Out of the Silence

by Robert Foster

  Regional foundational histories

  While in this period there was little engagement with the place of Aboriginal people in the national story or in state commemorative events that expressly articulated with the national story, regional histories of the mid twentieth century much more visibly engaged the stories of frontier encounter, just as memoirs and reminiscences of the nineteenth century had done. Aboriginal communities, of course, have always remembered this history,75 but local histories produced by settler-descended communities also remember the struggles between settlers, Mounted Police and Aboriginal people on South Australia’s early frontiers as a key part of the story of regional origins. These regional histories do not so much bring to the surface a set of colonial secrets that had been ‘hidden’ as keep in view a local knowledge about the violence of frontier encounters that has never disappeared from public circulation.

  Many of these South Australian regional histories were published from the 1950s onwards, and were written to commemorate the jubilee or centennial years which marked the beginning of European settlement in the district. Often they have been prepared by descendents of early settler families, or by local council committees. Broadly, their aim is to describe the region’s history of settlement and express a sense of regional identity, both past and present. In chronicling the times of early settlement, these histories often describe the state of relations between settlers and the local Aboriginal people. In doing so, what kinds of patterns do they illustrate?

  Not surprisingly, these settler-descendent histories usually provide a general description of frontier life that reflects a pioneer perspective: according to its trajectory, European settlement was met with some degree of Aboriginal resistance; settlers and their property were attacked, and acts of retribution followed; eventually, mutual bloodshed resolved itself into some kind of settled peace. This repeated story of how settlement took place is in keeping with most nineteenth century accounts of the pastoral frontier, which commonly regard Aboriginal people as the aggressors, and settler and police acts of retribution as a regrettable but necessary response. But unlike most nineteenth century accounts, which commonly position Aboriginal resistance as unprovoked, most twentieth century local histories identify Aboriginal attacks on settlers and their property as motivated by invasion of country and increasing starvation, or as retaliation against settler crimes such as sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women. As one local history of the Yorke Peninsula puts it:

  Whom shall we blame; The British Government who declared the whole colony to be ‘Waste Lands of the Crown’; the sheep farmers who despoiled the hunting grounds and the waterholes; the overseer who was commended by the press for protecting his employer’s interests, or the shepherds who ravaged the native women and disrupted the centuries-old social system?76

  As pioneering memoirs had done in the late nineteenth century, local histories of the twentieth century tend most commonly to remember the key, well-known episodes of frontier conflict. In the south east, for instance, the Maria massacre stands out as the most memorable event. Much discussed at the time for its legal and ethical repercussions, this event has remained perpetually in public circulation ever since. Sometimes it appears in regional histories as an example of the tragedies that beset settlers in the early days of the colony, but it is also related as a reminder of the loss of life that took place on both sides of the frontier in the course of European settlement and Aboriginal dispossession.77 An account from 1944 that is unusual for its time in raising an Aboriginal perspective is Gordon Hastings’ sketch ‘Tragedies of the Coorong’. Hastings relates the story as it was told to him by his Ngarrindjeri neighbour, Mr Cameron, whose grandparents had been members of the original party that had found the shipwreck survivors and assisted them in their initial journey along the coast. Their viewpoint structures the account from the start, and is unbroken over the span of a century with Hastings’ assurance that Mr Cameron ‘related the story to me as it was told to him by the old couple.’78 In local histories of the upper Murray, the remembered key event is the Rufus River massacre of August 1841, which is recalled as ‘that disastrous battle when the Rufus Creek ran red with the blood of the natives’.79 On the west coast, where Aboriginal resistance to occupation was more concerted and targeted than anywhere else in the colony, the memory of the fraught frontier is also alive and well, recounted in stories of settlers attacked, stations abandoned, and reprisals against Aborigines that took place at the hands of the 96th military regiment sent in by Governor Grey in 1842, which ‘indiscriminately’ took Aboriginal lives.80

  While such key moments and their aftermaths were sufficiently well-known to have kept a constant shape over a century of retelling, other less public frontier episodes have remained in circulation through an unbroken process of mythologisation. One of the most enduring yet malleable of these relates to the case of James Brown. As we know, there is little room for doubt that in 1849 James Brown murdered nine Aboriginal people on his Avenue Range sheep station, not far south of the Coorong where several years earlier the Maria massacre had taken place. An Aboriginal witness guided Protector of Aborigines Matthew Moorhouse in exhuming the remains of the Aboriginal bodies that had been burnt in an attempt to disguise the evidence, and he identified James Brown and his hutkeeper Eastwood as present at the scene of the crime. Eastwood fled the district and the colony, but the murder charge against Brown came before the Supreme Court in June 1849. Although the evidence against him was considered strong, the lack of willing witnesses to corroborate the Aboriginal witness’ account meant that the case was unable to go to trial, and the charges were eventually dropped.

  In most published local histories, James Brown remains a known name, and the murder charge against him is a remembered part of his historical reputation, but with two significant variations. One enduring thread of his story is that he was charged with poisoning an unspecified number of Aborigines, not shooting nine. The other more curious detail is that he is credited with a great feat of horsemanship: after laying the poison bait, he is said to have taken to his horse and ridden up the Coorong to Adelaide, thereby establishing a water-tight alibi. How might we account for these alterations, which enter the story like ‘Chinese whispers’ and replace the historical event? More importantly, what do these alterations tell us about the shape that the violence of the frontier takes in historical memory?

  It is likely that in shifting from shooting to poisoning, the charge against James Brown became blurred in local memory with another case which occurred almost simultaneously elsewhere in the colony, that involving shepherd Patrick Dwyer who was strongly suspected in May 1849 of poisoning five Aboriginal people with arsenic-laced flour near the settlement of Port Lincoln. Like Brown’s hutkeeper Eastwood, Dwyer fled the colony before he could be charged, and the case was dropped. Over time, the image of poisoned flour or poisoned waterholes became a familiar aspect of stories about violence perpetrated against Aboriginal people on the Australian frontier. While there are relatively few documented cases of poisoning in South Australia, rumours of the practice did circulate in the south east, and were recorded by the lay missionary Christina Smith.81 Given that suggestions of such a practice existed already as a suspected part of the south east’s frontier culture, and that the charge against Dwyer on the west coast had occurred within weeks of the charge against Brown, it is likely that these two events became conflated as one in public memory.

  Brown’s momentous horse ride to create an alibi could also readily have arisen from conflated sources. Brown’s hutkeeper Eastwood did in fact flee the district to Encounter Bay before boarding a whaling vessel and leaving the colony. But the more enduring source is Simpson Newland’s popular novel Paving the Way, the historical romance first published in 1893. In Newland’s novel, which drew on the Avenue Range massacre, the parts of James Brown and his hutkeeper are played by the fictional characters of Roland Grantley and his mate ‘Darkie’. Frustrated by lack of adequate police protection agains
t ‘marauding’ Aboriginal sheep stealers, they take vengeance into their own hands, slaying a number of their Aboriginal enemies and burning the bodies. When authorities in Adelaide decide to ‘make an example’ of them, Grantley gives his worker his best horse, enabling Darkie, a potentially incriminating witness, to flee the district. Paving the Way was an influential historical novel of the late colonial period and it remained in print until the late twentieth century. While it is certainly possible that James Brown undertook a difficult horse ride worthy of memory – at the time of his murder charge, he was obliged to report to police in Adelaide, which was indeed a long ride from Avenue Range – it is probably Newland’s fictionalised version of Darkie’s wonderful ride to evade the law that has entered into twentieth century stories about James Brown, and remained there ever since. Just as Newland drew on the living memory of history to shape his fiction, so too has his fiction helped to shape the living memory of history.

  Yet what is most striking about James Brown in local memory is not so much that the details of his story have changed over time, but that he is remembered largely for his gumption and skill in undertaking a great horse ride, more than for the crime that is known to have precipitated it. The story of Brown’s magnificent horsemanship receives comment in almost every twentieth century local history which mentions him, and overtakes what one could otherwise expect as repulsion at the likely fact that he murdered an Aboriginal family group. What might have led to this change of emphasis, where disquiet about the murder of nine innocent people becomes all but erased by admiration of the pioneer’s impressive horse skill? One likely influence in maintaining Brown’s reputation as a memorable pioneer into the present day is Rodney Cockburn’s sketch in the 1920s series ‘Pastoral Pioneers of South Australia’. Cockburn’s tribute to James Brown begins with an account of his status as a great benefactor to the colony in establishing, through a bequest in his name, the charitable institutions Kalyra hospital and Estcourt House. Cockburn remembers Brown as an ‘eminently worthy’ figure in the state’s pioneer history. He also refers to the ‘suffering’ Brown received ‘at the hands of untamed blacks’, and the ‘severe setback’ Brown experienced when he became ‘involved in a charge of poisoning a blackfellow’.82 In Cockburn’s account, Brown’s ‘involvement’ is reduced from a charge of shooting nine Aboriginal people to poisoning one, and he absolves Brown from even this crime by adding the assurance that he ‘emerged from the trial with a clean escutcheon, a jury of his fellow countrymen finding him not guilty’.83 As we know, James Brown was never acquitted of the murder charge, because willing witnesses could not be found to enable the trial to proceed.

  Cockburn’s ‘Pastoral Pioneers’ was published when the pioneer legend was still in the making. Yet it has continued to be influential as a source for local histories published in subsequent decades. Tom McCourt and Hans Mincham’s 1987 local history of the Coorong and lower Murray draws extensively from Cockburn’s sketches in its chapter on ‘Pastoral Pioneers’. In their account of James Brown, Cockburn’s account is repeated without editorial change, including the assertion that a jury found Brown innocent.84 Interestingly, their account also includes reference to Brown’s skill as a horseman, yet here it stands alone as a feature of his memorable reputation, now completely disassociated from his crime of murder: ‘He was a great man in the saddle, and is credited with having ridden a horse from Naracoorte to Adelaide in a little over a day’.85 The enduring story of James Brown’s fabulous horse ride is an instance of the way that a mythologising process works to create a narrative of frontier life that is on the one hand specifically local, and on the other emblematic of the Australian pioneer experience.

  A similar process can be seen in accounts of the otherwise unmemorable death of John Hamp, the shepherd killed by Aboriginal people on Eyre Peninsula in June 1848.86 John Hamp’s body was found a distance from his hut with a number of spear wounds and a deep laceration on the side of his head, probably made with the cross-cut saw he was carrying. Government Resident Charles Driver reported to the Colonial Secretary that the murder was particularly violent, the dead man’s head having been ‘sawn nearly half round with a hand-saw’.87 In local accounts of the twentieth century, the death of John Hamp has become tied to the gruesome detail that his head had been cut off and placed in a camp oven, where it was found by his son John Chipp Hamp.88 Possibly this particularly gothic detail originates with John Chipp Hamp himself, at least as told by locals who had known him. Over the twentieth century this detail became a regular feature of published reminiscences within the region up to the 1970s, its authenticity either asserted or questioned but cemented in local knowledge.89 Just as James Brown’s crime has probably become conflated with Patrick Dwyer’s, the ‘head in the camp oven’ story drifts from the Eyre to the Yorke Peninsula, appearing in relation to the death of the shepherd William Bagnall, who was killed by Aborigines in May 1851 on Milner Stephen’s run, three years after the killing of John Hamp. Bagnall was apparently resented by the local Aborigines, both for sexually exploiting Aboriginal women and for training his dog ‘to bite the natives whenever he saw one’.90 When found, his body was mutilated, and police considered that ‘his own indiscretions’ had led to his death.91 In a local history published in 1972, the detail relating to Hamp’s death has transferred to Bagnall’s with the discovery of ‘his head placed in a camp oven’, locating the source of this story with ‘Local tradition’.92

  It is hardly surprising to see separate events from the frontier compressed or crossed with others, since twentieth century accounts frequently draw on the same set of nineteenth century accounts which also reference one another. Books like John Wranthall Bull’s Early Experiences of Colonial Life in South Australia, Alexander Tolmer’s Reminiscences of an Adventurous and Chequered Career at Home and at the Antipodes, James Hawker’s Early Experiences in South Australia, and Simpson Newland’s Paving the Way, among others, became key sources of South Australian historical memory; well-thumbed copies could probably have been found in most local libraries. While they draw upon the memoirs and memories of contemporaries, they in turn are often drawn upon as sources for twentieth century regional histories.

  Whether or not such details as the head in the camp oven or the unforgettable horse ride are assumed to be authentic, their existence serves to enrich a localised sense of history by keeping alive the hardships experienced or the achievements earned by the early pioneers of the district. The key difference between these two particularly enduring stories, of course, is that John Hamp’s murder by Aborigines is remembered for its brutality, whereas James Brown’s murder of Aborigines is deferred to the memory of a spectacular horse ride. It is surely not surprising that such dramatic, if apocryphal, features might attach to remembrances of the frontier era. Each detail adds local specificity to the region’s frontier history, and at the same time gives the frontier a generalised character with the pioneer experience at its heart.

  Yet many regional histories of the twentieth century also acknowledge that settlers often operated beyond the reach of the law. Sometimes European violence is excused as desperation brought on by Aboriginal stock theft and by an absence of sufficient police support, and at other times it is sheeted home to the less reputable characters who inhabited the isolated reaches of the early colony: shepherds who were of a rough and unsympathetic nature, or ex-convicts from other colonies.93 Yet the names of respected pastoralists, such as Yorke Peninsula settler George Penton, also recur as examples of a legal double standard whereby Aboriginal lives could be taken without charge or conviction. Penton and his neighbours were known to have organised punitive actions against local Aborigines, to have shot at least three, ‘and not one conviction recorded’.94 Such individuals serve as a reminder of how white men took ‘the law into their own hands and ministered summary justice’.95

  Beyond the question of how ‘blame’ is apportioned for the violence of the frontier, what can we take from the fact that, from the late ninet
eenth century and throughout the twentieth century, violent clashes on the frontiers of settlement continued to be recorded and re-recorded as a key aspect of regional origins? To a significant degree, the continuing visibility of these stories indicates that local historical knowledge has never been subject to the same kind of silence on the history of the frontier that pertained for so long at the national level. Well known events from particular regions have never disappeared from public circulation. The loss of life is remembered on both sides. On the one hand, cases of settler fatalities at Aboriginal hands remain firmly remembered as a sign of the tragedies of remote settler life.96 On the other hand, settler violence emerges as something discomforting, something that draws forth a side of pioneering life that ‘we would like to forget’, but is nonetheless remembered.97

  Chapter 10

  PLACING THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

  The 1967 Referendum and the politics of change

  While through much of the twentieth century white Australia had largely ignored, or only partially remembered, the terms of Aboriginal dispossession and the continuing neglect of Aboriginal rights, Aboriginal people knew their history only too well, and by the 1960s white Australians were beginning to hear their calls for reform. The 1967 Referendum marked the culmination of a generation-long civil rights campaign by Aboriginal people. While technically the Referendum changed very little – amending two discriminatory clauses in the constitution – its symbolic importance was much more far-reaching. Supporters of change campaigned on the basis that it would extend ‘citizen’s rights’ or ‘equal rights’ to Aboriginal people. The more than 90% of the Australian population who voted ‘yes’ were voting to the redress of injustices of the past and for the acceptance of Aboriginal people, without discrimination, into the broader Australian community. At the time, it was regarded as the day Aboriginal people ‘got the vote’, or became citizens, and many people still think of it in those terms today. As a number of scholars have recently pointed out, this is both a misrepresentation and a mis-remembrance of the Referendum. Aboriginal people had always been citizens, albeit citizens systematically denied many of the rights and privileges enjoyed by non-Aboriginal people. Furthermore, many of those rights and privileges had already been won by 1967. The right to vote, for instance, was extended to Aboriginal people at the Commonwealth level in 1964 and individual states were already over-turning discriminatory legislation. However, the Referendum galvanised the emerging mood for change and gave the Commonwealth a clear mandate to take a lead in Aboriginal affairs.