by Julie Janson
‘Eleanor, I’m sorry. Ngubuty kurung. We were starving,’ says Mary.’ I wanted you, I looked for you. But you were gone,’ says Mary.
Eleanor walks towards her mother. At last they embrace with Eleanor’s child pressed between them. Timmy runs to them and takes hold of Mary’s legs, laughing. She lifts him to meet his sister and niece.
‘Sister. Timmy, this is your sister. She is all grown up. A wirawi woman.’
Bowen walks along the track and hangs his musket carefully on a tree. He smooths his feathered topknot and strolls with his mother towards Mary and they squat near the fire. Gooseberry hands Mary a lump of roast mutton and she shares it with her son and granddaughter. They chew the meat and spit gristle on the sand.
‘Fat sheep good,’ says Bowen.
‘You have a good life here, all the dyins and dhullai are happy’ smiles Mary.
‘That right, real budjery,’ says Bowen.
‘Where did you find her?’ asks Mary.
‘A farmer at Prospect give us Eleanor and that baby for present. He say take her to her people,’ says Bowen.
He is proud that they are all together. This family is strong and now they might live in peace.
‘Eleanor budjery safe now,’ says Queen Gooseberry.
Mary sleeps in a pile of wallaby pelts by the fire. She is with Timmy, Eleanor and her granddaughter. She strokes the children’s hair and curls it in her fingers. Timmy lies in her lap and Mary whispers his totem, magpie, wibbung.
In the morning, Mary breathes the fresh sea air and looks down the river. She is free. She joins the women dressed for a welcome corrobboree. She strips off the waibala clothes and paints up in white ochre. Mary wears a possum skirt and has white feathers and shells in her hair. She sits with the children and women to celebrate the dancing of ‘shake a leg’ that goes on all day. Near the men’s circle sits a young man with gold skin; he looks a little like a waibala in English dress, but also one of the tribe. It is curious to see him tie up a tall horse near the camp and bring bags of flour to share with the camp. This man is a possible mulamang husband for her daughter. They both have waibala blood.
…
The family fills its days diving for crayfish and gathering shellfish in dillybags. The oysters are as big as a hand. Mary fishes from the rocks with children for bream, whiting, flounder, blackfish, jewfish and flathead. She cooks the fish and adds bones to the midden that runs the length of Palm Beach. She collects pandanus nuts and cuts the hearts from cabbage tree palms for roasting; she grinds lomandra seeds and bakes dampers. Only sometimes do they eat waibala bread and mutton, for the land teems with wallabies, bandicoots, wombats, goannas and possums.
One bird-filled dawn, Mary wakes and swims in the salt water with her curly hair streaming out behind her. She looks across the bay towards Lion Island and imagines Deerubbin weaving the Rainbow Serpent in and out of inlets. She speaks aloud her Darug language, mouthing a chant for the trees, bunda, dirrabari, mambara, yarra, muggargru, kwigan, budjor. The sounds are from her childhood, before the waibala took her.
Her words are also a prayer. Across Broken Bay, convicts and settlers are burning immense forests of trees to make way for cattle and sheep. The crack of many axes rings out along the river. Great trees fall and burn, and plumes of dense smoke waft across the green water. They are different from the small native message fires dotting the escarpment. The smoke is eucalypt-blue and ominous. She can feel the land shifting and changing. The smoke fills the sky with a grey haze; it drifts along the river transforming the blue to mist, like a haunting, like the death of forests. Some huge trees blaze long into the night and a red glow ripples on the horizon.
For now, she is safe at Bowen’s camp, in the shadow of Barrenjoey, its cliffs towering over the beach, protecting and hugging the clan that lives here. She thinks of the solitude of Marra Marra Creek, and worries that police will come to arrest Ferdinand.
She will always be seen as a traitor to the English authorities, a turncoat who didn’t appreciate their education, their God, or their benevolence.
She uses a stick to draw a map in the wet sand and marks the lands of the Darug, Gamariagal, Garigal, Gundungurra, Darkinjung, Guringai, Awakabal, Wonnaruah, Worimi, and Biripai.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Benevolence is a work of fiction based on historical events of the early years of British invasion and settlement around the Hawkesbury River in Western Sydney, New South Wales.
The characters are derived from Darug, Gundungurra and Wonnaruah Aboriginal people who defended their lands, culture and society. Muraging is based on my great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Thomas, who was a servant on colonial estates in the Hawkesbury area. The other characters in the novel are inspired by historical figures and my imagination, except the governors who are based on historical documents.
The Parramatta Native Institution existed and some of the characters and events are inspired by research on that school.
I was able to research information about the Darug Nation while working as a senior researcher for Professor Peter Read on the University of Sydney project A History of Aboriginal Sydney: www.historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au. This website includes a rich multi-media collection of over 800 images, 30,000 words of analysis and commentary, and 400 digital videos of oral history interviews. The website is now hosted by the Western Sydney University.
While researching, I was able to find stories about the Darug and Gundungurra Nations’ survival and resistance in the early days of British colonisation.
Over five years, I interviewed Aboriginal Elders from Darug, Gundungurra and Wonnaruah Nations and others from as far north as Newcastle, and south to Botany Bay. During these interviews I developed a passion for finding out about my own Burruberongal clan of Darug Nation and my Aboriginal and English convict history. I carried out in-depth research on the family history of my father, Neville Walter Janson. Some family members dispute my account of this history.
I discovered that the old dark lady who sat in the sun and watched us children play at the rented family house in View Street, Chatswood, in the 1950s was my great-grandmother, Mary Reynolds (nee Bartle). Some twenty-five family members lived in that house and my dad Neville rode a horse bareback down to the Lane Cove River in the 1940s and 1950s to shoot rabbits and collect oysters.
Great-Grandma Mary was the daughter of Mary Ann Thomas, born at Freemans Reach on Black Town Road near Windsor on the Hawkesbury River. Mary Ann was a servant who relinquished three children to the Benevolent Society in order to marry the ex-convict Henry Bartle. She gave birth to four more children, one of whom was my great-grandmother, Mary Bartle.
I have some early birth, death and marriage certificates that reveal a story of illiteracy, constant movement, poverty and occasional employment as servants and log splitters along the Hawkesbury River from 1810 to the 1900s. There are also successful family butchers and land owners, the Reynolds in Wilberforce.
Mary Ann Thomas was difficult to find. She seemed to have no birth certificate. Then one day I stumbled upon a certificate in 1832 that named a certain Reverend of the Church of England in Windsor as her possible father and her mother as Maria Byrnes. This fascinating tale grew into Benevolence. Some names have been changed to protect me from accusations of historical error.
THANK YOU
Thank you to the Australia Council for the Arts for all the grants and my residency at the BR Whiting Rome Studio where I worked on earlier novels.
Thank you to Magabala Books and all their wonderful staff who have believed in this novel.
I would like to thank friends and relatives who encouraged and read my manuscript over a five-year period.
I give heartfelt gratitude for reading and commenting on the manuscript and showing support to: Michael Fay, Virginia Fay, Byron Fay, Jovanna Janson, Zoey Allan, Morgan Kurrajong, Lesley Giovanelli, Rose Pickard, Peter Read, Geraldine Starr and the Celestial Writers Group, the Eurobodalla Writers Group and Writing NSW.
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p; I also give thanks to my literary agent Sarah McKenzie at Hindsight for believing in the novel. Many thanks to the numerous editors, including: Brigitte Staples, Bruce Sims, Margaret Whiskin and publisher Rachel Bin Salleh at Magabala.
I acknowledge the support of the First Nations Australian Writers Network and the FNAWN Workshop 2018, and especially to the much-loved Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert (dec.).
The historical details and anecdotes portrayed in this work of fiction are derived in part from the sharing of information of a number of valued sources. Protocols in relation to First Nations’ permissions were given during the recording of interviews for the project that led to the creation of the website: www.historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au.
I give thanks to Aunty Val Aurisch (dec.), Elder of Darug Nation from Katoomba, who contributed many memories of growing up with traditional Darug knowledge.
Uncle Colin Lock, Darug Elder, contributed his stories to the website of childhood visits to the Darug and Gundungurra camp in the Gully in Katoomba.
I pay tribute to the descendants of Queen Matora, Queen Gooseberry and Chief Bungaree who shared their family history about Marra Marra Creek. My great-aunt Louisa Bartle (nee Lewis) was born at Marra Marra Creek. She was descended from one of the children living with their Prussian father, Ferdinand Lewis, and Aboriginal mother, Biddy (daughter of Matora).
I especially thank Bungaree descendant Uncle Bob Waterer (dec.), who was my father’s friend in the army after World War II. I thank Neil Evers and Laurie Bimson, the Garigal cousins and descendants of Bungaree, who have contributed to the imagined events on the Hawkesbury River.
I pay tribute to the Lewis descendant Muffy Hedges, who shared stories and photographs from Marra Marra Creek. I thank architect legend Col James (dec.), who shared his house at Gentleman’s Halt with us drama students in the 1970s. From this grand ruined stone house, I paddled a canoe along the Hawkesbury to Spencer with my small child.
I owe a special debt of gratitude for stories of childhood and cultural knowledge from Aunty Robyn Williams (dec.), Wiradjuri and Gundungurra heritage.
I thank my friend Sue Pinckham at Walanga Muru, Macquarie University, and my friend Aunty Clair Jackson for their generous support.
I thank my cousin Shane Smithers, who contributed Darug male knowledge relating to our Aboriginal family history.
Many of the extended Darug families live today in Parramatta, Plumpton, Riverstone, Liverpool, Katoomba, Northern Beaches and Blacktown. They are related to the families who lived at reserves such as the Gully in Katoomba, Sackville Reach Aboriginal Reserve, Freemans Reach Blacks’ Camp, La Perouse Aboriginal Reserve, Redfern community and Narrabeen Lake Reserve. We did not die out.
Many members of these families and Elders shared stories of their lives in oral history videos for www.historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au. I pay respect to their knowledge and culture, and thank them for allowing me to learn about our history and celebrate fragments of these stories in historical fiction.
READINGS:
Daruganora: Darug Country – The Place and the People, James L Kohen, Darug Tribal Aboriginal Corporation, Sydney 2009
Because a White Man’ ll Never Do It, Kevin J Gilbert, Angus & Robertson 1973
The Parramatta Native Institution and the Black Town: a History, Jack Brook and James Kohen, UNSW Press, Sydney 1991
Hawkesbury Settlement Revealed: A New Look at Australia’s Third Mainland Settlement, 1793–1802, Jan Barkley-Jack, Rosenberg Publishing, Kenthurst 2009
The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Grace Karskens, Allen & Unwin Sydney 2009
The Sydney Wars, Stephen Gapps, NewSouth, Sydney 2018 Website: historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au 2009–2013
Julie Janson is a Burruberongal woman of Darug Aboriginal Nation. Her career as a playwright began when she wrote and directed plays in remote Australian Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. She is now a novelist and award-winning poet. She was co-recipient of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize 2016 and winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2019.
Julie’s novels include The Crocodile Hotel 2015 and The Light Horse Ghost 2018. She has written and produced plays, including two at Belvoir St Theatre, Black Mary and Gunjies, and Two Plays, published by Aboriginal Studies Press 1996.