to be conducted'. One explanation of Simpson's refusal to support 'judicious interference', is that he believed that should such interference fail, the settlement would be attacked by the Yadhaigana, an event he may well have pondered fearfully given his alleged 'dread of the natives'.26 Jagg's reply to Simpson's report itself highlights the Police Magistrate's bias against local Aborigines by specifying significant omissions in his report. He claims that Captain Simpson's report mentions neither 'the great services rendered' by local people to the brig Ziska and the barque Ellesmere, nor Jagg's successful refutation of charges of sheep stealing against the Aborigines. The former had lost all her boats and had accepted the services of some Kaurareg men who had swum out, been taken on board, and subsequently delivered letters to Rev Jagg for the Police Magistrate. (This event is verified in separate reports by W Howe and William Kennett.)27 In general, the Government's uncritical attitude towards its officers at Somerset, is, as Jagg claims, underlined by the way in which a report which

52

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failed even to mention 'the progress of the Settlement, what work had been done and what there was to show for the outlay of Public Money', received the status of a parliamentary paper.28 Despite Jagg's call for an inquiry, and notwithstanding the written corroboration of his charges and refutations by Kennett and Howe, nothing seems to have been done to provide him with the opportunity to have his case heard and to clear himself of the charges which were seriously impugning his character and good sense. In February 1868,writing from lbowoomba, Jagg placed 'on record' a forthright and unequivocal 'denial of the greater part of Captain Simpson's representations' that he had 'acted either injudiciously or improperly' during his stay at the Cape York settlement. It was then that he called for 'a full and impartial inquiry' as the only way of accomplishing 'the complete refutation' of Captain Sirnpson's 'prejudicial assertions' against himself, claiming his ability to prove that these 'abound in inaccuracies and misrepresentations grounded partly on ignorance and partly on a perversion of facts'.29 Unfortunately we will never know the full evidence Jagg would have brought against Simpson to substantiate this statement. This has had serious repercussions in relation to the standing and stature of the Rev Jagg and of the mission and its achievements. The missionaries' refusal to be drawn on particulars left a gap which the failure to hold a Commission of Inquiry then left open. In turn, this gap leaves the way open for unsubstantiated criticisms of the missionaries. Thus in 1988 Mullins wrote: '... it is clear that he [Simpson] omitted details from his report that might have reflected unfavourably upon him. Similarly the missionaries were less than honest.'30 Footling accusations against, and innuendoes about, Kennett too, are repeated ~ncritically.~~ In seeking objectivity, some students of the area have chosen to be even-handed in apportioningthe blame for attacks on the settlers by aborigine^.^^ Such a position ignores the facts of a head-on clash between the missionaries and the settlers at Somerset over the way in which the Aborigines were being treated. The unanswered critique of the missionaries' activities has left their work vulnerable to belittlement. Thus a chapter headed 'The Troubles of Reverend C [sic] Jagg' in a book by Peter Prideaux on Somerset published in 1988, is almost entirely taken up with the text of Simpson's report of 10 October 1867 and a large extract from Frank Jardine's supporting letter, so creating a one-sided impression. 'The effect of this' Christian influence, Prideaux observes, 'would be difficult to judge, but Simpson and Frank Jardine were not impressed with the result'.33This statement leaves the reader hanging'; the writer makes no attempt to present the missionaries' own reports, nor to evaluate other readily available relevant material.

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A letter from WH Howe to the Inspector of Police, Somerset written as acting Sub-inspector of Police at the settlement, on 17 August 1868, throws light on the practical meaning given by Simpson on one occasion to the policy of non-interference', and in so doing tends to substantiate Jagg's accusations. On 25 August 1867, the Police Magistrate instructed Howe i n writing to tell the settlement Aborigines that if they attacked the Yadhaigana (as they had announced they would do), they would not be protected by the European settlers from any retaliation. As Howe reports, Rev Jagg 'rendered ... every assistance in explaining ... the substance of Captain Simpson's letter' to the Aborigines.34 Several days later, what turned out to be a false alarm was sounded by Somerset Aborigines that the Yadhaigana were going to attack them. Captain Simpson then told Howe that should such an event actually occur he 'was to get the Constables under arms and fire into the natives indiscriminately without regard to tribe', an order which Howe declined without written instruction. Should any Somerset Aborigines camp in the bush within the bounds of the settlement, Howe was ordered by the Police Magistrate 'to send the Constables to fire at them with small shot'.36 Kennett also castigates Simpson's report in his letter to the Police Magistrate written at Somerset on 29 August 1868: '...every circumstance of which I have any knowledge, that is mentioned in that Report is either exaggerated or inaccurately statedI.36 In contrast to the generally mild and non-combative style and the non-political content of his reports to the SPG, Kennett takes issue with Simpson firmly and unequivocally: I am not surprised at this [order to fire on the Aborigines], as that gentleman's nervous dread of the natives, as well as his ignorance of their language and custom is well known in the ~ettlement.~~ The Police Magistrate's perception of the Aborigines, Kennett contends, was totally colouring his reporting and interpretation of events. These issues, which became the subject of acrimonious debate, go back to events which occurred soon after the missionaries arrived late in February 1867. According to Kennett, within a month of their arrival, an engagement took place between two Cape York tribes, the allied Gumakudin and Ambiagan with the Yadhaigana, as a result of which the Ambiagan were totally wiped out, and the seven Gumakudin survivors forced to join the victorious Yadhaigana, which meant that from then on the Yadhaigana-Gudang lands included country to the west of Somerset. In June the same year, the Yadhaigana launched an attack on the Gudang who were camped at Albany Island, and the two missionaries went to

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the island, finding ten Gudang including three of Kennett's young students. In retaliation, on 24 July 1867, the Gudang and two allied groups announced their intention of making a return raid on the Yadhaigana. It was to this occasion that Jagg was referring in his interchange over the practical significance for the Aborigines of the Police Magistrate's policy of non-interference. As Kennett reports, 'All attempts to dissuade them were fruitless, the police magistrate did not think himself justified in intervening, and the only point we could gain with them was a promise not to injure the women and children.'38 Here we have the substance of t h e defamatory accusations against Jagg which achieved the standing of a parliamentary paper and which he was never given the opportunity to refute. (As it turned out, after an eight-day absence, the Somerset Aborigines returned without seeing a trace of the Yadhaigana.) It may be noted that, in practice, the policy of non-interference was not always adhered to by the Police Magistrate. Kennett states that while he was on Muralag the Police Magistrate allowed the Somerset Aborigines into the settlement 'in consideration' of their 'long good c0nduct',3~ the school increasing its numbers as we have seen. It was in this context that the Somerset people proposed a retaliatory raid upon the Yadhaigana. It takes little imagination to see that innocently or, as Jagg claimed, intentionally, the Police Magistrate's action gave backing to the Somerset Aborigines, increasing their confidence vis-a-vis the Yadhaigana who were noted throughout the area as a formidable warrior people. It was they who had killed the explorer Edmund Kennedy in their country at Escape River, and Oswald Brierly, who had recorded the shipwrecked Barbara Thompson's story nearly twenty years before, referred to them as 'bad Blacks'.40

FROM CLASHES TO OPEN WARFARE The friction over Aboriginal policies between the settlers and the missionaries which preoccupied Jagg during Simpson's time as Police Magistrate, was to be further exacerbated after Frank Jardine became Police Magistrate on 22 January 1868. At the end of 1867 Jagg went south to visit his wife; intending to return, he left his possessions at Somerset. Now alone, Kennett's situation deteriorated in almost every way: monetarily he was almost destitute, socially he was not only at odds with the settlers, but also subjected to minor disciplinary measures, his Aboriginal students were ill, and in himself he became not only frustrated but dispirited. The circumstances in which Frank Jardine, a man of only twenty-six years, with no background at all in the civil service, and a joint manager of a cattle station, was appointed to the quite senior position of Police Magistrate, were ones of severe financial difficulty for the Queensland Government. The financial crash

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of 1866 had put the future of the port of Somerset in doubt, and the mail-steamer service had been put on ice.41 Unable to act unilaterally, given the Imperial Government's three to four year involvement in the settlement, in June 1867 Cabinet decided that unless some support was forthcoming from Britain, the Government would be forced to abandon the ~ e t t l e m e n t . ~ ~ Given this overall context, the Jardines were able to point a gun at the Government's head. This they did successfully. As Mullins explains, expenditure on the settlement was cut to a minimum and the Premier, George Palmer, decided to do nothing on its ultimate future.43The Governor's hand was forced by the Jardine family in the following way. John Jardine, now in Rockhampton, wrote to the Colonial Secretary in August 1867 stating his belief that the settlement was unlikely to prosper or the cattle station at Vallack Point become a commercial success. In consequence, his son, Frank Jardine, wished to leave the Cape York area as soon as possible. In October 1867 he applied more direct pressure stating that if the Government would not purchase the family stock Frank Jardine would walk off with his stockmen on the next ship. If the Government was to salvage the settlement then it needed to do so at the least cost. Frank Jardine was not only an excellent cattleman and bushman; he also had his own private 'native force' of four policemen whom he had brought with him from Rockhampton. Given the continued war of resistance against the settlers by the Yadhaigana, the appointment of Frank Jardine as Police Magistrate had the advantage of ensuring the active defence of the settlement and livestock without any extra financial outlay. So as Mullins concludes, Frank Jardine 'was chosen because it was thought he had the wherewithal to defend the settlement against Aboriginal attack';44in appointing him as Police Magistrate, 'the colonial secretary gained the services of a de facto detachment of native mounted police at no cost'.45 Frank Jardine and his brother John had used all the means at their disposal against attacks on their property at Vallack Point by the Yadhaigana and others. Frank Jardine's elevation to the position of top civil authority at Somerset in January 1868 legitimated as well as extended those means of defence. The Jardines had become the supreme power at Somerset. The Government needed their services and they needed the Government's mantle of authority and respectability. Unlike Jagg, Kennett appears to have engaged little with Simpson, but in relation to Frank Jardine, the situation was noticeably different. True, Simpson disciplined him for leaving the settlement to visit Muralag without seeking his advice (an event that Kennett does not even mention in his report to the SPG).46 Jardine was tougher. He not only fined Kennett one pound for obstructing a

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FOOTPRIhTS A O N G THE CAPE YORK W D B E A C H E S

constable in the exercise of his duty (of taking him before the Police Magistrate); he also reported t h e constable to the Police Commissioner for failing to bring Kennett at once before him for having a number of Aborigines i n his home 'and for disobeying orders in so Kennett reported in January 1868 on illness among his scholars whom he personally nursed in his own house and paid for. In his last months at Somerset, alone now and with virtually no monetary resources, he became aware of an imminent tragedy for the Aborigines who had been angered by the provocations and bad treatment from the Somerset settlers. In sending his report on the mission from March 1867 to August 1868 to Rev Bullock of the SPG in Piccadilly, Kennett explained the formal source of his difficult situation: 'Owing to the political changes in the Queensland Government, the engagement of the previous ministry is r e ~ u d i a t e d . Kennett '~~ was now entirely without funds. He was also totally without social support at Somerset. As Jagg had predicted, the Police Magistrate was determined to get rid of him. On 30 January 1868, in the context of his application for a Select Committee of Inquiry, Jagg had told the SPG that the Police Magistrate would try to remove Kennett 'as there is such a strong antagonistic feeling towards the Blacks'.4Q The move to withdraw government support for the mission seems to have been made almost simultaneously with the Government's dismissive treatment of Rev Jagg's request for a public inquiry into the settlement. His complaints against Simpson actually began soon after his arrival. In April 1867, a month after the missionaries' arrival, the priest had made representation to the Governor on the great difficulty he was labouring under at Somerset due to 'the opposition and want of sympathy of the Police Magistrate9.5OAs Rev Jagg goes on to explain, the Minister apparently removed Simpson from' the office of Police Magistrate for other reasons; ostensibly his removal rested upon his impending elevation to the Legislative Council, but before their instruction could reach Somerset, the Ministry changed - one of the new Ministers being Simpson's brother-in-law - and he was reinstated. Was it Jagg's and Kennett's repudiation of everything in the Police Magistrate's report and Jagg's call for a public inquiry that soured relations irreparably? Did Jagg's demands 'rock the boat' so vigorously that support for the mission was withdrawn? Kennett's salary was terminated abruptly on 30 June 1868.51With this action there also vanished the chances of survival of the people of the Cape York region. While the missionaries were present, hostile relations with Aborigines were muted to a degree, although there is nothing to suggest that the two men acted as the consciences of the police magistrates. According to Kennett, after l August 1867, 'great changes' at Somerset followed the replacement of the marines by six constables and a sergeant, and the appointment of 'the squatter', Frank

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Jardine, as Police Magistrate. Many of the Somerset Aborigines became 'constant victims' of small thefts by the police of food, fisxing gear and spears.52 Yet Aborigines' rights in these matters were non-existent since their evidence was not taken in the police court. Thus, they had no means of redress and the missionaries could do little about it. Not long before Kennett's departure, provocations of local people increased. An incident in May 1868 created a train of events which put a n end to any sort of accommodation with local people. A constable threatened a Somerset Aborigine that he would put him in the lock-up unless he brought him some spears. After an argument during which the man in question threatened to spear the constable, the rest of the Somerset Aborigines announced that they would attack the police as soon as possible. All of them then disappeared. On l 0 May, the Police Magistrate, Frank Jardine, discovered that they had raided the cattle station at Vallack Point, taking guns and more than a thousand rounds of ammunition, and had killed Eulah, the former mounted police corporal, who had accompanied him and his brother on their overland journey from bckhampton. 53 This second attack on the settlers by the Cape York tribes ended a four-year accommodation. Moreover, a large party was involved in the uprising with three of Frank Jardine's tried and trusted 'policemen' suspected of being the leaders.54Kennett acted as peacemaker and the guns were brought to him. After this revolt only two Aboriginal students were allowed back into the settlement. Some two months later on 14 July, a further provocation accented a state of open warfare between local people and the settlers: a constable who had been unable to obtain fish from the Aborigines tried unsuccessfully to shoot a young child in the bush. Virtually all the Aborigines then left for the nearby islands. In August, Kennett issued a warning that should they return: it will now be almost impossible to hold any friendly intercourse with them. If, as is probable, they return with hostile intentions, the lives of all in the settlement will be in considerable danger, for there will be but eight or nine white men, to contend against several hundreds of infuriated natives.55 His words were prophetic. So far as we know, the attack did not come immediately from the mainland Aborigines; nor was it upon the settlement. In April 1869, an attack was made on the vessel, Sperwer which was anchored at Wednesday Spit between Wednesday Island and Hammond Island, and the captain and crew killed. The Kaurareg were blamed. Two punitive raids followed led by two successive police magistrates, Frank Jardine and Henry Chester. The chances of a three-way peace towards which the missionaries had been actively working vanished. A small light flickered and faded.

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REFT.ECTIONS UPON A HALF-SmRY It is not at all surprising that a situation of open warfare between the settlers a n d the Cape York people emerged by 1868, one that had been growing ever since t h e settlement began in 1864. The missionaries' presence had an inhibiting effect o n settlement practices; their presence also underlined the depth of the difference, a matter given written expression. Frank Jardine makes both these points i n a private letter to the Colonial Secretary shortly after the raid on Vallack Station in May 1868, in which he derides the idea of missionary endeavour. I have been into several of their camps and recovered some of the arms but as Somerset has been chosen as the field for missionary, I have not shot or molested the Blacks in any way, although they most richly deserve it.56 There was no way in which the mission or the school could continue given the refusal of the authorities to allow any but a few selected Aborigines into the settlement. lb achieve any of their purposes, the missionaries had to ignore or challenge the Police Magistrate's policies of exclusion and hostility towards Aborigines. In the face of this hostility, the two missionaries managed, through their sympathetic attitudes, their acts of kindness, their judicious and courageous interference in inter-group hostilities, to achieve reconciliations between local groups traditionally hostile to one another. Through the school they also made visible headway in sharing their knowledge with local people. As has been seen, two successive police magistrates clashed with the missionaries on this fundamental question of Aboriginal access to the settlement. The process of encirclement of the missionaries by officials hostile to their activities reached a peak after Jagg left Somerset, The unpaid and impoverished Kennett performed what may have been his last act of kindness at Somerset - the nursing of some of his adult pupils in his house - and as we have seen, was punished for doing so by the Police Magistrate. As we have noted, Kennett's departure, which was accelerated by such head-on collisions with the Police Magistrate, had been forecast by The rising state of general warfare and antagonism towards the Aborigines came to be matched by antagonism towards the missionaries: Frank Jardine wanted them out of the settlement as quickly as possible for their approach and actions were incompatible with both his aims and his methods of dealing with the Aborigines. Despite quite a wealth of evidence now available on the reasons for the missionaries' beleaguered situation at Somerset, and their gallant attempt to overcome the odds for the sake of the local people, there exists a strand of scholarly opinion which is wholly negative about the work of the mission. In Mullins' major

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study of contact in the Torres Strait region in the twenty years from 1864 the mission is taken to be a 'total failure'. This was not seen to result from the untenable situation created for the missionaries by successive police magistrates, who were, without seeming demur, supported by the Queensland legislature, a fact which he himself documents in some detail.58Its failure, in Mullins; view, related to the missionaries' inability to carry into practice a 'judicious interference' in inter-group hostilities,59and a hypothesised lack of interest by local people either in Christianity or in formal schooling, their concern being solely with the acquisition of material goods. On the first point, Mullins fails to consider the evidence given in Jagg's reports and even more in Kennett's accounts of the progress of the mission and its school, which I find no reason to question. On the Aborigines' supposed lack of interest in Christianity he provides no evidence at all. Unlike the LMS, the SPG missionaries were not evangelical; living the brotherhood of man would seem to be the manner of their Christian witness, and as we have seen, Kennett's acts of Christian kindness were rewarded in reciprocal acts of the highest order - being accorded the status of a brother.'jOMoreover, the descendants of the Cape York people were active in seeking a mission and a school in the years from about 1913 onwards:61 had they changed their attitudes, or were they just placed in a better position than their forebears to express a wish that the latter had been denied? Sadly, as Bayton observes, by the time a new wave of missionaries arrived in the area in 1871, 'the mainlanders had been forced to leave the vicinity of the settlement by the unjust and brutal treatment by the a u t h o r i t i e ~ 'many ,~~ of them moving westward by 1867. There has been little written on the notable achievements of the two 'intrepid gentlemen', as Moore describes the mi~sionaries.~~ In 1965 John Bayton published Cross over Carpentaria which, making considerable use of the SPG archive of reports and correspondence relating to the progress and problems of the mission at Somerset, provides a wehounded coverage of the two missionaries' work. In 1979, Moore made a further contribution to public knowledge of their work by publishing the reports of both Jagg and Kennett. Bayton lists four circumstances which led to the closure of the Mission Industrial School. One was 'the brutality of the European officials who had no apparent regard for, nor understanding of, the sacredness of tribal customs or grounds'; the other three were lack of government attention to creating welfare facilities at Somerset; the Church of England's failure to provide for the needs of a mission; and the personal strain placed upon &v Jagg by the absence of his wife and his own financial burdens.'j4 These four reasons themselves correspond generally with those given by the two missionaries in their reports, and in their letters to the SPG and to the Governor of Queensland.

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As Bayton, himself an Anglican cleric, goes on to observe:

... it is extremely unfortunate that almost a hundred years later no tribute at all is paid to either the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel nor to its first missionaries to the aborigines of Northern Queensland and the lbrres Strait Islands.65 This absence is hardly surprising, given the disappearance of knowledge of their work and their difficult situation, along with the disappearance of the Cape York Aborigines. The reason for this silence rests heavily on the refusal of t h e government of Queensland to hold the inquiry which Rev Jagg had called for. More generally, its supine support for the versions of the events concerning European-Aboriginal relations in the Somerset area given to it by its appointees is matched by its unreadiness to admit the total lack of sympathy and cooperation by its officers with the work of the mission (and its consequent undermining) as t h e mqjor cause of its closure. As a consequence, to this day, Jagg is portrayed as a somewhat erratic and unrealistic priest,66 or simply ignored. It was, I believe, the absence of a public airing of the missionaries' practices of judicious interference

and support that is responsible for the belief in the 'total failure' of the mission.67 Y e t their successes suggest that with even the slightest cooperation between officials and missionaries, the lives of many local people may have been spared.

NOTES l . Mullins 1988, 89. 2. Bowen to Secretary of State, 3 November 1862; 16 July 1874; Despatch 31, in QSA GOVl24, as quoted in Mullins 1988, 93. 3. Bowen to Secretary of State, 9 December 1861, Despatch 73, in QSA GOV123, as quoted in Mullins 1988, 90. 4. Minutes of proceedings of the Executive Council of Queensland, 2 December 1861, as quoted in Mullins 1988, 92.

5. Bowen to Secretary of State, 16 December 1861, Despatch 74, in QSA GOVl23, as quoted in Mullins 1988, 102. 6. Bowen to Secretary of State, 16 December 1861, Despatch 74, in QSA GOVl23, as quoted in Mullins 1988, 102. 7. Kennett writes: 'On 1st August HMS S a h r n u n h entered the port, and great changes were made in the settlement. The party of marines was removed and replaced by six constables and a sergeant, and the squatter was made police magistrate' (The Kennett Report, February 1867-June 1868, Somerset, l August 1868, in Moore 1979,246; enclosed with Kennett to Bullock, 23 October 1868).

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8. Governor Bowen to SPG, 12 February 1867 as reproduced in full by Bayton 1965, 33. Prideaux 1988,49, states incorrectly that Mrs Jagg and her two children accompanied Rev Jagg to Somerset. 9. Bayton 1965, 39.

10. Kennett Report, 243. 11. Kennett Report, 244. 12. Kennett Report, 244. 13. Kennett Report, 247. The preceding five paragraphs are drawn from The Kennett Report, which was written for the SPG; there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Kennett's account. 14. Kennett Report, 246. 15. Jagg to Under Colonial Secretary (refutation of statements made in Captain Simpson's report), Toowoomba, February 1868 (no day given), in QSA COL/119, in-letter top numbered to 822 of 1869 (see also V&P, First Session 1868, 523-24). 16. In WHD Howe to Inspector of Police, Somerset, 17 August 1868, in QSA COLlA119, in-letter 822 of 1869.

17. Kennett Report, 242. 18. Kennett Report, 248. 19. Simpson to Colonial Secretary, Somerset, General Report on the Settlement at Somerset, etc, 10 October 1867, Simpson, late PM, Somerset, to Colonial Secretary, 28 July 1868 (also published as a parliamentary paper, V&P, First Session 1868, 519-23). 20. Jagg to Under Colonial Secretary, February 1868. 21. The Jagg Reports, 1867-68, in Moore 1979, 255-56. 22. Jagg to Under Colonial Secretary, February 1868. 23. Jagg to Under Colonial Secretary, February 1868 (emphasis in original). 24. Jagg to Under Colonial Secretary, February 1868 (emphasis in original). 25. General Report on the Settlement of Somerset, 28 July 1868. 26. See Kennett to Police Magistrate, Somerset, 29 August 1868, in QSA COL/119. 27. Howe, 17 August 1868; Kennett to PM, Somerset, 29 August 1868 in QSA COLl119. 28. Jagg to Under Colonial Secretary, February 1868. 29. Jagg to Under Colonial Secretary, February 1868. 30. 1988, 156. 31. 1988, 156.

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32. Thus Mullins concludes, for example, that Kennett twisted the facts t o shift any responsibility for an attack on t h e cattle station at Vallack Point from himself or the settlement Aborigines (1988, 167). 33. 1988, 49. 34. Howe to Inspector of Police, 17 August 1868. 35. Howe to Inspector of Police, 17 August 1868. 36. Enclosed with 6912370 in QSA COLlA119, in-letter top numbered to 822 of 1869. 37. Enclosed with 6912370 in QSA COLlA119, in-letter top numbered to 822 of 1869. 38. Kennett Report, 246. 39. 29 August 1868. 40. Brierly 1849, in Moore 1979, 84. See Barbara Thompson (Brierly 1849, in Moore, 147). 41. Colonial Secretary, Queensland to Colonial Secretary, New South Wales, 14 May 1872, Qld V&P, 1873, 1247-66. 42. See Removal of Detachment of Royal Marines from Cape York, Qld V&P, 1867, 1187-92. 43. 1988, 160. 44. 1988, 163. 45. 1988, 162. 46. Simpson, General Report, 28 July 1868. 47. Jardine to Police Commissioner, Brisbane, 2 October 1868, DL. 48. Kennett to SPG, 23 October 1868, in QSA COLlA119. 49. At this stage Jagg was still intending to return to Somerset. See Jagg t o Bullock, SPG, Ipswich, 30 January 1868, in QSA COLl119. 50. See Jagg to Bullock, SPG, Ipswich, 30 January 1868, in QSA COLl119. 51. In a letter to Rev Bullock, SPG, Piccadilly, on 23 October 1868, Kennett wrote of his difficult position at Somerset, stating that due to political changes in the Queensland Government, 'the engagements of the previous ministry with regard to the mission are now repudiated'. He also records the consequent difficulty of his position, noting his difficulty in leaving Somerset given his total lack of funds, the cost of the fare to Sydney being double that of the fare from Sydney to London. 52. Kennett Report, 246. 53. F Jardine to Colonial Secretary, 12 May 1868, in QSA COLIA111, in-letter 2874 of 1868. 54. Ibid.

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55. Kennett Report, 251. 56. Jardine to Colonial Secretary, 3 June 1868 (private letter) in QSA COLIA111, in-letter 2874 of 1868. 57. Jagg to Bullock, in QSA COLl119. 58. 1988, Chapters 2 and 3. 59. 1988, 154. 60. This is Bishop John Bayton's observation on the manner of missionary work of Rev Jagg and W H Kennett (personal communication). 61. See Chapter 7. 62. 1965, 36. 63. 1979, 12. 64. 1965, 39. 65. 1965. 66. See Prideaux 1988, The Troubles of the Reverend C. Jagg, 49-57. Prideaux omits any reference to the body of written evidence produced by the missionaries; see Jagg's and Kennett's reports, in Moore 1979, 237-56; Jagg's correspondence with the Colonial Secretary, in QSA COL/119; and Jagg's letter to the SPG reproduced in Bayton 1965. Bayton saw Jagg as a man with 'great vision' (1965, 35); see CF Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the SPG, SPG, London 1901, as cited in Bayton 1969, 17, who notes how Kennett 'exhibited the degree of Christian spirit which won the confidence of the natives thus proving that if they are treated kindly they are capable of much more good than is generally thought possible'. 67. These are Mullins' words (1988, 157).

CHAPTER

TERROR AT SOMERSET: AUGUST 1868-DECEMBER 1 8 70 THE ABORIGINES Frank Jardine's relationships with Aborigines are intimated in the events of the ten-month overland journey from Rockhampton to Somerset from which he emerged with some eighty notches on the stock of his rifle and, in Dr Cannon's words, with 'blood on his soul'? 'A minimum of fifty-four Aborigines and a maximum of seventy-two, were killed' by the party led by the brothers Alexander and Frank Jardine.2 On 14 November 1864 they passed a number of Aborigines at the lily lagoon where they were attacked by twenty men with spears which they returned with fire power. Further engagements occurred on 22 and 27 November, and on 18 December there occurred a massacre which the Jardines named the Battle of the Mitchell, where fifty-nine rounds were discharged into the Aborigines, killing thirty and wounding many more before the leader 'thought it prudent to hold his hand ...': The natives at first stood up courageously, but either by accident or through fear, despair or stupidity, they got huddled in a heap, in, and at the margin of the water, when ten carbines poured volley after volley into them from all directions, killing and wounding with every shot with very little return, nearly all their spears having been expended in the pursuit of the horsemen.3 One might usefully contrast the Aborigines' treatment of Kennett, who made daring (and according to Simpson) foolhardy journeys to Muralag and other neighbouring islands to mediate a peace between hostile tribes, and that meted out to Frank Jardine: in 1866 an attempt was made on the latter's life; there is not a whisper that any Aborigines touched a hair on Kennett's head. Frank Jardine was a man of violence, of this there is no doubt. He himself boasted of the notches on his rifle accrued during his overland journey to Somerset; he confided in Dr Cannon of his admiration for those squatters who used poisoned flour as the 'final solution' to the Aboriginal problem; he had his personal 'native police' at his command until he eventually killed two of them in cold blood following the 'rebel' attack on Vallack Station; h e admitted that he would have shot the local Aborigines involved in the attack had it not been for the presence of the missionaries; he insisted he knew 'every one of the blacks concerned in the late robbery' at Vallack Station and could lead a body of native police into their camps assuming 'that they could all swim and carry their arms and ammunition dry...';4 and as we shall see, he 'properly dispersed' the Yadhaigana following the death of a white pearl-sheller in 1873. 65

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The case of Constable Ginivan who was posted to Somerset on 1July 1867 and suspended by Frank Jardine, Inspector of Police, on 26 August 1868 for insubordination according to Jardine,5and 'on the plea of disobedience of orders' according to Ginivan h i r n ~ e l fprovides ,~ an illuminating study of the character and temperament of Frank Jardine. Ginivan's was the one voice raised against his illtreatment of Aborigines at Somerset after the missionaries left. He also leaves a record of accusation against Jardine's treatment of his subordinates - the European police stationed at Somerset from 1867 to 1871. In an undated letter to Jardine as Inspector of Police forwarded from Somerset to the Police Commissioner in Brisbane on 2 September 1868, Constable Ginivan accuses Jardine of terrorising the Aborigines with the assistance of his private 'troopers':

... he leaves home sometimes in the middle of a dark rainy night, with his troopers and we hear nothing of him for two or three days. The Blacks are in great terror of him.. . . The reason that they so dread and respect him is, that he never breaks a promise or threat with them no matter what it might be so the name he goes by amongst them is Marmouchy, which means earnest and determined, which is quite true of him as all the men know.7 In the same letter Ginivan complains bitterly about Jardine's behaviour towards his police employees accusing him of taunting them, treating them as his servants and refusing to take their illnesses seriously: When the men complained of being ill he told them that it was only exercise they required, and that he would try and find them sufficient work to keep their blood in circulation.. . The men are now also frightened to make complaints, then, as he.. .only laughs at them - he will take no complaints unless written ones, when he punishes as severely as he can, to prevent them as he says from coming again.. . Instead of Police the men are private servants to the Inspector, and if they grumble at their hard lot, they are laughed at or threatened with severe punishment, and we all know Mr Jardine to be just the man to keep his promises.. . In conclusion Constable Ginivan begs to state, that he and Constable Healy would not tender their resignations if it was not for the hardships they have to e n d ~ r e . ~ Was this grumbling the 'misconduct' for which Jardine suspended Ginivan on 26 August 1868,just seven days before Jardine as Inspector of Police forwarded Ginivan's outspoken, audacious and dangerously self-wounding letter. Given his situation in an isolated settlement far from home, his daily life was at the mercy of the Inspector. Ginivan's accusations against Jardine, both in regard

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to his relations with Aborigines and with the police whom he controlled, were written by a man who appears to be out of touch with the embattled reality of his situation and the likely painful consequences to himself, especially if even a significant measure of his accusations were true. The only answer I can find is that the young policeman (of Irish extraction) had reached the end of his tether, thrown caution to the winds, and feeling he had nothing to lose, 'blown' the whole thing. It may have cost him his job, or perhaps he had already been suspended for 'insubordination' and the letter was merely an addendum to a verbal tirade. However that may be, his indictment of Jardine has been handed down among the documents of the era, among the few written records for which we must be thankful. Ginivan's statement that Jardine went out and shot two of his three remaining 'native police' - Barnie and Sambo - for their part in the raid on the station run by his brother John is confirmed by William Kennett, a man with a penchant for the truth. Thus, it would seem that Jardine lied to the Colonial Secretary in his letter of 15 October 1868. Contradicting Ginivan's positive assertion that he put 'two balls through Barney's head, and one through Sambo's back, as stated by the nine [men(?)]who were looking on',9Jardine states: '...they are here now to answer for them~elves'?~ It took weeks to travel from Brisbane to Somerset and who would listen to the word of a lowly constable, who had been described by Jardine to the Commissioner of Police as 'without exception the most unsatisfactory and insolent man that I have ever had anything to do with'tl against. that of the Police Magistrate? A major difficulty was the non-accountability of the Police Magistrate in the sense that it was more often than not his word against that of his subordinates or those of more limited experience or lesser status in government eyes. Thus, as we have seen in relation to Lieutenant Pascoe and the two missionaries, the Government generally took the line of least resistance, and upheld the Police Magistrate's position (see Chapter 3). After suspending him, Jardine appears to have acted towards Ginivan in a way exceeding even that which the latter had claimed was characteristic of 'Marmie', treating 'him with the greatest of hardship', as Ginivan states in a poignant letter from Somerset to the Inspector of Police, Somerset on 9 October 1868.12 Jardine, as Inspector of Police, then refused to accept Ginivan's resignation, claiming that he lacked the power to do so, ordered him to give up his arms and confined him to the barracks; he also refused to give him back pay for the months December 1867 and January and February 1968 when he paid the other policemen, 'thereby leaving him pennile~s'?~ Without money, his wife ill,

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the month following his suspension Ginivan presented an account for twelve shillings made out to Frank's brother John (a police constable's pay was ten pounds per year) for salting meat ("RI four days salting meat at three shillings per which Ginivan claimed he had been required to do before work, and which he claimed in his letter to the Police Inspector was sold to passing boats and to people at Somerset.15It was this action that infuriated the Police Inspector who threatened him with violence: 'I told him', reported Jardine, 'that ... I only wondered that my brother did not give him a hiding for his impertinence.. .'J6 Ginivan reported the incident a s follows: Constable Ginivan No. 41 respectfully begs leave t o report to the Commissioner that on 1st inst. Mr Jardine the Inspector threatened assault without provocation and said if his brother was in he would give him a dam good hiding and he believe [sic] he would put his threats into execution from the excited manner he was in if Constable Ginivan had not immediately left.17 Ginivan goes on to identify the cause of the threats as the presentation of the bill for twelve shillings to John Jardine Jnr for 'salting meat for him on four occasions which he [Ginivan]was compelled to do before he commenced his day's work ...'.18 Whether calculated or not to expose unlawful use of government property and Ginivan's government-paid labour for the benefit of the Jardine family (subsequently denied by Jardine on 9 October), it certainly did so, and this is surely what caused Frank Jardine to shake with anger. Ginivan did not get his twelve shillings which he desperately needed to buy medicines for his sick wife. When he approached the doctor on board a passing schooner for medicine for her he was 'well abused' by the Police Inspector in front of Sub-inspector Howe and the boat crew for leaving the barracksJ9 Ginivan was also refused permission to go to Brisbane on the schooner three months after he had tendered his resignation and the constable expressed his fear 'that his wife will fall a victim to his [Frank Jardine's] tyranny. ..'.20 (It may be noted that in February 1869 the Commissioner of Police replied to Ginivan's poignant plea stating that 'It is unquestionably a hardship on Ginivan now that he has left the force to be kept without his money, which is so long due to him', although he found himself unable to forward the back pay without confirmation from Frank Jardine that it had not been paid. A side note by the Colonial Secretary to the Police Commissioner's letter states: 'Await arrival of the mail expected in a few days February 26th 1869'.21It was then two years since the ex-constable's pay had been stopped.) Even those least inclined to support the claim made today by the Cape York Aborigines and the Kaurareg against Frank Jardine admit his sorties against

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local Aborigines 'to inflict retribution' for cattle spearing,22accompanied by his four ex-trooper stockmen who referred to him as Marmie, and who carried out the function of Native police at Somerset until the Government finally gave in and agreed to requests for them by Simpson and Frank Jardine. Kennett reports that one of the four, named Barnie was 'undoubtedly guilty' of the grotesque and heinous murder of a Gudang woman; after killing her he had taken out her heart and eaten it.23 (Barnie was not punished because of the Somerset practice of discounting Aboriginal evidence, the only evidence that is said to have existed in this case!) The background to these events was the apparently surprise raid on Point Vallack Station described already. On 8 May 1868 Kennett's scholars were given permission to attend a corroboree. Two days later they hadn't returned; nor had the settlement servants. In the previous week a constable had angered the settlement Aborigines by threatening to lock up one of their number unless he brought him some spears. As a result they had threatened to attack the police should a 'favourable opportunity' arise.24 On 10 May the Police Magistrate discovered that Point Vallack cattle station had been ransacked, 'old Eulah', as Jardine called the Aborigine in charge, had been murdered (Jardine had described Eulah as the most trusty of his 'black boys' on the overland trip from Fbckhampton and had named a welcome watercourse Eulah Creek after he had discovered it for them on the overland journey), and fifteen firearms and many rounds of ammunition and station supplies had been taken. The three Aboriginal policemen, Barnie, Sambo and Peter (whose promise of a return to their homes in Rockhampton and Wide Bay by Jardine had not been honoured by Frank Jardine), appeared to be the leaders in the revolt. On 20 June, following the encouragement of informants by the granting of a free pardon to all but the three, Jardine received information that Barnie and Sambo were camped in the bush. With his brother and some settlement Aborigines, Jardine came upon the three policemen's hiding place 'and both Sambo and Barnie were shot in the head and neck with revolvers and left to die in the scrub'.25Sambo did not die, and with Peter set off for their home country. (Two of Kennett's scholars' brothers who had taken no part in the revolt were the only males now allowed in the settlement; their sister Gonorah, had just given birth to a son, who, according to information supplied to Kennett by local Aborigines, was fathered by the Police M a g i ~ t r a t e . ) ~ ~ Soon after Kennett left Somerset the quasi-stable peace with the settlers was quickly disturbed and, as he had predicted, relations degenerated within a few months. Important in this regard is the arrival of a contingent of Native police. They were armed and on double rations - one for each of them and one for an Aboriginal woman whom they were permitted to 'select' from the local p o p u l a t i ~ n . ~ ~

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THE KAURAREG In mid-April 1869, an event occurred which heralded the impending outlawing of the Kaurareg: the massacre of the crew of the Sperwer and the capture and burning of the vessel a t Wednesday Spit only thirty miles from Somerset. Two raids were launched from Somerset, the first led by the Police Magistrate, Frank Jardine, assisted by Captain McAusland of the Melanie and crew members, the second by Henry Chester, who temporarily replaced Jardine as Police Magistrate. A pall of silence hangs over the first of these expeditions: the Jardine diaries and papers are missing and various students of the period have attempted to reconstruct the events from the recollections handed down through the Jardine family, there being no detailed official reports of the expedition.28 Frank Jardine 'avenged the murder of the vessel's crew', wrote the surveyor Logan Jack in a cryptic note. 29 Mullins is far more cautious. Jardine came close enough to see that the Kaurareg wore trousers and shirts 'and had broken pieces of gun-locks, watches and navigational equipment strung round their necks', he observes, yet 'he makes no mention of firing on them in his report'.3O Pinney and Runcie, using an imaginative portrayal of that act of retribution carried out in the name of a search for Captain Gascoigne's wife and son (who, as it turned out were neither o n the vessel nor in the area), claim that with the aid of Aboriginal mounted troopers and the South Sea Island crew of the Melanie, the party fired a t the heart of the village: The Kowra-regas broke and fled. Jardine's party advanced, searching huts and afterwards firing them; Mrs Gascoigne and her son were not there. McAusland's men came down to pursue the fight, and loot. A sea breeze was fanning the flames, and billowing smoke was drifting up the valley towards the rising sun. Jardine's men stared that way, wondering, and muttering inquiries; for sounds of warfare came from the ridge, including scattered musket fire, a screaming of trapped women and the hoarse cries of men. Some force which occupied that horseshoe ridge, it seemed, was slaughtering the villagers who sought escape that way. One could see nothing, there was too much smoke, a flaming aureole of burning nacre as the rising sun topped the ridge. McAusland stared, pale and drawn, as the terrible cries of a people fighting massacre shrilled and trembled through the valley. Every now and then Jardine paused in his relentless search to marvel at the sounds of savage tumult, frowning and uneasy.31 According to this account, the Kaurareg 'as a nation were destroyed'. Booties Jardine, Frank's son recounted to Pinney his father's recollection:

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The village was in a bit of a valley, high at one end. The kanakas [South Sea crew of the Melanie] burned it all out, once they got going nobody could stop them. They had rifles and no one [among the Kaurareg] was prepared. It was too sudden. There was a terrible killing. No one knows how many were killed ... I know my father shot one of the kanakas. He was trying to stop the killing. The village killing, when they all attacked, when the kanakas ran amok. He never liked to talk about that day. Not t o me. But people talked. And then Chester later on started doing a lot of silly things.32 Frank Jardine took leave of absence at the end of July 1869 before further enquiries were made. On 1 August Henry Chester assumed his duties. Whatever the precise truth about who fired the guns, there seems little doubt that many Kaurareg died that day. And the question remains unanswered as to why the government representative allowed the South Sea crew to accompany him if they were uncontrollable.

The practice of retribution was continued against t h e Kaurareg. Two more expeditions plus a preliminary observational one were mounted by Henry Chester. On 2 August 1869, Chester, accompanied by two native troopers and nine Somerset Aborigines, set out in the 15-ton schooner Georgina Godfrey finding that the Sperwer had been landed up on the rocks, stripped of portable goods and burnt to the copper. Following reports up to the middle of December that year by local Aborigines that the Captain's wife and child were living with the Kaurareg, on 13 December Chester manned and armed the boat and crossed to Albany Island where the party was told that three Kaurareg canoes had landed. These Kaurareg, at first retreating, were induced to return and lay down bows and arrows and turtleshell (described as tortoiseshell by Chester). Tricking them into believing that if the head man, Teepot (Teepotti), his son and another man were to accompany them to Somerset, a return gift of tobacco would be forthcoming, Chester took the headman and the other Kaurareg hostage (his son, sensing impending treachery, made off), put them in irons (the gaol being unsafe), and then released the message to the Kaurareg that they would never return if Mrs Gascoigne and her son were not given up. After confining the men for twelve days Chester concluded that the reports were untrue; were the Gascoignes being detained they would have been given up to save T e e p ~ t . ~ ~ It will be recalled that Teepot (Passiwapod), whom Chester then released, had become Kennett's adopted father in the middle of 1867, sharing his camp and his food with the missionary. Chester now recognised his leadership qualities not only among the Kaurareg but also among the Moans and the Badulaig,

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with whom, through Kennett's good offices, they had made peace. Had the warrior mind of the Kaurareg discerned the impending tragedy the missionaries' departure signified? And were they, with new allies, determined to repulse the trespassers whom they had come to recognise were in the process of expropriating their lands and s e a ~ ? 3 ~ Yet further retribution was to come. On 5 April 1870, a year after the Sperwer slaying, twenty-five bluejackets and nineteen Aborigines (including eight troopers, five of whom were recently released from St Helena gaol for rape and armed robbery) accompanied a party led by Chester, which set out for Muralag in Her Majesty's frigate Blanche to reinvestigate the supposed detention of Mrs Gascoigne by the Kaurareg. (The garrison at Somerset had been reinforced with additional troopers and water police the previous day.) They revisited the scene of the massacre, took twenty men prisoner, set fire to their camp, badly wounded one Kaurareg trying to escape and destroyed all but two canoes.35The prisoners, as Chester reported to the Colonial Secretary on 14 April 1870 were Kulkalaig from Mount Ernest Island (Nagir). There then occurred a piece of 'un-British justice' which Chester goes on to justify to his superior. The Gudang present identified t h e prisoners 'as having been concerned' with the Kaurareg in the Sperwer massacre: 'Three of the principal men were pointed out by the Gudangs and being handed over to me by the Officer in Command were shot by the tro0pers.'~6 Say-so became tantamount to conviction. An exception was made to Somerset practice, which, as Kennett notes, was to discount the evidence of 'the natives'.37 Chester goes on to justify the executions in the following words: Every care was taken to explain t h e reason of their punishment and I am convinced they understood it. Without unnecessary bloodshed a moral effect has I trust been produced, which, with the more frequent visits of a man of war to the Straits will go far towards preventing future outrages on small trading vessels.38 Retribution had been exacted: the Kaurareg, a people whom earlier voyagers had noted for their warrior prowess and for their kindness (see Barbara Thompson) were 'dispersed'. No trace of the woman was found and Chester announced his disbelief in the story of her presence on Muralag. On 9 December 1870 the Chief Secretary, Victoria, wrote to the Colonial Secretary asking for particulars of Captain Gascoigne's death on behalf of Mrs Gascoigne in Melbourne. She had not gone on the voyage.39 Controversy and disagreement still surround the question of the amount of retribution meted out to the Kaurareg. There are those who believe it was severe. Thus an old resident of Thursday Island told a visiting naturalist in the 1950s:

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there's plenty [of skulls] lying around the Dugong Hole [Rabau Nguki?] away inland, where that mob from Somerset and TI shot up the niggers years ago.40 Mullins, on the other hand, holds the rail of caution tenaciously, in attempting to combat the tendency to assume the worst in every frontier conflict situation.41 Thus he writes, for instance: There is no mention of reprisals in any of Jardine's or Chester's reports. If there had been reprisals it is difficult to understand why the police magistrate would have felt the need to conceal them.. . The only reason reprisals might have been concealed was if they were excessive, as Moore maintains they were.42 He admits, however, to 'anomalies in Chester's reports which indicate that there might have been reprisals against the K a ~ r a r e g 'For . ~ ~instance, Chester reported that only the Badulaig 'had not been punished'.44He also notes that the Kaurareg were punished, which he suggests may have been only the hostaging of Passiwapod (Teepot). In admitting the possibility of Kaurareg casualties at the hands of Jardine's and Chester's men, Mullins seems determined to exonerate the police magistrates who, he says, 'may not have been aware that they had occurred, or for some reason failed to mention them in their reports'.45Given their intense interest in the fate of the Sperwer crew and the whereabouts of Mrs Gascoigne, ignorance of the activities of their men is most unlikely. For what reason could they have failed to mention casualties in their reports? The police magistrates were well aware of the illegality of shooting local people; such practices they knew to be frowned upon in official circles.46In the light of the continuing criticisms of Police Magistrate, Frank Jardine, which we have documented, it seems that the two had very good reason to conceal their reprisals from their superiors. The words of W Wyatt Gill, the missionary traveller who passed that island in September 1872, are a fitting epitaph: 'When we saw on Muralag [Prince of Wales Island] the scene of the more than ample revenge exacted by the whites, we wished the Gospel had been introduced earlier to these dark places of the earth.'47He does not mention the sabotage of the missionaries' efforts in 1867.

NOTES

1. Cannon 1885, 30. 2. 1982, 21. 3. Byerley 1867, 36. 4. F Jardine to Colonial Secretary, 12 May 1868, in QSA COLIA111, in-letter 2874 of 1868.

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5. F Jardine to Colonial Secretary, in QSA COLlA118 in-letter 3287 of 1869. 6. Ginivan to Commissioner of Police, Somerset, 9 October 1868, in QSA COLlA118, in-letter 703 of 1869. 7. Ginivan to Police Commissioner, forwarded with F Jardine's letter 26-68, 2 September 1868, SL-B, DL, ref Spencer 6, 8. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid.

10. Frank Jardine to Commissioner of Police, Somerset, in-letter 49-68, 15 October 1868, DL, Spencer 6. 11. F Jardine to Commissioner of Police, in QSA COLlA118 in-letter 703 of 1869. 12. Ginivan to Police Commissioner, Police Station, Somerset, 9 October 1868. 13. Commissioner of Police, Brisbane to Colonial Secretary, 24 January 1869 in QSA COLlA118 in-letter 703 of 1869. See also Ginivan to Commissioner of Police, Brisbane, 24 February 1869 in-letter 703 of 1869. 14. 'Somerset, 1 October 1868, JR Jardine Esq Dr to Constable Ginivan. Tb 4 days salting meat at 31- per day, £0.12.0'in QSA COLlA118, in-letter 703 of 1869. 15. Ginivan to Police Commissioner, 9 October, 1868. 16. Jardine to Police Commissioner, Somerset, 9 October 1868, in QSA COLlA118, in-letter 703 of 1869. 17. Ginivan to Commissioner of Police, 9 October 1868. 18. Ginivan to Commissioner of Police, 9 October 1868. 19. Ginivan to Commissioner of Police, 9 October 1868; see Jardine to Police Commissioner, 9 October 1868. 20. Ginivan to Police Commissioner, 9 October 1868. 21. Commissioner of Police to Colonial Secretary, 24 February 1869. 22. 1988, 60. Jardine's grandson, Graham Vidgen is quoted as saying: 'The only few times he actually carried out a depredation against them were when the Indooyamas and Yardigans from the Kennedy area attacked him and he went back and shot u p their camp.' (The Australian, 19-20 July 1968) 23. Kennett Report, 247. 24. Kennett Report, 250. 25. Kennett Report, 251. 26. Kennett Report, 250-51. 27. Frank Jardine informed the Under Colonial Secretary on 9 December 1868 that only three of the native troopers had arrived, a

TERROR AT SOMERSET

75

further two having deserted at Port Denison (in QSA COLlA120, inletter 1108 of 1869). John Jardine had raised the question of t h e stationing of 'Native Police' at Somerset as early as 1864 (2 December 1864 in QSA COLlA63); and his request was noted sympathetically by Cabinet on 4 July 1865 (minutes of proceedings, Despatch No 41); t h e matter was raised again by Henry Simpson in 1866, 18 August 1866 in QSA COLlA82, in-letter 2491 of 1866), and in 1867 (Simpson to Colonial Secretary, 10 November 1867), and by Frank Jardine in June 1868 (Jardine to Colonial Secretary, 3 June 1868, in QSA COLIA111, in-letter 2548 of 1868). On their arms, see F Jardine to Commissioner of Police, 1January 1869, requesting 'four of the old horse pistols for the Black Boys [Native Troopers], as it is a pitty [sic] to let them have a colts revolver' (in QSA COLlA120 in-letter 1108 of 1869). 28. See F Jardine to Colonial Secretary reporting that he 'got the boats and crews of the Melanie and went off with four native troopers to the Prince of Wales Island' (26 June 1869, in-letter 83-69, DL). See also Jardine to Captain McAusland requesting '. .. use of two boats and their crews for a few days in order that I may search the Island thoroughly for traces of the unfortunate vessel' (21 June 1869, in-letter 82-69, DL). 29. 1921. 30. 1988, 175; see F Jardine, 30 June 1869. 31. 1978, 57; see 'Murralug Massacre'. 32. P Pinney, typescript notes of interview with Booties Jardine, given to me on 2 November 1981 by Pinney with permission to quote them. 33. Chester to Colonial Secretary, 31 March 1870, in-letter 1655 of 1870. 34. According to oral tradition at Muralag, the missionary, Rev James Chalmers was killed at Goaribari on the PNG coast in 1901 in response to a message from a sacred man of Muralag who believed that Chalmers' presence signified that more Europeans would come to Muralag and take everything away belonging to Muralag people (Wees Nawia, Cassette 052/U/TI/3/80). 35. Chester to Colonial Secretary, 14 April 1870, in QSA COLlA153, in-letter 1655 of 1870. 36. Ibid. 37. Kennett Report, 247. 38. Chester to Colonial Secretary, 14 April 1870. Presumably it was these actions which Frank Jardine described to his son as the 'silly things' done by Chester (see n 32). 39. Chief Secretary, Victoria, to Colonial Secretary, 9 December 1870, in-letter 524 of 1871. 40. As reported in Barrett 1954, 5.

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41. 1988, 181. 42. Mullins 1988, 180. 43. Mullins 1988, 180. 44. Chester to Colonial Secretary, 10 August 1871, in QSA COLlA160, in-letter 2499 of 1871. 45. 1988, 181. 46. See, for instance, John Jardine to Governor Bowen, Brisbane, 21 June 1865, Sub-enclosure No 1 in Enclosure No 3 in Despatch No 41, SL-B, 312. 47. 1876,20. Whatever the truth about the treatment of the Kaurareg, some twenty years later AC Haddon collected some twenty armlets, belts, leg-bands and other dance ornaments, several clubs and bows, a bull-roarer and a turtle-shell mask, which may have been part of a larger ceremonial mask (see Moore, 1984, 48, 45-52).

CHAPTER

ENDING?

1870-77 On 1 August 1869, Frank Jardine replaced Chester as Police Magistrate, Clerk of Petty Sessions, District Registrar,~eterologicalObserver and Shipping Inspector, in which positions he remained until he was succeeded by Charles E Beddome on 16 October 1873 following an inquiry into his pearl-shelling activities whilst he was a government employee? During this second period as Police Magistrate, there were no resident missionaries, marine officers, doctors or policemen to testify against him. On 11 July 1871, ten days after visiting Darnley Island, the Schooner Surprise arrived at Somerset. On 11October the following year, the barque John Williarns landed Rev Murray, in charge of the mission and Rev Gill, plus missionary teachers from the South Seas. Little information is available on the activities of the missionaries among Aborigines in the Somerset region or among the Kaurareg. They were about five years too late. The LMS who made Somerset their headquarters from late 1872 to 1877, a period of less than five years, paid little attention to this region, their sights being set upon the eastern and far northwestern isles of the Torres Strait. On 18 January 1877, HM Chester reported to the Colonial Secretary that Rev McFarlane was moving the mission to Murray Island,2 thus ending missionary contact with the people of the Cape York region until the visits of the Anglican Missionary, Canon John Done to those communities, beginning with his visit t o the Kaurareg living at Kirriri in 1919. The following seven years after Chester's punitive action at Muralag saw the opening of the sea frontier at Somerset and the last recorded armed interchange with the Yadhaigana late in 1873. In 1877 the settlement was transferred to Thursday Island and its dilapidated buildings and other assets sold to Frank Jardine - a sort of compromise which allowed the Government to protect the remnants of the settlement against a perceived threat to them by the Yadhaigana. The period begins with the rise of Frank Jardine as a major pearlshelter. By September 1872, he was the only pearl-sheller based at Somerset, having forty employees (five South Sea Islanders and thirty-five Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) on four boats. Papers signed by Jardine as Police Magistrate and Customs House Officer were supplied to these boats.3 Nearly a year later, on 28 July 1873, the Brisbane Telegraph carried an article on 'How the Port of Somerset (Cape York) is Managed', drawing attention to the impropriety of his dual roles. On 16 October 1873 Beddome accused him of taking advantage of his 'official position to give an exclusive privilege to the boats owned by yourself to fish for

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pearl-shell in excess of your power and without any authority whatever1.*A Board of Enquiry in Brisbane concluded that none of the charges against him were proved, and Jardine saw this finding as his cue to resign on 7 November 1873. (He had argued that his brother Charles ran three of the boats; his fourth boat, the Vampyre, was, he argued, used by him as a police boat, the Government not having responded to his repeated requests for a settlement ~ e s s e l . ) ~ Jardine's last recorded action against local people while he was Police Magistrate, followed the presumed killing by the Yadhaigana of a sea captain and sheller named Atkins who worked and looked after Jardine's three pearling boats. Jardine led a raid on the Yadhaigana camp thirty miles from Somerset, which resulted in large-scale slaughter. On 11 November 1873, Beddome wrote to the Colonial Secretary noting Frank Jardine's report of an attack on a pearl-shelling camp eight miles from Somerset and the killing of James Atkins, which appeared to be part of the continuing war of resistance by the Yadhaigana. The latter had 'sent a message into the settlement that they intended to attack it, and kill every one in the place.. .'. In the ensuing fight, the Yadhaigana, who were 'in large force' thirty miles from Somerset, 'showed a most determined re~istance'.~ Beddome concludes by saying thankfully that the Yadhaigana 'were properly dispersed' with the aid of the Native troopers. Six weeks later on 5 December, Beddome reported the Yadhaigana to be 'still in large force near the settlement', noting both their silence and his preparation against further a t t a ~ k . ~ On 26 October 1874, these 'wild tribes', as Beddome called them, had removed themselves from the vicinity of the settlement, no tracks were visible according to the troopers, and the Somerset people had reported no sign of the Yadhaigana. Of the remnants of the Cape York tribes who were centred on Somerset - some sixty in all - a few were engaged in the pearl fisheries, and a few more, it was reported, 'make themselves useful on the settlement cutting wood, carrying water, or doing any kind of light work that is r e q ~ i r e d ' When .~ the naturalist Moseley reached Somerset in the Challenger on 1September 1874, he noted that the twenty-one Aborigines (including six adult males), mostly Gudang he found encamped about half a mile from the shore, were 'in great terror' of 'a tribe of fierce and more powerful Blacks'.1Â Certainly the Gudang and the Unduyamo had accommodated themselves to the European settlers. Yet there were signs of life and protest in them: in March 1870 Chester noted that a Gudang man was killed by other settlement Aborigines for his role as police informer."

AN ENDING?

79

By 1875, official opinion was that the Gudang tribe had become extinct,12 a position upheld by outside observers such as Captain Moresby, who saw the remaining Cape York Aborigines in the early 1870s as a half starved and rapidly dwindling community plagued by alcohol and disease.13 Yet in official opinion the Yadhaigana remained a threat. When the Honourable John Douglas visited the area as Premier of Queensland in November 1877, he concluded that 'it would scarcely do to abandon Somerset altogether'J4 The reason was the substantial numbers of warrior Yadhaigana. On 3 December 1877 he wrote: At Newcastle Bay, about twelve miles southward there is a powerful tribe of some 300 Aboriginal natives, known, I believe as the Yadhaiganas. These natives would, in the event of the settlement being deserted, most certainly come in and wreck the place. They might also prove very troublesome to some of the neighbouring pearl-shellers. I felt, therefore, that I should be incurring considerable responsibility if I authorised the complete abandonment of the old settlementJ5 The selling of government assets to Jardine and the latter's decision to establish a fishing station there suited the Government well: with no protection and at no cost Jardine would keep Somerset in order. So on 1 January 1878 he took possession of Somerset where he built a new residence from the remains of the government buildings. On the land and sea frontiers Jardine was now a law unto himself. By 1896, a generation later, the powerful Yadhaigana had whittled down to perhaps a hundred sur~ivors.1~ No written records are available as to how they died. As accounts given in the next chapter indicate, Aboriginal people from Cowal Creek today refer to the slaughter of whole camps of Aborigines. Aborigines today believe that Jardine is buried standing up: signifying to them his eternal unrest for the blood that lies upon his soul.

NOTES 1. See the Report of the Board of Enquiry, Management of Somerset Harbour of Refuge, with attachments, 19 January 1874 in QSAIA191 in-letter 111 of 1874. For F Jardine's reaction to the criticisms of his management of Somerset, see F Jardine to Beddome, PM, Somerset, 6 November 1873, SL-B, 1872-77. 2. Chester to Colonial Secretary, 18 January 1877.

3. Captain J Moresby as cited in Prideaux 1988. 4. See Prideaux 1988, 120 and correspondence from DL.

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80

5. As reported in Beddome to Colonial Secretary, Somerset, 11 November 1874, SL-B, 122.

6.

Ibid.

7.

Ibid, 123.

8.

Ibid,123.

9. CD Aplin to Colonial Secretary, 26 October 1874 (report on the condition of the Settlement of Somerset during the month ending 26 October 1874), SL-B, 211. Moseley (1879, 354), mentions that one of t h e six adult males he met in September 1874 was employed at the water police station. 10. 1879,354. Moseley notes the absence of canoes (360); the bamboo pipe as their 'most prized possession' (356); and the remarkable form of their graves (360).

11. Chester to Colonial Secretary, 31 March 1870. 12. Aplin to Colonial Secretary, 1 September 1875, SL-B. 13. 1876, 13. 14. Douglas to Governor of Queensland, 3 December 1877, reprinted in the Brisbane Courier, 8 December 1877. 15. Ibid. 16. Meston 1896, 2.

PART 111 IDENTITIES OLD AND NEW

CHAPTER

A COMMUNITY AT INJINOO-COWAL CREEK: MAKING A NEW LIFE On 2 November 1898 AC Haddon and his colleagues visited Somerset to study the Gudang and the neighbouring Cape York groupings about whom MacGillivray had written. Greatly disappointed they concluded that 'none live in their own country' or perhaps they had 'all died out'? Two years before, Archibald Meston, the Special Commissioner on Aborigines for the Queensland Government, had likewise concluded that the tribe which held the country from Somerset to Cape York was extinct and that there were probably no more than a hundred survivors of the 'five large tribes from Newcastle Bay', who, according to an authority unlikely to overestimate them, had been able, twenty-five years earlier, to muster 800 to 1,000 fighting men, giving a total population of some 3,000.2 Yet the people of the northern Cape York Peninsula did not vanish without trace: not all of them. Remnants of the clans, moving southwestward from Somerset along the sandbeaches from as early as 1867, found their way to other camps, intermingling with groups to which they were tied by friendship or marriage: to places known as Utingu (Simpson Bay), Alau and Injinoo (Small RiverCowal Creek),3 and Red Island Point where, before 1911, some Yadhaigana, Wuthathi and Cape York people (mainly Gudang), had established themselves as one grouping. According to McConnel, both the remaining members of the Yadhaigana and the Wuthathi, the southern neighbours of the tadhaigana (who occupied

Plate 3

Cowal Creek: the first years

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86

country between Margaret Bay (Macan) and Pudding Pan Hill) were all at 1njino0,~ an observation which accords with that of Aboriginal accounts at Injinoo today. In the first decade of the century, resistance among these survivors was beginning to take a cultural rather than a physical form. People of the same language group were forming new alliances and joining forces; they were finding newer ways of obtaining a living; modifications were occurring in their social organisation; and leaders were emerging who could give expression to a new unity

Plate 4

At Cowal Creek, 1911

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of previously separate groupings. They had now come to know many of the ways of the intruders: the power of the gun, the money economy, the running of cutters and whalers, the practice of horticulture. Many Aborigines there had worked on boats with Japanese and Europeans, with Malays and South Sea Islanders in the Torres Strait, near the Papuan coast and around the Peninsula. Their dexterity as seafarers had soon earned them the respect of skippers and crews. They had seen schools in which Islander children were learning English and arithmetic, about God and England, and a few had themselves been schooled at Mapoon Mission. According to Aboriginal sources at Injinoo today, traditionally, Injinoo offered the necessary shelter for a northwest camp for people from both sides of Cape York: the Cape York and east coast groupings who were exposed to cyclones, and the Seven Rivers people whose country included the Jardine swamps and other low-lying country subject to flooding at northwest time. That there were relatives and exchange partners among these different groupings is borne out by the readiness with which Alick Whitesand, a Wuthathi man from the Margaret Bay (Macan)-Shelburne Bay area (Whitesand), was able to set about bringing these groupings together at Injinoo. Alick Whitesand had a brother in the Seven Rivers group and he himself married a Seven Rivers woman. At Injinoo-Cowal Creek in the second decade a community began to form from the Red Island grouping and the Seven Rivers people. From the earliest days many of the people who began the settlement combined much of the knowledge they had learned from white men with their own cultural inheritance. The people were learning new skills. They were becoming gardeners as well as hunters and gatherers. The all-weather houses they built themselves on the northern side, where Cowal Creek empties into Endeavour Strait, were signs of a relatively settled existence. They began to harvest the fruit of the seeds they learnt to plant. They also continued to dig wild yams, to harvest sugar-bag (wild honey), wongai and other fruit and to hunt marsupials on land and dugong, turtle and fish in the surrounding seas.

OFFICIAL RECOGNITION OF THE INTER-GROUP COMMUNITY In the years from 1918 to the mid-1920s, authoritative and influential outsiders - the Chief Protector of Aboriginals, Canon John Done, Supervisor of the Anglican Mission for the Diocese of Carpentaria, and the writer Anthony Wilkin - noted and applauded the Injinoo people's entirely self-initiated and voluntary activities. Their existence as a self-reliant community was noted and praised by the Chief Protector of Aboriginals. This settlement, wrote JW Bleakley, in the Report of the Aboriginals Department for the year 1919:

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which was established by themselves and ... carried on without European management, has proved that the native is ready and anxious to adopt suitable civilised ideas if given encouragement or opportunity. These people support themselves entirely by working their own fishing vessels and gardens, selling the produce in Thursday Island.6 Just at this moment, the Chief Protector was able to see t h e Cowal Creek Community as living proof of the adaptive capacity of Aboriginal groups. The context of this appraisal was the adoption of the principle of 'complete segregation'. The Chief Protector's announcement of the creation of a 'betterment scheme' in the previous year had been the signal for the sorting out and separation of various groupings based upon amounts of 'coloured b l ~ o d ' as , ~ well as the recognition and assessment of various stations, missions and other communities. The community at Cowal Creek, now being noted by the Chief Protector, had existed for some years; new priorities assured that it would be recognised and evaluated. It was on the Chief Protector's 'map'. He does not mention that in their founding period the people of Cowal Creek had neither encouragement nor opportunity from any government source; nor does he acknowledge the tragedy of their destruction in the period from 1864, or government complicity in that destruction. At this point the Chief Protector's praise for the achievements of the people at Cowal Creek (Small River), who were combining their old seafaring and fishing skills with gardening and marketing, is unqualified: A case worthy of special mention is that of the remnants of the old Seven Rivers and Red Island tribes, who, practically unaided and of their own volition, have established for themselves a small settlement on Small River [Injinoo-Cowal Creek], near Cape York. A neat little village of bark huts has been built; and gardening, fishing, etc., are carried on with creditable success. Bleakley then quotes from the local Protector's report on the community's handling of a whaleboat provided by the Aboriginals Department: 'The whaleboat supplied to the Small River Settlement has proved a great success. The Councillors and Police are taking great interest in the boat, and are looking after it well. They are now able to pay periodical visits to Thursday Island, and sell the products from their own gardens, such as pumpkins and bananas. Besides fishing for their own needs, they also sell oysters. The possession of the boat seems to make them far more settled and contented. A small portion of their earnings is paid into a Boat Account towards the maintenance of the ~ e s s e l . ' ~

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89

Although the Chief Protector may not have known it, his observations touched upon an important truth: these people were sandbeach Aborigines and like the Torres Strait Islanders sea travel was at the centre of their lives. Before the influenza epidemic, which began in 1918, there were 200 people at Cowal Creek; in 1922 after the epidemic their numbers had dropped to ninetyis and the population rose to 184 by 1925. Reverend Done describes their neat rows of houses on the north side of the spot where Cowal Creek empties into Endeavour Strait close t o a year-round fresh water spring. Their first dwellings there were made of bush poles and sheets of stringybark. Their height was just over four feet six inches, the floors were of sand and outside each a small fire was kept b ~ r n i n gIn . ~preparing for a more settled existence their four-walled houses had replaced the single-walled dwellings. There were plenty of messmates, mahogany gums and ironwoods to provide materials for houses. Food remained abundant and the people were well-fed. In the mid-twenties, Anthony Wilkin observed that the short history of Cowal Creek had proved that the natives would work for themselves. They have their own garden plots and banana plantations, and are running boats and industries on a communistic basis. Without any encouragement from the average white man, these natives have developed to the point of maintaining clean, well-kept villages and governing their own affairs in an orderly manner under a council appointed from among their fellows. The houses in the village are swept clean daily; they tend their gardens in the early mornings and meet for religious worship each night. These meetings are thoroughly appreciated, and while it may be that the natives do not quite understand the dogma taught, they do appreciate the atmosphere established by congregational effort - even more so, perhaps, than do many whites whose example they follow. The children are taught simple arithmetic, reading, and money values, and show a healthy development in mind and body. The councillors solve all domestic problems, and one of their number is appointed police sergeant and is entitled to carry out their ordersJO Three features of the Cowal Creek settlement stand out. In the first place, the people of two groupings had brought themselves together of their own free will, led by their own leaders. They were not 'gathered up' against their wishes. Second, separate and often hostile groupings had come to terms in the face of devastating change. Third, in order to cope with their new situation, they had taken up a semisettled way of life. They might be called the 'hunter-gardeners' of Cape York, with all the conflicting loyalties and hopes that such a name implies. They ate the food they planted at Injinoo; and in the appropriate season many of them made their

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way back to other country for the harvest." They travelled on horseback as well as on foot or by canoe. They adapted and continue to adapt to new circumstances taking advantage of new possibilities; if you go to Cowal Creek today they take you hunting in an outboard dinghy or a four-wheel drive. Reverend Done describes their continuing prowess as hunters. In his eyes their spirit of the adventure of hunting remained strong; they remained 'number one' marksmen with the spear. To see an Aborigine at his best, noted Rev Done, i s to go hunting with him': I have been left near some bushes with the spear throwers, and the other men would disappear. To one not used to them, the way they can disappear in the bush is uncanny. He is there, there he isn't! It is as simple as that ... The men would spear what they needed, the rest could wait for another day ... the men never killed for the sake of killing, but always for food, and nothing edible was ever wasted. Even when taking turtle eggs from a nest, a few were always left behind and the nest filled again with sand. 'Suppose we take 'em all egg, bimeby no more turtle.'12 They continued to know the land and sea much as their ancestors had done; 'it was the fashion of the natives... to remember a plant'?3They never passed by 'wild' food, nor did they waste it. And when the time for wild yams came they would move to other country; even as far away as Macan-Margaret Bay they could be found camping in the right season. So their gardening remained framed by their inheritance as hunters who moved in accordance with the seasons.14 Fifty years after the school begun by the missionary teacher William Kennett had had its short life at Somerset in 1867, the hopes of a new generation of Cape York Aborigines for a school and a mission were kindled at Cowal Creek. In 1923 the Anglican Diocese responded to the people's request and began a mission at Cowal Creek. In the eyes of the Church it was an 'Act of F'aith'.15 Lacking government subsidy, it was financed by voluntary contributions from the churches of the Torres Strait Islanders. In April 1923, with the arrival of Satraika, a school teacher from Mabuiag, the mission was opened. By 1937, it is claimed, no white man had ever lived at Cowal Creek or aided the people in their venture. Described by one writer in 1937 as 'unique' in its Aboriginal establishment and control, its absence of white supervisors and the existence of a self-run and fully elected 'legislative council' at Cowal Creek. 'Unknown to the authorities, some bush natives ... decided to build their own settlement.' The authorities only discovered this community with 'several "streets" of neat huts, surrounded by gardens and small farms' in 1915.16 In 1939, Ewen Patterson described the community in Walkabout as an 'Aboriginal utopia'. With its well-planned village, and rows of neat, well-

A COMMUNITY A T INJINOO-COWAL CREEK

91

constructed bark cottages facing picturesque avenues lined with white-painted stones, waving coconut palms, mango trees and other luxuriant tropical foliage, it appeared to him as 'a notable experiment in Aboriginal self-control ... an outstanding project in which people had been left to work out their own destiny .. .'J7 During its twenty-five years' existence, Patterson went on to conclude, the settlement 'progressed steadily, and today it ranks among the finest Aboriginal settlements in Australia ...'. In the twenty years between 1919 and 1939 reports of the Aboriginal Department noted many improvements in the conditions of life of the Cowal Creek community. Although they neither took financial responsibility for the community's development, nor provided the measure of security afforded the Torres Strait Islanders under the 1912 Act, which formally reserved lands for Islanders, Department officials kept a watchful eye on the community and provided limited assistance. During 1926, for example, the village was remodelled and a bridge was built across a large gully, coconuts were planted and the vessels Fly and Cherrie earned £34 and £18 respectively for marine produce.18Two years later more houses were built and improvements were made to the streetsJ9 During the 1920s and 1930s the population increased, partly by natural growth and partly by people from the major river campsites to the north of the Dulhunty River - MacDonald River people and additional Seven Rivers people -joining the community at Cowal Creek. On 30 June 1930 the population had risen to 243;20and at the end of 1933, it had decreased to 218, a fact said to be due solely to the departure of a number of MacDonald River people, who, as the Chief Protector noted, left 'the village, to return to their nomadic life in the McDonnell [sic] district'.21 Given its voluntary origin, it is not surprising to find that life at Cowal Creek is remembered as mainly peaceful, a contrast to life at the missions where people from still hostile groupings were brought together by force.22But there were fights, notably between the Seven Rivers and MacDonald River people, who had been rounded up and brought to Cowal Creek. For example, older people today recall an occasion when Deacon Bowie went down to the 'spearing ground' near the creek and broke spears over his knee, successfully putting an end to fighting between MacDonald and Seven Rivers men. After that, it is said, there was no more fighting between the two, but at one time the MacDonald River people moved to a campsite on the 'other side' of Cowal Creek.

FORCES FOR CHANGE: LEARNING NE W SKILLS From the beginning, the Injinoo people were forced by circumstances to modify their customs and style of life, and a number of influences contributed to the

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people's engagement in gardening. South Sea Islanders, such as Charlie Lifu, who had worked at Somerset for Frank Jardine, moved to Alau and settled at Cowal Creek in 1923, were important early influences. His daughter, Colina, who married Jimmy Pablo, a man from Wuthathi country in the Shelburne Bay area, lived at Cowal Creek until her death in the early 1980s. A man who made a special contribution to the development of practical gardening a n d other skills associated with a settled existence among local people was Jack McLaren, a white adventurer who established the first coconut plantation in the Cape York region in 1911 and who lived at Utingu (Simpson Bay) for eight years until 1919. He is credited with having planted the first coconut trees in the area; according to Aboriginal oral accounts, following his example, Frank Jardine began a plantation at S o m e r ~ e t . ~ ~ His plantation, whose establishment and growth was assisted first by the work of the Red Island people, soon became the talk of Aborigines along the sandbeachesZ4Many of the east coast people moving westward came there, worked for a while, learnt some gardening skills and other practical skills from McLaren, often married people of other clans, and gradually came together at Cowal Creek. From among the east coast Yadhaigana, came Billy Wymarra, a man with 'the manner and bearing of a white man ... a kind of white black-man', as McLaren saw him.25He became an 'excellent supervisor' of the Utingu plantation. He also remained a man of his own people: 'Dear to him was the native habit of squatting about the camp when the day's work was done, and gossiping over the events, and droning fragments of chants, or maybe staring aimlessly out across the sea' and later joining wholeheartedly in the dancing and singing.26 He, like many of the Aborigines among those groups which came together, was first and foremost an Aborigine. He was a man who could act as mediator between his own people, with whom he identified, and white men, whom he was able to meet, and when necessary confront, on their own terms. My CrowdedSolitude, McLaren's account of his years at Utingu offers high praise for the capabilities of Wymarra as a non-authoritarian leader of his own people, knowing t h e ways of white men and speaking their language fluently. The folk tradition which surrounds Billy Wymarra among his own family and people centres on his legendary agility in sniper tactics with his notorious foe - Frank Jardine of Somerset. In Aboriginal accounts, the Red Island people had 'marched down to McLaren' a t Utingu and asked him about beginning a mission. This would have happened between 1911 and 1918. What they sought was not 'protection', but the right to participate in the new way of life - to gain new knowledge for themselves and for their children, some of the 'whiteman' foodstuffs, especially flour (but

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not rice), kerosene lamps, cloth and a cutter or whaler, which they could run themselves, as was happening in the Tbrres Strait, especially through Papuan Industries Limited.27

A FORGOTTEN HISTORY In 1922 it was recognised by Church and State that the indigenous peoples were not dying out; in fact Aboriginal and Islander populations were rising.28 It was in this context that the Anglican Diocese began its modest and unsubsidised mission to the Cowal Creek people in 1923. Unlike the tiny school which began with eight Gudang pupils at Somerset and which Kennett had been forced to abandon in 1868, the school a t Cowal Creek grew and flourished. The community consolidated and developed under the conditions of a new chapter which was opening in the history of the Aboriginal and Islander people of Queensland. The keynote was segregation. The Cowal Creek community did not fit any of the categories created within the Aboriginals Department, and it is interesting to note the varying ways in which this anomaly among Reserves, Government Settlements and Mission was categorised from time to time. It was not a Government Station or a Reserve under the 1912 Act; it was a Mission after 1923, but unlike St Paul's Mission at Moa Island it had no legal status in the form of leasehold. Unlike other Aboriginal communities Cowal Creek had no appointed European superintendent. In 1923Cowal Creek was included among 'tribes on the mainland' who were 'camped' at specified places. From 1924 to 1928 it was included under Missions, but unlike Lockhart River Mission for example, Cowal Creek was unlisted.29 In 1931 Cowal Creek Settlement was included among 'stations visited', and in 1933 it was referred to as 'the native village a t Cowal Creek',30 being differentiated from both 'Mission Stations' and 'the Aboriginal camps' at Stewart River, Batavia and Coen. Cowal Creek community defied the all-inclusiveness of categories defined and listed by the government administration: by 1933 a bureaucratic recognition of its permanency led to its differentiation from 'Aboriginal camps' and 'tribes on the mainland'. Its lack of government and church funding set it apart from Government Stations and Missions. The variegated titles chosen from year to year to classify the community at Cowal Creek is inadvertently a tribute to its uniqueness and individuality. The unintentionality of the tribute is underlined; for a self-active, independent stance was incompatible with the tenets of Protection and the paternalist segregation program enacted over a period. Over a time, the brave, self-reliant beginning at Cowal Creek-Injinoo came to be overshadowed and forgotten by governments, missionaries and other

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outsiders. Was cultural annihilation the necessary sequel to the physical genocide of the majority of NCYP people in the years following settlement at Somerset in 1864? Was the ideology of a degraded race, endorsed by officialdom i n the era of settlement, necessarily manifest in policies and decrees which obliterated the memory of the creative and independent efforts which first produced a community a t Injinoo? For Cowal Creek people, this era of forgetfulness began four years after the Chief Protector had delivered his unqualified praise for the community's thorough-going self-determination and self-management. After the Anglican Church supplied a missionary teacher from Mabuiag, Torres Strait, the terms of the Chief Protector's viewpoint on the community's self-initiated, voluntary activities underwent a change: now it seemed that outsiders had induced 'the Injinoo Aboriginal Community' to make a 'crude start' at gardening. In 1918 he had commended the Cowal Creek people's 'creditable success' in voluntary gardening, building, fishing and marketing.al After a missionary arrived in 1923, the Chief Protector wrote of Cowal Creek community: This settlement was visited on six occasions, and they have now been induced to commence gardening on lines similar to the islanders. Naturally their efforts are crude. It is pleasing for them to have made a start...32 It is as though in the newer context of government and mission intervention in this voluntary community's activities, the Chief Protector had not given rounded praise for their subsistence and market-oriented activities in horticulture only four years earlier. The Chief Protector was handling the discrepancy between the voluntary character of the Cowal Creek project and the paternalist premises of the post-war 'betterment schemes' by forgetfulness of his own earlier acknowledgement of the community's self-evident independent prowess in gardening and commerce. This is not t o say that he failed to continue to acknowledge the voluntary character of the original beginning of the community at Injinoo in his annual reports for the years 1924-28.33He also noted that the people there were carrying on 'without white supervision', maintaining 'themselves by their gardens, their fishing vessel and hunting'.34Yet over this period the emphasis changed from full recognition of their self-management of all their affairs including their economic projects involving production and money management to one which minimises their abilities in this regard in the pre-mission period at Cowal Creek. Thus in 1924 the Chief Protector emphasises both the simplicity and the imitative character of their pre-1923 lives:

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Until a trained native mission teacher was sent to open a school there recently, these people carried on a simple village life, in imitation of that seen on the islands of Torres Strait, governing themselves, working their fishing boats and gardens, and doing their trading through the Protector at Thursday Island.35 Once again, in the following year, this supposed imitative quality is given importance: 'They follow.. . the village government system in vogue in the Torres Strait Islands.. .'.36 Yet clearly a system of law and order was visible in the period before the missionaries from the Torres Strait began to arrive from 1923 onwards. On 1 December 1922, Rev John Done negotiated a site for the first teacher's residence with Councillor Tbmrny Dodd and two p0licemen.3~ When I first visited Injinoo-CowalCreek in August and December 1980, Aboriginal people there acquainted me with this submerged story. A form of official forgetfulness by both Church and State is underlined by the role which came to be taken on by Torres Islanders, first at Cowal Creek and later in the NCYP as a whole. The official and public history of Cowal Creek begins with the opening of the Anglican Mission in 1923; recognition of the existence of a prior history is limited to the already-mentioned statements of the Chief Protector. The Torres Strait Islanders, who formed the 'professional cream' of Cowal Creek social life as the first clergy and teachers there, are accorded a special place in Church and government accounts.38No one would wish to deny or diminish the important contribution of Torres Strait Islanders like Satraika from Mabuiag Island, the first school teacher, Rev Francis Bowie and Jomen Tamwoy (school teacher), both from Badu Island; but for reasons which they would not care to endorse, the Islander presence at Cowal Creek from 1923 onwards has served to obliterate the memory of a prior history. The displacement of Cowal Creek Community through t h e establishment of Bamaga as a township, and the gradual peopling of the BamagaRed Island Point area with predominantly Torres Strait Islanders, began early in the 1950s. This displacement began with the arrival of Saibai emigres to Bamaga after a tidal wave at Saibai in 1948 had led to the devastation of many of their lands. On 24 July 1948, 44,500 acres in the 'Red Island Point-Cape York area was reserved for the benefit of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inhabitants of the State.. .. The area, containing all the Higginsfield military installations, was intended particularly for those in the Tbrres Strait-Thursday Island area.'39In addition to Saibai emigres, as we shall see in the next chapter, this was the area to which the people from Nurupai-Horn Island were intended to be moved. In January 1949 work commenced in the Cape York area which came to be known

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as Bamaga. A year later the layout of the Bamaga township, now 'the centre of administration of the area',40had taken shape; and the provision of water was well underway on a fifty-acre cleared area. Cowal Creek Community was now described officially as the 'old Government controlled camp'. For the purposes of 'effective supervision', the 53,120 acres on which the community lived were amalgamated with the newly-reserved 44,500 acres (a total of 97,620 acres), and the people were totalled, making a combined Aboriginal and Islander population of 350.41 A new area - 'the Cape York Peninsula' - had been constituted with Bamaga at its centre. Although the composition of the new township was mixed, the names by which the township, the local creek and later, the recreation reserve and many of the streets came to be known, were those of prominent Islander families. Only down at Injinoo did people remember that Bamaga was really Ichuru. Eventually Islanders came to exceed the number of Aborigines in the NCYP by more than two to one. The population in July-August 1978 for example, was Aborigines 473, Islanders 881. (Islanders have frequently been promoted over local people; they have also been used to dislodge them from their homelands as happened at Mapoon.) The integration of Injinoo as a quite secondary entity within an administrative sector known officially as the Northern Peninsula Area (NPA) is consistent with an overall imperialism towards Aborigines and Aboriginal land in the NCYP which has been a characteristic of Queensland government policies for most of this century. As the community at Injinoo has begun to make clear since the middle of the 1980s, all the land in the NCYP belongs to customary owners who are, in the main, centred at Injinoo. This fact remains unrecognised in official policies, although many, if not most of the immigrant Islanders are politely aware of their situation as guests. There are no official memorials to original Aboriginal leaders and knowledgeable figures in the early days of Cowal Creek Community's selfformation before the establishment of the Anglican Mission in 1923. Names like Alick Whitesand, Billy Wymarra, Tommy Dodd, Solomon Woosup and Jimmy Pablo are given no due in official history, although Alick Whitesand was provided with a half-moon-shaped brass breast pendant as a sign of government recognition. In the course of the 1980s the community and council became vocal about their rights being ignored and made the claim that Aboriginal customary owners are not consulted or informed on land use by the emigres to the NCYP or by the Queensland Government (see Chapter 9). The prior rights of customary owners, the destruction of the clans, and the history of Injinoo are, of course, well known among the Aborigines of the NCYP

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and beyond. The following two accounts are taken from many of those remembered by Injinoo people. Local oral history goes back to the arrival of the first explorers in their country, and in telling the story of Billy Wymarra - the last of the Yadhaigana guerilla resisters at Somerset - Ted Wymarra goes right back to the arrival of the Kennedy party in Yadhaigana country in 1848. Aboriginal accounts today square with that reported by Archibald Meston in 1896: 'One old fellow remembered Kennedy's expedition of 1848, and all the fatal circumstances of the last sad days. He said Kennedy had been shooting blacks all along his track.'42 Snowy Woosup, whose father Solomon Woosup was one of the early founders of the community, tells the story of Injinoo.

GETTING EVEN, THE YADHAIGANA: TED WYMARRA The Waimara-Pablo clan decided to get even with Jardine...

We should go back to Kennedy. It's been passed on to me by the old guy, Willie Somerset; but also another old guy, a lot older -Alick Sau. That Wymarra-Pablo tribe started off around Escape River. Wymarra is really Wai-mara. They were involved in the Kennedy massacre - or victory, or whatever you call it. In recorded history they've got Kennedy going up to the Escape River and then all of a sudden being attacked by blacks. What I was told is that these tribes were out fishing and hunting and heard all these shots, because Kennedy and his men came along and thought, ' I f we don't show a bit of fear now they'll kill us all! So theyfired and killed a couple of them. The Waimara-Pabloclan decided 'to get even! I n the white man's history i t said Kennedy was murdered by the blacks; but it's not really true because they were the ones that first started it. It's onlyfortunate for Jacky Jacky that they didn't catch them [all]. They were interrupted in their day-to-day lives. Kennedy and his men prepared themselves and said: 'If these blacks are going to come and attack us, they'll do it at night.' But as it turned out the clan came when they weren't prepared and wiped them out during the day. Isuppose you know the rest of the story. Jacky Jacky swam off to Escape River to the tip of Cape York, then he was rescued by a boat, and they took him back to wherever he came from and he told the story. The tribe moved from Escape River right round the Cape asfar as the MacDonald River. They werefeared by all the other tribes even though they spoke different dialects of the same language, even as far as Lockhart. They 'ruled' or had control of a section of land as big as Ireland. People feared them; they were known for their trickery and witchcraft, which they used a lotfrom time to time. They took advantage of what people feared. And Wairnara means head man, or witchdoctor. Powerful.

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Out of this clan came Wymarra, and the missionaries gave h i m the name Billy. He was feared and respected. And at that time Jardine was at Somerset. Billy Wymarra w a s a comical character/rom time to time, but he was also a feared man. I can tell you two or three stories about he and Jardine hawing duels. One of them was when Jardine established his plantation at Somerset. According to the old people, Billy Wymarra decided to steal some coconuts and Jardine saw thisfigure u p this tree. He knew that i t was Billy Wymarra so he fired these shots into the tree, and each time he fired Billy swung around the other side of the tree, and he did that and slid all the way down. The other one was the story of how after that episode Billy and a few others were going to get rid of Jardine once and for all because he was the guy who interfered with their customs and their land, and he did a lot of killing. Jardim had a white horse which was lame in one leg, so they decided they were going to catch him. Now this horse used to graze out over the plains. Billy crept u p one day and he saw Jardine near this white horse. And he aimed his spear, and if he'd thrown it i t would have gone through Jardine's neck. Jardine bent down to pat the horse's leg, so the spear went through the horse's neck, which galloped away only to die later. Old m a n Billy, as they called him, went off into the scrub making faces which said, 'You try and catch me! And took off. The other time they tried to get rid of Jardine he was a bit cunning. They knew where he was camped. The reason why they were going to kill h i m this time was because he shot this husband and wife and baby. They were out hunting and they heard the dogs barking. They knew i t was Jardine because he was the only one who had dogs, and the dogs didn't bark like dingoes. The husband panicked and flushed the wife into the pond and gave her some water lily vines to suck under the leaves. The dogs started barking at the husband u p in the tree ready to spear him. But the gun was quicker than the spear and Jardine blew his head off. Then he went for the wife and cut her breasts off, picked u p the baby, grabbed her or h i m by the legs and smashed her against the ti-tree. Billy Wymarra and a few of the others heard about this and decided they were going to really kill h i m this time. They came after him, but he knew that they were coming and he ambushed them. He made a dummy out of his swag, made i t look like a m a n having a sleep and got u p the tree. He shot them - exceptfor Billy Wymarra who skittled off somewhere [great laughter]. It was about this time that Jack McLaren came around, about 1911. And Billy Wymarra's wife was the older sister of m y grandmother whose name was Wandihnu. There's also the story that he went overseas on one of these bgche- de-mer ships. He and old m a n Pablo, who were the last of these tribesmen. And they say that these two visited places like Hong Kong and Singapore. They were shanghai 'd. They also lived on Thursday

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-

Island. When Billy Wymarra came back to Cowal Creek there was this white m a n with this plantation at Utingu named McLaren who had just come back from New Guinea. He thought he'd have this copra plantation and he'd just made a business deal with a guy on Thursday Island who'd said: 'If you want to face those blacks over there, well you do that part of it, and I'll supply all the money, but you've got to stick i t out there for eight yews'. It was a sort of gentleman's agreement. So he established this plantation and at the time Billy W y w a came back Jack was having problems with workers, because Aboriginal people weren't w e d to the idea of working set times, dates and what have you. Billy had learnt all these t r i c w r o m Asians and white people and he said: 'Look, I'll make these people work for you! So he became the overseer 43

INJINOO, THE INSIDE STORY: SNOWY WOOSUP Old Alick took them to the promised land

...

My people came u p here to Cowal Creek through a bloke called Alick Whitesand; his real name is Alick Pascoe. He came all the way from Pascoe; he was adopted by some people from Pascoe River When he grew to manhood he thought to himself how some of the older people had told him: 'You're not/rom here. You're from the Seven River tribe. Your elder brother u p there is Woosup.' That's m y grandfather. I don't know how that name came; it's not a n Aboriginal name. Maybe they made a brother by adoption and picked u p the name. Alick's a real hunter, a real warrior. He came all this way to Seven Rivers. Made his track coming down to see his brother, Woosup: 'I think we're a bit toofar away here at Seven Rivers. I think we better go somewhere else, but not yet. I'm gonna do a bit of scouting.' So he travelled all the way and came u p this way. Walked by himself; not only by himself, there's a lot of these wild people from different tribes about. He looked at this Small River, known as Cowal Creek today: 'Ah, Tl, Thursday Island, i s just there nearby. I think this is a good place to settle.' He went back and told Mr Woosup, 'We better shift'. So they broke u p the camp at Seven Rivers and they all came u p this way. They follow this old Alick Whitesand, Come, come, come. Other side of the Jardine River they had to spell, wait the tide. Mr Woosup, m y old grandfather was sick. He died there. They did all they could for him. They buried h i m on the other side of the Jardine River, in the mouth of the river; and he's still there. They buried h i m slowly, taking their time coming u p here. They didn't hurry. They had to watch it. Some of those wild people were their enemies. They crossed to the other side of the river now. They came u p this way now. They come up, come up, come u p on this other bank,

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and so they named i t Small River - the language name is Injinoo, place of cool water m y settled down on the other side of the bank; you can see where the camp has been there. They hadn't come u p this end yet; they camped on the other side. There's a n old cemetery there. They gradually moved over this sidefrom the old camp there. One time there was a big flu - 1918. That's when people were living on the other side, before that some were living here too. Everyone was down with the flu. Old Alick was the only m a n who buried the dead. He was so strong he didn't get the flu.He was the only one and he would takethem to the grave. Two in one grave. Didn't make coffins. Even three or four in one grave. Now you can see three or four crosses there in the cemetery on the other side. Water was on this side. They found a spring, a really running spring on this side. So they made a camp there;made humpy huts there. Clean up, clean up, clean u p everything. So Alick thought: 'Oh, everything's all right! Before old Woosup died he told Alick: 'Well, m y brother, you're m y eldest brother [you'll be the eldest brother now]. I'll get you to look after all our tribe here; you're responsible. I'm getting too old and I'm sick. You take them and you look after them.' Alick's a cousin of old Woosup. Thefirst lot of people did a bit of clearing on the other side. When everything's all right and the flu was over, they shifted from the other side of the bank and started to build their humpies. There's only a small passage where they can come in and land their dinghies. Bark canoes then. When they lived here on this side they start to work, work, work; make everything good. Alick thought to himself: 'All right, let's see how far this land goes! He goes u p and sees all these Bed Island tribe people. They were all mixed u p now: somefrom Utingu, some from Somerset. They'd all been scattered; some werefrom, Mr McLaren's time. They were scattered everywhere; they all married in different ways. Alick made the trip that way. He brought all these people here. In the middle of that Red Island mob he had a bloke who knew him; he was some relationfrom Whitesand. They'd mixed u p through marriage. All right, he talked language. The dogs started to bark. That's what I was told. This is his own story. He went to the camp; the dogs started to run. Everyone went with their spears. This old Alick talked their language; different dialect. Another old fellow ran out: 'That's m y son, m y son!' They welcome him. He knew their language; they had mixed u p with other groups. He went hunting with them. He said to them: 'I've got a camp with a good river close to TI; so you people had better follow me, I think.' He w a s talking to the bloke he knew, one of the chiefs; I don't know his name.

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So they brought all of this Red Island tribe here, and they and the Seven River tribe started to get used to each other, though they talked different languages [dialects]. All right, nobody starts fighting. Everybody loved each other. Then Alick started again. Go, go, go and find all the people who had been frightened by Jardine: at the last camp he'd shot most of them; u p at Bamaga down near where the police station i s now. That was the last camp; he just shot them right out fin cold blood] children and all. Alick brought all these fellows come u p here too. Well that's how the history of Cowal Creek goes. And this one's a real true story. When these Red Island people came u p here after Alick made them good u p there, they back here. That 's the same thing I wrote in m y book. That's the same one where the big fighting took place and Jardine shot all thesefellows u p at Bamaga now, Black Gin Creek [IchuruJ. The creek was all red from the shooting. The men went hunting and left all the women in the camp. Jardine was passing through there and shot all the women; some with babies. All there swimming in the Black Gin Creek, known as Bamaga today. That's the second Gallipoli [raising voice on second]. Nineteen fifteen, Gallipoli, but the shooting there might have been before that. The shooting there was something much bigger than at Somerset. At Somerset he might fire o n two or three persons, but they'd r u n away. B u t this was the biggest crowd that was here. Could have been more than hundreds. They might have come to that camp for turkey eggs or something. Now this was a respected [safe], customary place, but somebody stepped in there. [This was the m a i n place to get food, according to Lorry MacDonald.] Alick brought all these people from Bed Island (RIP). He'd spend three days with them, three days with others; everybody knows him, they talk language, they came back to Cowal Creek, called Small River then by the Protector, Mr Bleakley or somebody. All right, Alick bring all these fellows from RIP come u p here. Seven River tribes and then start to talk language and come to be f i r m friends. Then Alick thinks, 'By gee, everything's all right. So I ' m going to t r y another place.' Happy, say one of the tribes got dugong or turtle, well everyonefrom the other tribes came u p and helped them. It was really good; dancing all night. No fights, no nothing. Well,Alick thinks, 'Well, I think I better start again', and made u p his m i n d to go to MacDonald. When he was passing throughfrom Whitesand and coming this way he passed through MacDonald, known as Skardon today o n the army m a p where the telegraph station used to be. There's another big crowd there and he had his relatives there too I think. He talked to the chief: 'Youfellows better come u p there.' The MacDonald tribe - the new settlersfrom 'inside',bush people, the MacDonald tribe.

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The last one to come. After three days. Old Billy Wymarra was here then. Anyone who wants to Wnte the history of Cowal Creek must know that that 'S what 'S been going on in the early days. In Cowal Creek there's three tribes: Seven River, MacDonald and Red Island. Before this McLaren came here. Then Jardine came [this way]. And all the Wymarra-Somersetfellows [Yadhaigana/Gudang] were still there and Jardine started to scatter them everywhere. They tried to get h i m with spears, but they couldn't get h i m and he had this bang-too-too-too,revolver. Anyway those who survived, who got away from Jardine, stayed there until Old Alick took them to the promised land known as Cowal Creek today. When the MacDonald people came u p and settled at their new village now, they didn't know how to make gardens. But there's one old South Sea bloke called Johnson and this same Johnson used to live among the Seven River tribe. He was like one of them. And anyway he planted gardens at Seven Rivers and today they're still there with lemon trees and everything. He came u p to Cowal Creek and taught them a little bit. Then all these teachers started to come in. Church of England teachers. You can still see his gardens right round to Red Island Point. My father, Solomon Woosup was out in a boat. He'd had a bit of education; knew how to write. My grandfather used to take h i m down. One time m y grandfather went down to Mapoon. He had a relation u p there until now. And he heard about these children going to school. He went back to m y daddy and said, 'I think we'd better go! So he started at school. Grandfather tried to coax some of the other boys from the camps, but they were too frightened. For h i m i t was school, school, school. The teacher would flog them with a stingray tail for doing some mischief. And when m y grandfather came, m y father said: 'I'll never go to school again. You see all the scars o n m y back?' Old grandfather took h i m away, but m y father learnt how to count and all that.44

NOTES 1. Haddon 1901, 96; see 1904, 221. 2. 1896, 724.

3. According to Byerley the name Cowal means watercourse (1867, 73).

4. 1939-40, 56. 5. QPP, 1920, Vol 2, 9. 6. QPP, 1920, Vol 2 , 7.

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7. Aboriginals Department - Information contained in Report for the Year ended 31 December 1918, QPP, 1919-20, Vol 2, 10. 8. Done diaries. Done notes the presence at Cowal Creek of people from Newcastle Bay as well as Red Island and Mt Adolphus. In 1920 the Chief Protector reported thirty-two deaths at Cowal Creek, the survivors migrating 'to the south side of Cockatoo River, Utingu, and other camps'. (QPP, 1921, Vol 2, 7) 9. Done, Men of the Outback: The Beginning of Cowal Creek Mission, ABC Program (nd) included with J Done's diaries; see Stevenson 1987, 61. Done also notes the presence of a small number of people camped at Macan (Margaret Bay) on 9 May 1921. 10. 1928, 123. 11. McLaren 1966,80-82, writes of their movements with the seasons in the period between 1911 and 1918. Reverend Done notes in his diary the frequent absence of people at the Jardine River (see 5 November 1922, 19 June 1925, some of them returning to Cowal Creek the following day). 12. Diaries. 13. McLaren 1966, 78; see 44 et passim. 14. Thomson 1939, 209-21, provides an illuminating basic account of seasonal movement among the Wik Mungkan. 15. Done, Carpentarian, 1923. 16. Cowal Creek Aboriginals, Cummins and Campbells Monthly Magazine, April 1937. 17. Australia's Strangest Settlement, Walkabout 6 (2), 47. 18. Aboriginal Department - Information contained in Report for the Year ended 31 December 1926, QPP, 1927, Vol 1, Sess 11, 10. 19. Aboriginal Department - Information contained in Report for the year ended 31 December 1928, QPP, 1929-30, Vol 1, Sess I, 11. 20. Aboriginal Department - Information contained in Report for the Year ended 31 December, 1930, QPP, Vol 1, Sess 111-IV, 14. In 1925 the figure was 184 (QPP, 1926, 11); in 1926 it was 197 (QPP, 1927, 10); in 1931 it was 238 (QPP, 1932, 8). 21. Aboriginal Department - Information contained in Report for the Year ended 31 December, 1932, QPP, Vol 1, 11. 22. For example, Lockhart River Mission, established in 1923 (see Flo Kennedy, unpublished autobiography; Sis, Book of Islanders 1984, B88-B89. 23. See Jack, Vol 11, 371. 24. McLaren 1966, 105. 25. McLaren 1966, 125.

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26. McLaren 1966, 127. 27. See Sharp 1980, 1-16; Austin 1972, 38-62. 28. QPP, 1923, Vol I, 7. 29. QPP, 1925,Vol 1, Sess I, 10; QPP, 1926, Vol 1, Sess I, 11; QPP, 1927, Vol 1, Sess 11, 10; QPP, 1928, Vol 1, 10; QPP, 1929-30, Vol 1, Sess 1 , l l . 30. QPP, 1934, 10. 31. QPP, 1919-20, v01 2, 10. 32. QPP, 1924, 7. 33. For example, 'The settlement voluntarily established at Small River near Cape York by natives of mainland camps.. .' (QPP, 1925, Vol 1,Sess III, 10); 'The voluntary settlement on the mainland of Cape York, at Cowal Creek ...' (QPP, 1926, Vol 1, Sess I, 11); 'The native village established ... by the once savage tribes of the Seven Rivers and Red Island ...' (QPP, 1927, Vol 1, Sess 11, 10). 34. QPP, 1930, 14. 35. QPP, 1925, 10. 36. QPP, 1926, 11. 37. Diaries. See also QPP, 1919, 1920, 1925. 38. On 6 October 1922, Rev Done wrote in his diary: ' "Small River". It will be necessary to put a Torres Strait Islander here if we can get one and start a school.' Following the arrival of Satraika from Mabuiag on 18 January 1923, the publication of the Anglican Diocese, t h e Carpentarian, carried accounts of the activities of the Torres Strait Islanders appointed by the Anglican Mission; see Aboriginal Department, Reports of the Chief Protector, QPP, 1924-39. 39. Injinoo during the Second World War is a major focus of Susan McIntyre's post-graduate research which documents the history and archaeology of white settlement in Northern Cape York Peninsula. 40. Native Affairs - Annual Report of the Department of Native Affairs for the Year ended 30 June 1952, QPP, 1953, 26. 41. Ibid. The total population of 350 in the 'Cape York Settlement' was classified as follows: full-blood - 180; half-blood - 20; Tbrres Strait Islanders - 150. In the following year the area obtained in 1948 is referred to as Bamaga (QPP, 1953-54, Vol 2, 30). 42. 1896, 725. 43. Cassette, 0371TW/CN/1/80. 44. Cassette, 065/SW/CC/1/80.

CHAPTER

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8

THE IDENTITY OF THE KAURAREG The identity of the Kaurareg as an ethnic-cultural entity (itself composed of a number of totemic groups), was quite distinct from neighbouring groupings. Certainly they shared important myths with some other people, notably the myth of Kwoiam. They had formed alliances with other groups, through their common rules of reciprocity and pay-back, in the Northern Peninsula Area, among the Kulkalaig of Nagir (Mt Ernest Island), and even as far away as Moa (see Map 3). The Kaurareg cultivated yams and other vegetables from time to time and the gardens and places at which yams grew were inherited by both men and women;l they fought with bows and arrows, with upi (a bamboo knife), and most distinctively, with baidamal baba, a weapon carved from a single piece of wood and studded with shark's teeth. Baidamal baba is associated with their selfperception as Kaurareg, deriving from the myth of the warrior culture hero, Waubin, a mainlander who is said to have been the first K a ~ r a r e g . ~ Waubin was a giant3whose home was beside the large sacred waterhole known as Rabau Nguki in the inland western hills of Muralag. Waubin had three weapons - kubai (a throwing stick used with a woomera, kalak (a spear) and baidumal baba, the most dangerous and fearsome of the three, a weapon unique to the Kaurareg. From his home beside Rabau Nguki Waubin went to Irki, Gaibait, Muiarpui, Dak, Yata and Aiginisan looking for men to kill. He also killed men who came over from Adai, Northern Cape York Peninsula. Waubin collected many wives from the men he killed. One day he set out to fight Kiwain, a man as big and strong as himself, killing him with baidamal baba, and taking his wife to Rabau Nguki. Kiwain fled north and turned into stone at the place closest t o Waibene (Thursday Island), known today as Kiwain or Blue Fish Point. The next morning Waubin travelled eastwards with some of his wives (ipili), meeting Badane whom he missed with baidamal baba, whereat Badane, a very small man, darted between his legs slicing off Waubin's right leg at the knee with his bamboo knife (upi). Badane ran to Kiwain, swam to Waibene and then Kirriri, turning into stone there. Waubin returned to Rabau Nguki with the help of his wives who cared for his leg. He then led them to Badukut, where the stream of that name opens to the sea on the western side of Muralag, from Badukut to Giralag (Friday Island), from Giralag to Palilag (Goode Island), from Palilag to Nomi (Round Island), away from Nomi to Koimilai, a point on Kirriri. He left some of his wives at Palilag and

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m e w Mapoon

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The Islands of the Kaurareg-Muralag Tribal People, Prince of Wales Islands

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some at Nomi. He threw baidumal baba into the sea where it became a reef near Gobau Ngur, a rocky headland of Kirriri. Then he turned into stone at a place which the Kaurareg called a d i , big rock,4 known in English as Hammond Rock. The story of Waubin's home at Rabau Nguki is told here by several people at Wasaga Village, Nurupai, at Kubin Village and at Weipa South in 1988. Details given by several knowledgeable Kaurareg are included here since the story, which has not been written down before, is regarded by them as of first order importance in the formation and re-creation of their cultural i d e n t i t ~ . ~ Lizzie Nawia at Kubin, on 11 August 1988, tells the story as told to her by her husband Wees Nawia. They [the k u d u or palms at Badukut] are glad to see us. But when strangers go there they stand still. Strangers have to talk: 'First we come here, we don't know you.' Before, when friends say something to them k u d u start to sway. When you go up the creek k u d u know if you are strangers or Muralag clans. You go up to Rabau Nguki, up the creek bed where M u grow. Uncle Wees can go there because his mother belongs t o there. They are glad to see him. There's a waterhole on top. Big one. That's Waubin's home, his water. He always comes down from there, walks down and fights. Uncle says: 'The waterhole is always full up to the brim; it never goes down. You can't see the bottom. And if you put your ear on top of the water you can hear a drum: Boom, boom, boom.'6 Eselina Nawie, whose father was one of three brothers at Nurupai (Nawia, Yamazi and Elimadamu), gave the following details at Nurupai on 18 August 1988: If you go with a Kaurareg you go quietly. Only a Kaurareg can talk to the palms there: 'I belong to this place'. Then that palm will move. Look at the water at Rabau Nguki. You see the water there has one leg there inside: Waubin's. One leg there outside in the sea - Hammond Rock. That's Waubin's story there.7 Krismas Young tells the same story as other Kaurareg about the gateway' to Rabau Nguki at Badukut: When we got one stranger not belonging to that place, they sing out: 'Is that fellow a cousin or friend belonging to us .. .?' 'Yes.' Palm trees move now, even though no wind.8 Adie Paul added the following at Nurupai on 18 August 1989, based upon an account given to him by Billy POW, Jimmy Kaur and Madu Paul (son of Aidabo, granddaughter of Kakaku of Cockatoo River-Seven Rivers grouping).

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Waubin, a single mainland man came with his tribe t o Muralag from Cockatoo River. He made his own nation at Muralag. ... After Badane cut his right leg he went to Rabau Nguki. There was no water there before. That water is his leg which is shaped a t the top like a dugong. When his leg turned into the sacred waterhole there was lightning and thunder. This happened at the same time that Gelam came to Mer. When Waubin went to Irki he must have been standing on his left leg because the current flows from east to west a t high tide, which is on his right side. As he left his five wives at each place he said, 'I'll stay here and watch over you in case people come from Mugie Daudai [Papua]; Kie Daudai's [Cape York Peninsula] okay.19 Traditionally the Kaurareg were a seafaring people who obtained their living from the sea and the land. Canoes were as long as fifty-two feet, and the Kaurareg went on long voyages as far as Mugie Daudai for skull hunting and for e~change.1~ The latter created and perpetuated lifelong partnerships known as tukiap in which, like wauri partners among the Torres Strait Islanders, tukiap became like brothers or sisters." On 16 October 1848, Oswald Brierly observed the canoe of Manu of Muralag, and being struck by its unique beauty, sketched it and described it in his diary: ... the body of the canoe ... was painted with perpendicular bars of red in sets of three. In the stern a staff about 3 feet [g1 cm] long stuck up like an ensign staff with long streamers trailing in the water. Setting over each side were two [more?] staffs with small horsetails attached. Near this were placed a beautiful bunch of palm leaves fresh plucked which hung gracefully over each side of the stern which was painted bright red. Over the front of the bow hung a string of large white cowrie shells and below some long [reeds?]hung trailing down in the water. Wash strakes of graceful form - the beautiful and harmonious mingling of vivid red ochre with the yellow of the bamboo. ...l2 There were no hereditary chiefdoms among the Kaurareg, although, as early visitors noted, there were people with special knowledge of healing and hostile magic; persons of aesthetic sensibilities with important social functions. Brierly noted 'so much courtesy and gentleness' about men like ManuJ3

FROM MURALAG TO KUBIN The Kaurareg history of contact with foreigners to the area differs in many respects from that of the northern peninsula mainlanders, and this has a lot to do with

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the choice of occupation sites. Muralag had been noted as a source of water from the days of early British expeditions. In 1791 Captain Edwards and the crew of the frigate Pandora arrived at Muralag in their four open boats following the wrecking of the Pandora near Eastern Fields on 29 August. Anchoring a t the northern end they found fresh water; there the 'morning ushered in with the howling of wolves', probably dingoes, and Edwards named the place Wolf's Bay.14 Importantly for their future, the Kaurareg appear to have outwitted the imperial power by hiding their water sources from government officials. As the Police Magistrate at Somerset informed the Colonial Secretary in Brisbane on 25 October 1872: The natives [Kaurareg] are evidently averse to the formation of a Settlement on any of the Prince of Wales Islands and exert every ruse and means in their power to prevent the discovery of water;

... .15 The Kaurareg had reason to be wary. They were in close touch with the fate of the Gudang and Unduyamo groupings and knew the savagery of the Native police at first hand.16As we have seen, the Kaurareg had themselves been subjected to fierce retaliatory action following the Sperwer massacre in 1869. Two decades after the killing of the Sperwer sailors and the retaliatory expeditions to Muralag, the Kaurareg survivors had re-established themselves, being observed on different occasions at Yata (Port Lihou), on the southeastern side of Muralag and at Kiwain (Blue Fish Point) facing Thursday Island. For years they were forgotten and almost totally neglected by government authorities and missionaries. Whatever the truth about the size of the original Kaurareg population, by the end of the century their numbers did not exceed one hundred.17In the first decade of the century they were moved to Kirriri (Hammond Island). In 1913 the Kaurareg people at Hammond Island, the community a t Adam (Moa Island), and the people of Coconut Island, were the only communities in the Tbrres Strait without schools. The Kaurareg also had no medical attention?* In 1919 attention was drawn to their plight by the Rev Canon Done, Supervisor of the newly-established Anglican Mission which helped to bring them back on to the map of the living.19On his first visit to Hammond Island in April 1919 he described the situation of the Kaurareg, now numbering eighty, as 'the worst in the Torres Strait'. In the following year thirteen died in the influenza epidemicz0 The year after Rev Done's first visit the people built a church at Hammond Island. A whaleboat was supplied by government officials and the older children rowed over to Thursday Island so that the Kaurareg children could receive some schooling.

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Since 1913 the Protector's Department had made 'strenuous efforts', ' .. to induce the Hammond Island people to join in with those at Moa, but without ~uccess'.~l The indigenous Moans, now at Adam Village, had longstanding marriage and tukiap ties and they made quite frequent visits to one another. But t h e Kaurareg continued to identify with Kirriri, which was part of Kaurareg customary land and the place where their mothers and fathers were buried. As was to become painfully clear shortly, Kirriri was imbued with some of the same meanings which tied the Kaurareg to Muralag and Muri, and they wished either to stay where they were or return to Yata at Muralag. In 1921 a decision was made by the government authorities to move them to Moa against their will and, in Canon Done's words, 'for their own good'.22 In his report for 1921, the Chief Protector announced: Preparations are being made for the transfer of the whole of the Hammond Island tribe to Adam Village, on Moa Island. A house is being provided for each family, and the removal of these people should benefit them considerably in the future.23 In 1922 the whole Kaurareg community was shifted at gunpoint to Poid on the northwest side of Moa Island. As the Papuan Industries' vessel Goodwill took them away they wept as they sang the song 'Kirriri'. For Kirriri had become home, supporting a way of life in which birthplace and daily life of fishing and gardening and burial place were woven together. Presumably the Kaurareg were originally moved to Hammond Island so their activities in the pearling industry and within their own community could be more easily monitored and supervised from Thursday Island. Now the needs of administrative efficiency had combined with the imperative of colour segregation, which made Thursday Island out of bounds to all people subject to the Protection Act. The removal of the Kaurareg from Kirriri, which was only a stone's throw from Thursday Island, had become a matter of urgency for reasons based on racist premises: they were 'natives' and 'black', and policies based on their strict segregation were being further elaborated and actively implemented. The public reason given for their removal away from the Thursday Island area in 1922 was that they would be corrupted and degraded through close contact with the world of Thursday Island. Beneath that public reality lay a fundamental imperative: their forced removal stemmed directly from the tightening of racial separateness following the First World War. In 1918 a 'betterment scheme', as it was called, brought forward for those encompassed by Protection, was based upon the fundamental principle of 'complete segregation'. Its stated purpose was to save 'the native' from 'hopeless contamination' with 'the moral ills of our civilisation'; the underlying rationale to 'safeguard the purity of our own blood'.24After the

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'decimating effect' of the influenza epidemic of 1918, 1919 and 1920 the numbers of indigenous people in Queensland were increasing. The figures for 1921and 1922 revealed the 'interesting fact', wrote the Chief Protector, 'that, contrary to common belief, the natives are not dying out fast' and 'their improved vitality is particularly noticeable on self-contained reserve~'.~5 The removal of the Kaurareg from the vicinity of Thursday Island had become a matter of urgency. In the Torres Strait Islands, this policy was expressed in attitudes by white people in Thursday Island, who, along with a handful of chosen South Sea Islander families, did not wish to send their children to school with black children.26And, as Rev Done had noted, the Kaurareg people at Hammond Island had had no medical attention and until after his visit their health was in a state of longstanding neglect. Wees Nawia, who became a leader of this community for over forty years from the mid-1930s until his death in August 1981, tells how it was for him as a teenage boy, when the Queensland Government forced t h e Kaurareg to leave Hammond Island: Oh terrible; if I been a man like this now they wouldn't shift me out from Hammond, but I was too young then. My heart was too small, just like a bird's. I saw my uncle who was all that brave, just go and push all those white police. Three come out with revolvers you know and put two councillors in gaol and told all the adults to take everything. My uncle was a strong-hearted man, something of a giant and he said: 'You will never hurt me unless I put my hand on you'. And he meant it. I was frightened they might shoot my uncle. And the police said, 'You jump in the dinghy, you cheeky boy', and put a revolver into my chest and pushed me into the dinghy. When we all got to Moa, the Hammond people all cried ... Always in my mind I was living still in Hammond Island ... .27 In 1981 Newcamp Wasaga, a young Moan of the Namai family, living at Adam Village in 1922, recalled the arrival of the Kaurareg: Yes, we cry with them. The boat that bring them come here was called Goodwill.I'm eighteen then; I was born 1904. We had to go and cut the grass for the houses and help these people. Five boats go to pick up all them things, them mats they sleep on. They're weeping all the time. The Government wouldn't let them go back and visit afterward^].^^ A school had been established among the ninety-seven Adam people, who were composed basically of the original Moa Islanders known as Moa-it (coastal people) and Moalaig (hill people) of Moa (Banks Island). Some attempt was made

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to develop the two communities - at Adam Village, and at the newly created Poid Village which housed the Kaurareg. Yet even by t h e end of 1923 the school, unlike t h e other Islands, had no white teacher, and the schoolhouse was also the residence of the Island teacher.29 Two communities lived side by side: Adam Village and Poid Village. Slowly the barriers which made the Kaurareg the poor relations melted in the crucible of intermarriage. Less than a generation later they had become one community, a process also assisted by bureaucratic edict and practice which treated t h e two groups as one administrative unit known as Poid in government rep0rts.3~ The new community which joined t h e Kaurareg and the Moalaig and Moa-it together was not a homogenised one: families retained their own identities based on genealogical ties to place despite the administration's firm embargo on use of indigenous languages or travel to any of the Prince of Wales islands. After a time there were no families unlinked by affinal ties, so it would be wrong to refer to the Kaurareg or the Moalaig in the period after 1922. Today the Muralag Tribal Corporation represents members of this community now at Kubin, at Nurupai, at Injinoo and other places on the mainland who are linked with the Kaurareg; so, following their custom, we will refer to them all as 'Muralag tribal people'. In the early 1930s the crew of the lugger Manu composed of men from Poid, as the whole village had come to be called, refused to work the boat unless they were allowed to select their own skipper. When recruiting time came at the island of Badu for the 'Company boats', owned by the Islanders and controlled by the Protector, the crew of Manu refused to work 'and paddled back to Poid', as one Badu Islander recalls.31The Protector acceded to their demand and the skipper chosen by the men was Wees Nawia. Soon after he was also elected Chief Councillor a t Poid, an event occurred that heralded a move for community autonomy and a self-sustained life in the face of the iron rule of the Protector and the government appointee on each island, the Government teacher who had the power to control Islanders' earnings, their luggers and their lives. In January 1936 the crews and skippers of 'Company boats' belonging to Poid community unanimously participated in the maritime interisland strike against Protection, which sought to replace the autocratic direction of the Protector by selfgovernment through elected councils.32 During this testing period the Poid community became united behind Wees Nawia as leader of the Council, a fact that is recalled today by Islanders and recorded by the Chief Protector. The Chief Protector noted a remarkable change in the Poid community's preparedness to work, and a change in their spirit following the election of Wees Nawia as Chief Councillo~~3

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Moa's substantial supplies of wolfram provided a means of finding a source of income for the Poid community which was independent of the government department known as the Aboriginals Department under the Office of the Chief Protector until 1939 and renamed the Department of Native Affairs (DNA) in that year.34Before and during the Second World War the Poid Council led by Wees Nawia made a move to mine and sell wolfram, an enterprise which was made open to all Islanders. Local people walked to the wolfram and dug it with picks and shovels; little by little they carried it in bags on their backs to the rowing dinghies and sold it on Thursday Island. 'Come dig!' came the call from the community, and soon the wolfram hill was covered with the tents and bush houses of Islanders from neighbouring islands and even as far away as Murray Island. During the Second World War the whole Poid community was moved to Kubin Village on the southwestern side of the island - the Kaurareg's third enforced move. The reason given was that Poid, being on the northwest side of the island, had an unhealthy climate. After the War, the story of the Kubin community breaks into two parts, for in 1946 there began a migration from Kubin to Nurupai-Horn Island, one of the home islands of the Kaurareg (POW group). The most deep-seated source of the emigration was the people's wish to live independently and be free to move around their own islands as they chose. The second cause relates to the community's continuing 'bottom rung' treatment by the DNA, which is itself related to the reason why the Kaurareg were the only Islanders who were forced to move from their home islands: as we shall see, housing became the focus of the people and the symbol of their unequal and discriminatory treatment. The 'trigger' for their exodus from Kubin was a difference of opinion between the Chairman and his brother Elekiam Ibm: 'You stay here. I'll go back to our homelands', said the latter. And so the migration began. A community was built up at Nurupai after 1946, reaching a peak of independent well-being and stability in the first half of the 1960s in the face of government orders to vacate the island. A decline in the availability of work and employment in the 1960s, combined with a discriminatory and oppressive bureaucratic intervention on the subject of special leases for houses on Nurupai land, resulted in the disintegration of the community for a time. As we shall see, in the period following - the 1970s - the action swung back to Kubin Village when the Chairman of Kubin Council, Wees Nawia, became the leading figure in a move for a housing cooperative to solve the sameproblems with which the people at Nurupai had been confronted. The formation of MAW (Moa-Adai-Waibene), a housing cooperative outside the control of the DAIA (the successor to the DNA),

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meant a confrontation with the DAIA Director, PJ Killoran, which was eventually resolved in favour of MAW's initiators. In this way the two stories of Nurupai and Kubin come together: the common focus being the provision of houses for Muralag tribal people and NCYP people who had been the outcasts of the Torres Strait region. As the President of the Muralag Tribal Corporation, formed in 1989 with the support of both the scattered Nurupai community and the people at Kubin, concluded in December 1989: 'Ate [Uncle] Wees wanted us to stay here at Nurupai ... He was on our side all along.' %turning Home, the Nurupai Migration' is an interpretive account of the establishment of an independent, self-sustaining community at NurupaiHorn Island; of its initial success in defeating the DNA's order to leave the island; and of the effects of subsequent government intervention requiring the Muralag people to pay rates and rent on customary land. It is followed by 'We belong to Waubin', the Nurupai story as told by Nurupai people in December 1989. The move to establish an investment company and a housing cooperative which were independent of the DNA-DAIA and their successful formation is basic to the emergence of the Kubin community as a vital force in the 1970s. Wees Nawia is a central figure here. His life story offers an insight into the formidable pressures on the displaced Kaurareg, their efforts for self-expression, and Wees Nawia's own dedication to continuing and renewing the link between the Kaurareg and the NCYP groupings. MAW stands for Moa, Adai (the Northern Peninsula Area) and Waibene (Thursday Island).

RETURNING HOME: THE NUR UPAI MIGRATION Late in 1946 about ten men left Kubin and returned to Nurupai-Horn Island where they began to put up houses for themselves and their families on customary land to the northwest of the main wharf at a place that has come to be known as Wasaga Village. They began selling firewood to people in Thursday Island to provide themselves with cash. Before long their wives and children followed them from Kubin. Elekiam Ibm who had been the first man to make the decision to return home 'pressed the release button' for others. Many men and women soon followed. During the Second World War Islanders had been led to believe that a new deal was being shaped in which they would have both freedom of movement and control of their earnings, and equal access with other Australians to medical care, welfare measures (for example, child endowment), and education - 'citizen rights', as they were known throughout the Torres Strait. The social and political climate of the War was one of hope for Islanders; many of their war experiences

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contrasted sharply with those of the age of total Protection before the 1936 maritime strike. In 1939 Islanders had won legal recognition as a separate people under the Torres Strait Islanders Act which embodied a 'New Law', as Islanders called it, which returned a significant measure of autonomy to Island Councils.35 This partial freedom had been extended during the War when they had strengthened their interisland unity in the Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion; developed their skills and confidence in successfully carrying out tasks in communications, carpentry, mechanical and electrical work which had previously been the designated province of white men only; and experienced relationships of equality and reciprocity with some white 'diggers'.36Moreover, the DNA had been forced to place itself in their debt by publicly congratulating them.37 Many of the Muralag people, who had been moved for a third time from Poid to Kubin Village, Moa Island during the Pacific war, were stirring with a determination to return to their own lands. Their desire to return home is attested not only by their own statements and actions. According to HN Armstrong, the government teacher at Poid during the 1936 strike, the Muralag people believed that a strike victory would mean they would be allowed to return to Hammond Island: The Hammond Islanders [Kaurareg] are jubilant at the idea that they are shortly to be allowed to return to Hammond Island their idea of the M i l l e n n i ~ m . ~ ~ When some people enquired about returning to Hammond-Kirriri after the War they were told by DNA officials that the island was only for Catholics, the Sacred Heart Mission being the sole occupant of Hammond Island since 1929. The people who pioneered the return to Horn Island in 1946 were propelled there not only by memories of their ancestors; they were capable practical people too, and they had their eyes on the now abandoned military installations which they were employed to dismantle, and from which they planned to build houses for themselves. The reasons for the move and the hopes of the 'Pioneers of the present village', as the 1965 Report by DNA officers called them,39 are documented in Nurupai people's collective memories: Nurupai was home, TI too; at last they were free to go anywhere in the Prince of Wales islands on land their grandfathers and grandmothers had given them. Being close to Thursday Island they were close to hospital and medical care. Like the Injinoo people before them they were prepared to turn their hands to anything to create an independent life for themselves. Without outside help they built houses using mangroves as framing timber and galvanised iron for the walls and roofs. The men obtained firewood licences, cut wattle and bundled it for sale a t Thursday Island. They fished, hunted dugong and turtle and made gardens: They were back home.

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On 11 April 1949 t h e DNA counted thirty-three men, women and children at Horn Island.40By August that year St Bartholomew's church had been built on the advice of the Bishop, becoming the centre of community life at Nurupai, as well as the geographical centre of a circle of houses forming the village. Twenty children were enrolled a t primary school in 1949, which was held in the church. In October that year the Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria suggested that the area be declared a reserve like those on other islands. The DNA responded by making a full list of residents which it followed up by calling a meeting of residents on 10 February 1950 a t which a DNA officer advised the seventeen families that '. .. they would have to vacate Horn I~land'.~l Behind the DNA's 'eviction order' lay the same priorities which had led to the forced removal of the Kaurareg from Hammond Island. As a report by DNA officers observed, in reply to the Bishop, the Director of the DNA made it clear that there was opposition to a reserve on the grounds of 'difficulty of segregation', and as an alternative, he proposed considering a settlement at Red Island Point.42 Horn Island was a short boat-ride from Thursday Island and it was difficult to keep the people away from Thursday Island-Waibene, another of their traditional islands. Yet given the change in the political and social climate in postwar Torres Strait, the DNA was not prepared to arrive with a boat and shift them at gunpoint as had been done in 1922. A decade before in the maritime strike a solidarity had been demonstrated between Islanders from different islands. The new Bishop, like Bishop Davies during the 1936 strike, was raising questions sympathetic to the Nurupai people. The Department was prepared to employ someone to 'hunt them away from Horn Island'.43 As we will see, it was prepared to confront them with its authority, but not to bring out the guns. According to the DNA, for the next two-and-a-half years the Department made no move either to proclaim a reserve or to dislodge them. Meanwhile, the community was growing. Four more families arrived in this period. On 1 August 1953, the Horn Island school had thirty-one enrolments and forty in July 1954, from which figure the DNA estimated the total population in December 1954 at 130 to 140. By the same year sixteen houses on mangrove frames with bloodwood supports and piers had been built, varying in size from one room to eight or nine squares. By 1965 when a major survey was conducted by the DNA the population was estimated at between 210 and 260. The community, now supported economically by its participation in a pearl culture station which had been set up alongside the wharf, was thriving, and the opening of a private store at Horn Island was a sign of community prosperity.

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The DNA was placed in a quandary. It had resisted the request to declare the village a reserve and so acknowledge the Nurupai community's right to tenure there. Its officers were aware that the people had outwitted them by their effective reorganisation of their daily lives and the fulfilment of their subsistence and cash needs in the face of official opposition. With the support of the Bishop the community was displaying the practical self-confidence of a people who had returned to their homelands. The DNA's 1965 report caught the spirit of their determination: The villagers themselves are convinced of the stability of their tenure, despite constant reminders of its tenuous nature, and would undoubtedly resist any attempt to move them. (p 2) The same report even came forward with high praise for the people's efforts: In summary it seems apparent that Horn Island is a thriving and increasing community. Perhaps more so than those of many other better appointed islands. (p 3) It had become dangerous to try to move the community which was gaining in numbers; in a strength that comes from success and the spiritual renewal that free association with Muralag, with Waibene, as well as Nurupai and other POW islands gave them; and in the support which the Anglican Bishop and the church provided. 'I have a feeling that the Church Office would feed any fires that may be ignited by any future action', the 1965 report of t h e DNA concluded (p 2). Perhaps they recalled Bishop Davies' speech at the 1935 Anglican Synod and were fearful.44The Bishop had expressed the view that t h e Islanders might be better off under the Commonwealth, a statement which was critical in igniting the flame of rebellion against Protection. The DNA had cause to be wary: it was aware of Nurupai's determination through direct experience of the potency of a silent protest staged by the community before its officers. When the Manager of the DNA, PJ Killoran arrived with the Western Island Representative, Tanu Nona, to tell them the Department's decision that they must leave Horn Island, they found that the men and the women had staged a 'sit-down' and a 'stand-up' protest. The older women, wearing black petticoats, sat under the shade of a warup tree. Each man was standing on one leg in the manner of the first Kaurareg, the hero Waubin. The Manager did not say a word, his face red. Confronted in private by the Kaurareg man who cautioned him plainly to act as a brother, the Western Island Representative, a Badu man, stayed to one side. When the Department sent a boat to take them away, the men told the skipper, an Injinoo man, to take the boat away because they were not moving.

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The Muralag tribal people had won the battle to stay at Nurupai. The conclusion of the DNA report holds a note of impending threat. T h e officer who prepared it had a 'watching brief which sought out weaknesses in the people's armour: I quite realize that any final solution is fraught with difficulty both political and practical. None the less the status quo can hardly be allowed to remain undisturbed. It is clearly evident that the population will increase further and tax the already inadequate internal services. Unsupervised the whole area represents a method for people to come to and remain in TI.(p 3) The DNA was unable to fault the new community: people had created their own law and order, provided sustenance for their families, and within the limits of their cash incomes, provided themselves with housing and with basic schooling in the church building. As the DNA saw it, something had to happen. Certain practical measures were recommended by DNA officers to meet some of t h e basic needs of the community: some work on the water supply, appointment of a sanitary and garbage worker, an increase i n Sergeant Rattler's wages, together with a proportionate increase in his duties and responsibilities. Plans were laid out for a township. On 9 February 1969 the Horn Island Village Council was elected with Samuel Wasaga, who had been a police sergeant since 1963, as chairman, Elisara Wees, deputy chairman, and Nadai Savage, third councillor. At public meetings of the community at the Horn Island Feasting Shelter on 9 March, 23 March and 31 May 1969, a number of important measures were agreed upon on behalf of the 196 Nurupai people (thirty-three families): a n Island Industries Board (IIB) store, a variety of measures to ensure the good order of village life, and most importantly, proposals for land tenure and the creation of a model village with high-standard housing. A letter signed by the Chairman to the Land Commissioner, Thursday Island on 7 March 1969 set out a request for land acquisition on behalf of a meeting of residents:

... at least 33 families whose names are listed below are interested in acquiring land close to the present village site on a freehold or permanent lease basis to build a model village, replacing all the sub-standard buildings presently there.45 Mr Sam Wasaga attached a sketch map of the proposed village, a village square around the church was proposed, and the chairman indicated that the council was ready to meet the survey party which was reported to be visiting Horn Island shortly.

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Bureaucratic intrusion into the life of an independent community by an authority empowered by the Torres Strait Islanders Act (which originally embodied a system of indirect rule and had since been amended to re-create many of the same restrictions that had existed under the Protection Acts),46 was accompanied by measures which restricted the freedom of Horn Islanders. They were going to be made to pay for living on their forebears' land - the unannounced price of a few welfare services. Previously they had been ignored or 'hunted back' to Kubin. That method of 'dispersing' them having failed, a new approach was adopted. The intrusion of a Welfare Officer and the provision of limited services were a signal for the imposition of levies, notably, as it transpired, a system of land leases with accompanying rents and rates. According to the writers of the 1965 DNA Report, when the Nurupai firewood business collapsed with the introduction of gas cooking facilities a t Thursday Island, and the pearl culture too declined, people were unable to keep up rate and rent payments, the effect being to destabilise the p o p ~ l a t i o n According .~~ to the Nurupai people today, nobody told them the conditions of the leases on their lands with the result that after a year they had fallen behind in their rates and taxes. At the inaugural meeting of the Muralag Tribal Committee in Townsville on 29 November 1987 at which he was elected president, Mr Roney Wasaga, who had with him some minutes of meetings held in 1969 and correspondence from his father's file, summed up this viewpoint: 'Nobody was sent from the Land Commissioner's Office in Brisbane to explain to them .. . the conditions of the special lease deeds.'48They needed an interpreter from the DNA who could explain what they needed to know in Pidgin (Torres Strait Creole). Little was done by the DNA to improve conditions in Wasaga Village out of the rates collected; not even a sanitary worker was sent out to empty the toilet ~ a n s . 4People ~ who fell behind in their rates eventually had to quit their houses and move to jobs in mainland towns and centres. This was a signal for others to enter Horn Island and Department officials with inside knowledge were among those who bought and sold the vacated land on Horn Island to outsiders. Nurupai people meeting at Wasaga Village on 5 December 1989 tell the story of how they made it known that they continued to belong to Waubin. 'We belong to Waubin': the Nurupai story

He pressed the key for everyone ESELINA NAWIE M r E l e k i a m Ibm m a d e u p h i s m i n d to bring h i s children to Horn Island. He was the first m a n to arrive here. Tribal people t h e n got it

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i n m i n d to come here. Husbands came first, found jobs, then wives came afterwards. RONEY WASAGA

They werefrightened to make a move. But when there came to be some sort of argument between these two brothers of the Makaku tribe [meaning Kakaku] - Ate [Uncle] Wees Nawia and Ate Elekiam Ibm - Elekiam said: 'All right you stay here at Kubin. I'll go back home bilong yumi [belonging to we Kaurareg].' As soon as he made that move he pressed the keyfor everyone. At Poid-Adam village the tension had been onfrom the day they arrived on the boat Goodwill. Moa people treated them as outsiders for a long time. So that was the 'release button! At Horn Island they caught fish, sold them to shops and hospitals, and some people just ordered thefish. Each family cut down wattle trees, made the wood into bundles and sold them at TI. And we helped each other. With the money they bought flour and tea and other stores at TI. Gardens too - banana, sugar cane. They worked pearl-shell and trochus shell. I n the 1960s the pearl culture began. They were back home The m a i n reason we came here was to be closer to the hospital. We

wanted to be free to travel. Coming out from Kubin was like coming out of a cell, and living here with only a policeman to protect us. Ate Sam Wasaga looked ofter people, arranged medical attention, anyone who got into trouble was sent to Badu or Kubin. Hard labour. There was law and order here. Yet people were free to go anywhere they felt like. They were hunting for food around Prince of WalesIsland. They were back home. They were Kaurareg people. This was the main thing. Uncle Wees was on our side all along BILL WASAGA

Uncle Wees didn't worry about it. Because we'd been moved away [from, our lands], and we were bringing the people back again. RONEY WASAGA

%nu Nona, the WesternIslands Representative, didn't like it; Ate Wees wanted us to stay here at Nurupai, but he didn't want to tell the Department until the time when he made some move about that housing cooperative [MAW]. He was trying to help us very much but he was afraid from that law. DNA put their foot on him. He was on our side all along. I f he wasn't on our side he wouldn't have written that life-story. He wouldn't have done it.

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We're not going away; we're going to stop here BILL WASAGA As soon as the Government said 'You can stay here,' there was still no help with accommodationfrom the Department: 'You have tofind your own way to get your housing! No reserve, nothing.

RONEY WASAGA I heard about that proposal to move us to Red Island Point when I was at school. Just after Aunty Eva [Geia]and Uncle Esram had finished u p teaching us here at the school in the church. The tribal people had built a church here. They went over to Bishop Hudson at Thursday Island to ask h i m what he could do to help them. He said, 'You go back there and build a church and name i t St Bartholomew.' Before this happened Tanu Nona came here with Pat Killoran on the boat Petta. They walked right along the road here u p to a place with a tree called warup. And a group of seven old ladies wearing black petticoats sat down under the shade of the warup. And all along this little track here all the men stood u p on one leg under the ti-tree each carrying a n axe, making i t known that they belong to Waubin. Waubin was their god. While they're walking up Maber said to Thnu: 'My brother, I hope we're not going to [have to] take your head o n account of you coming here.' So only Killoran walked near the women; never said one word. Face red. The shoots of the warup tree are u p now. When Killoran went back he sent Nicholas Wymarra on the boat named Waiben. Same again. They growled h i m too: 'You know who we are? You're a Muralag person yourself. So you better go back again. We're not going away. We're going to stop here.' When the church was built, Uncle Esram and Aunty Eva [Kaurareg people living at Palm Island] started to teach the children in school. Things went along in this way. Then I came along and went to school here. We went to school from Monday to Friday. Every morning at eight o'clock we came there, said morning prayer. As soon as prayers werefinished we put a blind across the altar to cover that area. School till three o'clock. Our school was not recognised by the Government until some time after and then they sturted to supply books and rulers and chalks. When Aunty Eva went back to Palm Island a Saibai woman took over for a short time and then Waiu Eseli took over. Whenshefinished I heard that they were going to send u s to Red Island. Adi Kwoiam came over to teach us after that. And I remember when we heard this gossip we said: 'We don't want to go, we run away, go bush.' About the time that Willie Namai took over the school everything had blown out. We had shows at TT,everyone started to

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like us. But none of these people living here at Horn Island ever liked us. They called themselves half-castes, but they're second-class citizens. As soon as Aborigines' and Islanders' improvement came up they wanted to be TI people because they wanted money from the Government. We want the Government to pay us back the damage they did to us

We don't want moneyfrom the Government. We want the Government to pay us back the damage they did to us. That's what we want. And if there's money involved we want a billion dollars. Yes, a billion. So when we formed that Muralag Tribal Corporation we began to write that thing down now. That 's one of the m a i n things. BILL WASAGA After the War m y brother and I tried to start a boat business. Wefilled in a form and hoped we'd get the money straight away. But the Department stopped us getting it. And we're still waiting. So we signed on a trochus boat and went south. Then I worked at Bamaga and got only small money which I sent to keep m y father here. After 1950 I met m y brother on the boat here; we slept at the wharf because there was nothing here [to sleep in]. TI belongs to us. The government office was supposed to be in Somerset. But Jardine came and shot our people and got r i d of them so the white people could take over our lands. The land belonged to the old Nurupai lady's father, and that's it for her RONEY WASAGA I found out from m y research that some of the old people couldn't understand the lease system. The condition of the lease said that you have to build a house on the block. Not just a rubbish house or hut. Got to be a good-looking house. Nobody told the people here then that each year you have to pay rates and rent. Now inf m i n g this Muralug Tribal Corporation I had concluded that nobody had been sent from the Lands Department with a n interpreter from DNA who can speak pidgin English with these people. So as soon as that first year came along the people had fallen down on their rates and rents. 'Oh, we have to pay for our own land here.' So they went to the NCYP region, Weipa, TbwnsvilIe, Cairns and Darwin. The people who stayed here still didn't understand until I came along - on 24 September 1988. Aka [Aunty] sitting here lost her land because she couldn't understand. That land belonged to herfather - and that's itfor her;full stop ... She's satisfied now because Nurupai Housing Co-operative has a director insidefrom our tribal people. Constitutionally she lost that land; it was sold. They built a house there and we've negotiated with Nurupai to pay that

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house off gradually. You've got to speak pidgin English for people to understand.

KUBIN: THE SEARCH FOR INDEPENDENCE In the years following the Second World War, Wees Nawia, who remained the leader of the community at Kubin, was, like virtually all Torres Strait Islanders, trapped by the new measures taken by the DNA to restore the powers which had been taken away from the Department by the Tbrres Strait Islanders Act 1939. This was done by legislative amendments to the Act of a restrictive kind and by the making of regulations limiting movement away from reserves; by providing favours for those communities whose leaders worked in with them; and by using the latter to create a patron-client system in which the client's options were restricted and encapsulated by the patron. The Western Island Representative, chosen from among the chairmen of the Western Island Councils, played this role until the mid-1970s. Kubin community suffered most through this system. The 1970s saw a revival at Kubin Village on several fronts, the most significant being a self-initiated housing project to provide houses for people by bypassing the Department. Despite post-war DNA promises of ex-military housing materials, the system of patronage ensured that very few of those materials went to Kubin. Even in the early 1970s when the DAA established an office at Thursday Island and Commonwealth housing money became available, not a single Commonwealth-sponsored house was built at Kubin. Kubin community's record of self-help with projects like wolfram mining stood people in good stead. They had also taken a major part in the bakery initiated by the Christian Co-operative at St Paul's community, Moa in the 1960s. The Kubin community and its Chairman, Wees Nawia in particular, had kept up active communication with the Cowal Creek community, whose members were also seeking a means of building houses on their lands in the NCYP, known to the Kaurareg as Adai. In the mid-1970s the Moa Island Investment Company was formed by the two communities living at Kubin and St Paul's villages. In 1978 a housing cooperative, Moa-Adai-Waibene (MAW) was formed, linking together three selfmanaged investment companies run by communities at Moa, Adai (northern Cape York Peninsula) and Waibene (Thursday Island). In building houses MAW was filling an urgent need created by continuing government neglect of Kubin people. It was from the outset a self-managingbody outside the control of the DAIA, the successor to the DNA. Not long after its formation the Department made a concerted attempt to curtail its activities.

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Plate 5

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

Wees Nawia, Chairman, Kubin Community Council, holding baidamal baba

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In 1980, after MAW had built ten houses, a ruling was made by the Director of the DAIA, PJ Killoran, that under regulation 19 made under the Tbrres Strait Islanders Act 1971-1979 only Island Councils incorporated under the Act had the right to collect rents and hence MAW must discontinue building houses on reserve lands. Island Councils were not self-managing bodies for regulation 19 required that all rents must be paid into an Island Fund which is subject to the control of the DAIA.51

WEES NAWIA: A MAN OF STRONG SPIRIT Wees Nawia's genealogy reveals deep roots in Kaurareg lands; his life offers an insight into the hardships of the era; and it typifies the possibilities and the limitations placed upon a man of strong spirit of his time. His account of the Kaurareg in his life story which follows, includes information on how they were related both to the Seven Rivers and Cockatoo River people on the northwestern side of the Peninsula, to the Gudang, and even to the Yadhaigana with whom they were often at war at the time of European settlement at Somerset in 1864.

That Aboriginal boy was handed over to the Muralag people Muttee Head and all along there i s Adai. They camefrom Adai along the beach behind Prince of Wales,Muralag. Besides the long beach there i s another small beach behind i t and they had been landed there at POW, Prince of Wales. My mother's father's father, he said, 'Don't kill this boy, he's mine'.And that baby was handed over. He was the child of the mamus that Adai boy, a n Aboriginal boy, and Muralag people gave h i m their name and when he grew u p he married a Muralag woman. This is where m y grandfather on m y mother's side camefrom and his name was Koboris [Kaubarees].

.

who gave him their name, 'Like a coconut that floats on water' They named h i m Kakakuk, which means something like a coconut thatfloats on water, because hefloated like that. Camefrom Adui. We say, 'He came out from big land',from Red Island Point. He must have come from someone important to be in that fighting canoe, because we say he came from the 'other side' and so that piccaninny must be from first-class man, because they give good men in them canoes. Olsem bring em po pait prom wen em pikinini: they always bring them for the fighting from childhood [because they didn't expect to lose],

Jardine said, 'You better go to Hammond Island' I was born at Hammond Island. My mother married a Horn Island m a n and she married h i m there. They live there and POWpeople live at Y a k , Port Lihou. WhenJardine shoot all these people heforget about

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those he didn't shoot. There were people left at Muralag, at Nurupai a n d at Adolphus. So he said, 'You'd better go to Hammond Island! Cowal Creek people are like brothers

I n those days the people from Small River, Cowal Creek they always welcome and they come straight to Hammond to visit and Hammond people went straight to Cowal Creek. Like myself, when I come to Cowal Creek as a boy there comes old Mr Pablo and he says, 'I'm your brother; your father is m y father' I used to come over there with m y father. They had no canoes at Cowal Creek in those days, but POW, Adulphus, Hammond did. Muralag a n d Moa people had 'swaps' like wauri

Some of our people used to travel as far as Moa Island because some of our POW women had married to Moa men. Bipotaim, long ago, there was a womanfrom Moa. Her father was from POW and she was a real Waibew, Thursday Island woman. Each husband had died. Her father w a sfrom Waibene and he was something like a mamus She had two brothers and their mother died and she grew them up. In that time Moa people didn't make canoes, but POWpeople did and they gave them to Moa to be friends. They too had 'swaps' like wauri [in the Eastern Islands]. Protector tell all these people to get away from Hammond Island

I was born in 1908. I grew u p at Hammond Island until 1914 war, big war, German war. Army came out and we went way out in the hills away from the village. I was a school boy then. When the war was over we came back to the village where the Catholic Mission is now at Kadunai beach. So we lived there until I came out from school. When I came to age about eighteen or nineteen here comes a n order from the Chief Protector. That was Mr Bleakley then. He sent a m a n out to Hammond Island and tell all these people to get away from Hammond to Moa Island. Oh, terrible! I talked to m y wife later and I say, 'If only I been a m a n like this they wouldn't shift me out from Hammond. But I was too young then. Heart just like a bird 's, too small.' I saw m y uncle that brave,just go and push all those white police who come out with revolvers. And m y uncle said, 'You will never hurt me unless I put a hand on you! And he meant it. He was something of a giant, a strong-hearted man. And they kicked out one Island policeman and two Councillors and put them in gaol and tell all the adults to take everything. The police said, 'Youjump in the dinghy you cheeky boy ', and put a revolver to m y chest

I was frightened they might shoot m y uncle. So the police said, 'You jump in the dinghy you cheeky boy', and put a revolver to m y chest

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and pushed me into the dinghy. 'What are you staring at?' And Isaid, 'I want to know what you're doing with m y uncle?' So I was that frightened I j u m p in the dinghy. Anyway the mothers and sisters all cry and go with this Anglican boat Goodwill and take all their things and Badu and Moa people made grass houses at Poid, Moa. It was oh, big cry that night, everything was bad. Moa people come and the Hammond people cry and the Moa people they didn't like u s to have to leave Hammond. I don't know why they moved us.

We were that sorry to leave Poid and we thought we might go back It was called Adam, but when we got there we changed the n a m e to Poid. We stayed there from 1921 to 1940. Then i t was war-time and there was a big river there and people thought the Japanese might come there. I f they can come through Sydney harbour they can come to Poid a n y time. So we were told: 'Might as well you go to Kubin. So give us a signal if you see any Japanese around. ...' But we only had one policeman. We were that sorry to leave Poid and we thought we might go back because there was a church there, but the army people said 'No'. This place Kubin got no malaria, although Poid had it. So we came u p here and live u p here at Kubin from 1945. When I was at Poid I married in 1932. When we leave Hammond in 1921 we live in all those houses which had little mangrovefloors. The Moa and Badu people built them for we and we lived there and in 1932 I married Aunty. I became a Councillor and went to the YorkeIsland Councillors' Conference in 1937. Iget married then the War broke out in 1940. So I was Chief Councillor from 1934 onwards. Istayed at Kubin as Chief Councillor during the War.

Better I live on the place I was born, but I can't leave Moa just because m y mother's buried there Always in m y mind I live in Hammond Island, hut when Igot married to Aunty I tried toforget Hammond Island. I talk to Aunty, Isay: 'That 'S m y birthplace; your birthplace is TI. I love the place where I was born; better I live on the place I was born. But I can't leave Moajust because m y mother's buried there. One thing that I can't leave Moa for now, because if not for m y mother I never see this world.' So m y mother's buried at Moa, at Poid. The same thing applies to Aunty here. She was born at TI, but herfather and mother buried at Moa. So she look like me: oh, can't leave Moa. I'm sorry m y girl. I been at Moa; me and m y brother-inlaw make a garden more than anyone in that Moa Island, all over the place. Even the place where their grandfather was buried at Dabu, we grew a garden around there too. It's a long way but we walk there. Ooh, all m y children too. I got small wages, three pounds a month, that's what I get you know. I got to do all m y gardening to keep all m y family.

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Thursday Island

Waibene

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Horn Island

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Prince of Wales Island

Badukut

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Muralag

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KILOMETRES

Map 4

Muralag, Prince of Wales Island

M y old man said, 'Dugong come tonight here' My father used to be a good fisherman, Aunty can tell you. I used to go out with h i m when I was a boy and Isee h i m track all these dugong one night and next night m y old m a n said, 'Lhgong come tonight here! He knew the grass, what tide they been come on, i f they feed on this tide or that tide. He could tell by the grass. And Aunty can tell you, nobody, no Badu people good as me today in telling that dwong come tonight here or dugong not come. Dugong m a y come tonight on the low tide or the high tide. He leaves a mark on the sand and me and m y sons leave a stick here at that place. We make a platform so that

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when the dugong comes there he pulls this way and that, but he can't get away no matter how hard he tries. This platform w e call nat. So one night I was u p o n that pla(/orm; Aunty and the small one watched the rope o n that pier. There comes a dugong that night and when i t come I make big singout. Ooh, they don't answer me. They hold that rope. At first light they can see what tide that dugong's been feeding on from the seaweed. My mother always tell me to be kind and always stick up o n your rights

My mother, when I think of m y mother, well this old lady she teach m e all perfect things: not to be selfish, which is the big [respected] person, which is the low person. My mother was a very decent - I don't know what to say - polite person. She taught me. That S' why I think I'm a different boy from all m y family, because I take all that advice from m y mother. I f we sit here and she's here, she might come u pfrom fishing. She won't pass us. She come u p here with this fish and she say, 'Take what you like! That 's why people say Igot m y mother's way. Yes, I say m y mother was a very kind woman. She's a big woman. She never interfered; a very good-hearted woman and she always tell m e to be kind [louder]and always stick u p on your rights. M y father died when I was ten or eleven years of age. She married again. JW Bleakley said, 'Here are two sticks tobacco, two blankets', so we bend the knee and bow down to him

This Act belonged to the time of me and Tanu Nona. We been work for JWBleakley, you know. He come out all the Islands, he said, 'Oh, I'm you big mamus, here are two sticks tobacco, here are two blankets! Oh, so we bend the knee and bow down to h i m because he's the big mamus. So Aunty knows. Aunty always get blanket. I get one stick tobacco; that S' m y pay for Chief Councillor. Well that's why I always think about this Act; this Act is too wide. All these young people come and tell m e how people used to say, 'Yes boss!' That's why one m a n said to me: 'I'll never take m yfather's footsteps because m yfather did struggle for nothing ! Well we used to go down to the office and you know those little passbooks? They stop me i f Iwant to draw money today, Monday. 'It's not for today. You have to wait for next week.' That 's why I talked about the [Tbrres Strait Islanders] Act. Tanu Nona i s finished now. This Act has to go. In those days we always do things like gardening. The Church i n those days was not much, but we were very Christian people those days. No drink, no humbug around. Everyone got in mind to do a bit better; that's all. Calm sea-people, not disturbing the village, very honest. Today, oh! oh!. It's terrible. I remember when m y father used to go and work for Jardine at the plantation. Our family was a very big one, seven sisters and six brothers. After the seven sisters I start from there.

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We used to crawl on our knees

... So t h a t was what the strike was about

For a long time the money was controlled by them. We worked regularly, you know, but we got small wages. The money we earned had to be entered into apassbook and when you walked into the place they would say, 'Oh, you have drawn money o n Monday, you can't have any more this week! So that was what the strike was about. Yet the money was ours; we battled to get it. We used to crawl on our knees and say, 'Please,please, Iwould like more ...! Ifshe said 'no',that was it. I f we spent the money the wrong way, well that was u p to the people themselves. We wanted to take care of i t ourselves. For a long time we had one lady, Mrs Zahel. She was a very hard lady. She was a good teacher but she was the boss over the whole Island. So i t started from there. You could hardly see a piece of money.

Come, dig! People still talk about that wolfram mining today Before the war men and women go out and pick u p wolfram little by little and sell i t to Island Industries Board (IIB) in TI. Then we say we'll come together to form some cooperative; so we formed this Moa Island Investment Co-operative. So this began with wolfram mining. Everyone went to the wolfram. They just walked. Each family sold its own bags of wolfram in TI. One m a n used to be there to buy i t and IIB took i t across by dinghy. It was hard; we got no outboards in those days, only sailing dinghy. So we used picks and shovels. Oh dear me, hard work! Some families went out there and camped; big place for camp out there. All of Kubin and St Paul's [Anglican community at Moa Island], even some people from Mabuiag come out, Boigu, Saibai; everyone come out and camp round there, some from Murray Island, Badu ... all the families, some in tents and some got bark and made bush houses. Bushfires burnt i t all out later. One St Paul's m a n got a truck and buy all the wolfram and take it in cargo boat, Tbrres Herald 11, the Anglican Church supply boat. Several hundred people were there. That 's why people still talk about that wolfram mining today.

A very old white man, lovely old fellow, showedpeople how to make a mine shaft The Department did their part when theyfound one of these old miners and sent h i m out here to teach people how to mine for wolfram, how to make a shaft like they used to do i t in the old days. He was a very smart old fellow and when the crowbar was blunt he showed we how to sharpen it. He was like a blacksmith. He was a very old white man, oh lovely old fellow; he showed we how to make a hut, split wood right down the middle, take all the stuff out and make corrugated iron and build a stove, make bread. Something new, we never thought like that. Me and Aunty our heart near to him. He'd call out, 'Uncle, you can come u p and get your bread' Nice bread m y gel, nice bread. We been

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try to do the mining and it 's big rain and there was water at the mine, We grow good gardens: banana, pawpaw, yam, pineapple. No stores there; you had to live on bush tucker. Long way to get them, you had to carry them. No help from the Church, only Herald. One St Paul's m a n he had been down south on the luggers and he had seen mining and saw this was good. Others come here too. Tanu himself came here and mined wolfram. People all came here.

Co-op means to pull together, so we try to come together It was started by Rev Father Clint. He came over here to St Paul's and call for Kubin people to go over there and he had a meeting and explained what a co-op is. Co-op means to pull together, so we try to come together and form this Christian Co-op at Moa. So Father Clint and two men besides h i m and some St Paul and Kubin people go round u p o n the hill looking/or some places where we can do some mining or get something like ginger, wild ginger, to make some garden for a co-op. We been talking things over and Father d i n t said, 'What about starting off with something we eat everyday?' Well we said, 'What about we start a bakery?' 'Good idea, so you'll have bread in the morning', he said. With things that grow you have to grow themfirst. So everybody agreed that the bakery start off in small way and they make some small huts first to make the bread in. The village people just built them. We baked the bread in wood stoves at the beginning. So we said, 'We want a mango down to Tranby College and learn,how to make bread and learn how to make a stove for bread '. And P, one St Paul's m a n agreed to go down and he learnt about this bakery business down there. He bought some of these things where you can bake bread and he get some material and cement for making blocks, and when he came back all this stuff was coming too. So P and one or two other menfrom St Paul's made this house, this bakery, and they built u p this big brickwork oven at St Paul's.

When it's finished we call for a priest to bless that house When it'sfinished we call for a priest to bless that house. It took over a month to m,ake this bakery. They did good work. It was a village project; everyone helped to do that work. It was paid for from Commonwealth I think. This was in the sixties. So the bakery began and P do very good. He make the bread with one or two girls, I think, to give h i m a hand. We try this first with two villages, then after we said, 'Let's try and make more so we can join u p Badu. We can run the dinghy round right down to Badu and sell the bread there, Mabuiag too.' So we been try that and i t runs very good. But after that when the dinghy was wrecked, when the W o t a broke down (we used to run overland, but no road), we can't do anything. Wejust sell the bread at St Paul's. You can't make much money that way.

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Moa-Adai-Waibene is a housing cooperative MAW is a housing cooperative. M stands for Moa, A stands for Adai, that 's Northern Peninsula Area [NPA], and W stands for Waibene, that's TI. MAW built ten houses since 1978, Mr Killoran, Director of DAIA he said that we couldn't build any more houses at Kubin or St Paul k, although we can go on building at TI and Horn Island, not 'Reserves' under the Act. MAW build these houses at Kubin. When a house is complete i t no more belongs to the MAW, it belongs to Moa Island Investment Company. Same with Adai ones. We in the community choose this person to be in that house and that same person pays his rent, $15 every week to Moa Island clerk here who looks after his books. When Mr Killoran stopped this MAW from building these houses at Kubin and St Paul's he meant i t and he said he will never change [raising voice]. So we talked to DAA to come over to Kubin and have a meeting here because Mr Killoran says he will never change his mind about this unless the Cooperative gives the money to the Councils. The same thing applies to NPA. Every day we been look out for you. 'Watch out, em come now!' You come out to Moa Island, come out to Kubin next year, the people will make a good story: how they shift people to Hammond and from Hammond to Moa to a village called B i d and then to Kubin. Still r a i n out this way eh! I don't know if we go across to Horn Island . Well any way, next time m y dear ....52

Today there are some 200 Muralag tribal people, as they call themselves, at Kubin and Nurupai a t Waibene (Thursday Island), many also living at Injinoo, Weipa, Townsville, Umagico and other mainland towns and centres, some living at Palm Island and even Darwin. The pathos of their historical situation and the insult of the treatment meted out to them have been matched by the courage of their independent conviction and down-to-earth forthrightness. Today they are not interested in handouts; they are requesting and demanding major and just compensation for the harm that has been done to them beginning with the raids on their camps by Frank Jardine and Henry Chester in 1869 and 1870. These matters are addressed in the chapter which follows.

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NOTES

1. Brierly 1849, in Moore 1979, 171-72; Haddon 1935, 345. 2. Haddon 1904, 17 gives a version of this myth in which the man a t Hammond Rock is a giant named Adi. He refers also to a version he collected in 1888, which he did not write down; the man's name was Waubin and also a d i (see 1904, 18). 3. The following is an abbreviated version of the myth given by Wees Nawia to Margaret Lawrie (Lawrie 1970, 6-7). 4. Brierly 1849, in Moore 1979, 136 refers to both the man and 'the curious upright square-topped rock' as Adee. MacGillivray 1852, Vol 2, 30 tells the myth, calling the hero Adi. 5 . This fact only became visible to outsiders in the context of a threat to destroy Rabau Nguki in 1988 (see Chapter 9).

6. Cassette 003B/LN/K/1/88. 7. Cassette 004B/EN/N/1/88. 8. Cassette 002B/KY/W/1/88. 9. Cassette 002B/AP/N/1/89.

10. Manu told Brierly he had been there, see 1849, in Moore 1979, 122. 11. Moore 1979, 263. On the literal meaning of tukiap, see Brierly in Moore 1979, 122; on the Torres Strait wauri tebud, see Sharp 1991a, Chapters 1 and 2. 12. Brierly 1849, in Moore 1979, 48. 13. In Moore 1979, 122. 14. Hamilton 1793, 121. 15. Jardine to Colonial Secretary, 25 October 1872, SL-B, in-letter 67-72, 58. 16. See Chester to Colonial Secretary, 10 August 1871, SL-B, in QSA, COL/A160, in-letter 2499 of 1871. 17. Douglas 1899-1900, 31. 18. Report of W Lee Bryce, Government Resident and Protector at Thursday Island, in Annual Report of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals for 1913, QPP, 1914, 13. In 1911 it was concluded that Adam children were unhealthy because their parents visited Hammond Island (QPP, 1912, 17). 19. Diaries of Rev John Done. 20. Diaries of Rev John Done (see 30 April 1920). Done refers to a settlement of eight people at Port Lihou, Prince of Wales Island on 10 November 1924 and 21 June 1925, but does not indicate their nationality.

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21. Done Diaries. 22. Diaries, 30 April 1920. 23. Aboriginals Department - Information contained in Report for the Year ended 31 December 1921, QPP, 1922, Vol 2, 7. 24. Aboriginals Department - Information contained in Report for the Year ended 31 December 1919, QPP, Vol2,1920,7. 'The alternative to segregation', the report continues, 'is their eventual absorption by the more numerous and more virile race, a prospect not to b e viewed without some misgivings'.

25. Aboriginals Department - Information contained in Report for the Year ended 31 December 1922, QPP, 1923, Vol 1, 7. In 1913 it had been reported: 'As everyone is aware, the aboriginal races are slowing dying out ...' (QPP, 1914, 1). 26. See Sharp 1984, 183. 27. This is a n edited version of Book of Islanders 1984, B46; see also Sharp 1991a. 28. Sharp 1894, 188. 29. The Protector at Thursday Island reported that Poid Village compared unfavourably with other communities in the Torres Strait, things there being regarded as unsatisfactory in regard to school personnel and accommodation (Aboriginals Department - Information contained in Report for lthe year ended 31 December 1923, QPP, 1924, Vol I, 6. 30. Reports 1923 et seq. 31. Cassette 022/NM/B/3/80. 32. See Sharp 1984, Chapter 9. 33. QPP, 1936. 34. See Aboriginal Preservation and Protection Act 1939, 3 Geo VI, No 6. 35. Sharp 1990a, Chapter 9, 36. See Beckett 1987, 62-65; see Sharp 1984, 245-47. 37. Writing of the discharge of the 700 men of the Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion in 1946, the Director of Native Affairs noted the Islanders' 'excellent war service for the nation', and reaffirmed the Queensland Government's guarantee of 'rehabilitation in the [pearling] industry which they claim, with a very considerable measure of justification, to be the birthright of their race' (Report for 1947, QPP, 1948, 2). 38. HN Armstrong, government teacher at Poid, Moa Island to Protector of Aboriginals, Thursday Island, 27 May 1936,3615997in QSA.

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39. Report on Horn Island as at 6 July 1965, Thursday Island, mimeograph, 1-7. 40. Report on Horn Island as at 6 July 1965, Thursday Island, mimeograph, 1. 41. Report on Horn Island as at 6 July 1965, Thursday Island, mimeograph, 2. 42. Report on Horn Island as at 6 July 1965, Thursday Island, mimeograph, 2. 43. John Scott, formerly of the DNA, personal communication. 44. See North Queensland Register, 14 September 1935; Sharp 1990a, Chapter 9. 45. S Wasaga to Land Commissioner, 7 March 1969, Torres Strait Islanders Resident in Horn Island, mimeograph, 1. 46. Nettheim 1974. 47. John Scott, personal communication, December 1989. 48. Minutes, mimeograph, 1. 49. Minutes, mimeograph, 1.

50. Cassette 005B/MTC/N/1/89. 51. See Sharp 1980, 11-13. 52. Book of Islanders 1984, B45-B50; the version given here is lightly edited. An abbreviated version appears in Sharp 1984, 188-90.

CHAPTER

A RETURN? WILDERNESS, TOURISM AND CUSTOMARY LAND OWNERSHIP

9

IN THE NORTHERN CAPE YORK PENINSULA On 2 September 1980, the Special Projects Manager for Bush Pilots Airways Limited (BPA) noted that the history of the Cape York-Evans Bay area, would be a large part of its appeal to tourists. Evans Bay as a permanent watering place, 'is a key to much of the area's history'? He personally had found two rock mounds which were in a strategic position to give people at Evans Bay advance warning of canoes approaching from Muralag in the period before the invasion by Europeans. BPA had obtained a lease of 3,000 acres (five square miles) in 1979, which included the tip of Cape York and Evans Bay, from Canine Caterers Pty Ltd, which had held the lease since 1973. The company was planning a Wilderness Lodge at the tip of the Australian mainland: 'They can look over the edge of this rock face and say they've reached the top', the manager explained to me and my Aboriginal companion in 1980, as we looked down the rocky tip to the sea below. Less than a decade later the far northern Cape York wilderness had begun to undergo a fundamental transformation as some 5,000 vehicles a year brought people to the area. No mention was made by those associated with the enterprise of the wishes or needs of the Aborigines of the northern Cape York Peninsula. Or even

Plate 6

The catch: Evans Bay-Podaga 1980

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of their existence. Yet it was well known then that Evans Bay-Podaga is a favourite site for hunting and fishing among NCYP Aborigines. Those who extol the virtues of the Cape York Wilderness Lodge do not necessarily possess the sensitivity to see anything amiss in their disregard of Aborigines: Where the Gudany tribe once fished and hunted is now the setting for a Wilderness Lodge ... [which] ... caters for the tourist who has the urge to see one of the few remaining unspoilt environments containing winding rivers, northern scrubs and native bush.2 Not a word about the existing NCYP people. On 7 March 1988, the Cowal Creek (Injinoo) Community Council sought the assistance of the Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs to purchase the Cape York Wilderness Lodge now for sale by Australian Airlines. Tenders closed on 6 May that year. According to the Council, in March 1979 'unbeknownst to the Cowal Creek Community' the old lease of 3,000 acres was bought at auction in Cairns for $3,200.3 From that time onwards, as the Council pointed out on many occasions, members of the community were dissuaded from visiting the area and prohibited from hunting and camping in areas like Evans Bay traditionally used for those purposes.4 Evans Bay-Podaga is a rich source of all kinds of sea foods including oysters, and is lined with wongai trees which yield red plum-like fruit about August. Although the area covering Cape York tip had been under lease since 1923, first by the Queensland Government to the Commonwealth for purposes of the Department of Posts and Telegraph, in 1963 to private tenants which in March 1973 was transferred to Canine Caterers, and in July 1973 to Bush Pilots Airways (which became Air Queensland, which in 1987 was taken over by Australian Airlines), local Aborigines had continued to hunt and fish there. The community did not obtain the assistance necessary to obtain the lease in 1988. In fact the moves it had set in motion in May 1986 had been met by silence. An immediate reaction to a paper presented to a meeting with State and Federal Ministers at which the case was argued for greater access to leased lands occupied by the Wilderness Lodge had been a stealthy move to tighten the airline's tenure over the land. A memorandum of 29 July 1986 headed 'Land Rights', from the Manager of the Lodge to Sir Sydney William makes implicit reference to the Council's public request: 'Advice is that this kind of agitation will get worse once the Premier [Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen] leaves office, particularly with a coalition Government...'. Seeking 'to convince the Premier that our tenure be protected against future attempts to alienate it's - presumably by the traditional

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owners - the Manager suggested investigating the possibility of converting its tenure to freehold to safeguard the Company's interests. The community's move to purchase the lease to the land on which the Lodge is situated is integral with steps it had taken in the second half of the 1980s towards self-sufficiency. While it had no funds to purchase the Lodge itself the Council was offering to pay for infrastructure associated with it. The proposal, relating fundamentally to the wish to resume control over Podaga, arose from the firm belief that local people should run the enterprise as part of their cultural as well as their economic activities. The Cowal Creek-Injinoo Community Council's proposal was integral to, and one expression of, a more general move to regain control over land which NCYP people had lost, a claim which it had begun to press in the first half of the 1980s. In 1984, this pressure suddenly crystallised into unequivocal public statement. The Chairman, Daniel Ropeyarn, had announced to the Minister for Northern Development and Islander Affairs 'the community's wish to resume responsibility for our traditional land^'.^ On 26 January 1985, in the context of a major on-going controversy with the Queensland Government on recognition

Plate 7

Making ashes damper at Evans Bay-Podaga 1980

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FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

of the separate identity of the Cowal Creek-Injinoo Community, and in particular its primary right to thx whole NCYP, the Council again put its position unequivocally.

... it is neither the desire nor the intention of any of the residents of the Cowal Creek Community to enter into any division of the Torres Strait, under the Tbrres Strait legislation, with the Barnaga c~mmunity.~ The Community was seeking a separate division consisting of the three Abonginal communities i n the NCYP - Injinoo, New Mapoon and Umagico - and 'a more equitable break-up of the population of the Torres Strait' than that proposed, in which Cowal Creek Community would form but one-tenth of the population of a division composed of half the population of the Torres Strait, Bamaga Community representing one-third.8 In the intervening five years, Cowal Creek-Injinoo Community Council had made visible progress in the long process of creating economic self- sufficiency under the conditions of t h e 1980s, developing a community store, liquor canteen, camping area for travellers, transport and earth-moving enterprises, construction and cattle production. In the period from 1980 to December 1989, Cowal Creek Community, which, in 1988 had localised its name - becoming Injinoo Community - was moving towards becoming a prosperous, independent community again under modern conditions. People showed pnde in their new achievements, which included a very large, community-built brick recreation and meeting hall. With the issuing of Deeds of Grant in Trust (DOGIT) to sections of land north of the twelfth parallel to Injinoo Community, the Council, like other Aboriginal community councils, had 'looked forward to the return of traditional lands and reserves to the control and management of their community councils' Three reservations soon became apparent to the Council. The first was that some areas, classified as reserves under previous legislation (Aborigines Act 1979-84) were not included in DOGIT areas, the area known as the Jardine Swamps being one example. Second, Cowal Creek-Injinoo Community was not accorded any recognition of prior nghts to the land north of the twelfth parallel; it was, as we have indicated, 'lumped in a division with Bamaga' and seven other communities in the Torres Strait-Cape York region, only two others of which were Abonginal communities, the rest being made up pnmarily of Torres Strait Islander pe0ple.1~ The Injinoo Community's objection to this has two interrelated aspects, the significance of which is indicated by the historical context we outlined and discussed in Chapter 7. the identities of Aboriginal groups in the area have been suppressed and subordinated by official promotion of Islander groups and mterests; theprzor nghts of Aborigines, centred mainly at Injinoo, to land in the NCYP, have been officially ignored.

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After the Second World War many Saibai Islanders, in t h e aftermath of a giant tidal wave which had caused great destruction at Saibai, under their leader Bamaga, came as emigres in their luggers to Muttee Head, hoping to establish a new community in the NCYP. They settled at Bamaga alongside an already existing small community of a variety of people who had been sent there by the Department of Native Affairs (DNA). The Bamaga Island Community as it was called, grew to 658 in 1984 as compared with 241 at Injinoo, and Bamaga became the administrative centre of the DNA/DAIA, with its own postcode; the former military Higginsfield airfield known as Jacky Jacky airstrip became the civilian airport of the NCYP. A sawmill and an agricultural project were established, acting as a drawcard to people from various places. Although figures are unavailable, it has been suggested that Bamaga and Thursday Island took 'the lion's share of the Torres Strait budget' in the early 1950s." Seisia Community at Red Island Point (Ithunchi) was established as an Islander community, eventually having its own separate Council in 1987; people moved from Lockhart River Community were established as a community at Umagico (Alaukalau) in 1963, and in the same year, those forced to leave Mapoon to make way for the Comalco bauxite mine were provided with houses and other facilities at New Mapoon (Mandingu, also known locally as Charcoal Burner). Injinoo, together with the four new communities, became known by the DNAIDAIA as the Northern Peninsula Area (NPA). Since 1984, Injinoo Community has sought acceptance of two principles: its prior right and responsibility for NCYP lands; the need for a northern peninsula combined Aboriginal Council as a joint local authority with local government functions within a region separate from the Tbrres Strait, and covering all lands included in the DOGIT with respect to lands of the three communities. Despite letters to State and Federal Government Ministers and the Prime Minister, little has happened in response: progress towards recognition of the NCYP as Aboriginal land has been strictly limited, which brings us to the third reservation with respect to the hopes which the Injinoo Community placed on the issuing of Deeds of Grant in Trust: the general deficiencies of DOGIT with respect to recognition of customary rights to land - which the DOGIT do not recognise - a question I shall examine in the conclusion to this chapter.

THE MURALAG TRIBAL PEOPLE In the second half of 1988 a proposal was made by the Torres United Party (TUP), (a party formed in Townsville in 1977 by two expatriate Islanders, James Akee, a Murray Islander, and Carlemo Wacando from Darnley Island and committed to the goal of political sovereignty for the Tbrres Strait Islands), for the redevelopment

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of the whole of the island of Muralag (Prince of Wales (POW)) on behalf of Torres Strait Islanders. Known as TUPOW, the project had two interconnected aspects; an international tourist resort on various sites across the 150 square kilometre island, and a new city for Torres Strait Islanders on a twenty-square kilometre area on the eastern side facing Horn Island. It was thought by TUP leaders and their advisers that if the 16,000 Islander families at present living on the mainland or in Thursday Island were to press for house blocks, that pressure would be sufficient to convert the land tenure at Muralag to freehold, three-quarters of a square mile of which was leased by RN and AC Reddicliffe, the remainder being mainly Crown land. In 1987 the Reddicliffe partners were offered a thirty-year priority special lease of about twenty-eight hectares at the annual rate of $750 and a permit to occupy over the balance of the original Occupation Licence No 13 at the rate of $200 per year, by the Land Administration Commission, subject to executive approval. This alternative proposal came in response to a request from the lessees for a more secure tenure over the occupation licence area. The conditions of the proposed special lease prohibit use of the land for 'any tourism venture whatsoever'?2 Funds to develop the Torres Strait Islander city would become available through profits skimmed off the tourist resorts which would be used to subsidise Islander families seeking freehold house blocks and to finance the infrastructure (roads, parks, community centres, and so on). The TUPOW's call for a consortium capable of undertaking a $1,000 million development of the island was made public in an article in the Australian Financial Review on 14 September 1988?3That the proposal was seriously intentioned is evident from the stated support of the Minister for Northern Development and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, Mr Bob Katter Jnr; the arrival of Kerry Packer on a tour of Muralag in August 1988; and the visit of a party of engineers soon after to conduct a feasibility study concerned with damming the water source at Rabau Nguki. At meetings in Townsville, Torres Strait Islanders were encouraged by TUP leaders to request the right to buy freehold blocks of land at Muralag. News of the proposed development at Muralag was carried in the southern press. On 26 November 1988 the Age magazine carried the following statement on a project for tourism at Prince of Wales. Commenting on 'the fate of the option to buy the lease' there by a Sydney consortium, the report says: Prince of Wales Island is the most likely island in Torres Strait to see a pool bar. The island is large and covered with bush, with an occasional pocket of rainforest and a coastline of white sand beaches.. .. Prince of Wales has one commodity that many of the other twenty-six [Torres Strait] islands lack - water.

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Rabau Nguki is the only water source at Muralag to which the article could be referring. Muralag, it was being said by the Chairman of the TUP, Mr James Akee, i s the sacred property of islander people':* a statement which ignores the prior and specific rights of Muralag landowners, descendants of those who were forced off Muralag nearly four generations ago and strictly forbidden to return. While the customary owners of Muralag had been forgotten or ignored by the TUP and its advisers, it would be quite wrong to conclude that the landowners were ignorant, inactive or complacent. The Muralag Tribal Committee (MTC) had been formed at a meeting in Tbwnsville on 29 November 1987 before the plans to redevelop Muralag had begun. It was stated there by Roney Wasaga, who was elected president of the MTC, that there are many sacred sites at Muralag, Horn, Hammond, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday Islands 'which will be slowly disappearing into thin air', unless Muralag tribal people stand up for themselves and 'form an organisation to fight for what is rightfully theirs'.I5While it claimed the support of all Muralag tribal peoples the force behind its initiation and imaginative organisation came especially from those Kaurareg who had begun to return to Nurupai (Horn Island) after the Second World War. Since April 1988 the M E had become active in protecting a sacred site at Nurupai named Amain Nguki, which, they believed was threatened by the activities of a short-term gold mine on that island, and in pre-empting plans for tourist development on the outskirts of the mine site. In April 1988 the MTC turned its focus towards defeating the proposal to build a dam in the Rabau Nguki area and a controversy emerged in the Torres Strait weekly known as Torres News. On 19 August James Akee (of TUP) lodged an objection to the construction of the dam in the catchment area surrounding Rabau Nguki which the Torres Shire referred to as 'Dugong Story' (or 'dugong hole'), a name for Rabau Nguki common among E~ropeans.1~ Many indigenous Torres Strait Islanders were 'absolutely outraged' at the idea, said Akee in the Torres News of 12 August 1988: 'The Dugong Story has a principle of significance to us the Indigenous Tbrres Strait Islanders'. Akee had clearly been influenced by the Muralag landowners: yet Rabau Nguki is not of 'principle significance' to Torres Strait Islanders; it is of the utmost signal significance in the cultural meanings of the Muralag tribal people, the people of Waubin, playing something of the same role for them that Gelam does for the Murray IslandersJ7 Yet at this point plans to go ahead with the dam, estimated to cost up to $10 million, were being publicly advocated by Bob Katter Jnr, then Minister for Northern Development and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs. The proposal was for equal participation by the Queensland and Commonwealth governments. That

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pressure w a s being exerted from two opposing sides on the figures chosen as the public face of the whole TUPOW scheme is illustrated by the contradictory statements by TUP spokesman, James Akee. On 19 August 1988, a week after his 'feelings of outrage' statement, Akee stated in the Tbrres News that Horn Island 'should b e the next dam site rather than Prince of Wales'. Yet on 22 September he stated in a radio broadcast that Muralag-Prince of Wales has a water source adequate t o service any possible development there, and provide Thursday Island with water as well.18 This was clearly a reference to Rabau Nguki, there being no other suitable water source on the Island. Was Akee being caught in a cross-fire of interest between those pressing for the TUPOW resort development and the Muralag Tribal Committee and their supporters? Clearly, at this point some other Islander leaders had become aware of the principles at stake: Eddie Koiki Mabo, the first plaintiff in the Murray Island Land case, expressed his support for the rights of the customary owners to Muralag and his strongest opposition to its foreshadowed subdivision into freehold blocks for sale to Torres Strait Islanders or anyone else. The grounds of his opposition were precisely those on which he claimed his own land at Murray Island (Mer) in a High Court action.19 The active presence of the forgotten Muralag tribal people was being recognised by friendly Islander neighbours. According to Roney Wasaga, the chairman of the Muralag Tribal (Tbrres Strait Islander) Corporation (which had replaced the Muralag Tribal Committee), the two TUP leaders announced to him during 1989 that they were directing any applicants for freehold blocks to him. Early in 1989 he was told verbally by a senior officer of the Torres Shire Council that the dam was not going ahead. The reason given was the cost. The Muralag customary landowners were claiming at least a temporary victory. At the same time they are keeping a close watch for signs of any quiet move to freehold the lease and the rest of the island as was attempted in the case of the Cape York Wilderness Lodge. The Muralag Tribal Corporation was incorporated as an Aboriginal association on 2 June 1989 under the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act 1976. Alongside it is the Muralag Cultural Association which, led by Muralag tribal elders, is spearheading the move for registration and protection of sacred and historic sites a t Muralag, Muri (Mt Adolphus Island), Possession, Entrance, Horn, Wednesday, Hammond, Thursday, Friday, Goode, Booby Islands and other islands and islets. These developments may be seen as part of the process of reassociation with Muralag tribal lands from which the Kaurareg were forcibly separated more than three generations ago. Tb this end two investigatory site-mapping expeditions were undertaken by knowledgeable Muralag people in November and December

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1989. Muralag, the heartland of the Kaurerag, was chosen as the first island to be visited. Setting off from Horn Island soon after daybreak on 29 November, the party sailed to Muralag, travelling past Aiginisan on the northeastern side and Kiwain at the most northerly point. Travelling southwest round the island the party went ashore at Badukut, Muiarpui (Wongai Beach), Yet and Yata (Port Lihou). Badukut is the place where the Badukut River opens to the sea. Importantly, it is the gateway to the watercourse leading to Rabau Nguki. Muiarpui is a long sandy beach ending at Kiaki (Cape Cornwall), the southern-most point of Muralag. At Kiaki, a high rocky outcrop, is Agu, Turtle Lookout, which provides excellent sea visibility over Endeavour Strait in three directions. Yet is the northwest monsoon camp where the party camped overnight. The camp, at the southwest end of Yata, is placed adjacent to the edible mangroves (beu) at the southwest end of Port Lihou. A large sandy beach lined by she-oaks

Plate 8

Reclaiming Rabau Nguki, Muralag 1989, Elders Eselina Nawie and Maleta Luta

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borders a flat plateau immediately above the sandbeach and large enough to resemble a football or recreation field. Behind the flattened area is mangrove scrub. The creek at one end, dry at the time of our visit just before the northwest monsoon, becomes high enough in the northwest for the canoes to anchor out of sight.20 Yata, a sandbeach now lined with coconut trees, has a high rocky lookout point at its eastern end. The party did not find the kwod, or secret ceremonial ground at Waiza behind Yata. Three elders and two leaders of the Muralag Tribal (TSI) Corporation landed by helicopter beside Rabau Nguki on Thursday 30 November 1989 in pouring rain. A small ceremony was performed a t Rabau Nguki by the most senior elder present. Two other sites at Muralag were visited in December 1989: the cave paintings at the head of a small bay between Irki (Bampfield Head) and Yule Point; and Warngainap, a 'place of healing water' on the eastern side of Muralag, which is approached from Bed Point.

Plate 9

Reclaiming Rabau Nguki, Muralag 1989, Elder Billy Wasaga

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147

CONCLUSION: AFTER THE DEEDS OF GRANT IN TRUST In Queensland government circles in the second half of the 1980s great stress was laid on the advantages to Aboriginal and Islander people of the Deeds of Grant in Trust (DOGIT),which roughly correspond to land reserved for indigenous peoples under the respective Torres Strait Islanders and Aborigines Acts, which were repealed in 1984. Bob Katter Jnr, the Minister for Northern Development and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs until 2 December 1989, even suggested in 1989 that the DOGIT are a form of land ownership by Aborigines and Islanders.21 In reality, the DOGIT, accepted by all Aboriginal and Islander communities except the Murray Island community, have little similarity to ownership of freehold title. Trust areas defined by the Community Services Act 1984 are lands held in trust by Aboriginal and Island councils; in a narrowly legal sense the terms 'inalienable' and 'freehold' may be applied to them, for as trustees of these lands, councils may neither sell nor transfer trust lands 'except by surrender to the Crown with the approval of the Queensland Government': Land

Plate 10

Reclaiming Rabau Nguki, Muralag 1989, Roney Wasaga, chairman of the Muralag Tribal ('Ibrres Strait Islander) Corp,oration

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Act section 342. Yet portions of trust land may be removed from trust areas and granted as freehold Crown leases under the Land Holding Act 1985. These laws in no way imply ownership, and certainly not customary tenure: lands released from the trust areas and leased from the Crown are defined by further legislationthe Queensland Coast Islands Declaratory Act 1985 - as 'waste lands of the Crown

.

section 3(a),22In 1991, in the new circumstances of the election of a Labor Government on 2 December 1989, this was seen in government circles as an unexpected 'loophole'. TheInjinoo Community,who accepted a DOGIT as some sort of 'halfway house' to the return of all the lands of the NCYP to their customary owners, began to raise actively the inadequacies of DOGIT in the NCYP: families are seeking freehold blocks for cattle raising.23Injinoo Council is requesting that all Aboriginal reserves and land classified by the Government as 'vacant Crown land' (which includes previously established Aboriginal reserves) become Aboriginal reserves. In three-quarters of a century the Injinoo community has grown and extended its identity through intermarriage between the groupings which came together there in the first three decades of the century: the Red Island (east coast people who included Gudang, Yadhaigana and some Wuthathi-Whitesand people) the Seven Rivers peoples, who came together first; and the MacDonald River (Gumathi) people who were brought t o Injinoo later. Given their historic ties with Injinoo, there is a move among the Wuthathi, many of whom were taken forcibly to Lockhart River Mission in the 1920s, to strengthen their ties with the Injinoo C ~ m m u n i t yThis . ~ ~ does not mean a loss of identity: they remain the Wuthathi grouping within the larger whole, strengthening the latter by their identifiable presence. This is totally unlike the homogenising administrative process rejected by the Injinoo Council through which they would be assimilated into an administrative unit based upon the prominence of four immigrant communities in the northern Cape York Peninsula. At the beginning of the 1990s, recognition of a threat of a second invasion in the Cape York Peninsula has been accompanied by a response in defence of customary l a n d ~ . ~ Moves 5 for a transformation of the 'top end' through tourism, a projected military base, a spaceport and other development projects,26have met with major responses from Aboriginal communities: the formation of a Cape York Aboriginal Land Council (CYALC); a move by the Injinoo Council to obtain the lease of the Wilderness Lodge (which is on land at the tip of Cape York and Evans Bay-P~daga);~~ the training of Aboriginal rangers as guardians of Aboriginal land; opposition to the extension of national parks in the Northern Cape York Peninsula and the demand for these to be declared Aboriginal land;28and moves by the

A RETURN?

149

Muralag Tribal Corporation (MTC) to secure traditional rights to Giralag (Friday Island) and to Muralag (Prince of Wales Island).29

The Cape York region is not a wilderness, nor is it an empty space awaiting development. There have always been footprints on the Cape York sandbeaches; and they are beginning to become more visible to some people of the driving culture who had been schooled to believe they had disappeared. As we have seen at Injinoo and among the Muralag tribal people, the determination to win back the customary lands, fishing grounds and reefs taken through invasion consolidated in the late 1980s. At the beginning of the 1990s, their determination is finding public form. Both peoples have begun to make their wishes public in the areas of land, economic activities and cultural growth, including the initiation of work on indigenous languages a t I n j i n ~ o . ~ ~ In this work they have a basis of support from Torres Strait Islander people, who, since ancient times, have shared an affinity with the seafaring Aborigines of the northern sandbeaches. In the words of one Islander in 1981: 'Those people from Macan-Margaret Bay right round to Mapoon were a seafaring people. They were a nice people to work with; like us they belong to the sea.'31

NOTES 1. Paul Phelan, Cairns, to the author. 2. Prideaux 1988, 198.

3. Cowal Creek Council to Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Canberra, Council Office, Injinoo. The Lodge was for sale again in 1990 and the Queensland Government elected in December 1989, and later ATSIC, were requested by the Injinoo Community Council to buy the Lodge on its behalf. 4. Injinoo Community Council to M Ahern, Premier of Queensland, 30 May 1988, Council Office. 5. Facsimile, Council Office. 6. Injinoo Council to Minister for Northern Development, 28 September 1984, Council Office.

7 . Cowal Creek Council to Minister for Northern Development, Council Office; this letter was in reply to the Minister for Northern Development to Cowal Creek Council, 2 January 1985, which, in reply to the Community's letter of 28 September 1984 had stated that '. ..

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150

the Councils of Cowal Creek, New Mapoon and Umagico, ... would join with the Bamaga Council and then become amalgamated in a division of the Tbrres Strait'. 8. Ibid.

9. Injinoo Council to L Wyvill, Commissioner, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 30 August 1989 (re Return of Traditional Tribal Lands to Aboriginal Communities - Lizard Island and Wilderness Lodge). 10. Cowal Creek Council to Minister for Northern Department, 28 September 1984, Council Office. 11. Beckett 1987, 71, n 8. 12. Facsimile of Lease, Torres Shire Council. 13. Torres Strait Redevelopment Plan, Australian Financial Review, 14 September 1988. 14. Torres United Prince of Wales Consortium, Torres News, 16 September 1988. 15. Minutes of General Meeting, Muralag Tribal People and Supporters, Council Chambers, Thuringowa City, 29 November 1987. 16. See for instance Barrett 1954, 5; see n 41 to Chapter 5. 17. In the sense that the myth of the culture hero who came from Mabuiag and settled at Mer in the shape of a dugong gave the Meriam of Mer their basic identity. 18. ABC Radio relayed by TSIMA, Thursday Island. 19. Meeting of Torres Strait Islanders, St Stephens Church hall, Townsville, September 1988. For an interpretive analysis of the Murray Island Land case, see Sharp 1990b, 1-31; 1991b, 78-93. 20. As Moore reports (1979, 14), excavations had located an extensive occupation deposit in sandbanks between two arms of the creek containing remains of earth ovens and cooking stones, food shells and fragments of bone. Charcoal from a depth of 25 to 35 cm gave a carbon-14 date of 610+ 90BP (ANU-1364). Descriptions of sites visited rely on Moore's ethnographic reconstruction based upon the 1848-1850 Rattksnake Journals of OW Brierly. 21. Land Bilong Islanders, Yarra Bank Films, 1990. 22. For a detailed critical analysis of the DOGIT, see Sharp forthcoming. 23. Currently, every application for land leases from Injinoo or other NPA persons must be approved by a public meeting of Injinoo community members. 24. In 1990, Gordon Pablo, a Wuthathi man began work on indigenous languages at Injinoo. The Wuthathi Community of some 200 people

was threatened by moves for silica mining at Shelburne Bay (Whitesand) and for a spaceport at Temple Bay (Chatungun). In opposing both projects the Wuthathi gained wide support among Cape York Aboriginal communities (see Sharp 1990a, 32-40) and the Cape York Aboriginal Land Council (CYALC). 25. See Isaac Hobson, The Second Wave of Contact, in Proceedings, Conference on Fkmote Aboriginal and Tbrres Strait Islander Community Futures, AIATSIS, James Cook University, Townsville, 11-14 July 1990; We are the Rightful Owners of this Land, Traditional Owner Cape York Land Conference, Lockhart Riverl 2-6 September 1990; CYALC first meeting, Injinoo Aboriginal Community, 23-26 October 1990. 26. Sharp 1990c, 29-33. 27. See legal opinion, January 1991, 1-5 (Injinoo Council Records). 28, CYALC, Press Statement on opposition to the 4,151 hectares extension at Escape River to the Jardine River National Parkl September 1990; Noel Pearson for CYALC to P Comben, Minister for Environment and Heritage, Opposition to National Park on Aboriginal Land in Cape York Peninsula and the Escape River Extension, 21 September 1990; D Ropeyarn, Chairman, Injinoo Community Council to P Comben, 26 September 1990. 29. See Wasaga Claims h i d a y Island Victory, i'bwes News, 30 November-6 December 1990; a map identifying major sites on Muralag was prepared in conjunction with Muralag tribal people (see Tribal Rrritory Outline, Tbrr-esNews, 8-14 February 1991; 'Mr [Roney] Wasaga said the map would be crucial evidence in the land rights claim to go before the High Court, pending the [outcome of the] Murray Island or Mabo case.' 30. The Injinoo Community's request for due recognition of its shellcollecting rights in traditional waters has met with official refusal. See Injinoo Council to Deputy Director, Division of Fisheries and Wetlands Management, Brisbane, 20 April 1990, Council Office, asking that Injinoo people 'be licensed to collect pearl shell and trochus shell in our traditionally owned waters of the Endeavour Strait, and on the East Coast from the tip of Cape York south, as well as to the reefs east of the mainland and south to Swain Reef where our people have historically collected'. On 30 April a licence was refused on the grounds of lack of 'recent involvement in the industry'; the 'primary basis' for the issuing of licences being 'recent catch performance' (Deputy Director, Division of Fisheries to Injinoo Council). 31. Harry Captain, Cassette 089/K/T1/3/81.

PART IV A STORY OF LOVE AND DESTINY

The following story makes the important link between the life of the writer Jack McLaren with the &d Island (Somerset and east coast) peoples. It was they who made possible the success of McLaren's coconut plantation at Utingu-Simpson Bay between 1911 and 1919, the first such plantation at Cape York. In turnl McLaren, a seafarer, adventurer and writer, who came to Utingu from Melbourne as a young man of twenty-seven years, was a key figure in the adaptive transformation of the &d Island and Seven Rivers people into the 'hunter-gardeners' of Cowal Creek-Injinoo. McLaren's years at Utingu created bonds of mutual assistance; a two-sided growth in the understanding and way of life of McLaren and of local Aboriginal people who spent time with him at Utingu over eight years. According to McLaren's account in My Crowded Solituck, the customary owners sold the land at Utingu to him in return for flour and rice. He also explains there how they voluntarily, and under the leadership of one of their own people, the Yadhaigana folk-hero Billy Wymarral provided the labour necessary for the founding and development of the plantation. h turnl McLaren's gardening activities enriched and altered the ways of living of the Aboriginal people there, providing the groundwork for their initiative in founding a settlement at Cowal Creek-Injinoo around 1915 to 1916. As the events of these years are unfolded, one may begin to appreciate from the standpoint of Aboriginal custom and tradition, how Jack McLaren came to be linked irrevocably at Utingu through an event unannounced until now outside Aboriginal circles. His first coconut palm, the first in the Cape York area, stands as a symbol of the ties he made there.

lbwards the end of 1979 the late &v Alf Clint introduced me to Tkd Wymarra, through whom I met Marjorie, his mother, and other members of the Wymarra family. Ted told me the basic account of his grandfather and his grandmother, and of her brother-in-law Billy Wymarra, who came to act a s father to Ted's father, Nicholas. From this account I constructed the story which follows. The core events of Through a Glass, Darkly .,. have several oral versions. In the creation of a semi-fictionalised account, I have retained the core of the first version told to me in 1979; after careful reflection and investigation, I have amended the written story in only one respect. The alternative versions, responses to the paradoxes of the social period in which Jack McLaren left Utingu, are the subject of a fuller reflection in Children of the Milkwood Tree, the complete Utingu story. Among Aboriginal people today at Injinoo, Ted Wymarra is recognised as the heir to Utingu.

CHAPTER

10

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

...

For rww we see through a glass darkly, but then fme to face:

... l Cox miii, 12

CAST ASUNDER: A PROLOGUE * Still night. Moon moves upward illumining the sea and the she-oaks along the sandbeach. Shapes of palms thrust upward outline themselves against the sky. This is the Place of Many Big Trees, Utingu. A mahogany and bloodwood forest inward from Endeavour Strait at the peak of the continent is touched by the moon. Patterns move gently upon the ground; seas ripple softly. A diffused murmur of sea and trees creeps through the stillness as ground to the sound-music of humankind. Looking outward to the shapes of dusky shadows, silhouette-substantial figures of a night-ground whitened by the moon. Whites of eyes like countless points of stars sparkle upon the surface of darkness.

Th,emfelkr come Long way from sandbeach to this place of man9 big trees. 'People of the east', they called themselves, come from as far away as the white sandbeaches of the bay of black macan, the Victoria Rifle Bird, bird of paradise, a day's sail to Cape York, along the stretches of sand that move faster than quicksilver. Whitesand. Set within the mirror of the moon's light, Jack stands looking out at the world and the figures all about him: and in upon himself. Etched white-gold for an instant through the light of Wandihnu, daughter of the moon. In her light the world is lit up, customary division reversed, turning shadows into lights; fixing its white riband on the inner reaches of his soul. A meeting of two worlds. Palms trees lit by the self-same light as the camps of messmates. The palms had made their way from innocent seed to tiny shoot and now to bearing

* The characters are real and much of the conversation is drawn from Jack McLarenls My C~owdedSolitude. The basic story was given to me by %d Wymarra, eldest son of Nicholas, with the expectation that I publish it. The character and inner conflicts of Jack McLaren are built from the above book, from My Odyssey and S u n Man, and from the recollections and memories as handed down, of the Aborigines who worked and lived at Utingu.

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tree. His creations, nourished by the earth of Utingu. Creatures too of the shadowy figures making music below thfe trees, sap and root made flesh of their flesh.

They are making music and songs of recent stories: joyous notes of a life at newer country wrung out of sorrow. The cosmic notes have become fuller holding a strangeness. In his own sadness he longed for the sounds which might once again still his troubled soul. These are long low sad sounds he had not heard before. Songs of a parting? Of his going? The boy Nicholas moves in his arms; wakened by the change in the music. A sense of unease? Bathed for an instant in the moon's light, two faces merging; the man's bronzed by the equatorial sun, the boy's darkened beyond its first shade of wild honey before it had ever seen the light of the sun. The child, like the coconut palms, was made and nourished by two worlds. Moment of peace between the man and child breaks suddenly a s the winds begin to rise, swaying the trees and sending a howl across Endeavour Strait. Storm-winds of power are raising up the clouds to shadow the moon. The tempest is rising, a wide span of nature turning to fury. Plunge into darkness and the feel of strained nature; malign forces abroad accompany the putting out of lunar light. The human shadows become insubstantial, strange, fading into an even darkness as the music slowly comes to a halt. Two worlds cast asunder. Another kind of music comes from out of the blackness. Deep sounds of anguish for the death of the moon are accompanied by the weeping of the sheoaks along the sandbeaches.

The boy returned to sleep and Jack held him tenderly; shadowy faces becoming colourless. The man gazed gently down as though to imprint on his mind the features of the child. There was no space for him, no steady ground. The two were pulled apart by forces of darkness; the boy now lost to Jack forever. Silently the tall man placed him in his bed, his sleep uninterrupted. Tomorrow would begin at daybreak for him. Jack dozed and when he looked next rays of the dawn sun were reaching through the casuarinas which had ceased their soft, sad moan as they were stirred into movement by the night winds bearing in along the sandbeaches. The air was clear and still, filled with a waiting silence. He hadn't heard his uncle

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Billy's low call at the small boy's window, a morning signal which never failed to bring Nicholas hastening headlong through the house slipping out from his pyjamas as he moved. This was the daily hunting trip; as dugong man or as fisherman Billy was number one with harpoon. He hastened towards the verandah, for he knew the craft would be waiting to take him at high tide. Along the beach was the figure of the boy's uncle, Bill Wymarra, spears over a shoulder, Nicholas, a brown dot beside him, tinying in the distant creamy mass of surrounding sand. The children walking beside him, his older cousin brothers and sisters were spots of varying sizes in the distance as they made their way together towards the dinghy. Jack strained his eyes as the small group blurred beyond his focus. He was safe in Billy Wymarra's hands; neither solitary nor unprotected. There at the top of the steps was a small bluish heap of cloth. Nicholas' 'sip 'jamas', as he called them, dotted with tiny ships and anchors and other sea motifs; made lovingly by Mary Brown, they were the only clothes the boy would wear. Jack strode out into the quickening light of morning fevered by the intense awareness of a moment. Grasping the axe he had brought with him to the Place of Many Big Trees eight years before, he began to chop at a tree he had planted. It was green and beautiful, alive with sap. Spurred on by powerful movements, which come at times to men beset by a determination born of inward conflict, he cut right through. He had severed it. The sun brought his eyes to the morning dew on the leaves now lying upon the ground. As he looked through those drops it was as through a veil of tears. An enveloping mist seemed to be wrapping itself round the luminous glow of the morning sun: encirclement of gloom. The glass was darkening.

SHADOWS A CROWDED SOLITUDE Jack McLaren was a young man who sought to break free from the life of middleclass Melbourne in the early years of the century. A young Odysseus of the twentieth century living his odyssey within the seas which separate Pacific islands and the myriad isles of Torres Strait between Cape York and New Guinea. Jack was a resourceful would-be adventurer with qualities of strength, physical courage, prowess in countless ways: heroic virtues of classical times in a non-heroic age. His was the life of romance and adventure (a dream of all full-blooded youth), and like the bard Phemius of the Odyssey he believed: I a m self-taught; the gods have implanted in m y heart songs of all kinds. It was through those songs that he was to strike the chord of the world of nature. It was through newer songs of the equatorial lands that he was struck

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by a newer chord: the cosmic verities for which he searched. That sensibility could express both a devastating loneliness and a transcendence of the everyday world through the visible link 'between a thing of nature and the human soul'. In that attunement Jack was able to see an ending t o his search. 'My odyssey is over. The instinct of the wilding is dead', he told himself. Glamour had receded before familiarity. Other poems were to the fore. A newer song with a stronger melody and deeper note called him. A new challenge awakened his restless soul. 'How to transform that land which thrusts up into Torres Strait like a pointing finger from a black man's jungle to a white man's garden?', h e asked himself. For in this topmost peninsula of the continent were no coconut trees planted, no cultivated gardens. 'In my young man's view', he reflected in his diary, 'there would be something romantic in being the first systematically to plant coconuts in so great a land and thereby bring it into its own.' Jack's roving had ceased; his restless spirit remained. And so he sought and found the Place of Many Big Trees with a source of water and the remnants of the clans of the area. In October 1911 Jack and a partner leased for eight years 960 acres at Utingu, Simpson Bay, on the shores of Endeavour Strait and close to the old telegraph station at Paterson several miles from Ithunchi, which white men called Red Island Point, and Injinoo, Place of Cool Water, known sometimes as Small River and named Cowal Creek on white men's maps since the 1860s. In 1920, the partners were issued a Deed of Grant in respect of 219 acres, one rood and fifteen perches bounded by a road on an esplanade running west and northwest. Jack himself began and worked the plantation. He began to build himself a dwelling; he sunk a well; he planted mango trees. As a sign of his occupancy he carved his initials into the trunk of a young milkwood tree. Within a year, fifty acres of coconuts stood where only jungle stood before. In the fifth year was the first bearing palm: something he, Jack, had made. And there among them was the 'buoyant young palm which was the first to fruit', Jack wrote, thrilling to the awareness that he was the agent of its being. 'That palm gave me a special delight. It was to me like a child.' Like the fulfilment of a dream Cape York was becoming to Jack 'a true part of the tropical Pacific'. Four or five thousand coconut trees were the sign of a transformation. Challenged and spurred on by Jack's success, Frank Jardine, the former Police Magistrate at Somerset opposite Albany Island near the Cape York tip, began planting coconut trees also. Small clusters of Aborigines of the eastern sandbeaches were arriving at Utingu and Alau and Injinoo to join the Seven Rivers and Red Island clans who

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

Plate 11

The milkwood tree a t Utingu after fifty years

159

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had gathered there. For Jack their arrival helped to enlarge t h e focus of his new goal to create a garden at Cape York. 'It would be a finer thing still if I succeeded in turning a whole people from wandering idleness to habits of industry', he mused. During their own harvest time from about May to July the people returned to the place of the yam harvest; there they sought small game and special roots and wongai and especially sugar bag or wild honey. Here and there they

Plate 12

Utingu after fifty years, under the milkwood tree (inset J McL, 1911)

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161

stopped at crossings in search of roots. At water places they made camp and roasted in their earth ovens of stones the wallaby or possum or bandicoot they speared. This was a time they looked forward to, planned for and talked about endlessly in yarns of other similar times, of themselves and their fathers and mothers. They were yarns of hope and yearning in the season of the nor'west monsoon, the rainy season. In the recounting of a story they were reliving in retrospect and in prospect a way of life. Custom was being affirmed and at the same time altered in each new act of telling. They were moving, living the new experience of this fresh season. Their hearts went with it. This was a new walkabout to the country of their forefathers. For they were the survivors. The messages received from friendly neighbours had told of new things and of a white man who would share his knowledge and the things of white men. 'This feller whiteman em i alltime givim yumifeller something. Em i no like devil feller Jardine', was the message passed about Jack along t h e sandbeaches. The newer people from the east coast were sandbeach people like those who had arrived at Utingu some years before. They were people who savvy plenty whiteman ways. Tb Jack they were different to those he had met before. Why had they come? Men like Billy Wymarra with the bearing and manner of a white man. 'A kind of white black-man', he seemed to Jack. Speaking English with perfect ease, he was born and bred near a settlement, worked for white people all his life, on cutters and luggers, and on farms. He knew white people and their ways. He had learned not to trust them, by and large. From time to time he had found a different kind of white man. Like the man who had taught Billy English and custom and whitefeller ways. How to use a knife and fork, write his name, say grace, why there was a king of England and why the whitefeller come took this country and took Aboriginal women. The man was a school teacher and a sort of 'Bigfeller Unionist', as Billy related it to Jack during their first evening yarn. That man had told Billy he would have to fight for his land which white people had taken away. Billy had told that man he knew that from Somerset where he had worked for Frank Jardine. When he had seen what happened to less independent black fellers, the old servants of Somerset, he Billy had spoken up. 'I find legs, I stan'up', he would say. From that time on he and his wife, who worked in the kitchen, had been expelled from employ. For a time the two of them had remained on the fringes of the settlement at Somerset, roving with a small camp of other Yadhaigana people who had joined them. Every now and then, Billy, with some of his brothers, or even alone, had set off on hit-and-run raids, payback for the devil deeds of old

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man Jardine. And so a sniper war had begun between himself and Jardine. Billy told endless stories of the pitting of wits between himself and the old man. The story he loved telling most was about the dummy figure of Frank Jardine asleep against a tree beside the dying campfire with the old man awaiting Billy, rifle poised, hidden in the shadows. Billy, a man who could pin two dancing snakes to the ground in a trice, approaching, spear poised. Sensing danger. Righting his mistake, scaling a coconut tree as though it were horizontal. Swaying among the leaves for hours until the danger had passed. 'Jardine not come out tonight.' Again and again Billy would be asked to tell this story among the group of men who came of nights and yarned and sang and smoked a little and yarned some more on Jack's verandah to the sound of the waters close by lapping upon the sand. Not for nothing were Wymarra's people called the talkers by their neighbours in Muralag, land of spirits, the people of the big island off Cape York across Endeavour Strait.

THE SURVIVORS OF DEATH One evening Billy asked Jack to come down to the camp site close to the white man's house which Jack had them build for Billy and his family, for tonight was a special occasion and Billy had made up new dances and songs. When yam time, the season of the great yearly vegetable harvest arrived between the months of May and August, or in times for dancing and singing, Billy showed that h e was also a true native of northmost Australia. He revelled in the dance and mime and song. Tonight was a new one, 'nother kinda one', said Mary Brown, Jack's housekeeper. But more than that neither she, nor Billy, nor his cousin brother Alick Whitesand, would say. Soon it became clear why, for this was the story of their most recent wanderings. It was the reason they came, the story of their fathers and mothers, composed and relived by the most 'detribalised' of all those gathered here. It was the story of men who had left their country as children or who had been born somewhere else, away from the country of their fathers or their mothers. It was the story of men like Billy Wymarra, now about forty, who had been born in those times when the recruiters, unrestrained, were stealing men and women quietly fishing on the reefs - a time when people of the east coast from Macan Bay to Cape York were a dwindling band ravaged in the pincer between sea and land frontiers which had their people in its relentless grip. As Jack watched, marvelling at their fortitude, he began to see woven in mime and gesture some of the stories he had heard in their nights of yarning. Ships sailing in. White men with axes buying the confidence of black men. Womenfolk hidden in the shadows or within the sands. Recruiters grabbing

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women and children from off the reefs and sandbanks to lives of terror. Men resisting, spears deadly aimed. Nullah nullahs clapping. Tempo rising. Diving, at gunpoint, marooned and disused on devil islands. Shooting in their canoes. Ageold enemy tribes fighting more fiercely, grimly with more intensity than ever before, egged on by newcomers. Dying in the valleys of the Great Dividing Range which separated them before they could make common cause. And always the same figure with rifle and revolver. Devil Man. Dive and come up, go, dive again. Flash! Flash! The flickering lights of the campfires lit the sheen of their bodies, bedewed from the dancing, highlighting the contrasting white of eyes. Dance of Death. They had taken on the appearance of the tough trees and plants of the forest: ironwood trees green with life stretching forever heavenward above them; like shoots and ariel vines, resilient, intertwined, forbidding the marauder. 'White black-man', survived, returned to his country once more, gathered in larger groups and moved to newer 'old country'. The triumph of life over death had cast a long spectral shadow far across the land and they had walked in that shadow. That night was a turning point for Jack. The threads of his experience were tying themselves together in a pattern he would perceive. A thin shaft of light was shining upon them and in that brightness he glimpsed their experience as survivors of a cataclysm that had shaken their very souls. SHADOWS OF HOPE

Long before, a t first meeting he had recognised Billy's 'white man's' capabilities. Jack had appointed him as overseer and Billy had turned out to be quite excellent. He knew all he needed to know and probably more in white man's ways and he was continuing to learn all the time. He inspired confidence and trust in all the clans, not only his own and these were clans from different ground. They wanted to work when he was around and they did so with a devotion, a zest and a cheerfulness that no white man, not even himself, ever managed to induce. Through Billy, Jack's relationship to the people had earlier undergone a change. He no longer commanded them; he was no longer 'Masta', but had become 'man from the east' - the direction from where he had first appeared at Utingu; the people who accompanied Billy were also from the east. After all, hadn't he built a white man's house for Billy and his family, and hadn't he treated them all with respect and understanding. 'This feller savvy all-time what for we go walkabout', they would say. Hadn't he offered them land and taught them how t o plant and given them all kinds of fruit from his plantation: coconut, maize, banana, pineapple and sweet potato. From his stores he returned their work with flour, sugar, tobacco

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a n d rice, which latter they hated. Maggoty food, they called it. And he had done s o in a different way to other white men of their acquaintance. They were free t o bring their songs and sing and yarn at nights on his verandah, humming to the strange new sounds of his piano. They came into the home and into the heart of this strange, tall, hard-working, patient, but puzzling, white man. 'This white man is good and kind, and our hearts are glad he is here', Jack heard them say. 'Wanem you come look mefeller for?', they asked. 'Wanem yufeller no bring white missus belong you live longa you here?' It was incomprehensible to the clanspeople that any man would come and live in the bush alone. Not one of them would venture out into the bush alone even in daylight, even though it was inconceivable that any of them would get lost or even lose his way. Their sense of direction was faultless. Even the tiniest child seemed to have come into the world equipped with an inbuilt compass. But the bush was a lonely place to an Aborigine. There were always present the little men whom you could not see but whose spells made you go silly in the head and angry spiteful spirits of people who had not gone peacefully to rest. He must never go into a cave alone. 'Never', warned Mary Brown. Wasn't he terribly lonely, she had asked; she already saw that he was and her heart grieved for him. 'More better you bring white rnissus next time come up from Melbourne go', Mary Brown ventured one time. They would look after her, make sure no harm came to her, she assured Jack. Yet there seemed to be no way that he could give them the understanding that the young women he had known were not robust people who could cope with bush life. A woman nurtured entirely in a city was quite outside even Mary Brown's experience, and she had lived with and worked for white people in Thursday Island. And so to her, as to the others, Jack was partly a puzzle; like all puzzles he made their minds restive. Jack believed himself that no 'white missus' should be expected to eat bush tucker as he did when the boat didn't arrive. He believed this firmly, although he kept it to himself for fear of hurting the feelings of people whose hearts he had won. He thought of the white women he had met on his travels. Their conversation seemed more and more inane. Pinched and washed-out personalities which matched their lily-white legs, over-laundered in body and soul. He saw them ordering 'the blacks' around, saying they were dirty, hating the shine of the coconut oil on their bodies, calling them gins and boys and shutting them out of the house, or even the verandah as was the way at Somerset. 'How could I explain?' he chuckled to himself.

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They had changed him and they themselves had changed - two worlds blended and blending in the quest for life. In the fashion of their grandfathers and grandmothers they were settled people when the nor'west set in. They had strong weatherproof dwellings with four posts, bark walls and roofs. They lived on fish, dugong and oysters, as well as fruits of Utingu and rations from Jack. A day or two's journey down the coast towards the Gulf, some of the Seven Rivers people had made themselves a settlement with special help from a related person, Alick Whitesand, who, like Billy Wymarra, came from the east coast sandbeaches. There at Injinoo they had planted coconuts, sweet potato, bananas and pineapples just as Jack had planted in his garden. 'Mefeller try to make a mission here', they declaimed to Jack. 'Mefeller try for get a cutter and whaler, or one them 'Company boat' like them Island man,', they said. 'So mefeller can go gedda someting belong whiteman for build a school for mefeller piccaninny'. Here at Utingu or Injinoo or the camping spots in between, the groups appeared to white men like a settled people with all-weather houses and other signs of permanent camp. They could be seen fishing and dugong hunting from canoes like the people who belonged to the Torres Strait Islands. Yet soon the Aborigines would be out on a bigfeller walkabout. The great annual vegetable harvest would begin. They were not holed up and huddled in the wet: their hearts were laid out towards the coming of the new season; they were making preparation both material and in feeling of mind and body for harvest time. The camping place would change with the season. Everybody would be here at another place, clearly designated by blood ties of family and relatives by marriage. They were returning east where the yams seemed bigger, as did the oysters at the river named Escape by Kennedy's party. The appearance of a typical fisherfolk, of a seafaring people, was suddenly gone. They were packed up and away on the track to other country. They had become 'another kind of people' now. That 'wanderlust', as Jack called it, lay strong in them all, even in Billy Wymarra and others who were knowledgeable and who seemed to be inured to white people's ways. He could sit for hours gazing at the sea as did they all. 'S'pose I all-time got them white feller things, I all-time walkabout', one of them told Jack wistfully of his notion of an ideal existence. Yet they were not standing still. They felt the need for a settlement with 'whiteman' houses like Billy's and a school and a store with white fellers' food. Yes, above all, a school, for their children to learn new things: but still walkabout sometime.

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BEGINNING TO KNOW Jack had come to know how they felt about walkabout - not only the yearning for the harvest foods, though their eyes told of it, but also for the place of the harvest. These were part of them and they gloried in the times of that season and place. That season was there, not here, they would try to explain. For them every season had its own place. Harvest season was special. And t h e lilt of their voices and the swing of the step with which they greeted the signs of its onset were testimony. Years ago Mary Brown had explained to him what he could not then see for himself. It was 'the fashion' for the natives to go for 'walkabout' she had said firmly. 'Always wefeller been like that. Always!' With white men it was different. White men could stay long times in one place. But with natives, their eyes came tired walking always on the same ground. And their bodies came tired from sleeping always in the same camp. They wanted to go look at other places, walk on other ground. Dimly he grasped then that the call could not be denied. All of them would be going as they had come: in straggling procession along the beach, the men with spears and clubs, the women with their possessions bundled on their heads. As a wanderer himself he thought he had understood. But with them it was different too for their natures were formed by the land. They belonged to a land they knew and it was as if it knew them. They were going home to a ground that awaited them. He had come to know, bit by bit, their custom and their natures and their intimate knowledge of the land. 'It is our fashion to remember a plant', one of them said. Even the tiniest child could at no notice at all give a dissertation on any plant, be it weed or fruit; say where it grew, its flowering and seeding times, its habits and habitat, its preference for one kind of soil and aversion to another and the reasons. They knew their surroundings in a systematic way: for Jack it was total. They knew all there was to know. Not just inanimate lists as those he had had to learn in school like tables, but as figures in relation to a ground. They could tell from footprints which animal or man and which way, what that one had been doing or stopped to do, how fast he was travelling and even the time of day. For all of nature their knowledge was systematised and the categories were as detailed and more alive than those of any scientist. For these Aborigines too, who were seafarers like the Islanders to the north with whom they traded (and fought), this applied to the sea as well as to the land. Their dugong knowledge seemed to be unerring and complete.

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All their things had been grown one time. In his early days with them Jack had found them curious about things outside their experience like the hibiscus fringes on his Papuan mats which they loved. Or the strange plants which formed a secondary growth following the chopping down of bits of their forest for t h e plantation, which they had greeted with intense curiosity and amazement tinged with a strong note of aversion. For them the latter had arrived like triffids destroying the old certainties, taking up the anchors of their social world and threatening their sense of security. They were all part of a bigger reality-denying experience which had come with white men and disturbed their peace of mind in a fundamental way as no other event had ever done. Guns that could kill from a long way off. Other kinds of things which white men had made were removed from their world. The knownness of a world that was theirs was the axis on which their lives moved. The sense of order and the feeling of security in knowing the fabric of their environment and themselves was disturbed. White men had forced themselves upon them, destroying their means of existence often - their canoes and nets and harpoons, their places of big water and their food supplies on land. Often they were subjected to physical attack and always to scorn. This humiliation they found hardest to handle. It was totally outside the experience of men. So too was the arrival of these secondary growth plants. In a world which depended on knowing intimately the natural world, it disturbed their sense of being. The presence of these new plants growing in their own space was a s grotesque and frightening as an invasion by Martians. It became the subject of mime and dance and above all yarning. Eventually they had broached the subject with Jack: from so casual and genial a people he received his first jolt. He was destroying their food-producing jungles. He was also threatening their peace of mind. He felt immoral. Theirs was a way of knowing a living thing in its relation to other parts of nature and man. Each thing meant: it was part of living. It was a matter of being in tune with the trees and plants and the rhythm of the seasons. Like the graceful movements of the swim-diversamong the grottoes coral-lined below. Their lives were constantly close to all that. Things of nature blended with the people, for they remained part of each other. Even their loved ones were never totally departed; the spirit, the best of each, remained among the living. Above all, Jack came to conclude, they were totally kind to each other, to their children and to their old ones. Tb each other they showed infinite solicitude: a man would sacrifice himself totally for his brother. Jack had seen it happen again and again when they dived in the dangerous shark-infested waters close by. They were completely honest to him and to each other. It no more occurred to them

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to tell lies than to steal from each other or from him. If a person lost one of his possessions, everybody started looking: he didn't have to ask them. Most of all they loved babies. At first Jack watched dumbfounded at the sight of an old warrior crooning and cuddling a crying infant till eventually it fell asleep in his arms, the black of the two bodies merging into the darker and lighter shades of one whole. They were unaware that this expression of affection for small children was noteworthy. It was their way and they knew no other. Jack had come with hopes of instilling into these people 'habits of industry' as he thought. From a roaming, unproductive band to a community of tillers of the soil. He had changed them. Hadn't they taken him two days walk down the coast to the new settlement at Cowal Creek, the Place of Cool Water where some of them had helped the Seven Rivers people plant gardens like his own. Hadn't they besought him to start a mission. And they had made up storysongs about what he had done at Utingu. He was self-taught and he had taught them; this is what he believed. Now the songs flowering in them were newer ones. The New Dance of Death had held him in its thrall. Sometime it had happened that it was they who had begun teaching him. He was seeing anew. He had come to this lonely jungle to transform it and to change them. He knew from the start that they were indispensable for the task he had set himself on the beaches of Endeavour Strait. 'Those wild black men with tossed locks and fierce low brows', a s they had seemed to him in the early days, now held a changed expression for him. Their skins, dull-black, were now so familiar and commonplace to him that he forgot their colour and saw into their eyes. He had begun to merge with them, to respect their custom and feel their longing for the signs of each new season. He could also feel their hope for Change: for 'a Mission', for the Answer; something they believed in and hoped for so wholeheartedly. He became aghast in the awareness of how he had disturbed their peace of mind. He sensed that he, somehow, was becoming a key to their hopes. There was a knock on the door. Billy Wymarra had come to say goodbye for all of them. He was a quietly civilised man. In his own courteous custom one would never intrude on another man's place. He always tapped gently and spoke softly. When he chose to speak in English it was perfect. Last night had been the time of farewell before time belong walkabout. Already the sun was beginning to climb into the sky above the coconut trees. This time the other clan from down-coast at Injinoo had joined them before the move to east coast country. In a few days they would have rounded the Cape and be awakening to the red dawn of the east. And then further south beyond their home country, to Macan Bay, where the sand shimmers with a glare hard-white, and

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where the black bird of paradise, the Victoria Rifle Bird, named after the place, also makes its home. Billy was thanking Jack for his piano playing of the night before. 'Them proper nice-one songs', he said, breaking into the local idiom. Jack thanked him and all of them profoundly for they had yarned and sung and danced and yarned again. Both knew that another time had come and the morning meeting was filled for an instant with the soul of a silence. Jack watched them go as the sun shone among the trees, following first with his eyes their trek northward along the beach; watching them as they went as though forever until they were just a blur. As he watched, a black rnacan, radiant bird of the far reaches of their country, flew close by. The sun's rays lit up its plumage of red and copper shades and majestic blue; it seemed to Jack to lend the blackness of its body a sheen as of new coal. It too had responded to the call of another place and they went together. An intense solitude began to envelop him. A deep chasm of loneliness seemed to open into which he began to fall.

FACE TO FACE THE MEETING Standing at the moment where day meets night; the wide-angled rays of the setting sun sent a warm-coloured glow through the stilled air. A child was spread limply in her arms. It was the young woman he had glimpsed on horseback a few days before. Her quiet energy and mercurial grace tuned with those of her steed, tone on tone the shades of the pair blended together, left in his mind a picture of complete harmony. The blackness of the recesses of her hair, wavish, like the undulations of the sea on days of clear steady wind, and the outward curves of her curls, sun-bleached to give a copper finish, complemented the rich tonings of her skin and the shades of her horse, its mane and hair and tail. For an instant Jack recalled a half-realised feeling of exhilaration, experienced then he knew not why. This new meeting evoked an unforgetting resonance in him, heightening a partly-conscious awareness of the earlier occasion. Impelled by her presence to centre the focus of his gaze upon eyes deepset, the look returned straight into his own. Even in distress she possessed an enduring repose. 'Em i got kolsik, sik belong whiteman. I come up quick for you for lookem. If you can give em some medicine', she said low and matter-of-factly.

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The child had that leaden puffed-up look about his cheeks which in white people is accompanied by a visible flushing of the face. There was an earnestness about her bearing and face. Carrying with it was a gaze which might have been one of piercing clearness had it not been softened by an accompanying mistiness. The coming together of the two qualities caused Jack to glance away. The earth was well endowed with comely girls and he was a connoisseur of womankind. In the time of his odyssey he had sought and found in these parts wild passionate girls, dark-eyed to match their skins and the raven of their hair. But here was a girl of different quality. Most human, most ethereal; this was the unique virtue of Wandihnu. 'Ib Jack it was as though a god in artist mood had painted a human face in the likeness of heaven. There are some individuals whose vibrancy of spirit endows the plainest mortal form with qualities of beauty. So looking or speaking as the utterances of the soul transform the mundane earthly form. There are others too whom nature has moulded as things of formal beauty, but whose spirit being sickly or stunted, remain immobile and inert. When the spirit and the flesh come together in one inspired whole there is creation of ethereal beauty. Such a creation was Wandihnu. The straightness of her manner was characteristic of her people, Jack thought, as he gently administered the tablets to the small boy. 'Whiteman' sickness, so whiteman's cure. Snakebite or jellyfish or stonefish found their own remedies. But this was influenza; white man's kolsik. 'Keep him warm and bring him back in the morning', Jack told her quietly. He had no fear that she might not. Aboriginal mothers seemed to him like grown trees with tender fruit not yet ready to be detached. They went on suckling them for years after they had started to run about. It was as though children remained part of their own bodies. Not only mothers, but also fathers and grandparents too seemed to experience personally the physical pain of small babies. Countless arms were readily outstretched to offer comfort. For an instant the solitude was gone from Jack. She gathered up the small boy, thanked with her eyes as well as her voice and was gone. 'Em i orlright', concluded Mary Brown who had observed the sequence closely. 'Em i bin work before long all place belong whiteman, long Somerset, long Locherbie, long TI. Em i young feller yet, but em i savvy all them thing belong whiteman. Em i comeup and lookout for you long this place.' Jack knew that Wandihnu was the much younger sister of the dead wife of Billy Wymarra, whom he had recently appointed his overseer and for whom he was building a house like his own on a smaller scale. She must be the young

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aunt of the child she had brought to him. But Billy, who had worked for him for a month or two, had not yet introduced his young sister-in-law to Jack. It was not their custom to introduce anyone. Another one of their casual ways, Jack thought to himself. You just met people in the course of things. At first he had thought they were impolite. Later he discovered that their custom was different. There was no hurry. Sooner or later there would be the occasion. In their custom, strangers aside, a newcomer was identified beforehand by reference first to country, to blood ties, then to ties by marriage, and sometimes to ties of friendships formed in the wake of warfare. Time and again Mary Brown had said, 'If I go, who lookout for you?' The answer, it seemed had just been given. She, Mary Brown, would teach Wandihnu all the things she knew so she would be able to take the older woman's place. So it was arranged by Mary Brown. Wandihnu quickly learnt the new skills that the older woman could teach her. She went about the place with zest combined with a graceful charm. Tb Jack it seemed that if there were princesses among Aborigines she was surely one. A special kind of princess: earthly yet otherworldly. Many of Wandihnu's moods were movements between opposites. At times the surface appearance, her face to the world, was but a mask for contrary feelings. Earnest, even grave yet light-hearted and lively, ardent yet happy-golucky, firm but kindly, especially with children; above all casual and relaxed in manner, yet diligent and persistent. In the seeming unconcern of her manner she was the archetype of her people. To Jack they seemed the most casual race on earth. He had had to learn again and again that the most impassive face might be the cover for heart-rending news which had been strained through a fine mesh of feelings ready to be given in a cryptic statement. Despite her daily presence Wandihnu continued to surprise Jack by her coupling of proud and independent self-possession with a gentle yielding affection. Everything she did was completely generous, innocent of guile. Yet for one so selfless in her giving there was no loss of self, no martyrdom, no servility. She had that art of giving and still remaining herself. She did so within the house of a white man with another member of her race, Mary Brown, for whom that man was almost a creature divine. For Mary Brown, Jack's needs came first and last. He was the new messiah who would show the way to better things. To her his power was as the power of the sun. 'Way belong you more better, I think', she would say to him. Mary Brown was devoted and single-minded. Her feet remained on the ground of her own people, but Jack's life had become hers. She felt his

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loneliness and it grieved her deeply; she was god-fearingly grateful for the blessings of his presence. She had worked for many white people before; never for a man like this one. God had sent him in the time of her people's great need, she firmly believed. He would surely show them the way to a new life. She was a stronghearted woman and whatever she may have lacked in adventure or imagination or vision or joie de vivre was made up for by Wandihnu. Wandihnu was self-possessed as well as admiring of Jack's qualities of resourcefulness. She was straightforward like her people, lacking the power to dissemble. Yet she was no heady prattler nor humble servant. When she was in doubt she kept her counsel. She was a quick-witted and ardent learner of new ways which s h e unobtrusively transmitted to her people. It was not long before she could do some arithmetic and read a bit. Wherever she went, groups of all-sized children, some almost adults, could be seen circled round her bent on learning to count in her impromptu 'stick schools'. She was a born teacher; with her, there could be no such thing as boring lessons; they were exciting games filled with the fascination that goes with turning the strange into the familiar, the impossible into the straightforward and simple. Before long it became apparent to Jack that it was with healing that she was most gifted and keen to learn. She began to accompany him as medical assistant on his rounds to cure 'whiteman' ills or to hand out pills, a job he had been given from Thursday Island. She was beginning to combine two sets of knowledge: t h a t which came from her people and the things she learned from Jack. Although still in her teens, the touch of her hands as healer was silently recognised by her people and wondered at by Jack. Although nothing was said he soon became aware of signs that she was to them, as to him, a very special person.

FORESHADOWS One of Jack's periodic bouts of sickness, which occurred shortly, put Wandihnu's powers of healing to the full test. He had had these attacks again and again since coming to the tropics. Mary Brown was sickened with horror at Jack's stories of his early days at Utingu where he suffered alone the strange and bone-racking agues of tropical fevers. Each time she would nurse him with loving care, pressing herbs to his forehead and offering incantations to his spirit. This time as he lay there wild exotic music echoed through his soul; strange sounds tapping the chords of memory. Heroic music, music of the mightiness and the grandeur and the loveliness and the terribleness of the sea. Music he had heard once before in his seafaring, music which had brought forth the urge for heroic deeds, which had told of the love and hate of women and which

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filled him with a medley of hopes and feelings that caused him to tremble as from cold and made him all the time wish to shriek or sob. At the height of his fever those sensations were reaching a peak; with strange tremblings he was being drawn through tapestried grottoes coral-lined. Silently, with the touch of Wandihnu's hand gently stroking his forehead soft as a cloud, his epic dream began to lose its terror. He was floating and as though through the contours of his body a layer of him was rising to the skies, transported to the Olympian peaks and to the wide sky beyond. Returning to light. The moon was slowly rising and he was moving with its light to t h e world above. It was a gentle light, rippling forever, sublime like the sea. It was not a customary light to him and in this strangeness lay an impelling quality. It was like an ethereal light drawing him beyond the mundane to glimpse another world and to transform his own. He was being transported into a celestial realm. For a moment two worlds joined. Within the circle marked by the celestial light a serene force of calm held them close together. To his eyes, newly opened, Wandihnu's presence appeared cameo-like in reversed shades - black, shining, radiant in the moonlight, framed by a vast encompassing snow-like whiteness in a silvered sky. As Jack rested now towards gentle sleep, each of them was feeling that the liking of the other was a very great honour indeed. He lay there motionless, his profile illumined in the half-light, his hair, dark brown, paled now in the gold-red rays of the setting sun. The cut of his brow and the straightness of his nose gave to his face a near-Roman appearance. Lying out, still, his body was as though hewn from rock or moulded from the clay. Only the movement of his chest was answer to the thought that his spirit may have flown away, his body resting in eternal sleep. God-hero suddenly sunken into helplessness. Doer of brave deeds, creature of limitless powers, he had seemed. Once his strength had been pitted against a python and he had won the battle with death. Wandihnu saw him now in human form: as a man who shared the new ways with them, who wrote books, who could cure whiteman sickness, who understood them in a way no other white man had done. 'You savvy all mefeller', Alick Whitesand had said with a grin. To be recognised as one who knew them was the height of honour. Wandihnu sensed what his soul was seeking. The effect of this meeting on them was revealed to each much later. Wingless and earthly each had become; in sweet vision otherworldly.

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TRANSFIGURATION Since his recovery from fever, Jack had taken to early morning walks, sometimes to the small hills inland edging the dense forest of ironwoods and bloodwoods to the east. At the period of new moon there was a time of whitened night. As Jack set out on his latest journey he saw that this was such an occasion. Soon he came to the undulating foothills where the low vegetation formed a large clearing encircled by broad-trunked trees stretching upwards breaking into vast circles of green through which the blue of the sky would later appear like shapes in stained glass. In the distance, from the direction of the shore came Wandihnu in vivid green, swinging her body in gently rhythmic movement, her hair falling in ringlets wet from the sea. She came, walking at ease, unburdened by the load of sticks she carried in a bright blue sling on her back. Unlike all of her kind she was travelling alone, yet seemingly unconcerned. They would meet, so it seemed to Jack, within fifty yards. As she neared within some twenty paces of Jack her demeanour underwent a change. A slight swaying motion became perceptible as though a movement of her feelings was imparted to her person. Jack moved onward in her direction as though a force were drawing him towards her. Their eyes met for less than an instant and, as though by mutual understanding of a single exchange of glances, they continued onwards almost sauntering side by side. In this way they walked for five or ten minutes. The gums which lined their walk seemed to possess a heightened quality of geniality. The soul of their feelings, reaching out to exchange in the whitening air as yet unsunned, filled the silence. Soon they came to a tiny clearing covered in low grasses and framed by trunks of vast mahogany gums. Laying down her bundle she turned to him and with a gentle laugh pointed to the sky. In the light of the opening day, the new moon looked down upon them. The rays of the sun pierced through the blue-white light of the disappearing moon. The first golden light of a tropical sun transfigured the deep brown of coal to the shades of bronze and copper. There too their faces were touched with the shine of gold. 'Sun Man', she said softly. Through the brilliant light of each one, sun and moon were brought together. Face to face for one moment in a meeting of day and night. The mahogany gums reaching towards the sky, their leaves and chamois-bark like giant sentinels still silvered by the moon cast patterns on the ground, Dark and Light. The earth lit up with a strange light from the heavens. Together now lit up like a duet of dancers spotlighted upon a stage. Shadows from the face of man and woman cast far out were formed by the merging gold of sunrise touched

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with a glow of silver. Ancient trees and new blended their shadows, light and dark, reflected in a sunshine turned to silver. REAL KINSMAN

Wandihnu continued to work in the house, to help Jack on his medical rounds and to learn and learn. Mary Brown would laugh good-naturedly at her endless questions. Most of all she learnt to read, first from Mary Brown who had learnt a little when her parents had lived briefly at Thursday Island, and after that from Jack. She wanted to understand the words between the glossy pictures in magazines which came to Jack and to listen again and again to the stories of the 'other world' of London and Melbourne and New York and Sydney. Bit by bit she became an avid reader of these magazines. She put Jack's letters and bills in order and she listened to Jack explain the letters from publishers which asked for his writings. By-an-by sometime, you makem book like them one?' she asked, 'You go makem 'bout wefeller', she wanted to know with an amused ripple of laughter at the thought, her face partly hidden by her hand, the other pointing to a copy of a book by Kipling. To Jack she was like the more refined of the girls h e had known, a person of quality; yet still the most down-to-earth amongst her sisters. Always it was she they looked to for advice on the whereabouts of this or that fruit or fish or animal. It was she who was looked to on the ways of curing various ills. Billy Wymarra, man of the world who had never been to school, brilliant teller of yarns, a quick-witted man with a well-developed instinct for survival, a man with a singer's voice, a choreographer who transposed his people's changing life and their responses and feelings into dance, was proud of young Wandihnu, his wife's sister. When Jack asked Mary Brown, the person to whom h e always turned for interpretation and for guidance, how the people saw Wandihnu 'working in the house', as he put it delicately, she replied: 'You goodfeller man. You look after we. Wefeller plenty sorry for you.' And that is all she would say. A person of joyous spirit, Wandihnu could cheer the dreariest heart. One afternoon the two women were sitting beneath the she-oaks on the sand beside the beach waiting for the ashes-dampers to cook. They were laughing and joking together. As Jack approached, their peels of laughter were cut short by a secretive silence - as though they had been conspiring. Women's talk, thought Jack. Wandihnu had clasped in both hands what turned out to be a tiny red frog, a rare colour for these parts north of Red Island Point where they abounded. Her tone changed to seriousness as did her gaze.

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'Maybe it's for you7,she said simply, offering it to Jack. Another silence. She looked intently at the older woman and becoming strangely quiet made her way back to the house. It was not long after that that all the clans disappeared for it was time for their harvest. Their numbers had already thinned out at Utingu for many had joined the clans at Injinoo two days' journey downcoast where they were 'making a mission', as they called it at an old camping place with a permanent fresh water spring and a tidal river which flowed into Endeavour Strait. They had approached Jack not only as the local horticulturalist of the area, but also as the 'smallfeller gov'ment'. They were seeking a school and supplies and a 'Company boat', a cutter or whaler like those obtained by lbrres Strait Islanders as clan boats through Papuan Industries Limited, a project begun by a man named Fred Walker, an exmissionary. At Injinoo or Cowal Creek the dwellings they had built were those of a semi-settled people. A community was forming through intermarriages between far-away clans. 'Wefeller all m u up now, newfeller friends', they would say. Jack had already put their case for government recognition and support for their own selfinitiated efforts in his six-monthly visit t o Thursday Island. A week or two after the clans returned from walkabout Jack was awakened one evening by two young teenage girls a t the door, cousin-sisters of Wandihnu. 'Come here, hurry up come, Mister', they exclaimed, their faces intent and serious. 'It's Wandihnu.' 'Is there anything wrong?' 'No, everything orlright. Come quick longa we.' And no more would they be induced to say. On a track well back from the camp a tiny wurlie had been made and there in front was a small group of old women sitting beside the bright-red coals of a fire. In the whitened light Jack could see readily the reason for their summoning call: the outline of a small shape lying between them, almost indistinguishable in colour from his paperbark cradle. 'Lil man. Em i whitefeller piccanniny', said the oldest woman to Jack. And picking up the moving honey-coloured boy, she handed him to Jack. He was the newest child of the sandbeach. The midwives had already bathed him in the salt water as was their custom. But his skin was paler than the other sandbeach babes and his features bore the indelible stamp of a Scottish ancestry. Jack held him closely. For an instant they seemed to tremble together. The sun was just beginning to cast its early light on the water rippling along the beach.

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The birth of Nicholas Fitzherbert marked a new beginning. In a sense he was the new beginning; in another way its sign. Like the first of Jack's palms he blended with Utingu; like the new settlement at Injinoo he was a creation of two worlds. Through Nicholas, his son, Jack was now related. Slowly, over the next three years he became like a kinsman. He was part of the vast web of their lives which was peopled by kinsmen and the 'almost kin' who were tied by marriage. It gave order and meaning to their lives and social support to the living. The strands of their lives and his had been like the ariel vines of their forests growing towards one another? the fronds reaching out to clasp one another gently. That process, begun long ago, was now finding realisation. The person of Nicholas signified a stealthy tightening of bonds. Members of Wandihnu's family now felt relaxed in his presence. In their system he had a place, and signs abounded that the white man of the east was now 'proper sandbeachman', one of us. They began to talk a little differently to him, but the difference was significant. They were using kinship names, paying him the respect of an in-law. Those who had persisted in called him 'Mister' now quietly dropped that. They knew how to relate to him within their own terms. Even their movements and gestures seemed to be different to Jack. He could judge moods, tempers, blood pressures rising or falling, embarrassment. He could 'see' when they blushed. Holding Nicholas in his arms, he pondered whether his own movements had changed. Amongst people so sensitised to note the tiniest flicker of an eyelid, an altered look in a man's eyes, he knew that they would have noted and be noting each quaver of change in himself, The thing was two-sided and spiral, like a rising energy towards a plateau of serenity between them as they watched and noted in silence minute intimations of change. For Jack there had not only been much to learn anew; there had been much to unlearn before this was possible. Like the Islanders these Aborigines were sandbeach people who gloried in their seafaring. Now he began to become in tune with their movements which stepped along with seas and tides and winds; these told them their 'time'. Life continued on as before, but it was fuller and happier. Far from the embarrassment, jealousy or stigma which Jack feared might be attached to Nicholas, it was as if his arrival was greeted by the people in a grand sigh of relief in unison, Jack experienced a changed sense of belonging when the boy started to talk and called him uncle. Mary Brown became his self-appointed nurse? or more accurately, granny. He called her 'Aka Mary', grandmother Mary. She sewed for him as well

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as for Jack a n d her husband Willie and she insisted that h e be brought up a white boy and sleep in Jack's house. It nearly broke her heart t o find that he shed the clothes she made for him, immediately and without notice. Wandihnu thought it was funny. Jack felt sorry for both Mary Brown and the small boy. He insisted with her that Nicholas be allowed the freedom of his brothers and sister. Happily for Mary Brown there was one exception. She had made him pyjamas out of a piece of sea-blue cotton decorated with ships and fish and anchors and these he would wear anywhere at any time until she insisted they were for the house. Perhaps his passion for the sea and ships, a passion surpassed only by his love of music made these clothes an exception. A t nights when his uncle and the other men sat on Jack's verandah and sang and yarned about ships and sailing he would sit round-eyed and silent until the music of the guitar blended with the rhythms of his body first to sway delightedly i n dance and then to find an end in sleep. In the full circle of his dual inheritance were the sounds and the spirit of the sea. In his toddling days his uncle took him in the silver hours of the morning on the daily expedition for fish. Nicholas was filled with a zest for life. Like most small children who are physically healthy, personally secure and of active brain he could scarcely wait for the next day to begin. He had the best of all worlds and like his mother he sparkled. With her he cracked oysters, harvested yams, collected sugar bag; he played with his four older brothem and sister who seemed to care for him in some special way, never seemingjealous of his unique or advantaged situation compared with their own; with Billy, his uncle, he fished and hunted and Mary Brown taught him numbers and words. Most of the daylight hours he was inseparable from Jack, ever present like a small shadow. Life was perfection for him. He was quick-witted and even-tempered and Mary Brown said he had his mother's ways. With that vast net of human support emerged a boy with a heightened sense of his own person. Child-likeand his own man, qualities which came, perhaps, from his double identity. Everyone loved him, yet nobody spoiled him. Nicholas was the high tide of his people's hopes. He was to grow to manhood in cruel times for a boy of two races in far north Queensland.

IN THE HANDS OF DESTINY The bush began to echo the sound of hooves. The new Australia was on horseback. The still of the camps was broken by the thin wail of women as the new Pharoahs swept through the land. Men had been assigned to gather up the paler babes, not to slay them, but to shape them to their needs.

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Messages were passing back and forward between the camps that people were to be moved yet again. 'Betterment schemes', as they were called, were being put into action and the year 1918 was a turning point. There was shortly to be a flowering of missions on land set aside for a certain type of humanity. In a scheme for systematic separation of white from black, the light-skinned fellers had a special role assigned to them. Humanity was cut in two in the new Australian nation: white and coloured formed the great divide. Inside that divide were stepping stones with Aborigines the bottom stone. In far North Queensland the pearl shell fisheries didn't attract white men; unlike the sugar industry mechanisation had not worked. 'Protection' of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who came under the Act in 1897, had a dual role: it regulated a steady supply of labour from reserves and it ensured that anyone with a drop of 'coloured' blood was kept outside the world of white Australia. In the far north 'plural' society of Cape York and beyond, a post-war time of new schemes for segregation ensured stiff regulation of people of varied racial composition on the dark side of the colour bar. Two men on horseback, one white, the other black, were travelling along the sandbeaches north from the estuaries of the Wenlock River near Mapoon Mission towards Somerset. They had been instructed to count the heads of those with lighter skins. Messages were being passed along the sandbeaches by fire signal. 'Whitefeller, blackfeller come longa here, putem number on them palefeller piccanniny. Maybe 01 i come back 'gain take em 'way', their message ran. When Jack returned to Utingu from Thursday Island in angry mood, everyone was silent. Wandihnu had stopped singing and a strange unhappiness lay heavily upon her. As she held Jack in her gaze he sensed her air of tragedy, The look which passed between them stayed with him always. Something had shaken her deeply during his absence. Eventually Billy Wymarra told the story, Soon after Jack had left for Thursday Island they had received messages. 'Two man bin come this ples', he began, dropping into Broken English, as he always did when he was agitated. 'One white feller, one black feller. 01 i come there and countem olgeta [all] yellerfeller piccanniny. So we grabem, that smallfeller and gotim that black boot polish belong you and rubem long em.' Jack could hardly restrain a smile at their quick wit and ingenuity. 'By-an-by that blackfeller policemen i go mekem out track belong em. More better we put black polish on em. When 01 i come up, 01 i go lookem olgeta

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house an' they go no more askem permission from boss belong 'ouse. 01 i jus' walkabout go inside.' Jack trembled inwardly with rage. This was proper whiteman insult. He recalled their custom never to intrude on another man's home site. No Aborigine would ever walk to another's shelter or camp-fire without being invited. His heart sank. So it had really begun to happen in earnest, he reflected, even before the ink had dried on the Protector's pen. No wonder the local man had seemed so especially brisk, fidgety and- firm. A plan had suddenly crystallised down south and he had already received his orders from Brisbane. Once again their early-warning system, of which almost all white men were totally unaware, had worked. They had told him of the death of the missionary James Chalmers even to its detail, and it was their thin wisps of smoke which had given him the big news of the beginning of the Great War. 'Smoke-talk' was a great code which made possible advance news of the enemy's movements. Whitefellers could find blackfellers who would track for them for money. But it never occurred to them that the tribes may have forward news of their approach. When Jack arrived in Thursday Island, the local Protector, a dour Scot with the demeanour of a schoolmaster, reminding him afresh of one of his schoolmasters in Melbourne, seemed to be awaiting him. At any rate h e had his speech ready. Within the limits of his understanding he was a humane man. His face was kind as he congratulated Jack: 'The tribes are making good progress under your tutelage', he found it hard to unstiffen. They are learning new skills and the beginning of civilised ways.' 'But', he added with meaning, 'their natures are different. They are still scarcely removed from their savage past. Just when you think you've taught them new ways they're likely to drop their clothes and hive off into the bush.' For an instant Jack's lips curled upwards unvoluntarily as he thought of Nicholas. 'They are always likely to just drop everything and go walkabout. It is the age-old instinct in them.' Jack decided it was better to remain silent. He could feel the sweat on the palms of his hands and his pulse was quickening. How could he tell this man that across the middle months of each year was the great vegetable harvest time for these people; how they looked forward, even yearned for yams, long and round ones, black mangroves, water lily tubers and seeds, arrowroot and nonda plum and especially sugar bag or wild honey as well as the game of the savannah forest. '&member too', the older man was leaning forward now as though confidentially, 'what happened to Chalmers!' The Papuan natives took him to them, cared for him as one of their own, just like Jack's tribe, and then suddenly they turned on him. 'Wild instinct! One must not let them come too close.'

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Jack had stopped listening. He was thinking of Wandihnu and Nicholas. What would become of them with men like this holding the reins of power. 'Some of them, the half-breeds at any rate, have the potential to make good stockmen, swim-divers or boat crew. The half-blood women may be trained to go into service as home helps. But that is a long way off.' Was the Protector reading his thoughts? 'Some, the Islanders and the quadroons may rise to aide positions in teaching and nursing', he paused, 'in generations to come. These missions are now preparing their civilising work in the northern Cape. The Anglican Church has had three years experience in this vast diocese. Once they are established in the Strait they will move down the Cape.' The Protector was a devout man, a firm believer in God, and sin and hard work and the Empire. His own life was a mission for the Anglo-Saxon race as the true heirs to this land. Jack was only half listening. He was thinking of Nicholas, of Wandihnu, of all 'his tribes'. He noted the muscles tautening in the Protector's neck as he looked out the window past Jack. Then suddenly the reason burst upon him. 'I understand about the boy', he said, lips pursed, leaning forward with the demeanour of a father to a son. 'There is of course a place for everyone in this Somerset region; but we must recognise that Aborigines' blood - well', the Protector hesitated, choosing his words carefully, 'lacks a full potential. Perhaps on a mission h e may learn, well - even a trade.' Then he paused and altered his tone slightly. Portentously he said: 'The issue is the endangering of our birthright'. Secretly the Protector had his own feelings. Jack may have stayed alone with 'the blacks' too long for his own good. Become a bit unbalanced perhaps. Done a splendid job in building up Utingu. The first white planter on the Cape. An amazing man with the talents and determination of the true pioneer. It was his breed who were building the Australian nation. He could do anything. Even, legend had it, he had taken out his own appendix in years gone by. Well, perhaps he hadn't, but that was the story. But he was capable. And he had transformed the blacks in those parts. They would even work for him. He had, however, committed the impardonable sin for a white man: he had 'gone native'. The Protector could hardly know that they had transformed Jack too. The two men were miles apart at this moment. Jack took his leave as soon as he could. This was another world to him and he wanted time to think it all out. In The Grand he sat next to two merry garrulous men. 'They're going to make it an orffence for a whitefeller to get together with a black gin: co-habit,

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that's what yer can't do no more. Yer can 'ave yer fun as long as they don't catch yer. Cos if they do you pay up later for the yellerfeller. That's the noo thing', the red-faced one said with a raucous laugh. Jack pushed his glass aside, thirsty no longer. Their futures had just been decided. White Australia was closing in. Wandihnu had become a criminal obsession, Nicholas his wicked folly. They were all outcasts and Jack, the one who had made the integration possible, their cosandbeachman - like them, even one of them, was no more. There was no place for a person like him. There were to be no bridges. He felt physically sick. In a moment he realised how far he had come, jumping chasms as though in a madness. Now he was like a man galloping onward towards his doom. There was no way of turning back. 'I wanted to go, and I wanted to stay and knew not which to do', Jack reflected as his pen moved along the paper. 'The instinct of the wilding which I had told myself was dead, had but drowsed, and now is thoroughly awake.' But this was not the wanderlust of before. Then Jack was a mere boy seeking to break free of the life for which he was slated by birth. Middle class genteel city civilisation with Royal Doulton cups, ladies and pianos. Now his fairytale wanderings were over. 'I am returning to my own world, but not to the inglorious security of civilisation', he wrote. The awakened wilding was being reclaimed. Yet this now was the outward form of a newer escape. It was the surfacing of a deeper inner struggle for the child he had created, the life he had made for himself and the love which had transformed him. The desire to go, to wander again, which welled up in him and mounted to a tidal wave, grew on the bitter knowledge that there was no future for him as white man on the shores of Australia, with the son he had made and the woman who had requited his loneliness in those years of passing solitude. And so he could not acknowledge his son to the world for that world was out of bounds for the boy for the term of his whole life. Now the sun held those strangely insubstantial shadows in its haze giving an incandescence to the mist of dawn. As it extended out across the sea, the group fading into a shadowy whole, a dark against the palms had formed a seamless whole with the radiance of that patch of sea. Day had met night. The music spread its presence across the water. The growing distance marked by the gigantic wake was now a vast steel grey close-edged with white. He was part of that wake now: slowly his adopted world was receding. He was of it no more. The two worlds had come apart, detached and separated forever.

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The sky had turned to shades of metal, the clouds as figures, metallicgrey on a faded sky. The warm sheen of the casuarinas touched by the sun in gentlest pinks had vanished, leaving behind spindly trunks with spindly growths like skeletons, arms outstretched, tossed by the winds. The warning call of the black macaw echoing the sound of the rifle was heard in the country from west to east from Mapoon to Macan Bay. In parting, the substance of the shadows faded leaving only the shades of a vanished world. For Jack sailing away was a move from life to its reflection and portrayal. He would become cocooned into the world of art, he told himself. Already he could feel himself moving from adventurer to agriculturalist, from secret longing to momentary realisation. In standing in the mirror's glass looking in two directions he was at the crossroads to a world of retrospect. He would never live again, only dream or relive a fading memory. Now he tried to look forward to a constantly respent past; in artistic form he hoped to recapture those years where he, like the people there, lived their seafaring and the life of the camp places. The intense experience of that moment at Utingu was gone forever, while the strange fire of the world of the tropics, the mightiness and the terribleness and the grandeur began to recede into the inaccessible regions of his being bringing death to each of the two who met. 'Why are you forsaking me?', she had said with a single look to the one man who could read her inmost feelings. He had known the secret of her hopes for a new life. Bereft she had stood, a piteous figure, her stance changed; like a plant unwatered she was seen to crinkle and droop. Like a breathing creature deprived of air Wandihnu's spirit became strictured and encased, deprived of that bond of spirit which sustained and rekindled the force for life within her. Her shaken spirit was stilled. Her cocoon was mortal death, her spirit form now a misty shape among the forest shades. The centre and linchpin of Jack's life slowly began to fade, vanished and vanquished. That part of himself he left on the sandbeach of Cape York was but a fragile memory. The walls of silence closed in over the years. The shadows lost their strange substantiality. Time returned to the same patterns of light and darkness and the forever lapping of the waters of Endeavour Strait upon the sandbeaches of Utingu. Suddenly it came to Jack: the truth. The everlasting process of creation. Palm begat palm and humankind begat their kind. The meaning of life, so simple yet so elusive; this the Aborigines knew. The reason for their fortitude? It was children who stamped the Aboriginal

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character. They were part of themselves. Was this why they passed the small ones from uncle to aunt, to brother to sister? Why they carried their dead to each country to which they belonged. Why they felt the presence of their loved ones - of whom they were begotten. The eternal circles of life by which the dreaming enjoined those now in human form and those yet unborn in mortal flesh. Part of each other forever? For a people knotted to one another, to the earth and to the cosmos through never-ending circles of giving and receiving, a child was the supreme gift of all. The boy Nicholas was claimed by them: one of theirs - forever.

CHAPTER

ONE OF OURS: THE STORY OF NICHOLAS A CHILD RECLAIMED: THE BEFRIENDING * AT CHARCOAL BURNER: JENNA'S STORY Dad got a fright. He was clearing up the farm for the Japanese man he worked for and this small boy jumped out from under the bush. He walked all that way from Utingu, Simpson Bay, right down to Charcoal Burner where he lived. He just thought he'll run away and hide himself from those people, the soldiers. He'd rubbed himself all over with charcoal from the fire. And when Dad came back from mustering and went to chop all that bloodwood for the charcoal, he thought: What's all those bags all over that bush like that? The boy came out and Dad got a big fright. He thought he was one of those little pygmy men from the bush and Dad said, 'Who are you?' 'Oh please, all soldier come for take me.' And Dad said, 'No, they won't harm you. You come out and I give you a good home. You nice boy, lovely boy.' Dad said, when he touch his hand all charcoal come off; made him like all black. Dad said: 'Oh, you're nice boy, all people going to give you good home, plenty to eat.' He just lives with us till somebody comes for him and Mum feeds him and gives him some of Manji's clean clothes; like that. So he don't want to go no more. Don't want to go back home when his mother and father came for him. Want to stop there with us. My family was the first that picked him up. He was like a baby brother to me. That's why h e always called me big sister, just like Manji calls me. When Mary, his cousin sister, came out and took him he says: 'I fright from them come and hunt for me and take me away for school'. About this time they changed his name from Fitzherbert to Nicholas: devil child or gift from God; no one knew. Old Nick or Saint Nicholas? So his family went down to Weipa. After they came back he got to like it there. So he went to school there for a while. He got to know already those Weipa people at RIP, that's Red Island Point where the meatworks were. Nicholas used to walk over there from Utingu and Peter Gibson used to take him down

* The Story of Nicholas has one major fictional character, Katharine Gilbert, through whom I was able to portray Nicholas' two selves and the inner conflict which ran through his life.

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Weipa. After that he went to school at Cowal Creek - Small River. Language name, Injinoo. He was a lovely boy. Shy, but not afraid to talk. Lovely boy. Clever boy. All that tribe of his loved him. Even though his real father was that white fellow. Nicholas' mother lived with that fellow a long time. And he plays the piano, really lovely. That fellow Jack, his skin all brown from the sun. Tall man, very tall, straight back. Gold hair, wavy hair, sort of reddish tinge. We used to ride down there on horses. He likes dad. Those two used to sit and yarn. After that white fellow left they all went to Cowal Creek and the place a t Utingu went down, down, down. Well after that, sometimes Nicholas' family would come down to Charcoal Burner and they'd bring us wild turkey eggs. Then my mother would ask them to have supper with us and they'd stay the night with us and go again next morning. You see, in those days, food was often hard to get. So when they bring something, then we'd give them something for going back. Oh, they'd been very good to us, really good too. His Aboriginal uncle, Billy Wymarra who brought Nicholas up, always brings something for our family. And we give them something for going back. And we used to go down and get watermelons. That Japanese man my Dad worked for let us have as many as we kids wanted. You know how we used to eat them? We just broke them in half. Just take that inside part. His family used to go up and down from Utingu to Alau and Cowal Creek and when we moved from Charcoal Burner to Red Island they came down there sometimes too. They go to Utingu, Paterson, Alau. They travel round and look for yams and all them things, turkey eggs. They never garden no more. Though Billy had been a really good overseer for that white fellow, Jack McLaren. I suppose he, Billy, was a little bit of a wise guy; he could speak English and Malay and I think he suited Jack right down to the ground. Because the tribe used to yarn all night and then sleep till midday and only Billy could get them to work in the garden. Jack used to rack his brains to work out how to get them to work set hours. Sometimes, when it was walkabout time, time for harvesting the yams and fruits at their land on the other side, east coast, they'd just get up and go and Jack really fretted over that. In the end he gave up and came to know he had t o just fit in with them. That kind of thing. Well Nicholas was always a shy boy. Maybe because of his white colour. You see, like this. At the time they got people who used to go around and take all the children and pick out the white coloured ones. Take them and put them in a dormitory. That's right. If any white man goes near the place his people take the small boy and hide him.

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AT INJINOO: THE WYMARRA STORY Colina Pablo recalls: We often just eat garden tucker. We had plenty rnanioc, kumala and yam and pumpkin. Hard days for us. We had to work hard to make up them garden, plant them thing. But before that if you're short you got to look for yam and sugar-bag. You got to eat yam or sugar-bag or mangrove. Mangrove fruit. Tribe belongs to here they make mangrove paste. Seven Rivers tribe. We all did that. When they used to take Nicholas down to Injinoo Mary Brown used to spoil him just like before. She was an old lady now and there was something sad about her all the time. She never got over Jack's departure nor the death of Nicholas' mother. She had wanted so much a different kind of life for this boy and yet she could see that things had gone wrong somewhere. If only Jack had stayed. She couldn't understand what took him away from the boy he loved so much.

What you go for leave that smallfeller? Her look held a strong note of chiding. There was no way he could explain. He didn't know what to think himself entirely. But he knew he had to go and he was sure he couldn't take Nicholas with him. That was unthinkable. No good for the boy either. Mary Brown used to put her hand on his forehead and say: 'I love to see this boy grow because he's a European. He's gonna be a very clever boy.' 'You're a European and you must be like a whiteman; you're going to be a very clever man. Clever boy', she said to him. 'You European boy', she went on saying to him. 'Now your daddy take you go Weipa and school you there.' Nicholas wept. He was frightened of all that; frightened of the white solders with their horses and their guns. I want to stay with you', he pleaded. 'Please don't let them take me away. I fright from themfeller.' Well when Nicholas been come to Injinoo Mary Brown made him a nice kind of thing with manioc and coconut milk. She'd say: 'You use all kind manioc. You scrape 'em, you boil milk, that milk boil with a slow fire. Then you crush the manioc with shell or something, squeeze the juice outside. When you got the milk come boil, you make little dom boy - dough boy - inside that saucepan. Very nicely. Boil dom boy in coconut milk. You make that cassava, just gently, jus' putim nicely inside a saucepan and milk i boil. That's one, two, you scrape, mix in coconut milk with the sugar, bake it inside the oven. That's damper. Cassava damper. Lovely. Inside the native stone oven.' Nicholas used to love that. He'd always ask Mary Brown for cassava damper. Dom boy in coconut milk too. Mary Brown learned that at Somerset and at TI.

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The different tribespeople became mixed together there at Injinoo. One village now. Red Island, Seven Rivers and MacDonald was here now. Some came from Red Island side. Others belonged to Seven Rivers side.

The early years at Injinoo were times of hope. People had worked hard to make the Mission and their efforts were rewarded with the arrival of the missionary from Mabuiag, Satraika to open the mission school in 1923. The Anglican Church, through its mission director for the Western Islands and Cape York, Canon John Done, had worked closely with the people there to build a church, a residence and a school. And the whole project had been financed by the Torres Strait churches. Islanders' money in the plate. There was no other money from the Anglican Mission. Injinoo had begun to form i n the years of Jack's plantation at Utingu. It had been set back cruelly after its bright beginning. From a flourishing little community of 200 souls, the people of the sandbeaches from the east coast and Seven Rivers, with their neatly laid-out gardens and all-weather houses in neat rows, had dwindled to the remnants during the influenza epidemic of 1918-20. First influenza, then dysentery. No proper medicines. They buried people on the north side of Small River where it flows into Endeavour Strait. Colina Pablo remembers: 'They had no coffins. Sometimes whole families were in the graves. People cry there. People cry at TI too. And at Badu. At Hammond. All we were crying. You cried for your grandpa or your mother. This one cry for her brother. Another one cry for her husband. In the morning sometimes one would be all right. Dead by that same night. They had to carry them down sometimes to where they were buried. When they came up again to the village time to go back to bury more.' 'And dysentery too. But for this one we gave the wongai root. Crush the root with some shell, put it on top on inside, put it inside the cup. Red sort of brown. Like a mango. You got to squeeze 'em now. And you got to drink that juice from the wongai root. Oooooh, proper hard. That's all our grandpa give we, that kinda medicine then. But all we family relation no got that kind of dysentery.' The gardens were planted, houses built. What the people had asked McLaren for when they marched down asking for a mission, was, it seemed, coming true at last. As all around these parts the populations were rising following the flu epidemic. In the year 1922 the Report of the Aboriginals Department disclosed 'an interesting fact - that, contrary to the common belief, the natives are not dying out fast...'.

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After Jack went and after they tried to hide Nicholas a t Utingu and Charcoal Burner Billy came to realise that a boy with brown skin like Nicholas was a prize possession. Not like in the Territory where if you're brown, you're sort of half-brown, half-black. Not like that in Cape York and the Islands. Up here it's something to be respected. Gives you a chance for an education - a better one than for black people. Billy and the others at Cowal Creek like Alick Whitesand and Solomon Woosup came to know this and they tried to get education for Nicholas, first a t Weipa, then a t Cowal Creek. It was Billy, his uncle, who got him over to the school at St Paul's Mission at Moa Island. They had a slightly better school there than the ones on the Government Reserves where they'd only let kids get up to third grade. You see, when Nicholas was a small boy, everybody loved him. He'd go over to RIP (Red Island Point), with the family and Peter and Ryda Gibson (they were Mapoon people) would give some meat for the family and they'd take Nicholas to Weipa with them when they had to go down there. Peter used to bring cattle up and he'd go down there on horseback or by boat. It wasn't far. After a while Billy got to know that the boy could have education down there. So that's how it happened. When he was quite a young boy still at Cowal Creek and when he came back from Weipa he developed a knack for diesel motors. He became that sort of young fellow who knew a lot for his time about diesel engines, how to run them, start them in forward gear and so on. These were the days of the pearling boom when there was quite a demand for someone with Nicholas' skills. For the people there and for his family, they had lost Jack, but they had gained Nicholas. He was their hope. Within the arc that stretched from Whitesand to Weipa Nicholas' life was being shaped. He was a child of that arc.

A VISIT TO THE OTHER SIDE THURSDAY ISLAND 1934 The between-war years were years of growing Protection for the coloured people of far North Queensland. Thursday Island formed their social centre and point of attraction. TI was the world beyond 'our place'. It was Town. As the years went on, it was barred to those who had been defined as 'needing protection': they were confined to their own areas or to places nobody else wanted. They were the 'others', people encircled by powers which could bring them in and lock the gate: Government superintendents and missionary supervisors with the badges of State power. They were 'inmates' now of benevolent asylums.

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Thursday Island formed the gateway to the island continent. Even the palest skinned was barred by the mark of 'colour'. In t h e fifteen years from 1919 to 1934, colour segregation there was strengthened: beyond Cape York the multicultural community of non-white races of more than a dozen strands now interwoven into several patterns, which the pearling industry (and especially indenturing) had bequeathed, was also graded by the administrative arm of Protection. Anyone with a drop of Aboriginal blood dropped down to the bottom. In the fifteen-year span this was the trend in race relations of the area. In 1934, the year of its culmination, Nicholas left Cowal Creek for the Islands. Nicholas came to TI with the Herald on his way to St Paul's Mission with head high and heart thumping. He knew he had been there in days before he could distinguish this place from that. This was Town, the bigger world, known from his uncle, Billy Wymarra, his older cousin-brothers, his mates. To Nicholas it was the open book of his dreams; he had travelled t o the outreaches of his halfworld. He was looking forward to becoming acquainted with the other half. Nicholas's thoughts were happy ones as the group of islands named after the days on which Captain Cook sighted them came close to view from the deck of the Herald, the Anglican Diocese's vessel which operated between TI, St Paul's Mission at Moa Island, to Cowal Creek and Lockhart River on Cape York Peninsula. He had come up on deck at first light and he was dressed in the long trousers and open-necked shirt Billy Wymarra had bought for him on his last trip to TI. His wavy hair was laid out smooth without so much as the wrinkle of a curl. He had spent Christmas at Cowal Creek with his folk. Now as he approached TI, where he would spend New Year, it was with the expectation of looking forward to gay times of singing and dancing and joking and feasting with people h e knew, and with hopes instilled from those who sent him off for school and new things at St Paul's. In the freshness of the morning air, the sunrise which lay behind the vessel in the approaches to Port Kennedy at Thursday Island shone out lighting the approaching island. As they neared the jetty he could see Manji awaiting him. He had become like a real brother to him more than a decade before when he had hidden a t Charcoal Burner. Jenna, who was like a real sister, and a couple of Manji's teenage mates were standing in a group. A feeling of relief spread through him when the moment of exchange of glances drew them close together for an instant. His very bones creaked. 'Come fight the tin', the small group of young people, all coloured, mainly Islanders, outside the Church of England compound asked them, as Nicholas and Manji and Manji's cousins drew near. It was New Year's eve. 'Come', called Dora, 'Come along us and fight the tin. We go singout for yufeller.'

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'Fight the tin is like "beat the drum" ', Manji explained to Nicholas. Somewhere along the way the custom had grown up with the people right round the Islands. It was like a big procession on New Year's eve and in TI it began somewhere in the front of the island near the Anglican compound and went round the back of the island to Tamwoy Town. It was an 'Asking Festival'; in response you gave, and in doing so you became one of the group. 'Sing, dance, dance, dance; stop in the middle of the road. Chukka flour on one another. Go outside this house now. Fight the tin. Themfeller come out. Bring kaikai - might be damper, banana, pawpaw, anykind of food. All yufeller kaikai. Go dance, sing, dance. Go outside next house. Themfeller all join in. Big crowd comeup. Proper good one', Dora explained the whole thing to Nicholas. Nicholas joined the fringes of the group. He was secretly glad to be in it, but he was new to it and felt oddly different as he listened to the chatter and glanced at the dress and demeanour of the mainly Islander throng. Most of them had tight Island hair although all of them were children or grandchildren of fathers from South Seas - Niue, Samoa, Rotuma, the Loyalty Islands, especially Lifu. Those native Torres Islanders, who came to TI on the boats were curfewed out of the town after sunset. The rest were straight-haired youths and girls like Nicholas; but all of them were of Asian descent in their father's line. Only one young man was lighter-skinned than Nicholas; he was almost white. Who's that boy over there?', Nicholas asked Manji. 'Oh he's up here on school holidays from South - Brisbane I think. Martin something or other', said Manji as they moved along with the growing group to the next house. Nicholas had become a boy whom everyone liked and wanted to be kind to. That was certainly true among his own kind. He could never do anyone a bad turn; even at sixteen and going on seventeen and still slightly gangling of limb, he came over as strong and dignified. He had nothing of the drooping and dejected stance of a person beaten down. He was handsome, tall with wavy hair, a slightly acquiline nose, and a high forehead which gave him an almost intellectual appearance. His skin was nut-brown and in the light of the sun his hair seemed to glow with a touch of the chestnut-brown of his father. He always looked healthy and well-cared for and 'deep'. Most people saw him as shy; to a few he was even surly. Always his expression seemed to be saying; Don't try to get to know me right inside, for this part i s secret. This i s what svstainsme. I f I let you get to know it I will no longer be me. Not that Nicholas thought it out exactly that way. It was more that he felt it. For it was his way of not getting wounded in a hurtful world.

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Over the years of his growing up Nicholas had come to know how to protect himself from the jibes which came from hidden blades. At least that is what he thought. But h e was resilient. That he was capable of being hurt or humiliated, or that he could be caught unawares by those who wished him ill was far from his mind. Yet it was the experience at St Paul's to which he looked forward with so much eagerness which was to disclose his vulnerability. The jibes, it seemed, could reach far beyond t h e skin and injure the delicate flesh of a heart that knew no colour bar. They had circled the Island and Manji and his sister were walking along the esplanade towards their home near Hospital Point where the cross-currents created a violent battery of waters between Thursday Island and Muralag, the largest of the Prince of Wales Group which turned its back towards Endeavour Strait and the vast island continent. Nicholas cast his eyes on to the swirling currents visible in the boat's wake lit now by the rising moon which tonight ushered in the year 1935. Manji was talking about the lightish-skinned Island girl whom all the boys were after. Nicholas was interested - quite interested in what his brother was saying, though he himself was shy with girls. 'Well, this way', the older boy was saying. 'Whenever that feller come near she dodge him. And he's a pretty boy, nice-looking boy. I no savvy that gel', he confided. 'Yes', his sister chimed in, 'a very handsome boy. An' he's a mechanic too; he done a real trade school in Brisbane.' 'He's different; like a white man', Manji went on: 'He can't even speak Broken. He grew up with white people down Brisbane. He's just like white.' 'Used to sit together in the pictures when he first came a few weeks ago', Jenna added. 'Now she runs away as soon as he comes near her.' 'Look at the moon; it's allsame morningtime', one of the smaller children called, breaking the line of their conversation. 'Singout for New Year; it's a sign of good luck', Jenna urged. The small boys and girls let out a whoop of joy. Nicholas had become silent. He had noticed the pretty Island girl and the pale-skinned, handsome Martin Wade. And he had wondered fleetingly what lay behind those deeply-set eyes. Martin to him had a demeanour rather like that of a white man; there was something of the confidence there. Yet even when their eyes first met in the New Year revels Nicholas was aware from his eyes that he too was Aboriginal. Nicholas arrived at the jetty at dawn for the tide was right for an early get-away across to Moa. The new year had begun. As he walked along the beach

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the night before the sky was black unbroken as yet by the glimmer of the new year's dawn. He could hear the rush of currents clashing in angry motion, a surging power between the two stretches of land. His mood was sombre as he merged with the knot of men who'd joined his path from the Anglican compound. He could not clearly define the reasons for his sudden gloom. His mind turned to the revels of the night. 'Heave to', came the cheerless voice of the skipper, a new man from the south with no sense of humour. Nicholas directed his mind to his task blotting out his presentiment of malign forces which he now felt flowing all around him. Nicholas soon learnt the truth about Dora's sudden change of behaviour towards Martin. 'Well', said a voice out of the darkness, 'Dora's mother's proper smart and she say, 'Em no whitefeller, he's a real binghi'. There was a pause. ' 'Don't bother to call again"; that's what she was told to say to him. But he was a nice-mannered, good-looking boy and the girl didn't want to hurt him', the voice went on. The conversation continued, but Nicholas was engrossed with his own thoughts. The wind began to rise letting out an eerie sound between the islands which had disappeared out of sight. The high spirits with which he had set out for TI had dampened. He lay down on a bunk and fell asleep. In his dream he was heading back towards Cape York. When he awoke he was looking out at Moa lit up by the early morning sun. ON THE BEACH AT MOA

He had seen her in church the day before and watched the sunlight play along the curves of the long wavy hair that hung below her cream straw hat. Bronzed russet, wisps of burnished gold. He had noted her face as the wide-spaced green eyes seemed to take in his glance and he enjoyed a kind feeling from her in return. In a fleeting moment before they both looked away he saw the olive shade of her face, the nose curiously etched with a spray of freckles. Eyes like the clear green water above the reefs were shaded and darkened by her strangely black lashes. The face was new, but something about her eyes gave him an unexpected feeling of familiarity. Her glance had remained imprinted upon his brain ever since. Later he found that whatever he did with his eyes her image would not go away completely; whenever he thought of her the good feeling he had experienced returned.

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Now he had caught Katharine unawares; himself as well. She was way out on the reef following its westward curve; bare footed and bare headed. He had ample time to take in the long red-gold tresses blowing gently in the wind. Should he warn her of the dangers? Never walk into an incoming tide; sandbeach children just know that. They don't need to learn it. Nicholas could see the detail of her movements through the keen eyes of a sailor. She was carrying her shoes and delving for shells and other sea things among the rock pools; she was doing so with the unfamiliar fingers and the stranger's eye which come from faraway places. The innocent-looking sands which one could see through the clear pure water hid the dangers the sea-children knew by heart, the dangers perilous to a stranger. Most deadly the spiky stone-fish. Nicholas hung back. The shyness of his nature was multiplied a thousand-fold by this girl. Hers was a beauty he had not seen before: white girls he had seen at a distance always seemed strangely pallid to him. Their pale faces, the bits he had seen of their white ankles and hands and forearms and necks reminded him of the sub-bleached linen that used to hang in dense rows upon Mission clothes lines. As though they had washed the skin off. This girl was different. A consensus had quickly formed among the coloured people a t the Mission. 'When I seen her face my heart comeup', said old Namai, Chief Councillor from Poid. 'Like the Blessed Lady in the stain glass', Father Poi agreed. 'She's all smiles; that makes a man feel good. Not like them tight-lipped unsmiling ones', old Namai replied straightening out pursed lips and moving his head up, eyes aloft, face tilted upwards. Everyone laughed at his exact impersonation. 'Yeah. She's a pretty young woman with the ways to go with it. You know she come and talk me, ask 'bout the dinghies and how we go catchem plenty fish and dugong. Not like them high and mighty ones', Uncle volunteered. 'Even goes about without the bonnet. That's how that nose of hers got them pepper-pot freckles on the pretty face. A real lady too. Proper nice mannered kind one. Plenty spirit in em too', Namai summed up the general feeling as a straight-backed, straight-lipped missionary lady interrupted their conversation with a set of tasks. Nicholas had smiled to himself as old Namai moved his face slightly as her back turned, seeming to say, This one, is different! The young men, who had been listening with strong interest, laughed and exchanged faces among themselves.

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Katharine had stayed in his mind's eye every second of the past twentyfour hours. Even in his sleep her hat framing a face with friendly happy eyes and unpowdered skin seemed to be there. Now she was fifty yards out on the reef and in danger of the perils of an oncoming tide. Too far to call. He tried to motion her in but she seemed to pay no heed. Or failed to understand. Then, suddenly, she was beckoning him.His feet remained motionless while he struggled with the contrary demands upon him: his concern for her safety and the cautioning sense that he must not go near her. Fear for her and fear for himself were pulling him in two directions. He could vaguely sense his body straining like a thin tree moving this way and that way in the wind. He hollered out to her, 'Come back in; it's dangerous!',but he knew the incoming wind from the sea had gathered up his call as it billowed into the tops of the coconut trees behind him. He could hear her call now, 'Come on out, it's great. Lovely!' Still he could not go. His feet seemed planted in the sand. Away along the beach his eyes searched as though help might be at hand. But the beach at Wag right round the inlet was strangely deserted. He could see her bare feet and her hands lifting up the rocks. In an instant his body freed itself from his mind. He was running across the reef towards her, his feet finding their own safe path over the reef. Within calling distance he stopped. Averting his gaze from her he said as gently and politely as he could and in his best school voice. 'Excuse miss, you mustn't walk out there. Not in bare feet. There are stone fish maybe under them rocks you're turning up', he compromised his English in his haste and embarrassment. Only once or twice had he ever spoke to a white woman of his own generation. Never before had he done so alone. And always it had been to ask permission or to seek instructions. 'Why?' she replied. 'What are stone-fish?' 'Horrid little fish covered with spikes that can kill you with their poison. You shouldn't wander out here alone anyway', he added lamely. 'But', she answered him, ' I always go out by myself collecting shells and things down in Melbourne. I'm used to the sea; I live next to it down there. And anyway you have such lovely, bright-coloured coral and tropical fish', she added with a smile. 'Well, I can show you a much better place with all kinds of coral and cowrie shells and spider shells I can dive down and get you', Nicholas replied, forgetting himself for a moment.

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'Oh I'd just love that', she replied with a kind smile. 'Will you?' Nicholas had never seen anyone like her before, not even in the distance or in the magazines that used to come by boat to Father's wife. She reminded him of one of the Sunday School cards of the Christ-child with long red-golden locks come to life and grown into girlhood. Here he was standing out on a reef fifty yards from shore and only three feet away from this angel-faced white girl. 'Let's run back along the beach', she suggested happily, pleased at his presence, for she, a lonely child, was touched by his concern for her safety. 'Thank you for telling me', she said, remembering her manners, as they started to amble back towards the sand. She was up here amid the magic of t h e tropical islands, alive in her imagination with corals tinted like a rainbow and t h e hint of adventure she could not pin down. So far it had been dull; the Mission staff here at St Paul's reminded her of the stiff-mannered Anglicans in her rulebound grammar school in Melbourne for the daughters of well-to-do Anglicans. She herself was a widowed vicar's only child. She had been only two days at t h e Mission and she appeared unaware of the .rules. Nicholas hung back several feet. What Vany0n.e were to see them, he thought suddenly. The sensation of experienced danger passed through him. How could he explain it to her? 'What's your name?', she interrupted his thoughts, volunteering hers. 'You must be named after Said Nicholas. He's the one who brings presents to children: their patron saint. That means you must like children', she queried turning round to face him. Nicholas nodded his assent. Of course he did; they all followed him about. But no one up this way bothered to ask these kind of questions; for the answers were obvious. Howmm did she c m to k m things Zik this, he wondered to himself. 'Our Divinity teacher showed us lantern slides about St Nicholas' Day in Europe', she volunteered, as if reading his thoughts. 'Fifth of December, is that your birthday?' 'Never mind', she said gently, responding to his negative. 'He's still your patron saint.' Nicholas filed away the word 'Divinity' to ask Harry Captain, the Sunday School teacher and 'walking encyclopaedia' from Darnley Island, as the Government school teacher at Badu described him. ' h c e you', she cried, cutting across his thoughts. He hesitated for a moment. They had almost reached the line of pig-face plants separating sandbeach from foreshore just behind which the mission settlement lay.

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'No, no, I must go for work now', he said, averting his eyes. He was just in time to catch the change in her mood from open-faced innocent happiness at finding in him a companion for a moment to one of equally open disappointment. What a well-mannered, though@ul boy, she thought to herself as she sadly made her way back. Good looking too. Nicholas had his own problems to cope with, themselves more than he could handle just then. It could scarcely have occurred to him that this splendid girl of his own age was - of all things - lonely. It seemed t o him just then that she was surely the most beautiful girl he had seen. For an instant they stood looking at one another, their steps frozen. The sun had all but vanished behind clouds and he saw that her eyes had darkened to the deep green-blue of the sky. In a flash he had vanished along a track to the mission. For an instant among the array of feelings which welled up in him was an indescribable happiness. Engrossed witKin his own confused thoughts as h e quickened his pace towards the men's quarters he did not see the tall figure who had turned back from their direction along the line of scrub towards the settlement. He was only partly aware too of the rising winds approaching upon the oncoming tide. Katharine arrived back at the mission-house in subdued and silent mood. Usually sensitive to the feelings of others, even though impulsive and headstrong, she sensed that she had done something wrong; breached some kind of etiquette whose rules she did not know. She liked the shy, bronzed-looking boy about her own age who had been so concerned for her safety. So thoughtful, considerate, yet so serious; like a man, not a boy. And she wondered at that moment when he had suddenly changed in manner from the too-serious young man she had wondered at in church to a youth full of gaiety. 'You walk in my shadow', he had said suddenly carefree. 'I'll jump in your footprints', she had returned his playful boyishness laughingly, giggling on and off as she misplaced her foot from time to time in the carefully chosen but winding tracks he made for her. When she had found difficulty making the big jumps his long legs made so effortlessly, he had offered to carry her shoes. Next day she passed his back; he was chopping wood and had quickly turned when he saw her coming. His back seemed to be saying: 'Keep away'. She was hurt as well as perplexed. Yet his behaviour didn't add up; he had warned her of danger; he had been friendly and joyful. And suddenly he had changed.

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What did I da to hurt him? she asked herself. That same night she began to understand the reason for both her sense of unease and his sudden coolness. She lay in bed striving to bring to the forefront of her mind the various pieces of her recent experience which lay half-buried in its recesses. She was beginning to put them together. The picture of Nicholas springing like a young mountain pony down the beach suffused her thoughts. His back-view looked happy. And when he had turned round and caught the shoes she threw at his request as he continued to bound, the sight of his face had confirmed that impression. She felt she had known him for a long time. 'Tomorrow I'll see to it he goes round to Poid', a voice said firmly. 'He knows he did wrong. There's just one chance I've given him before I'll put the matter in the policeman's hands. And then he'll go back where he came from...', the voice continued. The next words were indistinct. Katharine strained to hear. Somehow the conversation was linked with her own thoughts. In an instant the train of her thoughts was confirmed. A shiver as vibrant as an electric shock passed through her as the other man replied: 'All right, but if there's any trouble for him I can send her back early in the Herald'. It was her father's voice now. There was no mistaking whom 'she' was, Katharine thought, her feelings of alarm mounting rapidly. What k v e I done? she thought, her attention now fully fixed upon the conversation. 'Just because he's got some European looks, it doesn't mean he's different from an Aboriginal', the first voice continued. She recognised it as the Superintendent's. 'In the blood - you just have to watch them. Give them an inch.. .'. Katharine's father, remained silent. She sensed his unease - even his disagreement. 'You southerners can't quite understand. We know the Aboriginal', the Missioner continued, as politely as he could. 'We're doing our best to uplift them and this boy's case is unusual. That's why we agreed to school him at this Mission for South Sea people. He's a clever boy and well behaved; until now. I've spoken to him and punished him.' The silence between them was uneasy, but the Missioner seemed set to justify his actions. 'We couldn't take him off the inboard job because there's no one else. Our Mr Fixit man from Brisbane has his hands full with this visit of M r O'Leary and the men from town. But I put the native curfew on him. Nine o'clock down to the boat and lights out. That ought to teach him a lesson. No use giving him extra privilegesjust because of hk father when he behaves like a savage.'

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'What did he say?', Father Gilbert ventured. Katharine, whose mind was racing along with the train of events, sensed her father's feeling of unwanted complicity in Nicholas' punishment. She knew in a flash that it was of him they spoke. 'Nothing', came the reply. 'He sulked. He turns quite surly at times.' The Superintendent did not explain to John Gilbert the way he had cut short Nicholas' attempt to explain his fears for the girl's safety. Suddenly Katharine understood the unfriendly back. It was all her fault, her thoughts clearing in a rush; though she couldn't yet fathom the reasons for their shaming of Nicholas. What sort of hell-hole is this? she thought, trying to keep her mind straight. And unwittingly she had pushed her new-found companion down into it. Bleak House, came into her mind. She buried her face in the pillow and sobbed. 'Oh dear God', she wept her prayer. Don't let them hurt him.It's me who's to blame for whatever they're

abing to him. She had looked to adventure and she had stumbled into something wicked and evil, whose meaning she could but faintly understand. Yet the way Nicholas had run off suddenly; the seriousness of his somewhat withdrawn ways had intimated to her something amiss. His unboyish demeanour which had broken through for an instant as they ran free along the sandbeach: there was something wary and joyless and burdened in Nicholas. As though he carried some permanent scar. In the morning she resolved to herself, she would talk to her father. Fkverend John Gilbert sat long in thought. His high-spirited daughter with the face and kind ways of an angel was becoming a problem. Young and old, both man and woman, found difficulty in unfixing their eyes from her. Least of all young men. Yet she seemed to be unaware of and unaffected by her good looks. He'd brought her up to what he supposed to be an isolated spot more or less against his sister's wishes. And now the taut faces of the lady missionaries had tightened further, and the Superintendent was readying himself to mete our severe reprimands to whose who responded to her bright greetings. With her about the atmosphere changed. All the people there warmed to a first-hand experience of the unaccustomed, unchecked graciousness from a lovely young white woman, The young man had only sought to protect his daughter; to John Gilbert he should be thanked for his expression of concern for her welfare. Feelings that natural justice had been denied the lad surged within Katharine's father. He had done a Samaritan act and been rapped over the knuckles for it. Yet his conversation with the Superintendent had made him wary of intervening.

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'It's hard for you people from Melbourne to understand the Natives', the Superintendent had said to him. 'The half-caste population has risen enormously over the twenty years since this Mission began. Our job is to encourage the more advanced types to improve themselves. That's mainly the South Sea men; but there are a few superior types among the Natives who may even learn a trade in time t o come. They are learning about the loving F'ather and the Christian way: that's the basic thing.' John Gilbert said nothing. The musical strains of the children practising for the arrival of t h e government party came upon the wind. Through the open window he could see the straight figure of Harry Captain, the devout and energetic young man from Darnley Island on the other side of Torres Strait, leading the children singing: 'Tell me the story of JesusA love to hear.. . First let me hear how the children stood round His knees.. .' For some reason he could not frame, a feeling of loneliness and melancholy crept over John Gilbert.. . 'And I can fancy His Blessing resting on me', sang the children. What were they hoping for?, he wondered. 'Sing well, don't they?', the Mission Superintendent asked rhetorically. His visitor seemed not to hear. His head was bowed and his eyes were closed. He was sunk deep in himself and his Saviour. 'Strange people these southerners', the Superintendent was thinking. Secretly he found the presence of his colleague and daughter disruptive. Somehow he felt discontented by the presence of this high-minded priest and his pretty, wilful daughter. 'Well', said John Gilbert, patting her head comfortingly, 'they have their own ways of doing things up here and we just can't interfere. We're their guests, you know.' He paused to choose his words. 'Nicholas is an Aboriginal and the Mission is trying to help these people', his voice dropping and accenting the words in the way he did for sick persons. 'But h e was only trying to help me', Katharine answered between her tears. 'It isn't his fault', she added ambiguously after a pause. 'No, I realise that9, replied her father, choosing the unintended alternative. 'He can't help being an Aboriginal.' John Gilbert was that sort of man; principled but obtuse. 'His father was a most respected white man. Did a lot for the Native tribes. Nicholas is here being trained to do all sorts of things that he's good at. And when he's finished he'll go back to his own people and help them. Now you

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go and sit with Sister and she'll teach you some of the nice crochet work they do up here.' He'd begun to wish he had listened to his sister and left his daughter at home. ' n o high-spirited', they said at the Grammar School in Melbourne. The old maids there detested the look of her face anyway. He must see that she had a lady companion with her in future. John Gilbert was often sad. Katharine's mother had died when she was three years old. With the help of his unmarried sister, Beatrice, he had brought her up himself. Nicholas brooded. There was nothing else he could do. Shame was mixed with other emotions; anger at his wrongful punishment; frustration at his helplessness. He kept away from everyone, even those who understood and would give him the support he needed. He sought solitude, not succour. The boy was suddenly becoming a man in giant-sized steps like those he had made in the sand. He glimpsed her once more before he set off for Poid. Her face seemed to be saying something sad too. When he returned from Poid she had vanished like a dream. Still the face of merriment of a happy young woman stayed with Nicholas. His own understood or felt they did. They all knew personally the feeling of insult and humiliation. Inside he felt like blowing up at the injustice of it all. At times he glowed with its heat. They knew and they didn't know. For them it was the same all the time - certainly that was so for those who were 'black'. For him it ebbed and flowed. He had 'privileges' which set him apart as was intended. And they could be taken away at will and on a whim on behalf of that bigger impassable barrier which he, like them, would not ever cross. He awoke indescribably happy after the dream. Or was it a dream? The china-like, fine-grained skin, face aglow, eye mistily green, were luminated by the refraction from the sea over the reefs, an enduring torquoise. The eyes, wide spanned were given a look of wonderment by Nature's hand. The words of the song that Father Gilbert had played on the Mission's gramophone were drifting far above her in the clouds: Did you ever see a dream walking? Well I did ... Did you ever see a dream talking? She was asking him something, but he could not hear the words. She was leaping gracefully over the reefs and on to the sand: Did you ever see a dream dancing?The words were following the movement as she arrived on the sandbeach and they continued along it together: Will you ever see a heaven right in your arms, saying I love you, I do?

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He rolled over, fully awake now but confused; the shadows in the room revealed night-time. Yet the light from the open square cut in the galvanised iron wall for a window was like daylight. Still confused he sat up and looked out into a whitened night. The moon in its full glory, a giant ball of gold-silver-white was approaching its zenith, figure upon a night-sky whitened by its lumen. He looked out spellbound for an instant; the leaves of the coconut palms thrust up into its blue-whiteness were silvered on the top half; black-gold on the underside. Nicholas was transfixed by an eerie stillness listening to the silence. Like a world halted for an instant. As he watched a white bird flew across the 'screen' of his frame of the world. It seemed to Nicholas that it spoke to him, but, although he craned his neck as far as possible he could not catch the words. The bird had taken on the qualities of the silvered leaves of the coconut trees. A feeling of strange happiness awoke in him as he watched its flight eastward until it disappeared into an awakening dawn. It was as though the bird knew him. The moment passed and with an unanticipated feeling of contentment Nicholas fell fast asleep to be awakened at daybreak by the Mission whistle. Its sound held a more than usually harsh note for him. 'Ah, to hell with them all', he surprised himself by saying the words aloud as his feet touched the floor. Nicholas became more aloof than before. He was beginning to understand as a man; and that was a painful experience. For ever after when he heard of Melbourne, Katharine's face, like an eternal close-up of yesterday, framed by her cloud-like red-gold hair passed across his eyes. Melbourne was like another world, one which had brought first his father and now this girl up to his world. It was all too hard to imagine what that other side was like. 'South' it was called, the captivating unknown. The sky was darkening as they made the last preparations for the Protector's visit next day. Clouds began to gather suddenly, inexplicably. White caps curled the seas into small mountains, like snow-capped peaks. They quickened their pace; the storm-winds were gathering. The bluff beyond the beach at Wag had taken on the darkness of evil. Throughout the years of his growing up Nicholas had never had t o go out of his way to be wanted or liked: his knowledge, his dependability, his unassuming personal style meant that people liked him and helped him. But instinctively he never overstepped. He went to the boundary of the so-called 'coloured world' - his world - and stopped there. Even were his white father the King of England now it would have made no difference. He was an Aborigine.

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'Just keep away from them white people, especially women', the old man told him when Nicholas eventually acquainted him with his punishment and disgrace. 'They'll always get you into trouble', the old Muri man added. He was almost a proper uncle to this Wymarra boy. It was then that Nicholas decided to keep strictly to his own business and his own people. He was building a tough fortress round himself.

A CONVERSATION OVERHEARD Con O'Leary was everybody's friend; one of the boys. A great mixer and a great troubleshooter. He knew how to handle the Islanders on behalf of the Protector's Department and that was something. When the strike on the boats broke out in 1936 JW Bleakley, the Chief Protector, had summoned him from Palm Island, another troubled spot and sent him post haste to Thursday Island to investigate the refusal by all the 'Company boat' men to work their boats. Everyone knew the Islanders were hard to organise; they'd refuse to do anything if it didn't suit them. They didn't budge and acted 'stupid'. Did nothing. Said nothing. You couldn't get anywhere by belting them or ticking them off. It's insolence, the Protector affirmed to himself. 'You just can't push these people. They're stubborn as mules', the man who'd been Government teacher-superintendent at Darnley Island and was now principal of the Tsachers' Training College at Mabuiag Island, spoke for them all. 'You have to get round them. Win their confidence and then lead them without rousing their suspicions', he continued. Things were in a mess round the Islands. Everybody knew that. Discontent was rife since McLean had taken over the Protector's job at Thursday Island in 1932. Even the Anglican Mission at Moa had felt his firm hand. Saint Paul's, as it was known, had been a small oasis. Not coming under the 'Act' as the Aboriginals Protection Act was commonly called, the people there of South Sea Islander extraction mainly, enjoyed certain freedoms denied the rest. McLean had introduced a curfew on all the other islands: young men and women were forbidden to walk together; it was home-time after 6 pm for girls and at nine o'clock, when the 'Bu' whistle was sounded the men were obliged to return to the boats even when they were on their home islands. The people resented it and they met in secret and sent covert messages across the islands.

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Compress or suppress the passions o r next they'd be taking liberties with women of other races. Even ours! Heaven forbid. As the boats sailed away for work t h e young Island women held up white calico to wave farewell to their sweethearts and their pieces of mirror sent long shafts of bright light across the sea between the coconut palms. I don't know where you are. But in m y dreams I see you sitting beside me. I don't know when I will be back again ..., sang the young Island men as the boats sailed away from Badu Island. 'In a secret way, a secret way, we sang because it was not allowed; we called that love song "Linda", which really means darling. The love was too strong, that's why we did these things anyway', the songman explained. 'They put that man in gaol long Badu', the old man told Nicholas. 'He no ask teacher, Mrs Zahel, for a permission to move over here', he went on. 'They make 'em work long them roads, shaved heads belong 'em one side, to teach them fellers a lesson. Proper bad one there', he continued. 'Now this strike come up and Mr O'Leary come round to straighten things out: all tell Mr McLean chase them out of his office always.' O'Leary had returned in February 1936 to win back the confidence of t h e men in the Administration after they had suddenly refused to man the 'Company boats'. Now in 1937, he was accompanying the Chief Protector, J W Bleakley, to introduce the 'New Law', as the Islanders called it, in preparation for the Minister's visit to the Strait in July and the interisland Councillors' Conference to be held in August. He'd worked and worked tirelessly and for months over the Christmas holiday period of 1936-37 to restore 'the confidence' of the men. Nicholas was to accompany them over to Poid and then to Badu and Mabuiag; at Badu he would do some repairs on the inboards while the Protectors were talking to the Councillors and contemplating the situation. He had already been put to work on servicing the crane on the Melbidir before she sailed. The Protectors and the stiff-collared Brisbane men were ensconced on the upper deck. He found to his alarm that his ears were glued to their conversation. It was carried on in tones quite audible to his excellent hearing which had been tuned from his first days to many sounds against the backdrop of the sea. 'Now things are improving for shell again', O'Leary went on, we have to make full use of these half-caste colonies like this one for South Sea men and the Hammond Mission, to find some with the right ambition for apprenticeships. Maybe building and mechanics work. We can't go on relying on the white man.' 'You see that boy out there', he continued in a quieter voice. 'Well, he's the type I mean. He's handy with engines.'

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'Yes', Bleakley replied, 'but don't go too far; the blood is always an obstacle. No matter how well trained they're rarely able to combat the influences on them.' So far Nicholas heard perfectly. 'Well, most of them are drifters anyway', Nicholas heard O'Leary reply to the stern-faced old man. 'They're not proper Malays and they're not Islanders. Class themselves a few rungs above the Islander as well as the Aboriginal. What was done three years ago was right: sort out the wheat from the chaff and then pick out the better grains of each and try to grow something out of those few.' Nicholas' feelings see-sawed between fascination and repugnance. 'Some of the quadroons over at Hammond Island are doing well now. Father McDennott's got the knack of making them all work. They built that church all themselves, although he had to work every minute with them himself', O'Leary continued. Yes', replied the Chief Protector, 'what the Department did in 1923 to combat the half-caste evil has proved right. The cross-breeds were a third of the Natives then. We banned whites and aliens from marrying full-bloods; we encouraged the ones that threw to the Aboriginal side to marry back and the superior types we assisted to uplift themselves.' 'That's true.' Yet O'Leary's voice held a note of hesitation. Firmly etched upon his mind was the lady of South Sea origin at Rennel Island who had stopped him from coming beyond high-water mark in his efforts at carrying out his duty of including her family under the Act. She's stood her ground and he'd sat in the sun. She had won. It was one thing for the Administration to make new rules; it was quite another to carry them through. This his superior, now beside him, found it well nigh impossible to understand. 'Their own will always pull them down', the Chief Protector interrupted O'Leary's thoughts. The senior man had his own ideas about the 'half-caste evil' as he viewed it. This energetic Irishman was smart, admittedly. He knew how to handle these men. But in Bleakley's opinion, you had always to keep your eye upon them and always keep your distance. In his opinion O'Leary mixed in too much. And as he'd written to him, his program of reorganisation of the Administration after the strike went further than either he or Mr Cameron, the Public Service Inspector, who had been sent to accompany Con O'Leary, had originally intended. He was granting powers to the Islanders which rightly belonged to the Administration through the government teacher-superintendents on the islands. Anyway, the thought angered him, what are all these Aboriginals doing around the Mission for South Sea people here on Moa?

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'We must always be ready whenever we grant freedom for one of these better types', he said aloud. The Chief Protector was now looking closely at Nicholas who was skilfully readying the crane as though he and it were partners, '...to help or resume control if need be - always keep an unobtrusive eye on them, Con', he concluded watching Nicholas' every movement. 'Who is that light-coloured boy out there?' he queried. O'Leary's answer was drowned out by the noise of the machine. Nicholas could not hear O'Leary's reply to the next question, of special interest to himself. What was a quadroon, he wondered. He would ask Harry Captain, who seemed to know all the things that he wanted to know. Words, '... mother was a full-blood', 'shouldn't have stayed so long'. 'Got carried away ...', came through to his ears on the wind. 'That's why he's brighter than the others.' They were nearing Poid village. 'Things here have improved a great deal since the new council took over', O'Leary seemed to be reporting his own success. 'mere's a young married man, Wees Nawia, came from Hammond as a boy (he's really a Muri), who's the new chairman. They'll do any thing he wants; grow gardens, build houses, keep the cutters in order. Was skipper of Manu.' The Chief Protector listened in silence. So far so good, he thought. They could see the welcoming committee a t the beach. A new era was beginning, so everyone thought. That was the common view. But there were different ideas about just what that meant. Only snatches of their conversation drifted over to Nicholas. He felt secure at the sight of the new chairman and the council quietly awaiting the government party. To him the chairman was 'Uncle Wees', a 'proper uncle' to him. As the Chief Protector and his entourage came on deck to view the welcoming scene a cloud of 'sullenness' descended on to Nicholas' face like a mask. The Poid people had been consolidated with the few remaining original Moans about fifteen years before. Although they were related somewhere back, the Chief Protector couldn't remember how, they had not liked it. The white police had to force them with guns into the dinghies at Hammond Island. It had taken a while and there had been some troubles recently over skippers at Poid. But with the new chairman and the strike over things were improving. Now the Chief Protector looked at the young man closely. He was less than thirty years old. His welcome and look gave nothing away. The village was clean, the gardens neatly planted out, the children wore small loin cloths, and the Mothers' Union had a small feast nicely laid out for the government party. The chairman and the new councillors had already shown a keen interest in the

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New Law, asking questions of both O'Leary and the Chief Protector. They asked most about boat returns and bank passbooks. 'We want to take care of the money ourselves', the young chairman was polite but determined. The man before him with the deep-black face had an unmistakable air of quiet dignity. Those troublemaking traders in TI had poisoned their minds, thought the Chief Protector. They wanted to get their business away from the Aboriginal Industries Board stores. Anyway it was working out all right now as long as they would spend their money wisely. Here at Poid the people seemed to work i n the gardens and on the boats quite differently when they had selected their own men to run things on the Island. He had already noted that in his last report i n the year of the strike. 'There is something to be said for letting these Islanders select their own men', he wrote to the Minister in his night despatch. 'These Islanders are a superior type to the mainland people.' Nobody bothered to point out to him what he already knew: that Wees Nawia and all the 'Hammond people' had close blood ties with the Cape York Aborigines. The chairman had exchanged glances with Nicholas as the young man passed. 'We'll have time when this is all over', the older man's looks were saying. Nicholas noted a difference in the dress of his uncle. He no longer wore the jumper with its emblazoned insignia in bold letters: COUNCILLOR. Like a jailbird's number on his back, though these had had the writing on the front. The chairman's shirt was now a plain colour. The new chairman, who was related to people at Cowal Creek and always welcome there, was especially beloved by children. Nicholas had always loved his kind ways. His open-faced, genial manner were matched by his compassion. But there lay behind it the heart of a giant; it signified courage and this is what he needed to confront the man who had had until recently, total power - JW Bleakley - a man empowered by %he Act'. In the past two years Wees Nawia had moved from a man unknown to popular leader. Not long before he had married a young woman from a South Sea Island family; the links between Poid and St Paul's Mission had strengthened. Nicholas was with the young single men beneath a wongai tree; the sweet red plums were ripening. Many of these Poid boys were his cousins, for, as Billy Wymarra had told him, some of the east coast people had swum out from Somerset and Albany from the guns and whip of the 'devil feller' and joined the Muri-Kaurareg people who had been forced to end up here at Poid in the Tbrres Strait.

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Those who had observed the recently arrived government party were showing the other boys how the Brisbane officials had strutted round the villages, re-enacting Joe's mimicry and imitative gesture. Not a movement had gone unnoted. They couldn't bend their stiff backs; the joints of their legs seemed to need oiling. The pompous, awkward style of the government officials, who spent their lives a t their desks, and who had come up from Brisbane for the first time, contrasted sharply with these sailor boys whose bodies were supple and muscular and super-humanly strong. 'And one feller drop right down long backside long dinghy.' Peels of laughter were ringing out from along the branches of t h e wongai tree. The favourite fruit of the Islands and Cape York for both humans and the white Torres Strait pigeon, which came from Tugeri country in West New Guinea to Australia to lay its eggs, had ripened. 'You go chukka that one at them big men from Town!', a bigger boy full of mock bravado, dared his smaller brothers. The Protector and his men retired to the warm cabins of the Melbidir. "hmorrow', O'Leary reminded himself, 'I will speak to that boy'. 'Keep away from white girls', the Protector told Nicholas next day. 'Find a nice light-skinned girl like yourself.' His words, meant to be kindly, for he liked Nicholas, sounded stiff and sensorious. Nicholas retreated imperceptibly from the Protector. O'Leary moved a trifle restlessly. He was faintly aware of the impact of his advice on the young man. 'Your father', he went on 'started you on a correct path'. 'You must be grateful for that', he continued after a pause, oblivious of the impact his total forgetfulness would have of the fact that it was from Billy Wymarra, not Jack McLaren, that this boy had first learnt his 'whiteman' skills. The coloured people of Cape York like Peter and Ryda Gibson, the old man Abu at Charcoal Burner who had found him hiding, men like Alick Whitesand, Tommy Dodd, Solomon Woosup, Larry MacDonald, Pablo, and the South Sea men who had come from Somerset to Cowal Creek and Alau like Charley Lifu, were Nicholas' teachers. The Melbidir was returning to Moa in the morning and Nicholas was sleeping below with the older boys for the tide would be right at the first sign of the dawn. As he slept he dreamed. The dream began with Katharine holding her hat - full of shells. People began to crowd in all round. They seemed to be fighting, so it seemed a t first. Katharine had floated away into the sky and the muddled

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scenes of innumerable men and women screaming as they ran, letting out piercing sounds as they stopped began to clear. They were in a hall; and the reason for their screams was becoming clear: they were being forced t o run back and forth. The building was just like the bush courthouse and newly-built gaol. At either end was a clenched fist level with their brows. A black man was laughing a t them and the women were running and crying ... . The scene darkened and the yelling ceased. Katharine was beckoning him from the far background. But as the scene drew closer to him her whole face and body and demeanour was transformed. The young girl was gone; in her place was a fat, ugly old woman. The old woman was calling to him. 'Nick boy, come 'ere!' Her tone was imperious, her voice thick. 'Yumi kaikai', she commanded, pointing to some cooked manioc in a saucepan standing on a low table. She was drawing him closer, as though his will had become hers. Closer, closer. She had moved back on to the spotted burgundy couch with which her awkward form seemed to merge. Nicholas' repulsed reaction remained; yet the old woman held him with an impelling power. Loathing mingled with curiosity, pride with shame. Her power over him was becoming absolute. His will was numbed; he could no longer resist. Something strong and soft was enveloping him. There was a faint smell of spirits. The old woman's belly was like a mountain. Nicholas sobbed and woke up. The night was heavy and hot; the blackened sky interrupted by patches of deep charcoal, black upon blacker, as the storm-clouds gathered. The air inside the small sleeping-quarters of the crew next to the engine room was oppressive, even though they were at anchor. Nicholas shot up the ladder for a breath of freer atmosphere on deck; even there the air was stifling. The sea had become a murky grey-brown clothed in a misty darkness as though he had entered the nether world of the kingdom of Hades. He knew intuitively that he was no longer wanted on this side. People like himself were being prevented from moving freely in the Islands and taking jobs even where their skills were considerable and in demand. Where there were no skilled local people, white men - fitters and turners, even carpenters - were being sent up from Brisbane as employees of the Protector's Department. Boys like him were being clamped into slots assigned to them by the Act and reallocated where possible to the place from where they came. Cowal Creek or Mapoon on Cape York, not St Paul's and the Islands was his place, they were saying.

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Yet he would never have let it come to pass that they told him where t o go. Never allow yourself to be in a position where they could hurt you inside. Don't let them have the satisfaction of pushing you around. This was the message h e had begun to tell himself in the two years since he left Cowal Creek for Town a n d the Islands. To hell with the lot of them, he reflected. Gradually, imperceptibly, a decision began to take shape within him. H e would return to Cowal Creek and find work. Maybe down Galloway Hill way where he had worked before when he was a t school at a family orchard there. His country was down that side. He belonged to another place. Nicholas' demeanour began to change. He looked more free and easy: No cares in the world. At your service. Whatever you want sir. Silently. Inside he was in turmoil. The humiliation he had suffered over his wish to help the young white woman wounded his soul. He was neither demeaned nor defiant; he was also no longer vulnerable. He had arrived at Moa a boy; a boy with high hopes for a new life for himself. He was leaving a man. But what did he care about them? A group of small children were calling him. 'Corn on, play!', they yelled. %un away from the crocodile!' They knew he was always one for fun. They felt he was one of them, a sort of adult with the heart of a child. 'I'll get you', he roared, and they all scattered. He grabbed one small boy, pretending to eat him. Then as the others turned back to look, he said: 'Quick, jump on my shoulders and catch on real tight'. The small boy jumped on his back as he crouched down for an instant and hung on with all his might and Nicholas and he were off like a flash of lightning with the others in hot pursuit. 'All right. Eat me', he roared, pretending to fall with the small boy attached. What a game! Lead kindly light ..., the children's voices rang out clearly from the church as he passed. ... Amid encircling gloom. Yes, that was it surely, he thought darkly. As he crossed the sandbeach to the dinghy which would take him out to the church vessel, Torres Herald, the whole world seemed brooding. A sense of foreboding began to encompass him as he pushed the dinghy off the sands of Moa. He was returning to his own.

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RETURNING HOME AT COWAL CREEK Nicholas' return to Injinoo was a real homecoming. His arrival lifted people's flagging spirits. They were being dumped. The background was a regrading of persons. The Great Gap between the white and the rest was being policed more vigorously. The 'rest' were more actively being placed in different slots according to various amounts of 'coloured' blood. Things had changed - mainly for the worse. Certainly the Island school teacher, a Badu man, managed to give the people hope through their children. But generally things were bad. Much worse than in the Islands where the 'Company boat' sailors had gone on strike in 1936. Nicholas was like a nugget of gold. He could do things. Mr Fixit had become his nickname. He had a way with anything to do with engines and machines. A sort of natural talent, people said. The way he could take them apart and get them going again seemed almost uncanny to some people. He made it all look easy. To his own people he was a source of pride. At a time and place where you had to make do a boy like Nicholas was always in demand. Now there were many things to be fixed and Nicholas set about doing so with a will. He also got work again at Galloway near the Cowal Creek Mission and daily brought a family of children into school. The Cowal Creek people had been schooled to believe that Nicholas' natural talent came from his white blood. This particular way of seeing things forgot' about Billy Wymarra and his talents which had made him Jack McLaren's overseer at Utingu a generation before. Many Aboriginal people, even some of his family, had come to believe that Nicholas was clever because his brain was white. Him no got black brain. No other viewpoint was ever voiced. They had only their own intuition that it was not so. And when you're fighting for your physical as well as your human existence there's little opportunity to argue these sorts of things. Other voices from the small circles of Aboriginal Rights and Advancement rarely reached their ears. They were marooned. Nicholas went about things nicely. Didn't get flustered; or let those in command stand over him. He had the special advantage that he usually knew

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more than the white officials and lots of the tradesmen from Brisbane. He was also aware that they depended upon his skills: Brisbane, even Thursday Island, was a long way away. He returned to Cowal Creek more self-containedthan before. The quiet boy they knew had become the quiet young man. Clever and well-mannered too. People did not ask for any more and Nicholas never gave them cause to wonder further how he came to know this and that. One by one the remaining chinks in his armour of aloofness were closing. He was approaching twenty and in mind and body he had attained manhood. When he went to St Paul's Nicholas had finished Third Grade - the Statutory Limit for Protected people. 'They don't want us t o know too much. Cunning devils', Solomon Woosup had said to Billy Wymarra. He had been one of the bright kids. First he became monitor when Sailor Gabey was teacher; then he helped Jomen Tamwoy, the kindly young Badu man. He could read and write; he learnt arithmetic too at Weipa and the Gibsons tried to make sure he kept this going. In the milieu in which he had grown up there were many many Aborigines of his father's generation who knew all those 'white man' things. Sort of black-white men: his uncle Billy Wymarra, Alick Whitesand, Solomon Woosup, old man Pablo and Tommy Dodd. Knowledge once gained is never lost; and these men who had worked on the boats, a t Somerset, at Utingu, had passed it on to their sons and daughters. That heritage was a taken-for-granted part of Nicholas' life. The new knowledge was in various ways available to him; his father's generation still practised the old ways as well. Nicholas had set out for Moa with hopes of moving to newer heights. He loved the ordinary life a t Moa as he loved his childhood homes of Injinoo and Red Island Point, of Galloway and Alau and Charcoal Burner; of places as far away as Mapoon and Weipa. Life was an exciting pleasure; simply to exist among the kindly people to whom he belonged was sheerjoy. As he was treated so he treated others coming on; they loved him for it. He was popular for his humour, his wit, his ingenuity - and for his white ancestry. Built into him were the hopes of Mary Brown, of Billy Wymarra; and these were the hopes of all his people. His hopes carried forward an inchoate, unlimited aspiration; he knew not what exactly. It was driven by the belief, which he had held as long as he could remember, that he possessed some sort of special personal passport from his faintly remembered white father. In his growing years to the end of his boyhood at Cowal Creek, nothing had really occurred which cut across the close accord between wish and achievement.

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Yet there already existed in Nicholas a quality, as yet undefined and unconscious to his reflective mind, which was created by being hidden and hunted; from the inexplicable behaviour of Jack, his father, in leaving him forever; in the mystery-death of his mother. He was aware that he was 'valuable' in some way different to his brothers and sisters; yet he did not entirely like the reasons for being so. He wanted most to be one of the kids. In some way in which he was partially aware the put-down he experienced at Moa was not entirely a surprise to him. There was a side to him that was glad it had happened. It resolved sitting on the edge of a fence, exposed to the world. Whatever the peaks that he was meant to attain, he was well-equipped, so it turned out, to acquiesce in the notion of life as imperfection. QuicklyNicholas came to take on the melancholy akin to that mature age associated with the shattering of the dreams of youth. Yet if his personality of early manhood formed as an austere melancholy, his joyful side was not extinguished; it was subdued and recessive. He was becoming the resilient man, given neither to despair nor defiance.

AT MAPOON Nicholas had long ago been betrothed to a Mapoon girl. Some time or other he came to know this, but it was something he didn't think about before he went to Moa. He partly belonged to Mapoon for it was there that he went with Ryda and Peter Gibson who themselves came from Mapoon. When Nicholas arrived at Mapoon on the J G Ward, he had been working for the Presbyterian Mission for three months. All the girls remembered him as a boy at school at Weipa. He was quiet, shy and clever. Now he was back as a young man and he didn't miss noting how all the girls cast looks in his direction. He was good-looking,well-mannered and more than faintly aloof. More serious than most of the other boys. And his looks had retained that quality as though in some 'before-land' the young angel who put people together had wrapped an all-brown skin round a child of European mould. Yet the deep-set eyes of his mother's people were indelibly present. Marjorie looked up when he came by. She was making her way from the laundry, where she spent most of each day, to the clothes line. As she cornered the building there was Nicholas. He seemed to be waiting for someone. Her heart thumped. Could it be for her? In an instant he passed her a note. She carefully placed it inside her dress at the neck scarcely looking a t him. In a flash he was gone, as though the interchange had never happened.

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The young men and women were forbidden to be seen together, much less to talk or pass notes or words. Right round the police were instructed to punish such association. Sweethearts were forbidden. Sing praises to the Lord to wash away the sin and employ the hands in diligence. These were the messages of the Mission. The girls worked and worked washing and washing and washing and folding linen. When they'd finished they sang in church; learned to cook; to read and write a little. Learning to make lace and crocheting kept their idle hands busy. There was little room in the official round for laughter and none for sweethearts. The passions must be suppressed. 'These people', the Superintendent recorded in his report, 'were little better than savages half a century ago. Now they can do all sorts of things we have taught them. But relax things a bit, and they go bush. The process of uplifting is a slow one and not always rewarding.' Madorie was one of their rewards; she was bright and diligent. 'One of the more teachable ones', the Superintendent said. Not like the real tribal girls. Jean was the same, 'sort of civilised', and the others could be got to follow their lead. A good-looking girl, her open face smiling only occasionally for the missionaries, Marjorie appeared attentive and guileless. Beneath her gentle demeanour lay a firmness and certainty that no amount of coercion seemed to eradicate. Outwardly she seemed almost passive. As Nicholas passed her face was seen to light up, like a lamp that suddenly brightens up a surrounding dullness at the same time revealing itself. For a young woman who usually lacked cause for gaiety, in that instant the faintly mournful look had gone. He felt a wild impulse to turn back and press her hand. But when he glanced round she had disappeared. To Nicholas she looked as he approached unseen as though someone had just given her a slap. The change he noted in her as he glanced back momentarily was miraculous. She was totally transformed; the melancholy, inert look had been overtaken by a n embodying radiance. The urge to touch her was almost overpowering. Fresh energy welled up in Marjorie. Like water beneath the sandbeach near the shoreline welling into a freshly made opening. As she carried the pile of linen to the laundry she became aware that she was whistling softly. 'What's happened to you?' cried Joyce laughing herself at such an unexpected event, overcome by curiosity a t Marjorie's changed demeanour. 'Look out old spider-legs don't hear you sing', warned Barbara, miming the silent tip-toe movements of the Superintendent's tall, thin wife.

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Marjorie became silent, but her movements continued to carry a vibrancy of spirit. Joyce and Barbara exchanged looks which said: 'What is there to be happy about here?' 'Must have seen a ghost', Barbara muttered, immediately wishing she had not said so. She shivered slightly at her own suggestion. Old spider-legs' voice descended discordantly on Marjorie's ears. The owner of the legs had neither the voice nor the physical strength which might be associated with the spider. 'Why don't you lazy B's hurry up with that washing?' The words crashed in on them followed by her person. The thinness and straightness of her lips, the elongation of her face in the form of a rectangle, matched her long spindle-like legs. She seemed to drop sheer from the neck, her person seemingly absent of curves. 'Someone must have stretched out the bumps front and backside', Barbara had once observed. 'Maybe they ironed her flat', said Joyce. An uncurved, angular woman was totally foreign to their kind of people. Nicholas' note sent Marjorie's head reeling. So it was her he wanted. It was like looking at a brilliant light. She almost stumbled into the laundry. How could she tell the other girls? How they would envy her. Each wished that some man would come and take them in marriage. Dormitory life was joyless. And Nicholas was the one who set them all talking. He was pleasant, handsome - and different. Some months later Nicholas came to ask the missionaries if he and Marjorie might be married. Her family had no objections. He had a job with the Mission: no one had any complaints about him. He didn't give them cause. Whatever he thought or felt that crossed their idea of 'proper' they never heard. Nor did anyone else. It was safely locked up inside him. The key he had hidden away.

REVERSALS GOLDEN HANDSHAKE

Soon after his marriage Nicholas became skipper of the J G Ward delivering supplies to the Presbyterian Missions at Aurukun, Mapoon, Weipa and Mornington Island. He served in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War delivering supplies to Australian and American troops in the area.

216

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In 1945 he had had enough of the Mapoon Mission. So the family packed up and migrated to Thursday Island where he got a job as coxswain on one of the boats belonging to Torres Strait Pilots. Each night he gave the three children a lesson in English. 'You try tell m e in English what you have been doing today?' Straight away they said, 'Mefeller been ...'. 'No, no, no. Don't say "Mefeller"; say "we" and "all of us". ' But they kept talking in broken English. 'Now talk in English; and stop picking up things with your toes. Islanders and white people will laugh at you.' One day the children came home from school, Pearl in tears. 'This big kid called them binghi and yellerfeller.' 'So what'd they do?' 'They called them 'steel wool' - you use to wash them greasy pots.' Nicholas couldn't help a smile creeping around the corners of his lips at their original designation of tight Island hair. 'Raymond punched them too', added Pearl. 'All of them ganged up and hit them ...' Nicholas had his own troubles in the following days. The first insult came in the pub where he had been allowed to drink on account of his free papers. 'What's the binghi doing in here?', he heard one white man say loudly, as he leaned on the other side of the bar where the few 'emancipees' were awkwardly holding their beer glasses with unaccustomed hands, not knowing where to look. As he walked in a dejected state towards his house, he saw Pearl, his eldest daughter coming to meet him. He was retreating into himself as he had learned to do to protect himself from the daggers of his vexed surroundings. Sometimes he felt as though he were apart from his skin; at such times he would wish that people would just listen and try to know the kernel inside that was him. Two different people sometimes stood and faced each other: the inner and outer Nicholas. Often he wished he, the real Nicholas could crawl out of it for a moment and say: 'Here I am!' The outer paper wrapping round the gift within was irrelevant. You could not judge the human person who lay inside. 'Daddy, daddy, I been lookout for you. Mefeller been lookout for you', cried the smallest as she rushed at him and into his arms. Nicholas didn't have the heart to say, 'not mefeller!'. She was a very loving small girl. 'Daddy, what's the matter? Are you drunk?', she asked affectionately.

ONE OF OURS: THE STORY OF NICHOLAS

217

A LAST STORM Nicholas was making his way home alone from The Grand. The March night was strangely windy; the sky grey-black as though a dark blanket had been pulled over the stars.

Plate 13

Nicholas Wymarra, cl967

218

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Somewhere in the darkness a man was humming a tune. The words of the song appeared suddenly upon the wind: 'I wish I was a white man ...', a dark figure could be discerned against the grey-blackness: 'Instead of a coon, coon, coon'. He was singing like the Negroes, crying from all the bad treatment. Nicholas was attracted and repelled. 'And I wish my colour would change from a coon, coon, coon ...' He sounded just like the Negro on the old wind-up record at Moa. It was beginning again, louder this time and Nicholas began to wish it would stop; it was interrupting and disturbing his thoughts. Coursing through his brain were the words of Con O'Leary on the day of the Golden Handshake soon after he returned to TI in 1950. We don't want you to be a bludger or a loafer now you're free. Because McLaren taught you all those things and put you where you are today ... 'Rubbish', he said aloud. He experienced again the same surge of bitterness he had felt many times. . A n d you have to live u p to that. 'Yes', he said to himself aloud, 'Jack did the favour of giving me his white blood'. Jack's gift was to let him exist. He made m e and left me, he said once again to himself. Live u p to what? It was Billy Wymarra who had taught him 'all those things' that white men knew; hunting and singing the dugong too. Who had put him where he was? Himself. He knew the answer well. As engineer and skipper on Duffield's luggers he had himself earned the reputation of fine seaman. On his own record he became the first coloured man to work on the Harbours and Marine Department's boats and he had been with them for twenty years. That had nothing to do with McLaren. They had pushed him and goaded him on to do things that went with his paler skin and Anglo-Celtic looks; then, just at that moment when he might seem to be getting somewhere, thrusting him backward, demeaning him. And here was O'Leary thrusting McLaren down his throat again. Now as before they were giving nothing he hadn't had and they were exacting everything. That was their birthright. In 'offering' him his freedom they were saying once more: 'You have no birthright as a man. For you are not a man. You are [only]an Aboriginal. Always. But we are bestowing something upon you.'

ONE OF OURS: THE STORY OF NICHOLAS

219

We are exempting you from the provisions of the Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Acts 1939-46 on 24 March 1950. You are held in good repute at Mapoon Mission ... one of the better types of half-castes. They were changing the rules. And so the dagger in his flesh had been withdrawn slightly; yet the scars that lay in his heart remained. The knots that composed his innermost self held tight. ' And I wish my colour would change from ...' The singing had become louder and closer now as though the paths of singer and listener would soon converge.

... considered a man of good character, and sober habits. This way, that way, he was stumbling along the uneven path and the singing was getting louder. The wish to silence it gripped him. 'Stop, shut up', he shouted suddenly at the voice. It refused to stop or the listener failed to hear him against the sound of his own singing. It was reaching a crescendo and Nicholas was responding with a surge of desperation. It was infuriating him as it approached louder and louder. ' instead of a coon ...' He reached out and threw a stone in the direction of the voice, but it west on, '. .. Coon Cooo-n'. The words were taunting him, as though with life of their own. Nicholas was nearing his own yard and he could distinguish the familiar sounds of the galvanised iron flapping in the wind. He was stumbling towards the back verandah steps. There were only two - plus the third which was a bit broken. But there was no railing and he lurched sideways as he approached the third, somehow managing to fall and hit his head against the verandah post that stood at the side of the steps. And there he lay as the sound of the wind carried away the singer's voice that now seemed to come from the spot where he was; the verandah steps he thought he knew like the front of his hand. The singer had reached him now. 'It's you, Nick', the voice came from an ancient man with deep-black skin. 'Proper good one the way you saved themfeller from that capsized dinghy. Them new chums don't know nothing', he went on, seemingly unaware of Nicholas' fall.

220

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The senselessness of Nicholas' death was a silent statement upon the futility of so many of the occasions of his life. Tripping on familiar steps. He was taken t o the hospital and there he seemed all right. Unconscious, then semi-conscious. The doctors gave no reason for alarm. No one guessed he would not recover. He just seemed to be in a long, long sleep. Within the limits of their knowledge they did their best. Nicholas felt himself being transported over seas. He could feel the swell of the waves; could discern a blackened sea. Faster and faster the vessel sped, the boatman fighting the wind which brought them nearer and nearer to the edge of the whirlpool. They were moving now in a circular motion the right hand side of his body twirling against his left; the blackened centre that looked' thicker than water was drawing the boat into its whorl. Lower and lower, closer and closer the coil became its power strengthening. The smell was different and an unfamiliar darkness seemed to penetrate the skin. Some terrifying nightmare world of malevolence? Suddenly the sensation of suction ceased. They were entering a calm sea. The boatman was steering his craft towards the source of an iridescent light. Slowly Nicholas began to discern the setting sun. At the same time he became aware that the atmosphere was different. Then he noticed a strange thing: beyond the horizon of the sunset he could make out a blue-green haze which hid coral reefs. The ancient man with the deep-black skin had reappeared out of the haze. His body refracting the many colours of the setting sun had turned t o white light. For an instant the features changed. It was as though he were confronting his own whitened figure. 'Are you One of Ours?' a voice was asking gently. Nicholas could not make out who was asking the question. Yet the voice was familiar. He shifted his self forward in answer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS AND ARTICLES Alien, J. and P. Corris (eds) The Journal of John Sweatman, Queensland University Press, St 1977 Lucia. Austin, C.G. 1949 Early History of Somerset and Thursday Island, Queensland Historical Journal 4 (2). Austin, T. 1972

FW Walker and Papuan Industries Ltd, Journal of the Papua New Guinea Society 6 (l), 38-62.

Barrett, C. Isles of the Sun, Heinemann, Melbourne. 1954 Bartlett, N. The Pearl Seekers, Melrose, London. 1954 Bayton, J. 1965

Cross over Carpentaria, being the History of the Church of England in Northern Australia from 1865-1965, Smith and Paterson, Brisbane.

Book of Islanders Springs of Originality among the Torres Strait Islanders, Vol 11, 1984 Bundoora, La Trobe University. Drawn from Cassette Recordings made by Nonie Sharp in the Torres Strait Islands and Cape York Peninsula 1978-84, Cassettes 001-128 as listed B167 (see Sharp 1984). Brierly, O.W. Canoes in Australia, Athenaeum (1792, 1795), 305, 396-97. 1862 1848-49 Journals. Manuscripts, Mitchell Library, Sydney, reproduced in Moore 1979. Byerley, F. (ed) Narrative of the Overland Expedition of Messrs Jardine, Buxton, 1867 Brisbane. Cannon, R. Savage Scenesfrom Australia: Being a Short History of the Settlement 1885 at Somerset, Cape York, Helfmann, Valparaiso. Carroll, J.M. (ed) Journey into Torres Straits, Queensland Heritage 2 (l), 35-42. 1969 Crowley, T. Phonological Targets and Northern Cape York Sandhi, Papers in 1980 Australian Linguistics No 13: Contributions to Australian Linguistics, Pacific Linguistics, Australian National University, Canberra, Series A - NO 59, 241-58. 221

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222

Done, J. (Rev) 1915-26 Diaries and Personal Papers, manuscript in possession of his son, TE Done, New South Wales; see also Stevenson, B. (compiler) 1987 Wings across the Sea, Boolarong Publications, Brisbane. Douglas, J. 1899The Islands and Inhabitants of Torres Strait, Address to the Royal 1900 Geographical Society of Australasia, Queensland, 17 January 1900, in Queensaland Branch, Queensland Geographical Journal XV, 25-40. Evans, G. 1972

Thursday Island 1878-1914: A Plural Society, University of Queensland, BA (Hons) thesis.

Farnfield, J. 1975

Shipwrecks and Pearl Shells: Somerset Cape York 1864-77, Lectures on North Queensland History, 2nd series, Townsville.

Gill, J.C.H. Governor Bowen and the Aborigines - A Documentary Review, 1972 Queensland Heritage 2 (7). Gill, W.W. 1876

Life i n the Southern Isles, Religious Tract Society, London.

Griffin, J. fed) 1976 The Torres Strait Border Issue: Consolidation, Conflict or Compromise, Townsville College of Advanced Education, Townsville. Griffin, J. 1977

Impasse in Torres Strait, Australian Outlook 31 (2), 217-40.

Haddon, A.C. 1901 Headhunters, Black, White, a n d Brown, Methuen, London. Haddon, A.C. fed) 1904-35 Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to k e s Straits, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: Vol V, Sociology, Magic and Religion of the Western Islanders, 1904; Vol 1, General Ethnography, 1935. Haddon, A.C. and J. Hornel 1937 Canoes of Oceania, Bernice Bishop Museum (Special Publication No 38), Honolulu. Hale, K. 1964

Classification of the Northern Paman Languages, Cape York Peninsula, Australia: A Research Report, Oceanic Linguistics 3, 248-65.

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223

Hamilton, G. A Voyage .Round the World in His Majesty's Frigate 'Pandora': 1793 Performed under the Direction of Captain Edwards in the Years 1790, 1791 and 1792, Berwick, London. Harris, D.R. Traditional Patterns of Plant Food Procurement in the Cape York 1975 Peninsula and Torres Strait Islands, Report on fieldwork carried out August-November 1974, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. Hobson, I. 1990

Jack, R.L. 1922

The Second Wave of Contact, in Proceedings of Conference on Remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Futures, James Cook University, Townsville, 11-14 July 1990. Northmost Australia: Three Centuries of Exploration, Discovery and Adventure i n and around Cape York Peninsula (two vols), Simpkin, London.

Jagg, F.C. (Rev) 1868 The Jagg Reports, 1867-68, in Moore 1979, 252-56. Jardine, J. 1866

Description of the Neighbourhood of Somerset, Cape York Australia, Journal of the Geographical Society, London, 36, 75-85.

Jukes, J. Beete 1847 Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of HMS 'Fly', commanded by Captain FP Blackwood RN, during the Years 1842-46 (two vols), Boone, London. Kennedy, F. 1991 Knowing Who I Am, manuscript. Kennett, W. The Kennett Report, February 1867 - June 1868, in Moore 1979, 1868 237-51. Loos, N. 1982

Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal-European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier, Australian National University Press, Canberra.

McConnel, U.H. 1936 Tbtem Hero Cults in Cape York Peninsula, North Queensland, Oceania 6 (4), 452-77; 7 (l), 69-105; 7 (2), 217-19. 1939-40 Social Organization of the Tribes of Cape York Peninsula, North Queensland, Oceania 10 (l), 54-72; 10 (4), 434-55.

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

224

MacGillivray, J. 1852 Narrative of the Voyage of HMS 'Rattlesnake' C m m n d e d by the late C a p t a i n Owen Stanley RN, FRS etc, during the Years 1846-50. Including Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea, the Louisade Archipelago etc. To which is added the account of Mr E B Kennedy's expedition for the exploration of the Cape York Peninsula, Boone, London. McLaren, J. M y Crowded Solitude, Sun Books, Melbourne. 1966 Melville, H . Sketches in Australia and the Adjacent Islan d...Taken during the 1849 Surveying Voyage of HMS 'Fly' and 'Bramble!.. during the Years 18^2-46, Dickenson, London. Meston, A. Report o n the Aboriginals of Queensland to the Home Secretary, 1896 Government Printer, Brisbane. Moore, D.R. Cape York Aborigines: Fringe Participants in t h e Tbrres Strait Trading 1978 System, Mankind I1 (3), 319-25. 1979

Islanders and Aborigines at Cape York: A n Ethnographic Reconstruction based o n the 1848-50 'Rattlesnake' Journals of OW Brierly and Information he obtained from Barbara Thompson, Australian Institute o f Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.

1984

The Torres Strait Collections of AC Haddon: A Descriptive Catalogm, British Museum, London.

Moresby, J. Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea and the D'Entrecasteaux 1876 Islands - A Cruise in Polynesia and Visits to the Pearl-shelling Stations in Torres Straits of HMS 'Basilisk', Murray, London. Moseley, H.N. Notes by a Naturalist o n the 'Challenger': An Account of Various 1879 Observations made during the Voyage of HMS 'Challenger' round the World, in the Years 1873-76, Macmillan, London. 1885

Report of the Scientific Results of the Voyage of HMS 'Challenger' during the Years 1873-76. Narrative, Vol I , Her Majesty's Stationary Office, London.

Mullins, S.P. Torres Strait 1864-84: A History o f Occupation and Culture Contact, 1988 unpublished PhD thesis, University o f New England, Armidale, New South Wales. Nettheim, G. ( e d ) Aborigines, H u m a n Rights and the Law,ANZ Book CO, Sydney. 1974

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225

Patterson, E. Australia's Strangest Settlement, Walkabout 6 (2). 1939 Pinney, P. and E. Runcie Too Many Spears, Angus and Robertson, Sydney. 1978 Prideaux, P. Somerset Cape York Peninsula 1864-67: From Spear to Pearl-shell, 1988 Boolarong Publications, Corinda, Queensland. Rigsby, B. 1981 1981 Scott, J. 1965

Aboriginal People, Land Rights and Wilderness on Cape York Peninsula, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland 92, 1-10. The Languages of North Queensland Aboriginal People', unpublished manuscript. Report on Horn Island as at 6 July 1965, DAIA, Thursday Island, mimeograph.

Sharp, R.L. 1939 Tribes and Totemism in North-east Australia, Oceania 9 (3), 254-75; 9 (4), 439-61. Sharp, N. 1980

Torres Strait Islanders: The Case for Independence: The Underlying Issues, Melbourne, mimeograph, 1-16.

1982

The Seafaring Peoples of the Cape York Region: Themes in a Quest for Homelands, in Olbrei, E. (ed) Black Australians: The Prospects for Change, Students Union, James Cook University, Townsville, 148-62.

1984

Springs of Originality among the Torres Strait Islanders (two vols), unpublished PhD thesis, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria.

1990a

A Second Invasion: Aboriginal Space at Cape York, Arena 92,32-40.

1990b

Comparative Cultural Perspectives in the Murray Island Land Case, Law in Context 8 (l), 1-31. Armed Space at the Top End?, Arena 93, 29-33. Stars of Tagai: The Torres Strait Islanders, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, forthcoming. A Landmark: The Murray Island Case, Arena 94, 78-93. Faces of Power in the Torres Strait Islands: The 1980s and the 1930s, unpublished manuscript.

1990c 1991a 1991b 1991c

Shnukal, A. Broken: A n Introduction to the Creole Language of Tbrres Strait, 1989 Pacific Linguistics, C107, Research School of Pacific Linguistics, Australian National University, Canberra. Stevenson, B. see Done, J.

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

226

Sutton, P. (ed) 1976 Languages of Cape York, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. Swan, G. fed) (Fox, Matt, J. compiler) 1921 History of Queensland: Its People and Industries; A n Historical and Commercial Review,Descriptive and Biographical Facts, Figures and Illustrations, an Epitome of Progress, Hussey and Gillingham, Adelaide, for the States Publishing CO, Brisbane, 1919-23. Thomson, D.F. The Hero Cult, Initiation and Totemism on Cape York, Journal of the 1933 Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland LXIII, 453-537, with Plates XXVII-XXXVI. 1934a

The Dugong Hunters of Cape York, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 64, 237-62 with Plates XXIX-XXXI.

1934b

Notes on a Hero Cult from the Gulf of Carpentaria, North Queensland, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 64, 217-35.

1939

The Seasonal Factor in Human Culture: Illustrated from the Life of a Contemporary Nomadic Group, reprinted from the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, Paper No 10, July-December, 209-21 with plates.

1952

Notes on some Primitive Watercraft in Northern Australia, Man 1, 1-5 with map.

Tindale, N.B. Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, Australian National University Press, 1974 Canberra. Wilkin, A. 1928

Undiscovered Australia, Ernest Benn, London.

GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Acts 1897-1939; Aboriginal Preservation and Protection Act 1939, 3 Geo V1 No 6; Torres Strait Islanders Act 1939, 3 Geo V1 No 7; Community Services (Torres Strait) Act 1984 (No 52); Queensland Coast Islands Declaratory Act 1985; Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (Land Holding) Act 1985 (No 41). Report of the Western Pacific Royal Commission, 16 October 1883, Qld V&P, Vol 11; Report of the Royal Commission appointed to enquire into the workings of the Pearl-shell and BGche-de-Mer Industries, 1908, OPP, 1909. Queensland Votes and Proceedings to Year ended 31 December 1901: Reports of the Government Resident a t Thursday Island to the Chief Secretary; Reports of the Inspector of Pearl-shell and Bgche-de-mer Fisheries. See especially

BIBLIOGRAPHY

227

Correspondence Respecting the Proposed Station near Cape York, V&P, 1863, 679-94; Further Papers Respecting the Removal of the Detachment of Royal Marines from Cape York, 1867, 1, 1187-92; Mission to the Aborigines at Somerset, 1867,II, 991-95; General Report on the Settlement of Somerset, etc (HC Simpson), 1868, 519-23; Refutation of Statements made in Captain Simpson's Report (FC Jagg), 1868, 523-24; Further Paper Respecting.. . (HC Simpson); Correspondence Respecting the Purchase of Messr Jardine's stock, at Cape York, 1868-69, 673-78; Colonial Secretary, Queensland to Colonial Secretary, New South Wales, 1873, 1247-66; Contributions from the Imperial Government towards the Cost of the Establishment at Somerset, 1875, 11, 1401-02; Removal of the Establishment at Somerset, 11, 1403-21, Report of Commander Heath RN on the Site for the Proposed Settlement at Prince of Wales Group, 11, 1423-26. Queensland Parliamentary Papers 190%. Annual Reports of the Northern Protector of Aboriginals to the Year ending 1903; Annual Reports of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals to the Under Secretary, Home Secretary's Department to the Year ended 31 December 1917; AboriginalsIAboriginal Department - Information contained in Reports for the Years ended 1918-39; Annual Reports of the Director of Native Affairs (DNA), of Aboriginal and Island Affairs (DAIA), of Aboriginal and Islanders Advancement (DAIA) for the Years ended 1939-84, and of the Department of Community Services (DOS) 1985-89.

ARCHIVAL SOURCES Queensland State Archives, Outgoing Correspondence, Somerset, 1864-77. See especially the Gall Collection (COL/A63-Al77) listed 21 July 1869, File No M008.15. Extracts from the Somerset Police Magistrate's Letter-Book, Outgoing Correspondence, 2 September 1868 - 30 December 1871, Dixson Library. Chester, H.M. Autobiographical Notes, 1832-82, DL, MS Q287-89. Jagg, F.C. and W. Kennett, Letters and Reports to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel relating to the Mission to the Aborigines at Somerset, 1866-68, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, Facsimiles. Injinoo Aboriginal Community Council Records 1984-91, Injinoo.

CAPE YORK COLLECTIONS AND DIARIES Donald Thomson Collection, University of Melbourne, housed in the Museum of Victoria. Done, Rev J. Diaries and personal papers, 1915-26, in the possession of his son, TE Done, New South Wales. Pinney, P. Notes of interview with Booties Jardine, personal papers, Brisbane.

228

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

SERIALS AND NEWSPAPERS The Carpentarian, Anglican Diocese of Carpentaria, Cummins and Campbell Monthly Magazine, North Queensland Registm Courier-Mail, Brisbane, Jbrres News.

UNWRITTEN SOURCES Recordings 028-OO^R Cassettes 028-073 (from first series) and OOIB-004B (second series) recorded between December 1978and December 1989 at Thursday Island, Iqjinoo, 'lbwnsville, Cairns, Kubin Village (Moa Island), Horn Island (Nurupai), Muralag, Weipa South and Lockhart River, in possession of the author.

Aboriginal rangers 148 Abu Manji ix Adai (see also Northern Cape York Peninsula) 105, 123, 125 Adi (Hammond Rock) 107, 133n Adam Village 109, 110, 111, 127, 133n Agu (Turtle Lookout) 145 Aidabo 107 Aiginisan 105, 145 Akee, James 141, 143, 144 Alau, Lalau (see also Umagico) 3, 8, 15, 85, 92 Albany Islander (Pabaju) 6, 45, 53 Albany Passage 3 Amain Nguki 143 Ambiagan 53 ari 18 augud 17 Badane 105, 108 Badukut 105, 107, 145 Badulaig 29, 48, 71 baidamul baba 105, 107 Bamaga (Ichuru, Black Gin Creek) 8, 101, 104n, 122, 140-41 as administrative centre 96, 149n-50n Saibai emigres 95 Bana, Napia X Batavia River 6, 14 Battle of the Mitchell 40, 65 Bayton, (Bishop) John X, 4, 15, 29, 32n, 59-60, 63n Beddome, Charles E. 77-78, 80n beu 145

Biledi 25 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh 4, 139 Bleakley, J.W. 87, 88, 100, 101, 127, 129 Bosen Osa X Bowen, Governor Sir George 6, 37, 41, 45, 46 Bowie, Rev Francis 91, 95 Bowie, Wilfred ix Brierly, Oswald W. 14, 16, 19n, 20n, 26, 28, 29, 31n, 36, 54, 108, 133n Bush Pilots Airways Ltd 4, 137, 139 Byrne, David ix Cannon, Dr Richard 31, 36, 37-38, 39, 40, 41, 42n, 4311, 73 Cape Direction 17 Cape York ix, 14, 15 Cape York Aboriginal Land Council (CYALC) 148, 151n Cape York Peninsula as humanised landscape 7 Cape York tip 137, 138, 148 Cape York-Tbrres Strait trade routes 20 Chatungun (see also Temple Bay) 14 Chester, Henry 30, 32n, 57, 70, 71-73, 74n, 77, 78, 79n, 80n, 132, 133n Glint, Rev Alf 131 Cockatoo River 16, 103, 107, 108, 125 Community Services Act 1984 147 Cowal Creek (see also Injinoo) 3, 1911, 79, 123, 126

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FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

Cowal Creek Community Council (see also Injinoo Community Council) lOn Crowley, Terry 4, lOn, 13, 19n culture change 13 Dak 105 Darnley Island, Islanders 41, 77 Deed(s) of Grant in Trust (DOGIT) 140-41, 147, 148, 150n Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) 123, 132 Department of Aboriginal and Islanders Advancement (DAIA) 113-14, 123, 125, 132, 141 Department of Native Affairs (DNA) 113, 114-19, 120, 122, 123, 141 Dodd, Tommy 9, 95, 96 Done, Rev John X, 29, 77, 87, 89, 90, 95, 10311, 104n, 109, 110-11, 13311, 134n double outrigger canoes 11, 14, 16 Douglas, Honourable John lOn, 25, 29, 32n7 79, 80n, 133n 'Dugong Story' 143 Dulhunty River 16, 91 Elimadamu 107 Endeavour Strait 3, 4, 47, 87, 89 Escape River 15, 27, 54, 97, 151n Eseli, Lili X Eulah 57, 69 Evans Bay (Podaga) ix, 4, 137-39, 148 Fly Point 14 Gaibait 105 Genetcha 47 Gill, W. Wyatt 73

Ginivan, Constable 31, 33n, 66-68, 74n Giom (see also Barbara Thompson) 36 Giralag (Friday Island) 105, 149 Gobau Ngur 107 Goodwill 110, 111, 120, 127 Gudang (Somerset people) 4, 14, 15, 17, 26, 27, 29, 36, 47, 48, 51, 53-54, 72, 78-79, 85, 93, 109, 125, 148 retribution against 38-40, 46 revolt against settlers 36, 40, 41 Gumakudin 15, 19n, 48, 53 Haddon, A.C. 17, 18, 19n, 20n, 7611, 85, 102n, 133n Hale, K. 4, 19n Hammond Island (see also Kirriri) 30, 57, 111, 125, 126-27, 132, 133n Hammond Rock (see also Adi) 107, 133n Harris, David lOn Hobson, Isaac 151n Horn Island (see also Nurupai) 116, 119, 123, 132, 135n, 144, 145 Horn Island Village Council 118 Howe, W.H.D. 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 6111, 62n, 69 influenza epidemic 89, 109, 111 Injinoo (Cowal Creek, Small River) ix, 4, 5, 8, 9, 15, 85, 86-96, 112, 132 Anglican mission, 90, 93, 95 meaning of name 100 name changed to 140 as northwest camp 16, 87 as voluntary settlement 87-90, 94, 96, 97, 99-102, 104n

INDEX

Injinoo Community Council ix, 138-39, 148, 149n, 150n, 151n and customary land ownership 139, 148-49 Injinoo people as 'hunter-gardeners' 89 as separate identity 139-41 intermarriage between Cape York Aborigines and Kaurareg 16 ipili 105 Irki (Bampfield Head) 105, 107, 146 Jack, Logan 70, 103n Jagg Reports 32n, 42n, 4311, 59, 61n Jagg, Rev EC. 26, 28, 31, 32n, 36, 39, 45-46, 47, 48, 49-51, 56, 58, 6111, 62n, 63n call for Commission of Inquiry 49, 50, 52, 56, 60 condemnation of Police Magistrate's conduct 49-50, 52-54 Jagg, Rev F.C. and Kennett, William collisions with police magistrates 58-59 disappearance of knowledge of their work 59-60 as mediators 47, 49, 50, 58-60, 72 reasons for departure 59 Jardine, Alexander 40 Jardine, Booties 70, 75n Jardine, Frank X, 6, 9, 28, 33n, 40, 41, 49, 53, 54, 55, 58, 65-71, 73n, 74n, 75n, 77, 78, 79, 92, 98, 101, 102, 122, 125, 129, 132, 133n Board of Enquiry on pearl-shelling activities 78, 79n known as Marmouchy or Mannie 6, 69

231

overland journey to Somerset 40, 57, 65 own private 'native force' 55, 69 'the squatter' 46, 56-57 Jardine, John (see also Somerset) 28, 3111, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42n, 43n, 55, 75n caning incident 36, 39, 43n negative attitude towards Aborigines 26-27, 28 Jardine, John Jnr 36, 38, 68 Jardine River 9, 14, 15, 99, 103n, 151n Jukes, J. Beete 16, 28, 36

Kakaku, Kakakuk 107, 120, 125 Kala Lagaw Ya 14 kalak 105 Katter, Bob Jnr 142, 143, 147 Kaur, Jimmy 107 Kaurareg (see also Muralag tribal people) ix, 3, 5, 8, 14, 15, 25, 28, 29, 30, 41, 48, 51, 57, 68, 70-73, 7611, 77, 105-14, 115, 117, 120, 123, 125, 143, 144 composition of 144 population estimates 29 request for a school 46-47 retribution against 70-73, 77 Kennedy, Edmund 6, 54, 97 Kennedy, Flo X , 103n Kennett, William, 14, 17, 19n, 26, 28, 31, 45, 47-48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58-59, 60n, 6211, 65, 69, 91, 93 Kennett Report 2011, 32x1, 59, 61n, 62n, 63n, 74n, 75n Kiaki (Cape Cornwall) 145

232

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

Kie Daudai (Cape York Peninsula) 108 Kie Marina 25 Killoran, P.J. 114, 117, 121, 125, 132 Kin-iri (Hammond Island) 3, 14, 29, 48, 77, 107, 109, 111 removal of Kaurareg 110-11, 126-27 Kiwai 14 Kiwain (Blue Fish Point) 105, 109, 145 Koboris, Kaubarees 125 Koimilai 105 kubai 105 Kubin (Village) ix, 107, 112, 113, 115, 120, 123, 127, 130, 132 kudu 107 Kulkalaig 47, 72, 105 Kuuku Ya'u 7 kwod 18, 146 Kwoiam, myth of 14, 19n, 105 other names for 14

Land Holding Act 1985 148 langa 18 languages creole 4 traditional 4 Lifu, Charlie 92 Lifu, Muen ix Lockhart River 97 Lockhart River Community 5, 14, 93, 103, 141, 148 Lockhart River Community Council 5 London Missionary Society (LMS) 25, 59, 77 Loos, Noel X, 28, 32n Luta, Maleta ix

McConnel, Ursula 13, 14, 19n MacDonald, Larry ix, 9, 101 MacDonald River (Gumathi) people 9, 13, 15, 29, 91, 97, 101, 102, 148 McFarlane, Rev S. 77 MacGillivray, John 14, 19n, 26, 28, 36, 85, 133n McLaren, Jack (John) ix, 9, lOn, 92, 98, 99, 100, 103n Mabo, Eddie Koiki 144 Mabuiag 17, 94, 95, 104n, 131 Macan (Margaret Bay) 14, 86, 87, 90, 103n, 149 Manu 25, 26, 108, 133n Mapoon people, mission 14, 87, 102, 141, 149 Mara, Mae ix Mara, Sammy ix Margaret Bay (see Macan) Masig (Yorke Island) 17 Matauri, Jimmy 17 MAW (Moa-Adai-Waibene) 113, 114, 120, 123, 125, 132 Meriam 17, 18 Meston, Archibald 27, 29, 3211, 80n, 85, 97 Miskin, Saila X missionaries (see Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, London Missionary Society) Mitchell River (see also Battle of the Mitchell) 30 Moa (Banks Island) ix, 105, 110, 111, 113, 126-27, 132 Moa-it 111, 112 Moalaig 111, 112, 120 Moore, David X, 4, lOn, 15, 17, 19n, 20n, 25, 29, 31n, 3211, 39, 42n, 4311, 62n, 73, 76n, 133n, 150n

INDEX

Mt Adolphus Island (see also Muri, Morilag) 103n, 126 Mugie Daudai (the island of New Guinea) 14, 108 Muiarpui (Wongai Beach) 105, 145 Mullins, Stephen P. 4, 15, 17, 20n, 26, 29, 31n, 32n, 52, 55, 58-59, 60n, 62n, 63n, 71, 73, 76n Muralag (Prince of Wales Island) 3, 4, 5, 14, 20n, 25, 29, 46-47, 54, 55, 65, 72, 73, 75n, 108, 109, 110, 117, 125, 126, 137, 143, 144, 149 as Kaurareg heartland 145-46 proposed redevelopment for tourism 4-5, 142-44 Muralag Cultural Association 5, 144 Muralag Tribal Committee ix, 5, lOn, 119, 143, 144 Muralag Tribal (TSI) Corporation X, 5, 112, 114, 122, 144, 146, 149 Muralag tribal people (see also Kaurareg) ix, xi, 5, 6, 112, 114, 115, 118, 132, 143 claiming customary land 143, 149, 151n Muri (Morilag, Mt Adolphus Island) 3, 5, 14, 16, 110 centre of exchange 16-17 Murray Island, Islanders 17, 113, 143, 144, 147 Murray Island Land case (Mabo v Queensland and Commonwealth of Australia) 144, 150n, 151n Muttee Head 15, 125, 141 My Crowded Solitude 9, 92 myths, see Kwoiam, Waubin

233

Nagir (Mt Ernest Island) 47, 72, 105 Namai 111 nat 129 Native Police, troopers 7, 69, 75n, 78 Nawia 107 Nawia, Eselina ix, 107, 119 Nawai, Lizzie ix, xi, 107 Nawia, Wees ix, xi, 30, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114, 120, 123, 125-32, 133n Newcastle Bay 14, 15, 1911, 27, 85, 103n New Mapoon (Mandingu, Charcoal Burner) 8, 140, 141 Norni (Round Island) 105, 107 Nona, Tanu 117, 120, 121, 129 Northern Cape York Peninsula (NCYP) X, xi, 5, 6, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16, 26, 95, 122, 123, 148 immigrant communities in 95-96, 148 as wilderness 4, 7 Northern Cape York Peninsula Aborigines (see also Somerset) ix, 6, 7, 8, 15, 17, 18n, 47, 48, 85, 94, 96, 114, 137-41 armed interchanges between groupings 51, 53 assistance to Ellesmere and Ziska 48, 51 brutal dispossession 6-7, 30, 31, 35, 56, 57, 59 claiming customary lands 139, 148-49 'a doomed race' 27 languages 13, 149 as 'primitive nomads' 7, 49 seven named groupings 5 , 13

234

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

Northern Peninsula Area (NPA) 96, 105, 141 Nurupai (Horn Island) ix, 14, 95, 107, 112, 113, 126 attempt to remove people 114-17, 121 return to 114-23, 143

okara 18 Pablo 9, 98 Pablo, Alick ix Pablo, Colina ix, 92 Pablo, Gordon 150n Pablo, Jimmy 92, 96 Pablo, Tina ix Packer, Kerry 142 Palilag (Goode Island) 105 h n d o r a 109 Papuan Industries Limited 93 Pascoe, Lieutenant 28, 31, 35, 36-38, 42n, 45, 49 Passiwapod (lbepotti) 28, 47, 71, 73 Paul, Adie X, 107 Paul, Madu 107 Peters, Andrew ix Peters, Raina ix Pidgin 119, 123 Pinney, Peter 70, 75n Podaga (see also Evans Bay) 16 Poid Village 112, 113, 115, 120, 127, 132, 134n Port Lihou (see also Yata) 133n Port Musgrave 14, 27 POW, Billy 107 Prideaux, Peter 3211, 43n, 52, 6111, 63n, 79n, 149 Prince of Wales (POW) island(s) (see also Muralag) 3, 5, 18n, 29, 112, 115, 117, 120, 125, 143, 144

Princess Charlotte Bay 30 Protection 115 'betterment scheme' as segregation 88, 93, 94, 110 strike against, 112, 115, 116 Pudding Pan Hill 15, 27, 86 Rabau Nguki 5, 105-08, 133n, 142-44, 145, 146 racial segregation (see also Protection) 88, 93, 110 Rattler, Mackie X Rattler, Sergeant 118 Rattlesnake HMS 25, 36 reciprocities between Europeans and local people Brierly and MacGillivray 25-26, 36 Jagg, Kennett 47, 48 Red Island Point (see also Seisia Ithunchi) 3, 8, 15, 85, 95, 101, 102, 116, 125, 141 'Bed Island tribe' (see also Gudang, Wuthathi, Yadhaigana) 9, 15, 29, 87, 92, 97, 100, 101, 103n, 104n, 148 composition of 85 Rigsby, Bruce X, 4, lOn Ropeyarn, Daniel ix, 139, 151 Sacred Heart Mission 115, 126 Saibai Islanders 17, 141 St Paul's Community 130-31, 132 Salamander HMS 37, 46 sandbeach Aborigines 11-20, 18n, 89, 108, 149 territory details 11 Satraika 95, 104n Sau, Alick 97 Savage, Nadia 118

INDEX

Seisia (Ithunchi) (see also Red Island Point) 8, 141 Seven Rivers people 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 29, 87, 91, 99, 101, 102, 10411, 125, 148 Sharp, Lauriston 19n Shelburne Bay (Whitesand) 6, 9, 87, 92, 100, 151n Shibashaki, Jenna ix Shnukal, Anna 4 Simpson, Captain S. 27, 31n, 3211, 41, 43n, 49, 54, 55, 65, 69 Report on settlement as parliamentary paper 49, 50-53 Simpson Bay (see Utingu) Skardon 101 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) 29, 30, 45, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 59 Socio-cultural units and linguistic groupings 13 Somerset ix 3, 6, 7, 9, 14, 17, 27, 28, 29, 30, 3211, 3311, 35, 36, 39, 41, 43n, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 60, 65, 69, 71, 77, 79, 85, 90, 92, 94, 98, 100, 101, 122, 125 ban on Aboriginal presence 26, 39-40, 46 Christian missionaries at 4, 28, 29, 41, 49 destructive practices of police magistrates 30, 31, 46, 56, 59 doubt about future 54-55 missionary school 46 'non-interference with native quarrels' 50-51, 53-54 removal of government settlement to Thursday Island 6, 30

235

replacement of Marines by police 56 Royal Marines 28, 31, 35, 37, 38, 45 supreme power of civil authority 37 Somerset cave paintings 35, 43n Somerset, Willie 9, 97 spaceport 148 S p m e r 30, 57, 70, 71, 72, 73, 109 strike against Protection 112, 115, 116 Sutton, Peter 4

'famwoy, Jomen 95 'famwoy, Millie ix Tthiako 16 Teepotti (Passiwapod) (see Passiwapod) Temple Bay (Chatungun) 6, 151n tera 18 Thompson, Barbara 19n, 25, 29, 36, 54, 6211, 72 Thomson, Donald lOn, 11, 14, 18n, 19n, 30, 103n Thursday Island, TI (see also Waibene) ix, 72, 98-99, 109, 110-11, 115, 120, 122, 123, 127, 132, 141 Tbm, Alice ix Tbm, Elekiam 113, 114, 119, 120 Tbmagugu 16, 20n Tbrres News 143, 144, 151n Tbrres Strait contrasting pattern of occupation to NCYP 25, 31n Torres Strait Administration 8 Tbrres Strait Creole (see Pidgin)

236

FOOTPRINTS ALONG THE CAPE YORK SANDBEACHES

Tbrres Strait Islanders 8, 14, 18, 25, 41, 89, 95, 108, 143, 144, 149 Tbrres Strait Islanders Act 115, 119, 123, 125, 129 Tbrres Strait Light Infantry Battalion 115, 134n Tbrres United Party (TUP) 141, 143, 144 Tbrres United Prince of Wales (TUPOW) 142, 144, 150n Tugeri 14 tukiap 16, 17, 20n, 47, 108, 110, 133 Umagico (Alau, Lalau) 8, 133, 140 umbalako 18 Unduyamo 17, 27, 78, 109 u p i 105 Utingu (Simpson Bay) ix, 9, 15, 85, 92, 99, 100, 103n Vallack Point cattle station 28, 40-41, 55, 57, 58, 62n, 65 Aboriginal attack on 65, 69 Wacando, Carlemo 141 Waibene (Thursday Island) 14, 48, 105, 117, 126, 132 Wandihnu ix, 98 Warngainap 146 warup 121 Wasaga, Billy X, lOn, 120, 121, 122 Wasaga, Newcamp X, 111 Wasaga, Fbney ix, X, xi, lOn, 119, 120-22, 143, 144, 151n Wasaga, Samuel 118, 120, 135n Wasaga Village 119 Waubin 105-08, 117, 119, 121, 133n, 143 Wednesday Island 30, 57

Wednesday Spit 30, 57, 70 Wees, Elisara 118 Weipa South ix, 107, 132 Whitesand, Alick (Alick Pascoe) 4, 9, 87, 96, 99-02 Wigness, Annie X Wigness, Isaiah ix Wigness, Manu X Wilderness Lodge 4, 137-39, 144, 148, 149n, 150n Wolf's Bay 109 Woosup 99-100 Woosup, Arthur ix Woosup, Sepi ix Woosup, Snowy ix, 19n, 32n, 97 Woosup, Solomon 9, 96, 97, 102 Wuthathi (Whitesand people) 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19n, 85, 87, 92, 148, 150n, 151n Wymarra, Billy ix, 9, 92, 96, 97, 98-99, 102 Wymarra, Edward ix Wymarra, Marjorie ix, xi Wymarra, Nicholas ix, 121 Wymarra, Tbd ix,3, 9, 97 Wymarra-Pablo tribe (see 'Red Island tribe', Gudang, Wuthathi, Yadhaigana) Yadhaigana (Yaraikanna) ix, 6, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19n, 27, 29, 43n, 47, 48, 51, 53, 54, 65, 85-86, 92, 125 attempt on Frank Jardine's life 41 known as warrior people 54 war of resistance 6, 41, 55, 77-79, 97 Yamazi 107 yampa ceremony 18

INDEX

Yata (Port Lihou) 105, 109, 110, 125, 145, 146 Yegilli, Yegillie 15, 19n Yet 145 Yintjingga 11 Young, Krismas X, 107 Yule Point 146

237