Out of the Silence

by Robert Foster

  The journey was followed avidly by the public. Each day the press reported on its progress, and each evening the Australian Broadcasting Commission put to air the ‘Sturt Report,’ which documented the expedition’s progress, interviewed the crew about the events of the day, and spoke with local officials about their district. Anthony Sturt, the great grand-son of the explorer, was flown in from Britain to read for radio audiences daily accounts from Sturt’s journal. The crew’s arrival in Waikerie, in South Australia’s riverland, is typical of the nightly broadcasts. It had been a day of wild winds; Grant Taylor, playing Sturt, had fallen into the river but had grabbed hold of a rope and was pulled out; another member of the crew had his nose broken, but they had battled through. The crew members marvelled at how much tougher it must have been when Sturt made the original voyage without the sort of back-up they enjoyed. An elderly pioneer was interviewed; she had arrived in the district in the 1890s, depression years. For seven years, she told the listeners, her family had lived in a house with hessian walls and an iron roof before they were able to move onto their ‘block’. The achievements of the men, she said, had been marvellous.51

  At each port of call locals would gather, many in period costume, to welcome the crew ashore. The crew, in turn, would present to the mayor a Memorial Scroll signed by the Governor-General, and local dignitaries would make speeches on the progress and industry of the district. Discussion of the ‘explorers’ would naturally flow into praise for the ‘pioneers’ and ‘settlers’: this was an assumed genealogy. The re-enactment, as one journalist put it, awakened appreciation of ‘our heritage of resolution and resource’.52 Such days would often end with a country dance in the local Institute Hall or packing shed. One can imagine the trails of dust rising on rough country roads as locals streamed into the town.

  The story of encounters with Aboriginal people was not central to the unfolding re-enactment, but nor was it absent. On the North-West Bend Station the owner made mention that the homestead had been built on an old Aboriginal graveyard, and that Canoe Trees dotted the district. At Mannum, a local reported that all the Aborigines had disappeared from the district by the 1890s – the still pervasive view that only ‘full-bloods’ were ‘real’ Aborigines serving to make invisible the significant indigenous population of the Murray Lands. But most pertinently, the re-enactment provided South Australians with the opportunity to remember its foundational story of the enlightened treatment of Aboriginal people. While the official Centenary celebrations of 1936 had barely referenced Aboriginal people except as passing pre-historical witnesses to the moment of European arrival, the 1951 re-enactment of exploration provided space to highlight Sturt’s historical reputation as conciliator and protector of Aboriginal people, and as the personification of South Australia’s difference. This was distilled in a speech made by Governor Willoughby Norrie at Murray Bridge. In the course of his voyage, Norrie said, Sturt was met by some 6,000 ‘dark coloured natives’, but not once did he order aggressive action; it was this quality of ‘tact and forbearance’ that made Sturt great.53

  This theme of ‘tact and forbearance’ formed a kind of sub-narrative to the journey. Along the way, Aboriginal groups were brought forth from mission communities like Point McLeay (Raukkan) to welcome the passing party. Sturt’s well-known encounter with a hostile Aboriginal party on the Murray River, whose aggressive approach he disarmed with friendliness, also received picturesque reference. At Gundagai and at Narrandera, painted Aboriginal people formed part of the costumed crowds who greeted the whaleboat crew.54 Only one crude joke marred the preferred story of mutual goodwill. On 20 January at Red Cliffs, members of the local RSL sub-branch posing as ‘hostile natives’ ‘attacked’ the whaleboat with practice army hand grenades, blank-loaded rifles and sulphur dioxide stink bombs. When the ‘explorers’ stepped forth for their ‘famed parley with the natives’, the ‘blacks’ began ‘a fiendish dance’ and pelted the crew with tomatoes.55 It is impossible to know whether Governor Norrie – an Englishman – knew anything of Australia’s frontier history when he praised Sturt’s ‘tact and forbearance’, but his was a resonant observation. Indeed, it echoed Governor Galway’s earlier speech observations about Sturt in 1914. As the frontier expanded inland, and as subsequent generations wrote about the events that unfolded, the motif of settler ‘tact and forbearance’ became stubbornly persistent. Sometimes it was a sentiment that masked violence, but more often it attached itself to accounts of violence, as a justification of sorts and as a reinforcing reminder of pioneer stoicism.

  For two months, Australians had sat in their living rooms and listened intently to this ‘Australian story’ designed to unify a nation. In late February, the crew of the expedition arrived in Adelaide – the prophetic terminus of Sturt’s journey – where they were greeted by the thousands who took part in a welcoming street pageant, and feted at a civic reception. Those who missed the radio broadcasts could watch the re-enactment in Movietone News footage at their local cinema. As a Jubilee celebration, it had been an enormous success in ‘arousing a sense of history, and in making that history live’.56 The legacy of Captain Sturt had inspired thousands who followed the re-enactment in 1951, for as a foundational historical figure he was compelling. Not only did he represent a nostalgia for ‘the heroic age of Australian exploration’, but he conveniently reinforced South Australia’s belief that in its dealings with Aboriginal people, its history represented one of humanitarian concern and forbearance.57

  Bitter Springs

  Just six months before the Sturt re-enactment, Australians had the rare privilege of witnessing their frontier history on the silver screen with the release of the film Bitter Springs.58 Produced by Britain’s Ealing Studios, it was one of three films they made at the time centring on frontier experiences in different parts of the old empire. The film starred Chips Rafferty as the pioneering settler Wally King, Bud Tingwell as his hot-headed son, the English Vaudevillian Tommy Trinder as the ‘new chum’, and Michael Pate as Mounted Policeman Ransom – the last an actor who, ironically, would spend much of the ’50s typecast as a ‘Red Indian’ in Hollywood westerns. Bitter Springs was filmed in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges, the South Australian government having won its bid against Queensland to secure the film. Its purpose was to tell a story of pioneering days, when a man ‘would face the desolation of the desert and 600 miles of inland emptiness in the hope of building a life.’ At the same time, as part of that story, it would tell of ‘the encroachment by white pioneers on the aboriginal hunting ground’.59 Despite the fact that it was a popular ‘Australian Western’, Bitter Springs also had a serious story to tell of frontier relations.

  South Australians embraced the novelty of having a motion picture made on home ground. Local department store John Martin’s took the opportunity in a full-page advertisement to salute ‘a fine pioneer effort – the Australian-made film “Bitter Springs”’ – and to advertise itself as ‘a pioneer South Australian Institution’.60 Stories of the film’s progress filled the newspapers, but the good feeling was somewhat marred by news reports about the treatment of the Aboriginal extras who would act in the film. Though never named in the credits, 115 Aboriginal people had been brought from the West Coast by the Aborigines Department, under government directive, to play as extras. In the rail journey from the West Coast to the Flinders Ranges, they were accommodated in cattle trucks and a dog-box, without seating or sanitary facilities. When they eventually arrived at Quorn, where they were to join the film team, no accommodation had been arranged for them: ‘off-loaded in the rain into open trucks and driven to the oval’, they were obliged to shelter all night in a refreshment room until a tarpaulin was erected to house them.61 When interviewed, the Railway spokesperson directed the responsibility for the travel arrangements to the State Aborigines Department, whose spokesperson stated that they had been satisfactory.62

  When the film finally premiered a year later, the treatment of the Aboriginal actors was forgotten in
the flush of pride in South Australia’s achievement in holding the film’s world premiere. The newspaper which had reported on the Aboriginal actors’ transport to the set by cattle truck a year earlier now reported on the film’s ‘orchids-and-ermine premiere, with handsome furs and elaborate corsages dominating the women’s dressing’, and attended by the State’s Premier and the nation’s Prime Minister.63 Soon after the film opened, a small article appeared reporting that ‘Aborigines who played in the film “Bitter Springs”’ were begging along the East-West railway line.64

  If the treatment of the Aboriginal actors left much to be desired, how were their characters’ rights portrayed in the film’s saga of pioneer life? Set at an unspecified location in 1900, the story focuses on a pioneer family travelling north to establish their property. The film follows their hardships as they drive their sheep and battle with a wagon-load of all their earthly possessions through rough passes and seemingly interminable plains. When they finally reach Bitter Springs, they find no water. About to turn back, a Mounted Constable arrives at their camp, and pointing to a nearby creek bed tells them, ‘if you dig down into the sand a couple of feet you’ll get all the water you want’.65 He also offers a caution and a prophecy: the Karagarni have lived on that land a thousand years, perhaps two; someone pays eighty quid at an office in Adelaide, and all of a sudden the Karagarni don’t have a tribal land anymore; it’s a sheep property, and the police are ‘left to clean up the trouble’. ‘The land’, he adds, ‘is sort of sacred to them, and they don’t budge easy’. In response to the settler’s claim that he’s not going to let ‘no stone-age blacks stand in my road,’ the Trooper offers some advice: you can ‘shove them off’, you can ‘ease them off’, or you can ‘find some way of taking them in with you’.

  The film follows the settlers as they dig their wells, graze their sheep and build their homestead. Their relationship with the Aboriginal people is cautious at first, sometimes friendly – the New Chum’s young son is seen throwing boomerangs with Aboriginal boys – but when the settlers interrupt a hunting party and shoot a kangaroo that the Karagarni had been patiently stalking, relations sour. The Aboriginal group spear a sheep and carry it off; the settlers pursue them to retrieve the animal. In the stand-off that ensues, the settler’s son shoots and kills an Aboriginal man. The Karagarni respond by burning down the lovingly built homestead and abducting the New Chum’s young son.66 Bereft of supplies and cut off from their only source of water, Bitter Springs, the settlers’ fate looks grim. In desperation, Wally King’s son goes for water, but as he returns he is struck by a well-aimed spear. Meanwhile, the New Chum has inveigled his way into the Aboriginal camp and, with comic guile, rescues his son and sets off for the Trooper. Just as the settlers are preparing to fight their way out, the Trooper arrives with reinforcements and drives off the tribe.

  The jubilant liberation of the homestead cuts away to a scene of Aboriginal people confined in a cart, ready to be ‘eased off’ the land. Wally King, as he attends to his injured son, observes that ‘fighting don’t get you nowhere’, and asks the Trooper to remind him of the advice he had given earlier: you can ‘shove them out’, you can ‘ease them out’, or you can ‘take them in with you’. World-weary after having tried and failed at the first two options, Wally opts for the third. The scene cuts away to a new scene of busy station life, Aboriginal men happily shearing alongside the settlers, before the screen fades to black.

  The film’s portrayal of violence between Aboriginal people and settlers on the frontier has some insightful moments. Not unrealistically, it portrays the origins of that violence as a contest over land and resources. The portrayal of the Aboriginal tribe, while often patronising, nonetheless presents their response to the settlers’ incursion into their country as both considered and reasonable: deprived of water, and their food supply threatened, what options did they have but to attack the settlers’ stock and, eventually, to meet violence with violence? Interestingly, given the historical role of Mounted Police in protecting pastoral stations, the Trooper is the one character who displays some sympathy and understanding of the situation. He is the one who cautions Wally that he is moving onto Karagarni land, and he is the one who has to do the settler’s dirty work by ‘easing’ the Karagarni out after the siege of the homestead. The director originally intended to end the film with a massacre of Aboriginal people, but was persuaded by the studio to end it on a lighter note.67 Despite its rather idealised picture, the resolution of the film, which shows Aboriginal people working side by side with white pastoralists on the station, carries a degree of truth. Once the worst of the violence had passed, Aboriginal people in remote Australia did become the backbone of labour in the pastoral industry. At the time the film was made, they were the mainstay of the cattle industry.

  The fictional Mounted Constable’s dictum calls to mind an observation that the settler Robert Warburton made about the Central Australian frontier in 1890, although in this instance, he did not represent it as a set of alternatives as much as an inevitable sequence:

  Of course things are difficult and will be until the blacks knuckle under, but not before, when you have subdued them you can be as kind as you like to them, its only the same old story of pioneer settlement over and over again ever since Australia was first settled.68

  ‘Ultimate absorption into the general community’

  Whereas accounts of the violence that accompanied frontier life, however circumspect, figured fitfully in commemorative publications and works of popular culture, academic historians through the mid-twentieth century indicated little interest in this thread of the national history. Richard Broome has mapped how textbook histories and encyclopaedias of the mid-twentieth century had little to say about the place of Aboriginal people in the national story beyond a role as ‘fleeting cardboard figures on the backdrop of European exploration’.69 Gordon Greenwood’s Australia: A Social and Political History of 1955 for instance, which was sponsored by the 1951 Jubilee Celebrations Committee, barely referenced Aborigines at all.70 Other national histories produced between the 1930s and 1950s, such as Max Crawford’s Australia (1952) and the multiple-authored, nine volume Australian Encyclopaedia (1958), did include significant reference to Aboriginal people, but primarily through the filter of an anthropological eye, and shaped by contemporary assimilationist values. If Aboriginal people were seen to have a future in these expositions on the past, it was one seen to be best served, as Norman Tindale put it in the Australian Encyclopaedia, ‘by their ultimate absorption into the general community’.71 Perhaps the most culturally enduring of historical works to be produced in this decade was Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958), which sought to trace a distinctive Australian character back to the ‘nomad tribe’ of white bush workers. Although it includes some references to Aboriginal people, it does so through a somewhat uncomfortable attempt to make white bushmen ‘heirs to important parts of Aboriginal culture’, in the sense that they too needed to develop an understanding of the land. Given that Ward’s bushmen were often on the frontline of European expansion, the absence of comment on any further relationship between Aboriginal people and ‘bushmen’ seems a surprising omission. Indeed, Ward’s claim in the book that bushmen ‘rarely went armed’ is astonishing.

  A year before Ward’s book was published, Douglas Pike published what remains the definitive account of South Australia’s foundation and settlement, A Paradise of Dissent. The most extensive discussion of relations with Aboriginal people in Pike’s book is his reference to the violence on the overland route from New South Wales in 1841. However, the reality of violence was not Pike’s point in itself; his point was about the cut-backs and economies Grey was forced to introduce into the bankrupt colony, and his refusal to allow ‘rumours of desperate villainy to interfere’ with them.72 Perhaps the most interesting omission in Paradise of Dissent is the absence of any reference to the often fraught and seemingly interminable discussions about the rights and protection of Aborigina
l people that occurred on the eve of settlement. For most of 1835, the Colonial Office and the Colonisation Commissioners exchanged correspondence on the issue, and especially the question of Aboriginal rights to land. Pike glosses the issue in a few sentences.73 Five years later, Pike would publish a broader national history, Australia: The Quiet Continent (1962). As in his history of South Australia, the history of Aboriginal dispossession barely rates a mention; indeed, Australia’s history of ‘peaceful isolation’ is seen to be one undisturbed by ‘battles or revolutions’.74 In representing Australia’s history as primarily peaceful and positive, Pike and his contemporaries were not writing bad history but simply writing history for their time. At the national level, mid-twentieth century Australia was the heyday of assimilation policies and the heartland of the ‘great Australian silence’. Although attitudes would change dramatically in just a few short years, the fate of Aboriginal people was still thought to be absorption into the body of the Commonwealth. As such, their part in the story of South Australia’s foundation and development was thought to have little or no contemporary valency.