by Sally Morgan
It was winter in the south when my grandmother arrived, and she and her brother were placed in the dormitory with thirty or so other children. Being infants they were able to stay together for a time. It was Mission policy that when boys reached the age of seven they were transferred to the nearby Swan Boys Orphanage with the white boys. The girls remained at the Swan Mission House.
The children at the Swan Native and Half-caste Mission had come from all areas of the state, and their removal to the Mission coincided to some extent with the colonisation of Western Australia. As the colony spread from the South-West through the Midlands to the Gascoyne, out to the Goldfields and eventually into the Kimberley, the names of children being removed from these areas reflected this expansion. Children were renamed Cue, Gascoyne, Linden, Argyle and Menzies. The names were registered at the Mission in parallel with the growth of towns and stations of the same names as white settlement spread and more children were scooped up by the police. With the rapid expansion in the north, from 1905 onwards the population of Swan Mission was increasingly made up of Nor’wester children like my grandmother.
Gypsy from Argyle Station, along with her brother Toby, was given a new name. The baptism was a ritual of renewal as well as destruction. Their older names and skin names were replaced with English names and they were forbidden to ever use their language again. Gypsy was renamed Jessie Argyle. Her brother was renamed Thomas Bropho.
Children who were removed from their families learned to form special bonds with other Mission children, bonds that were to last a lifetime for my own grandmother. Separated from family, country and homeland culture, the children of Swan Mission survived by adapting as best they could. But that isn’t to say they lost all sense of an Aboriginal framework of belief, respect and belonging.
Where you came from and who your people were became especially important to children taken thousands of miles from their homelands and people. In your own country, rules of belonging were clearly defined and understood. With the disruption to this constancy the children held all the more defiantly to their sense of country. Skin defined you within your own culture, and as the missionaries worked to wipe any sense of skin from the children’s minds it became even more important to know where you were from and who else was from your region.
Out of the pain of removal, Mission children learned to claim as extended family people from country in the same general direction as theirs. Skin was replaced by a sense of your country, and those from similar country became your countrymen. In broader terms the children divided themselves into Nor’westers and Sou’westers. It was a system the missionaries tried to replace with a sense of belonging in the church, but while some children no doubt acquired a sense of the God of the Christian church, they were also aware of other spiritual and cultural belonging linking back to their homelands.
Nor’westers were kids from Carnarvon and further points north, including those from the Goldfields to the north-east. Sou’westers were mostly Noongar kids from the south-west who had been removed from their specific homelands but still remained within Noongar country.
My grandmother was taken from the new world order of the guddia in the East Kimberley to the new order of the missionaries in the south. Children from different Aboriginal countries were forced together under a singular fixed ideal of a Mission education that was supposed to equip them for a world of servitude and piety. They were influenced by their home cultures, by other people’s home cultures, by the church, by their removal and by the situation they found themselves trapped within.
The Mission was supposed to be their new family, their new homeland, their new culture. It was supposed to be a place of Christian teaching and obedience. It was this, but with the addition of the children’s own different senses of belonging, the culture of the Mission became far more complex, dynamic, and even contradictory than the missionaries were able to realise. The children might have prayed to Jesus daily, but at night they feared spirits that dwelled in the fertile Noongar country outside the dormitory windows.
Swan Mission received subsidies from the state government on a par with other white institutions of the time, marking it out as unusual compared with the New Norcia Mission to the north, which received far less for the children in its charge. Nevertheless, the children still had to contribute to the working life of the Mission to make it a going concern. When Thomas Bropho (Toby) turned seven, he and my grandmother were separated. He was sent across to the Swan Boys Orphanage to sleep and to receive schooling, but would return after his three hours at school to help with the chores around the Mission. The same went for Jessie (Gypsy) and the girls who lived their entire day at the Mission House. The younger girls had to learn to sew, cook and serve dinner and, as they became older, to care for the younger children. They had to tend the orchard, milk the cows, feed the stock, collect the eggs, and generally help run the place.
After a long day’s work the children were locked into the main dormitory. Single beds stretched in rows down either side of the long red-brick building that cut west from the main Mission House where the missionaries slept, meals were prepared and lessons were carried out. It was a place of planned repetition designed to breed well-mannered, hard-working, obedient children who would take their place — and that was never expected to be too high a place — in white society. They did learn, but not beyond what they had to know to be good workers. They ate well when the Mission was doing well, and sang for their supper, literally, to raise funds to keep themselves afloat. The place was small enough not to be overwhelming, but large enough for the children to separate into groups of Nor’westers and Sou’westers.
It was the kind of place that was greatly affected by the staff who ran it, and for some of my grandmother’s years there, there were some staff members who were particularly good. Sadly though, for some of those years there were staff members who were particularly bad.
The children soon became attuned to the regular rhythms of a Mission life of work and prayer, and within a short time of James and Letitia Jones’ arrival, escapes decreased. In that period the new girls’ dormitory was also completed. Photographs were taken of the sturdy new walls lined with iron cots down either side of the corridor of highly polished jarrah floorboards. It looks like a hospital ward. Kapok pillows sit on crisp cotton bedspreads with neat tassels that the girls would have sewn and embroidered themselves, and you can just make out the high and wide, heavily barred windows separating the neatly hung pictures of Christ.
The Joneses allowed the children to head bush on Sunday afternoons to hunt, cook food in hot ashes and scout the country. The inmates loved this chance to get out into the bush. It seems to have been some kind of recognition by Mr Jones of the children’s culture, and they appreciated it. Beyond Mr Jones’ desire that the children really understand the Bible, and that they really embrace Christ; beyond the repetitious rhythms imposed by these desires, the children were also operating from their own rhythms — watching for jennuks (bad spirits), and checking out each new inmate to see where they belonged; to see if they were from their home country.
Of the many people who managed the Swan Mission, Mr and Mrs Jones were the only ones that my grandmother remembered fondly. Among the people I have spoken to from the Mission and the stories that have been passed down, the Joneses were remembered for being solid, fair-minded people. My mother tells a story of when she once met them, years after they had left Swan Mission, on a visit with my grandmother. The Joneses had a small farm in the Perth hills and my grandmother was given a tour of the orchard and enthusiastically invited to sample fruit from every tree. She wasn’t allowed to leave until she did.
I decide to try and track the Jones family down. I know that it isn’t possible for either Mr or Mrs Jones to still be alive, but I am curious about what happened to them. Registrar-Generals’ records in the archives lead me to death dates. Obituaries in the newspaper lead me to the married names of their children. The Joneses’ deaths, their children’s m
arriages and their addresses begin to link up as a paper trail, and I begin building my own files on the people who entered my grandmother’s life. Shipping records and biographical indexes take me back in their story to when their ancestors arrived here, to the journey that would bring the young Mrs Letitia Jones, and the not-so-young Mr Jones, to the Swan Mission to answer their Christian ‘calling’.
Tracing them back, I want to go forward and track them across electoral rolls and through telephone books. A good thirty calls later, some distant family are revealed. This branch of the family has photographs of the Mission and they give me the contact details for a woman whose name I recognise. She was the youngest daughter of the Joneses, who the children in the Mission referred to as ‘Baby Jones’.
In a well-tended suburb of the city, widowed, and not exactly sure of what I want of her, was the woman I will call by the name my grandmother used, Baby Jones. Baby Jones is eighty-six and she looks well for her age. The child of missionary parents, she grew up in the Swan Mission separated by a brick wall from the girls’ dormitory where my grandmother and thirty or so other young children slept. She has agreed to give me her time and to tell as much as she can about the Mission. She agrees for me to use a tape-recorder so I won’t forget the details of what she has to say.
Baby Jones’ story is carefully filtered by her fear for her parents’ reputation. She is guarded because there is much talk in the newspapers of the Stolen Generations. She doesn’t like that term. She doesn’t think it represents the real situation as she sees it. As we talk I realise there is a bigger stake here. Baby Jones became a missionary herself and worked in other countries, and I believe is worried that all that she has worked for is under threat. In some ways, it is. It is the fate of all of our histories to be scrutinised by later generations. But as she becomes more relaxed and realises that I am not here to attack her, that I am genuinely interested in her history, she shows great pleasure in remembering the many Aboriginal children of Swan Mission who she claimed as her friends.
She remembers back to the time when her limbs were wiry and supple and she ran without fear of anyone or anything, where the world of childhood seemed as natural as breathing. As a child she had shared the same air, played in the same orchard, hauled up gilgies from the same creek, and looked for love from the same woman as the Mission children had. Washing with the Mission children, eating with the Mission children and being punished with the Mission children is how she describes her upbringing. They were friends of her own age and she remembers them with a great sense of affection.
‘Oh dear,’ Baby Jones says, as she looks at the photographs of the children that I have brought with me. ‘That’s Tommy Bropho, my coachman.’ Each morning Thomas had taken her in the sulky, over the river, beyond the brickworks and the grounds of the Orphanage, to the state school where the white children received their education. Each morning, barefooted, but without a stitch out of place in his heavily mended clothes, Tommy took the young Baby Jones to a place where he was not allowed to go. If she is aware of the obvious difference between her privileges and Tommy’s situation, she does not mention them.
Baby Jones is peering at the images as if they will somehow begin to move. But the images don’t move easily for her. It is a long time back that I am asking her to remember. The names have a bit of difficulty coming to her, even if she recognises their faces. ‘Ah, this is Bob Dorey, he was my little friend.’
Baby Jones remembers her adventures with Bob Dorey. She remembers how the Mission creek would flood in wintertime, right up to the horse’s chest as they tried to cross the river, and how they’d hunt for gilgies every weekend. Out of school, and after chores, they were free to roam the grounds, dig for roots and bake fish in ashes on the river bank. She remembers ’Ception (Conception) and Chattra Benjamin milking the cows, filling the pails for the day. Queenie Magnet is watering the vegetables. Thomas Bropho is gearing up the horse and buggy and the Parfitt girls are getting sulky, ‘jumping the traces’. They’ll be brought back into line by her mother, Mrs Jones, she says with a knowing smile.
After a slow start the memories come flooding in. Dion Dirk is checking the chicken coop for any eggs to feed the little children and Mrs Jones is keeping an extra special eye out for little Mary in case she fits again, due to her epilepsy. When she tells me this it jogs my own memory of a story my grandmother told about Mary fitting in the dormitory, and how the older girls learned to look after her so she did not swallow her tongue.
Baby Jones remembers learning to milk the cows and polish the floors, which were always kept so shiny you could see your face in them. She can see her father, an older man, who had travelled the world from the age of nineteen. His bout of malaria, which nearly killed him, turned his hair white for the rest of his life. And she can remember my grandmother, Jessie. ‘I can remember her quite well. When you said her name, yes, Jessie Argyle, I could make a mental picture of her. I can see her quite plainly, what she looked like. She used to have long hair, fair skinned she was, and very sturdy.’
She sees them sitting outside on a summer’s night. The Mission children are all gathered in the evening dusk. Mr Jones plays his gramophone, seated in his wooden chair in front of the children who are sitting barefoot on the grass in neat rows. The strains of the ‘William Tell Overture’, the ‘Huntsman’s Chorus’ and the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ waft out over the orchard and settle in the paperbarks that strangle the creek.
Baby Jones says she loved her time at the Mission. It gave her some of the happiest memories of her life. She believes there was really no difference between her upbringing and that of the Aboriginal inmates. She says she ate the same food, cleaned as they did, played as they did and attended church as they did. To her it is a story of racial harmony and equality.
Baby Jones does not seem to realise that she was not one of them. Simply by having her parents, she was not one of them. She got to keep the name her parents had given her and live the choices in life they would make for her. When she turned sixteen she would not be sent out as a domestic servant.
Baby Jones is surprised to hear that Uncle Bob Dorey is alive, and a little defensive as she asks, ‘And what was his story?’ A moment of relief sweeps over her face as I tell her he remembered her parents fondly, but not the people before them. Uncle Bob had remembered Baby Jones with affection too.
But Uncle Bob has his own memories. They are of a different place, though it is locked within those same grounds and occupies the same space. For him, the Mission is viewed from a perspective which could never really be called home. It is a place out-of-country. This is not to say that Baby Jones’ version of her life at Swan Mission is invalid.
In tripping over the threads of the past you have to respect the experiences of witnesses; you cannot confuse one telling of a story as the only telling. In the battleground of the Mission where hearts and minds, cultures and races were up for grabs, stories of friendship are always welcome. But they aren’t the only narratives that affected these children’s lives, and to ignore the story of servitude that was set out for them is to ignore too big a part of the picture.
The children were trained to serve God and Jesus, to serve the white people who had taken them from their homelands and replaced skin, country and family with the wafer-thin pages of the Bible. Their lives revolved around lessons, work, survival, and the slow movement towards their exodus into a world that they had only made small excursions into since leaving their home countries.
Abridged from Shadow Lines
Stephen Kinnane, 2003.
Alice Nannup
LIFE IN MOORE RIVER
The time came for us to catch the train to Mogumber and we all felt really excited. We knew nothing about Moore River, hadn’t heard much about it. All we knew was what they told us; that we were going to a mission. To us, we thought we were going to a place where there’d be lots of lovely little kids and that we were going to be really happy. Well, what a joke that turned out to be.
We got to Mogumber siding at about one or two o’clock in the morning. We got off the train and onto this old truck to go the eight mile ride out to the settlement.
When we got there they unlocked the dormitory to let us in, then showed us to our beds. Doris and I had the two beds in the middle. When we got in we could hear all this whispering, like little kids talking. We didn’t see Herbert again for a while because he was stuck over with the boys.
The next morning when I woke up I could hear birds singing. I peeped out from under the rug and all I could see were these little faces looking at me. I thought, ooooh, what’s this. I’d never seen so many faces
Anyway, we got up and went to have a wash. We never wore nighties in that place, we just slept in our shimmy and pants. We went off to wash our face and comb our hair, when all these kids came across and asked, ‘Where you come from?’ I told them we came from Roebourne and they didn’t much care about us, just walked off. See, they were South girls, they were all from country in the South.
Then these other girls came around and said, ‘Where you come from?’
‘I come from North,’ I told them.
‘Oh well,’ they said. ‘We come from North too.’ So the North took over then and looked after us.
On the very first morning we were there we were taken up to the office. Mr Brodie was the superintendent then, and his wife was the matron.
They spoke to us for a while about the rules and things like that, then Matron asked me if I knew who my father was. I told her yes, I did. Then she asked me, ‘Do you know the Flinders?’ and certain other people from Roebourne. I told her yes because they were all my father’s friends. In fact, Mrs Flinders said that if she had known I was going to be taken away I could have stayed with her and gone to school with her three daughters in Roebourne.
