Heartsick for Country

by Sally Morgan

  One of the very few stories from my childhood which could be called ‘black history’ and which indicated that this was Aboriginal country was an incident related to the spearing at Hells Gates. This was despite the fact that this part of the valley must have been an excellent place for people to live in pre-colonial times. There was access to fish in both the fresh waters and the salty estuary. The fish varied in abundance throughout the year, but there were always some available. Perch and bream were most plentiful in spring and summer, the mullet arrived in big schools in early autumn followed by blackfish off the rocky banks as the weather got cooler, and the big jewfish swam to the head of the estuary in winter. Even by the time of my childhood, when commercial net fishing began to deplete stocks, we could always catch plenty of fish to eat. If Uncle Dick or my grandmother said we were to have fish to eat one night, then that is exactly as it would be. We would simply gather our rods and lines and go and catch the fish and the idea that we would not catch any was unthinkable.

  There were also crayfish in the fresh waters; we often ate wallaby, and my grandmother used to talk of catching and cooking the smaller pademelons. Wild ducks might be on the menu, there were fruits and yams that were easily collected, and the estuary abounded with oysters. These grew on the mangroves and on the rocky outcrops, and in one part of the river they even attached themselves to waterworn pebbles so that dislodging them required just a simple tap with another stone. Indeed, the presence of large shell middens was and remains evidence of people eating these shellfish over many, possibly many thousands, of years. But we were not told about these people.

  Similarly, we were told little of ‘white history’. The last of the big logging ships used to come to Allworth to collect timber when I was a small boy, and I remember being told that the village, near the head of navigation, was once an important river port for people and produce coming and going along the river. At Booral, and especially Stroud, upstream from Allworth, there were very ‘historic’ houses and grain silos which were visibly from another era, but no information was ever forthcoming to us about their origins. Perhaps in the middle of the last century people were not interested in local history. Perhaps if we had gone to school in the valley our teachers might have told us something of its background. Perhaps people had forgotten the past. And, perhaps there were some aspects of that past which people had decided should be left untold.

  From research which I have done in more recent years, I now know that the little Karuah River valley played a very important role in early Australian colonial history and had the climate there proved more favourable it would have been very significant indeed. It was near the mouth of the Karuah River, at Port Stephens, that the famous Australian Agricultural Company began its farming operations. The AA Company, as it has long been known, was formed in 1824 with a capital base of one million pounds, an enormous amount of money in those days. Its aim was to produce fine wool from sheep and to grow the crops of the Mediterranean, such as wheat and grapes. No doubt the landscape might have seemed like that surrounding the Mediterranean to the early Europeans, and the mild winters and hot summers reinforced the comparison. But the rainfall pattern is very different. Instead of being concentrated in winter, leaving the summer months hot and dry, the timing of rainfall at Port Stephens is unpredictable. Rain can arrive at any time of the year, especially in summer when crops need dry weather for ripening and sheep need dry conditions to avoid parasitic, fungal and other diseases which thrive in heat and high humidity. Farming here proved to be a complete failure.

  The AA Company moved quickly and fairly soon after its establishment to country further north and inland. Other settlers soon followed them and there were the perhaps inevitable clashes between the company and settlers on the one hand and Aboriginal people on the other. While some of the colonial conflicts have been written about for some time, it is only in very recent years that a more complete and accurate picture has been emerging. And even today there is a silence about movement through this part of the Karuah River valley.

  This silence has become of increasing concern for me. Now, when I think about the valley that nurtured me, I see this lovely part of the world in yet another light. In some ways it is a gloomy, even sad and tragic imagination that now takes hold of my thoughts. I find myself constantly wondering about what happened to the people who once lived here. Did the original inhabitants suffer the same fate as Aboriginal people in the surrounding valleys? Was that spearing at Hells Gates an isolated incident or, as now seems likely, was it part of a broader pattern of Aboriginal people being forced to defend their country and their lives? What awful secrets may lie hidden in that large lagoon?

  We now know that atrocities took place not far inland from the Karuah, near Gloucester, and in the adjoining Manning River valley. That these terrible things happened is being revealed as academic historians search for truths about the past, and also as descendants of early white settlers reveal their family histories. In those valleys adjoining the Karuah, there are also oral histories which have kept previously unwritten stories alive.

  One now well-documented atrocity was at a place called Baal Belbora, on the Upper Gangat River, not far from Gloucester. It was here that the AA Company had established a cattle station and, in retaliation for the theft of some young cattle by some Aboriginal people, dampers were made of poisoned flour and left for Aboriginal people to eat. The result was that many Aborigines died. This was not an isolated incident. There was in fact a practice called ‘the harmony’, which came from a belief that poisoning Aborigines was a way to achieve peace between the invading white people and the resisting Aboriginal people. So widespread was the practice in the Manning Valley that there are contemporary reports of Aboriginal corpses being found in every creek near where the present town of Wingham is located.

  In the other direction, but again not far from Gloucester, near the area known as Rawdon Vale, there was a horrific massacre of an entire tribe of Aborigines in 1835. It was known as the Mount McKenzie massacre. Men, women and children were rounded up and, so the story goes, forced to leap to their deaths from a cliff top in this very rugged terrain. Some modern historians now think the people, especially the Aboriginal men, were most likely shot and then thrown over the cliff. Whatever the truth, the remains of these poor people were never buried and their bones lay bleaching on the surface of the ground and in the bush for many decades. I have been told by a friend, who had these bones pointed out to her from a distance when she was a child, that they looked like white handkerchiefs tied to the limbs of the trees.

  Other historians now talk of hints and rumours of killings at most places surrounding the Karuah River, at specific locations in the Manning River valley and around the Soldiers Point area of Port Stephens. Settlers are reported to have formed hunting parties and, on horseback, shot Aborigines or drove them into swamps and rivers where they drowned. Arsenic was mixed with flour or treacle or put into tea and given to Aborigines to kill them. Poisoning waterholes had the same tragic results.

  Even where the killings were not deliberate, Aboriginal people suffered catastrophic consequences from the effects of introduced diseases. Smallpox resulted in many deaths in the nearby tributaries of the Hunter River, and again there are reports of corpses stretching across the countryside. Even diseases that we would consider less serious today were the cause of tragedy for people with no immunity to them. Measles and influenza proved to be lethal. There are, in fact, reports of people experiencing the fever of measles leaping into the waters of Port Stephens to reduce the heat they felt. Their actions only made their conditions worse and they died. Around Port Stephens itself, where at least some counting of people was carried out, the Aboriginal population declined in only a few years to about a quarter of what it had been when the white people first arrived. I’ve also read reports in the State Archives of cases of emaciated women and their ill children being found in remote bush areas around Gloucester. The whereabouts of their men appeared not
to be known.

  We also know that a large mission was established in the early 1900s at Karuah itself, the town at the mouth of the river that began its existence largely as a sawmilling enterprise. Many of the surviving Aboriginal people from around nearby Port Stephens were taken to live on this mission. They were joined by people who had survived the killings further inland, around and beyond Gloucester. We used to visit the mission when I was at school; my aunts used to tell me that they had many visits there as children, and mission people visited and often stayed with us. My grandmother and my father had very close friends there. But as far as I can determine, none of the mission dwellers came from our immediate part of the world, the bountiful and generous part of the valley where I was raised.

  The nagging question for me now is ‘where did the original inhabitants from around here go?’ or, perhaps more appropriately, it is ‘what happened to the people from around here when white people arrived?’. My ancestors moved away for a while, but they had come back by the 1920s. I have located my great-grandfather’s death certificate (he died in 1908) and it lists both his parents’ names as ‘unknown’, and in the space for ‘father’s occupation’ it simply says ‘Aboriginal’. Given that he died at a recorded age of about sixty-five, these unnamed people, my great-great-grandparents, must have given birth to him in the early 1840s. This would have been the time of increasing movement and activity throughout this valley.

  I don’t know why my people left here. But sometimes when my imagination really flies free I think back to the spearing story my Uncle Dick told me. He knew the story (and he was never one to make up tales), but I never heard others tell it. Is it just possible that the man who threw the spear at Hells Gates was his grandfather, my great-great-grandfather? Could this have been one of the reasons that those unnamed people fled this area?

  When I am being less fanciful, I nevertheless cannot escape the conclusion that Aboriginal people around here must have suffered the same fate as in nearby country. I see that spearing as the act of an Aboriginal man fighting for his country, his people and, indeed, his own life. I see it as an act by a man who clearly knew his country very well. And I imagine that it was one of the few successful acts of retaliation by a man whose people were under threat of losing all that they had known and loved. Certainly, that accords with what we now know happened in the nearby valleys and in many other parts of Australia.

  Obviously, when I am thinking these sad thoughts, my mind also wanders to the big lagoon. Again questions come flooding in—and persisting. Why was this stretch of water forbidden to us? What secrets are hidden in its brown depths? Why do birds and fish avoid it? Was it, too, a place where ‘harmony’ was practised and, by whatever means, Aboriginal people suffered greatly? Was it a poisoned place that contributed to the demise of people who went there simply to drink as they and their ancestors had done for untold centuries? Is it just the fact that it was forbidden to us when we were young which makes me fear it, or did I as a child catch hints or parts of adults’ conversations which have led me to fear it still?

  I probably will never know the answers to these questions. But the fact that they enter my mind and stay there adds another layer of complexity—indeed character—to country that I have known for all of my life. And it seems that as I get older, I can recall things I was taught, explanations that I learned or made up, and the way I have felt about places in that country with increasing clarity.

  Hells Gates and the spearing, along with the lagoon as a place to avoid, are as clear to me as they always were. But I now know and appreciate the fact that we were taught things about country for good reasons, and it is those reasons I try to understand. I know, too, that there are scientific or academic explanations for the world that I see around me and I am able apply those reasonings to places that I know. This is exciting too. But in no way does this dull the images of the rapids or the lagoon. If anything, it just makes them clearer in my mind. (Image 9.3)

  Image 9.3: The river, island and hills where we played as children Courtesy R and S Filson

  And in a strange way so does not knowing some of the events that happened. Perhaps the stories about tragedies were deliberately kept from children. Perhaps we were meant to learn these truths when we had grown up, but sadly all of the old people who could tell us are now gone. Perhaps it was meant to be that we reason things out for ourselves, aided by gradually emerging knowledge and our own imaginations.

  What I can say, however, is that country, like people, is a complex and many-layered part of our lives. It has those simple aspects which we learn about when we are young and for which we will always have strong feelings; there are the parts and patterns that we learn more about as we get older and hopefully wiser; and there are those places and events which remain partially hidden or secret to us forever. The Karuah River valley and my relationship to it fit exactly into this description. And I would not want it to be any other way.

  TJALAMINU MIA

  is a Nyungar woman with bloodline links to the Minang and Goreng peoples of the South-West. She works as a research fellow in oral history and the arts in the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. (Image 10.1)

  Image 10.1

  Kepwaamwinberkup (Nightwell)

  Kepwaamwinberkup (Nightwell)

  In 2000, an opportunity of cultural rejuvenation was presented to me: to step out of a fast-paced city life and to return to country. Just on forty years had lapsed since I’d last walked as a child in country, in the footprints of my grandfather, Lennard George Keen, so I was really looking forward to it. When you live in your own country, there is a quiet serenity and connectedness, a feeling that is sometimes hard to express because it’s so deep. I was eager to experience that again, because, through circumstances beyond my control, I’d been robbed of it. I am a survivor of the Stolen Generations. When I was younger, I was incarcerated in Sister Kate’s Children’s Home in Perth, along with my six brothers and sisters. After that, I wondered if I would ever go back to my people’s land again. Being put in the Home was very traumatising, and it left me feeling displaced in the scheme of things, torn away from the spiritual and cultural connections I had known when I had walked in country with my grandfather as a child. But now I was going back once again, and I felt really excited about it.

  In my early years I had lived a rich life. We camped out in the bush and listened to stories told by our old people—about the animals, trees, birds, the waterways, the stars, the moon and the sun and how we are all connected to them. We had journeys out bush to be shown the different types of foods we could eat, like cumuuck, a bush berry, as well as the wild bush potato and carrot. We were shown how to track yonga, kangaroo, in the saltpans, where the gnamma (fresh water) holes were and how they played a major role in connecting the different groups for community Law business. Life in my younger years was culturally and spiritually grounded. I remember the sense of freedom and connectedness to the natural world, the different sounds, smells and the landscape. There is nothing better than smelling the earth after a rain, or listening to the wind in the trees, and seeing the first lot of wildflowers bloom. I longed to return to the days of my early childhood and experience all that again. That is what I had lost when I was institutionalised in a place determined to break my cultural bonds, connections and understanding. And I needed to reclaim it, because it is a part of who I am.

  My people are the Minang and Goreng, whose bloodline links to country encompass a large area in the lower part of the Great Southern region of Western Australia. My father was a white man, so my Aboriginality comes from my mother: both her parents were Nyungar, which makes me a Nyungar person. My great-great-grandmother was a traditional Nyungar woman, her name was Tuglaranu. From her, my links to country take in the area where now there are the towns of Katanning, Tambellup, Gnowangerup, Borden, and Albany, as well as the Stirling Ranges. My mother’s father’s mother’s mother—my great-great-grandmother—was also a traditional woman.
My links to country through them is land that also borders the same areas of my mother’s people, but extends from Broomehill down through the Stirling Ranges, out to Esperance and Ravensthorpe and over to Thomas River near Eucla.

  Nyungar peoples were the first people in Western Australia to be invaded, massacred and oppressed when Captain James Stirling established the Swan River Colony in 1829. We were disenfranchised from our land and our hunting and food gathering rights were denied us. We were forbidden to use language, or undertake men and women’s business, which included ways of looking after the environment, like seasonal burn-offs of particular tracts of land, maintaining gnamma holes, ochre deposits, and food resources, such as the fish traps along the Kalgan river near Albany. This dramatic change in our circumstances meant that our people, our countries and all the living things within our countries were decimated. Yet despite this trauma, we Nyungar peoples have survived. As a Nyungar woman, I can honestly say we continue to celebrate our identity as a distinctive people in Western Australia. Collectively, we stand strong in our Nyungar identity and heritage, our cultural and spiritual knowledge, and our connection to country, and all this reinforces our sense of place and self. Nyungar peoples and Nyungar country are one, because since time immemorial we have belonged together. This has been explained to me through my old people, who have told me about koondarm, or Nyungar Dreaming. There is no English word that truly captures this concept: koondarm reflects a Nyungar understanding of creation, time, land and all human and animal existence—we see it as a continuum of Then, Now and Tomorrow. Like all Aboriginal people in Australia, who have their own words for it, Nyungars understand that koondarm is never-ending; it is eternal.