Great Australian Stories

by Graham Seal

  Having recrossed the river in good order with the baggage on three horses the whole party formed a junction on the left bank, fully expecting the natives would return in stronger force, but in this were disappointed. After a consultation over the prisoners, it was resolved to set them free, for the purpose of fully explaining to the remnant of the tribe the cause of the chastisement which had been inflicted, and to bear a message to the effect that, if they again offered to spear white men or their cattle, or to revenge in any way the punishment which had just been inflicted on these for their numerous murders and outrages, four times the present number of men would proceed amongst them and destroy every man, woman and child. This was perfectly understood by the captives, and they were glad to depart even under such an assurance; nor did several of their number, who were the widows, mothers and daughters of notorious offenders shot that day, evince any stronger feeling on the occasion than what arose out of their anxiety to keep themselves warm.

  Nyungar tradition tells a substantially similar tale as far as the details of the encounter are concerned, though the numbers killed are often said to have been much larger. Descendants of the Pinjarra settlers continue to believe that Stirling and his men were reacting to the justifiable fears of their ancestors about the threat of a concerted Aboriginal attack. In settler tradition it was a battle. In Nyungar belief, what happened in 1834 was a massacre. The discrepancy between these views is poignantly reflected in a memorial of the incident in the park just south of Pinjarra township. Never completed, it is the victim of warring stories about the past.

  The White Woman of Gippsland

  The White Woman of Gippsland legend was widely circulated in Australia and beyond during the nineteenth century. It is part of a class of stories in which settlers are captured by the people they are displacing. Frequently the captives are women. While there were certainly well-authenticated instances of European women living with indigenous groups in America and Australia, many other such stories are folklore rather than fact. And like much folklore, they reveal deep truths about fear and prejudice.

  The first mention of the white woman was in a letter published in the Sydney Herald in October 1840. A Scots settler in Gippsland named Augustus McMillan claimed that he and a small group of colonists had frightened a band of twenty-five Kurnai people, mostly women, into the bush. The settlers found European clothes, weapons, medicines and a range of other goods in their hastily abandoned camp, even newspapers, dated 1837. They also discovered, in a kangaroo-skin bag, the corpse of a two-year-old boy who was later identified as European.

  While the pioneers of this only recently settled region were rummaging through this cache, they noticed that one of the women being herded to safety by the Kurnai men seemed unusually curious about them and what they were doing. Putting together their puzzling find and her interest, McMillan and his companions came to the conclusion ‘that the unfortunate female is a European—a captive of these ruthless savages’. They thought the woman, perhaps with a small child, might be a survivor, probably the only one, of a ‘dreadful massacre’ of settlers. Two years later there surfaced in the newspapers another—anonymous—account of a sighting of Aborigines driving a white person, probably female, before them as they fled from a surveying party. The surveyors found a pile of European objects in the abandoned camp, as well as a giant heart shape drawn in the ground with a sharp object. The letter claimed that other settlers had also seen Aboriginal groups with white captives.

  By 1845, these rumours had developed into a storyline in which the white captive was always female. Sightings were reported frequently throughout Gippsland and beyond. In every case, the white woman was supposedly being herded away from the Europeans but looking desperately to them for rescue. By the following year, claimed sightings were so common that people began demanding government intervention. A settler with the pen-name Humanitas wrote a windy letter to the editor of the Port Phillip Herald on 10 March 1846, concerning the alleged fate of a missing white woman known as Miss Lord.

  Sir: About twelve months ago, I addressed a letter to one of the newspapers shewing that this lady was a captive of a tribe of blacks in the Portland Bay district, and although that letter was calculated to call forth all the sympathies and at the same time the energies of man on her behalf, yet what has been done?

  The letter berated Governor La Trobe for his failure to act and pointed out that a £1000 reward had been offered by the public. Nonetheless, ‘The blood of every true Briton boils with indignation at witnessing the utter indifference, the utter barbarity in respect of this lady . . .’

  Although the government had been making inquiries into the stories, it took no further official action. Instead, in October that year a private expedition was mounted under the command of Christian De Villiers and James Warman. They carried white handkerchiefs printed with a message of rescue:

  WHITE WOMAN! — There are fourteen armed men, partly White and partly Black, in search of you. Be cautious and rush to them when you see them near you. Be particularly on the lookout every dawn of morning, for it is then the party are in hopes of rescuing you. The white settlement is towards the setting sun.

  The message was printed in both English and Scots Gaelic, as many of the early Scots settlers spoke only that tongue.

  Although the expedition failed to locate the lost woman, it did add a new slant to the story. Dispatches published in the Port Phillip Herald suggested that the white woman was a shipwreck survivor, a theory bolstered by the discovery that the Aborigines possessed a wooden ship’s figurehead around which they reportedly performed corroborees.

  Finally the government mounted its own rescue expedition, led by the head of the Port Phillip Native Police, Henry Dana. There were now two expeditions roaming the same area in search of the elusive white woman. Both focused on capturing a Kurnai chieftain named Bunjaleene, suspected of being the woman’s abductor. But after Dana’s party murdered a large number of Kurnai people in the Gippsland lakes district, it was recalled. The De Villiers/Warman party’s supplies were withheld, forcing it too to return.

  Rumour and speculation continued to run wild, however, and the government felt it wise to dispatch another expedition in March 1847. It captured Bunjaleene and held members of his family hostage while he led the would-be rescuers to the Snowy Mountains, where most of the Kurnai had retreated. It was now thought that Bunjaleene’s brother was holding the white woman. Winter forced the abandonment of the search, and Bunjaleene and his family were (illegally) detained pending the white woman’s return. Mumbalk, one of Bunjaleene’s two wives, died in captivity, and the old chieftain, having been told that he and his people would be shot and hanged, died the following year.

  Late in 1847, the bodies of a European woman and a part-Aboriginal child were discovered at Jemmy’s Point. It was widely speculated that Bunjaleene’s brother had murdered them, and the local newspaper concluded that the remains were indeed those of the lost white woman and her child. The sightings, then, had been real, or so the paper declared:

  Death though regarded as a mishap by others, must have descended as a blessing upon this poor woman, who has undergone a trial far more harrowing and terrible than even Death’s worst moments.

  She is now no more—and it is a melancholy gratification that the public suspense has been at length relieved, by her discovery even in death.

  While this should have marked the demise of the White Woman legend, some people still persisted in the belief that at least one white woman was in the hands of the Kurnai. The story, reinforced by persistent Kurnai traditions of the massacres and related injustices that took place as a result of the search for the white woman, lived on, finding its way into artworks and even local histories.

  Was there a White Woman of Gippsland? It is possible that there were several. Kurnai tradition holds that there were at least two European women living among them at this period, including on
e, known as Lohan-tuka, who had long red hair—a feature that appeared in several of the early settler accounts. A number of European women did live with indigenous people, often after surviving shipwrecks. Eliza Fraser, who spent several months with Aborigines on and near what is now Fraser Island in 1836, is the best known of these enforced cultural crossovers. True or not, these stories owed their longevity to their theme’s strong hold on the popular imagination.

  Raising the Southern Cross

  The bloody events at the Eureka Stockade of 3 December 1854 involved men, women and children from many nations, including Italy, Germany, the United States, Canada and Britain. They came in search of wealth and a better life, but they found what some considered to be an inflexible and oppressive system of taxation without representation in the form of expensive gold digging licences sold by the government. Hundreds of these ‘diggers’, as they were known, initially took up arms against the Victorian authorities within a hastily erected wooden stockade near Ballarat. Subsequent events, involving around one hundred and twenty defenders of the ramshackle assemblage of wooden mine supports and carts, have created an enduring colonial narrative.

  One of the miners involved in the Stockade was the colourful Italian who called himself Rafaello Carboni. Under that name he authored a compelling memoir of the revolt. The Eureka Stockade was published in 1855, shortly after Carboni and twelve of his Eureka comrades had been acquitted of treason. It provided a point of view, strongly biased towards the diggers, of the events leading up to the battle and of the fight itself. It included not only Carboni’s recollections but those of other participants and observers. In this extract, Carboni describes the first raising of the Southern Cross flag among a crowd said to number twelve thousand. Peter Lalor (pronounced Lawler) was the leader of the Stockade miners. The scene is ‘Lalor Stump’ on Bakery Hill where the ‘flag of stars’ was first raised on 29 November 1854. Carboni begins with a short verse that echoes the tone of the revolt:

  Brave LALOR—

  Was found ‘all there’,

  With dauntless dare,

  His men inspiring;

  To wolf or bear,

  Defiance bidding,

  He made us swear,

  Be faithful to the Standard,

  For Victory or Death!

  On that Thursday, November 30th, more memorable than the disgraced Sunday, December 3rd, the SUN was on its way towards the west: in vain some scattered clouds would hamper its splendour—the god in the firmament generously ornamented them with golden fringes, and thus patches of blue sky far off were allowed to the sight, through the gilded openings among the clouds.

  The ‘SOUTHERN CROSS’ was hoisted up the flagstaff—a very splendid pole, eighty feet in length, and straight as an arrow. This maiden appearance of our standard, in the midst of armed men, sturdy, self-overworking gold-diggers of all languages and colours, was a fascinating object to behold.

  There is no flag in old Europe half so beautiful as the ‘Southern Cross’ of the Ballarat miners, first hoisted on the old spot, Bakery-hill. The flag is silk, blue ground, with a large silver cross, similar to the one in our southern firmament; no device or arms, but all exceedingly chaste and natural.

  Captain Ross, of Toronto, was the bridegroom of our flag, and sword in hand, he had posted himself at the foot of the flag-staff, surrounded by his rifle division.

  Peter Lalor, our Commander-in-chief, was on the stump, holding with his left hand the muzzle of his rifle, whose butt-end rested on his foot. A gesture of his right hand, signified what he meant when he said,

  ‘It is my duty now to swear you in, and to take with you the oath to be faithful to the Southern Cross. Hear me with attention. The man who, after this solemn oath does not stand by our standard, is a coward in heart.

  ‘I order all persons who do not intend to take the oath, to leave the meeting at once. “Let all divisions under arms ‘fall in’ in their order round the flag-staff.”’

  The movement was made accordingly. Some five hundred armed diggers advanced in real sober earnestness, the captains of each division making the military salute to Lalor, who now knelt down, the head uncovered, and with the right hand pointing to the standard exclaimed a firm measured tone:

  ‘WE SWEAR BY THE SOUTHERN CROSS TO STAND TRULY BY EACH OTHER, AND FIGHT TO DEFEND OUR RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES.’

  An [sic] universal well rounded AMEN, was the determined reply; some five hundred right hands stretched towards our flag. The earnestness of so many faces of all kinds of shape and colour; the motley heads of all sorts of size and hair; the shagginess of so many beards of all lengths and thicknesses; the vividness of double the number of eyes electrified by the magnetism of the southern cross; was one of those grand sights, such as are recorded only in the history of ‘the Crusaders in Palestine’.

  The famous battle of the Eureka Stockade took place a few days later as poorly armed miners were swiftly defeated by a combined force of the police and military on the morning of 3 December 1854. The aftermath of the encounter is described in Chapter 8.

  Although the Eureka Stockade has been the subject of much literary and political romanticisation, curiously there is little general folklore about the event. There are traditions within the families of descendants of those who fought on either side of the brief but bloody encounter at Ballarat, but there are no stirring folk ballads of defiance and injustice, as there are about Ned Kelly and Ben Hall, for example. The goldfields minstrel, Charles Thatcher, wrote popular satires of the event and Henry Lawson and other poets later celebrated it, but these have only been collected in oral tradition, and only then on rare occasions. Few tales are publicly told about the event, apart from some fragmentary anecdotes about the sewing of the Southern Cross flag by goldfields women. Despite this, the Eureka Stockade, its emblem and the opposition to injustice and oppression that they signify are well and truly embedded in Australian mythology.

  The lost children of the Wimmera

  On the morning of 12 August 1864, seven-year-old Jane Duff and her brothers Frank and Isaac went searching for broom in the bush near their home at Spring Hill Station. Spring Hill was about fifty kilometres from Horsham, Victoria, in the maze of scrub known as the Wimmera. Jane and Frank were the children of Hannah Duff by her previous husband. Isaac was the child of Hannah and her second husband, John Duff, a shepherd. The family lived in a slab hut, and one of the children’s chores was to collect twigs for their mother’s brooms.

  On this Friday, though, the children strayed too far into the bush. When they did not come home, Hannah went looking for them. She found no trace, nor could her husband when he joined the search. On Saturday morning, the Duffs contacted their neighbours and thirty men hunted all through that day and into the next two. At last, on Tuesday, the children’s tracks were sighted. Searchers followed them until a storm washed away all traces on the Thursday night.

  Now desperate, the searchers made a wise decision. They called on an Aboriginal elder named Wooral, also known as Dick-a-Dick, a noted tracker. (He was destined to be a member of the Aboriginal cricket side that toured England a few years later.) By the time Wooral and two other Aboriginal men arrived, the searchers had found the children’s tracks again. The Aborigines were able to follow them much more quickly than the settlers, and soon detected signs that the children had become very weak.

  Eventually, however, they were found—huddled together beneath a tree with Jane’s dress covering them all for warmth. Fearing the worst, their father rushed to the children and was overjoyed to find them still alive, though only just. The children were returned home and nursed back to health, having miraculously survived eight winter nights in the open with few clothes and hardly any food. They had eaten a few quandong berries but feared that these might be poisonous. ‘We used to suck the dew off the leaves at night to ease our thirst and dry throats,’ Jane Duff recalled in later life.


  The news of their rescue and Jane’s heroism—she had helped carry the younger boy as well as sharing her clothing—spread fast through Victoria and beyond. Aside from its local significance, the story resonated with British tales of lost babes in the woods, which had been popular since at least the sixteenth century, and with European fairy tales like that of ‘Hansel and Gretel’. General rejoicing over the children’s survival combined with these echoes of history and legend to infuse the story with great emotional power. Large donations were made to assist the rescued children and reward the Aboriginal trackers. Jane became a celebrity, and a local squatter later paid for her education. At the age of nineteen she married and settled in Horsham, eventually having eleven children. She died in 1932, still a heroine. Showing how she is remembered in local tradition, the inscription on her gravestone reads:

  In sacred memory

  of

  Jane Duff

  Bush Heroine

  who succoured her brothers

  Isaac and Frank

  nine days and eight nights

  in Nurcoung Scrub in August 1864

  died 20th Jan. 1932 aged 75 years