Further down the Terrace was the equally appealing and vaguely Tudorish Government House, where the Governor still resides. The Classical Revival–style building was constructed by convicts during the tenure of Governor Hampton and under the supervision of Colonel Edmund Henderson, who also designed Fremantle Prison. It is still set amid three acres of gardens. I liked to look across from the Supreme Court Gardens and admire in particular the capped turrets and gothic arches, which gave the building a martial flavour, although now I can also appreciate the bonded brickwork, the square mullioned windows and the views over the river. I used to imagine Hampton fuming inside, distracted by the exploits of Moondyne Joe, who was free from the hard labour of his convict peers laying down ‘Hampton’s cheeses’, thick transverse cuts of jarrah used as road-building material throughout the colony.
Perth was very poor during Hampton’s reign (because governors really did reign). It was so poor that Hampton gifted the city its first town hall, although like all civic projects during the period the work was done with convict labour. The land upon which it was built was near where Mrs Helen Dance had chopped into the first sheoak as part of the proclamation of the Foundation of Perth in 1829. Until the hall was completed in 1867, the area had remained an expanse of grey sand.
The Perth Town Hall was another building that caught my imagination as a child, with its medieval flavour and gothic touches, its Flemish bonded brickwork, its exposed jarrah beams inside. I was particularly attracted to it because of the traces left by the convicts, such as windows that were shaped like the broad arrows on the convict uniform. There was also the story that a hangman’s noose was disguised in the face of the town hall clock; I looked eagerly, but was never able to find it.
When I was driven into the city as a child, I would observe the Barracks Arch and the First Church of Christ, Scientist before arriving at The Cloisters, London Court, Government House and finally the Town Hall. Each seemed ancient and culturally adrift from the city that had grown around it, making these landmark places in my childhood feel like relics left over from a calamity of some kind, and I suppose there are many who would hold this to be true. No doubt I would have appreciated the recent addition on the Terrace of the Christian de Vietri and Marcus Canning sculpture Ascalon: all eighteen metres of St George’s seemingly diaphanous white silk cloak, billowing around the stainless steel lance thrust into the ground outside the 1888 cathedral named after him. From an adult’s perspective, though, it’s hard not to read the planted spear as yet another statement of violent possession.
After all, it wasn’t far from St George’s Cathedral that the corpse of Yagan’s father, Midgegooroo, was hung from a tree on the Terrace for several days in 1833. He’d been executed by a firing squad in front of a cheering crowd, despite the fact that there were Europeans who identified with the Whadjuk and were curious about Nyungar culture.
There were many examples of friendship and curiosity in the period that equal the relationships portrayed in Kim Scott’s depiction of the ‘friendly frontier’ at Albany in his 2010 novel That Deadman Dance. As Scott pointed out to me in a recent conversation, Perth also contains the largest number of Aboriginal place names of any Australian city (although not in the CBD), so that whether or not we’re aware of it, Perth citizens use Nyungar words on a daily basis. It’s evidence of the settlers’ reliance upon Whadjuk people for navigation throughout the colony in the early days: it made far more sense for a European traveller wandering along the sandy tracks between homesteads to hail a party of Whadjuk people and ask directions to Wanneroo, for example, rather than North Beach.
According to one letter-writer to The Perth Gazette in 1836, there was no need for the government to employ an official interpreter, simply because there were ‘many Europeans who can speak the native language fluently’. In some respects this was an intimate society, with Whadjuk adults and their children known to many colonists by name, and it can be assumed that the converse was equally true. However, the early familiarity also existed alongside a strong tradition of marginalising those white voices that considered the Whadjuk to be rightfully defending their territory from foreign invaders, or that demanded that they be afforded the same rights as any other.
Robert Menli Lyon, who arrived in the colony in 1829, was like many other male settlers both a Scot and an ex-soldier (although the details of his military service can’t be verified). He was soon enough in trouble, as one of the few settlers who recognised that the official version of events under James Stirling’s command was likely to be coloured by self-interest. Lyon made sure that his letters to Whitehall detailed what he saw as evidence of nepotism in the early years. He complained that all of the best land was allocated to Stirling and his military friends, who were indifferent absentee landlords (Stirling included), and that this was the main reason the colony was struggling to feed itself.
Lyon had been granted good land in the Upper Swan, but he had generously sold it to a late arrival to the colony and taken to life on the river as a boatman. He was a zealous Christian, and this, together with his admiration for Yagan as a new ‘William Wallace’, isolated him from the majority. The time of massacres was upon Perth, however. These were often blamed upon the ‘lower orders’, although it’s clear that in many cases soldiers participated.
Even the urbane Irishman George Fletcher Moore, explorer, farmer and recorder of the Whadjuk language, but also the colony’s judge, felt like taking up arms and putting them to use after he suffered the loss of some swine. He generally writes with affection for the Whadjuk people with whom he travelled on occasion and conversed in faltering Nyungar. However, this friendliness didn’t temper the harsh sentences he gave different Nyungar men when they came before him in court.
Robert Menli Lyon put himself forward as peacemaker following the first arrest of Yagan, for the spearing murder of Erin Entwhistle. The man was a victim of payback after a servant on the same farm shot one of Yagan’s friends for stealing potatoes. The murder of Entwhistle is significant because it also provides one of the first descriptions of the active role Nyungar women might play in their society. They had initially kept themselves away from Europeans, something thought to be a result of earlier depredations by sealers and whalers. Entwhistle hid his two sons under a nearby bed, from where they observed their father’s murder. Yagan and Midgegooroo speared the prostrate man while ‘a woman rather tall and wanting her front teeth, and who, I have been told by Midgegooroo himself is his wife, broke my father’s legs and cut his head to pieces with an axe,’ stated one of Entwhistle’s sons, Ralph. The boys, now orphans, were forced to become beggars in the Perth streets, and the younger of the two, Enion, is said to have died of starvation.
The crime was serious, although for Yagan it was not a crime but an obligation. Lyon argued in the Perth courthouse that Yagan should be treated as a prisoner of war rather than as a common criminal, and he convinced the authorities to allow him to convert Yagan and thereby pacify the local Nyungar population. Yagan was clearly a physically and intellectually impressive character, able to joke with his jailers at the Roundhouse Prison in Fremantle before his exile to Carnac Island, south of Fremantle. There Lyon lived with Yagan for two months, and the Scot began compiling a vocabulary of the Nyungar language and the names of the clans and territories of the Perth area.
Made to wear western clothes and pray, Yagan chose to escape by dinghy – despite the fact that he’d only been in a boat once – and returned to Perth. When his brother Domjum was murdered in Fremantle, Yagan and his father fatally speared Tom and John Velvick on the Kelmscott-to- Fremantle track. The Velvick brothers, one of whom had been speared more than a hundred times, had a reputation earned when some Nyungar had come to the aid of a Muslim man, Samud Alil, after an unprovoked attack led by the drunken Velvicks and a group of about twenty other whites outside a Perth tavern. The assailants had then turned on the Nyungar and viciously beat them with wooden poles.
A price was put on the heads of
Midgegooroo and Yagan. Midgegooroo was captured and executed without trial. Yagan, after travelling around Perth to solicit the advice of his many white friends, was betrayed by the young Keats brothers in the Upper Swan, one of whom shot him when his guard was down. He was decapitated and skinned of the distinctive cicatrice on his right shoulder and back. His head was taken to a nearby house where it was sketched by George Fletcher Moore, who had earlier written in his diary that ‘The truth is everyone wishes him taken but no-one likes to be his captor. There is something in his daring that one is forced to admire.’
Moore had suggested compensating the Whadjuk people for their loss of land and he knew Yagan personally. This didn’t stop him making sketches of Yagan’s severed head and, on hearing that another had claimed the head, writing in his diary that ‘I should have been glad to get it myself.’ The following day he made one of the strangest diary entries imaginable:
I have rudely sketched this beautiful ‘caput mortum’ of Yagan. He wore a fine twisted cord round his forehead. I have been in a singular mood tonight, my thoughts running into or rather working in the manner of musical voluntaries. I sang one which gave me great pleasure by its strength, beauty and expression. Now, do not laugh at me for this …
Throughout the period, Robert Menli Lyon had been busy writing, complaining about attacks on Yellagonga and his people and about the idea of allocating rations to the Nyungar on a reserve outside of town. His rather Swiftian suggestion was that perhaps the real reason behind the reserve was so that Europeans could hunt the Nyungar at their leisure, in the equivalent of a game park.
After a number of massacres, according to historian Tom Austen, Lyon wrote directly to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Goderich, in London, and spoke to hostile audiences in the Perth streets, before and after massacres took place. At one gathering, writes historian Henry Reynolds, Lyon gave ‘one of the most distinguished humanitarian speeches delivered in colonial Australia’. But it wasn’t enough, and the hostility wore him down. Lyon left the colony in 1834. He moved to Mauritius, to take up a position lecturing in the humanities, and later to Sydney, although he continued writing about what he’d seen in Perth well into his seventies.
Yagan’s statue stands before the city on Heirisson Island, surrounded by the shallow river. The current head looks oddly European on its elongated neck – the first two were cut off and stolen. Yagan lived his life beside and on the Swan River, where he learnt to swim and fish. His father’s country, Beeliar, encompassed the southern side of the river from Fremantle through to the Canning River, although Yagan was ultimately murdered while seeking refuge in the Upper Swan, where for most of the year the river is narrow and quiet. The Upper Swan is also where Yagan was finally put to rest in 2010, after the retrieval of his skull from Everton Cemetery in north Liverpool, Britain, where it had been buried in a job-lot with a Maori head and an Egyptian mummy. Whadjuk elders led a private ceremony in the memorial park that now bears his name.
The Limestone Coast
The sight was now, therefore, anxiously strained towards the shore in order that their eyes might satisfy them and decide their ultimate fate. And what did they see? A fine river, the verdant banks of which refreshed their anxious gaze? No! Sand! In every direction as far as their eyes could reach, a brilliant white sand the children called snow and wondered why the trees were green!
Jane Roberts, Two Years at Sea, 1829
Sand, everywhere. The same colour as the bleached sky. A few diminutive settlers crouch in it, like children at play. Mary Ann Friend’s hand-coloured lithograph ‘View at Swan River’, ‘taken on the spot’ and drawn on stone, is the earliest surviving representation of the Swan River Colony produced by a trained artist. She painted her husband Matthew Curling Friend’s encampment in March 1830, soon after their arrival at the colony. The Friends, like everyone else, are camped on the beach or in the swales of the dunes.
Matthew Friend was captain of the Wanstead, moored in the Gage Roads channel off Fremantle, and the Friends spent only a few months in the colony. Perhaps because of Mary Ann’s ready means of escape, her picture of the area initially feels light-hearted, not coloured by the gloom of others. Where colonists described their first impressions of the scene at Fremantle as one of ‘complete wretchedness’, Mary Ann wrote in her diary that it had a pretty appearance. The prevalence of white canvas tents made the settlement strongly resemble a ‘Country Fair’.
Friend’s perception was soon to change as the reality of her situation became apparent. Not only were the flies and mosquitoes and rats plentiful, the natives frightening, and the heat and hunger terrible, but she also hints at the troubles that were to come. She felt that Stirling had granted himself and his cronies the best land, and she feared that the colony would starve. She also mentions problems associated with a servant class who were no longer cowed, and the odd detail that because of the sand even Governor Stirling’s beautiful wife Ellen was getting around in her bare feet. Friend’s complaints are always outweighed by her optimism, however, and her early descriptions of the landscape and the colonists’ attempts at making do are entertaining, particularly their diet of kangaroo tart, parakeet pie, bush quail, and stewed and pickled samphire.
Friend’s painting has the naive immediacy of a postcard. The tone is soft and the light gauzy, lacking the fierce blue that presages a blinding hot March day. In the middle distance, within the four corners of stunted and broken vegetation used to frame the campsite, a small clump of balga tree and zamia palm are sketched in the foreground, with what looks to be a dead tuart and live marri filling out the background corners. The stumps of severed trees are littered about, and the campsite consists of a couple of hoochies and lean-tos belonging to Friend’s servants, as well as an odd cube that turns out to be the home of a horse that died of bruising on the journey over.
The ‘horse house’ (which Friend jokingly described as her ‘cottage ornee’) was also nearly lost, with two men inside it. During an attempt to bridge the rock bar at the river’s mouth, the horse house had tumbled into the waves, drifting ‘five miles above the town. Every time the men who were inside tried to reach the door it turned over. They were like squirrels in a cage.’
The idea that an ex-officer of the Royal Navy and his wife inhabited the equivalent of a horse float, and that in this they considered themselves lucky, was the message seized upon in Britain when the lithograph was reproduced for the wider public. This discouraged most potential settlers from migrating to Perth, as did mail from the colony that recounted the disastrous failure of Thomas Peel’s settlement at Woodman Point, just south of Fremantle. Starvation and disease killed off one in eight of his colonists.
There are four people in the centre of the painting, one of them a young woman in a bonnet and long dress. All of them are huddled beneath the feathery shade of a juvenile sheoak, itself shaped by the prevailing winds. A boy is barely visible; he peeks from behind the trunk of the sheoak, shaded by both branch and fly as though afraid of the sun. The horse hut is a cube made of smaller cubes where the battens show through, alien in its linear geometry; everything else, including the settlers, is bent and crouched.
Only one man leans casually against a rail that looks like salvage. He is the interesting figure, looking entirely at ease in his new environment. It is almost as though the painting is hinting at the temperament that will be required to feel comfortable in the new environment – the acceptance of the light and silence coming across the vast emptied spaces behind them. In this I think the painting functions as both ironic critique and optimistic portrait. The people in the composition appear marooned. Sand fills the foreground of the painting and the sky is sand-coloured, rising over them like a great pale wave. The trees in the new environment are unlike the trees at home, and most of them are already hacked down for firewood.
If Friend’s sketch manages to capture any sense of optimism, this was a minority perspective. Time and again the early narratives refer to the sand a
s unexpected, and the tone of these descriptions is static – the settlers are waiting, doing time, bogged literally and metaphorically. Images of sand are used to suggest not only the infertility of the soil but also the failed pregnancy of the idea behind the colony. The biblical reference to building on the rock and not upon the sand was in the forefront of many minds.
The quartermaster of the HMS Beagle described Fremantle as so insignificant that all of its sand could pass through an hourglass in the passage of a day, and even George Fletcher Moore, one of the colony’s most energetic supporters, summed up his impression of the port town as a
barren looking district of sandy coast; the shrubs cut down for firewood, the herbage trodden bare, a few wooden houses among ragged looking tents and contrivances for habitations, one poor hotel, a poor public house into which everyone crowded; our colonists a few cheerless, dissatisfied people with gloomy looks, plodding their way through the sand from hut to hut to drink grog and grumble out their discontents to each other.
This kind of negative characterisation of the nascent colony led to very bad press in Britain, best summed up in the sketch of the ‘Flourishing State of the Swan River Thing’. The cartoon, published in England in 1830, captures the listlessness and despair of the hapless colonists over on the other side of the world. Five dishevelled and clearly depressed figures sprawl over on the sand before a jerry-built tavern and a shipwreck. They are glowering at one another, wondering what the hell went wrong.
The truth was just as alarming. The shipwreck in the background of the cartoon was that of the Marquis of Anglesea, which at that time was being used variously as the governor’s residence and a storehouse. Later it became a prison hulk for colonists arrested for assault and disorder. It was under these conditions that architect and civil engineer Henry Reveley was instructed to build Perth’s first civic structure: the Roundhouse Prison at Arthur Head. Like many buildings in Fremantle, its limestone walls were constructed from stone quarried on site. Reveley, who once saved Percy Shelley from drowning in Italy (but wasn’t there to save him the next time), designed the prison to resemble a minor Benthamite panopticon, sitting solidly over the whalers tunnel that links Bathers Beach to the town.
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