Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Champion player of the Australian rugby team was Dally Messenger, a friend of the great cricketer and rugby follower Victor Trumper, who had earlier that year helped defeat the English cricket team with an innings of 166 runs at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Trumper and the entrepreneur and noted cricket umpire James J. Giltinan asked the working-class Messenger whether for a fee of £50 he would cross to a new code if it were founded. The inauguration of this new code occurred in 1907 at Bateman’s Crystal Hotel in Sydney. So many players followed Messenger over that by the code’s first day of play, 20 April 1908, the League was able to field eight teams. It was the almost immediate popularity of rugby league which further prevented the spread of Australian Rules into Eastern Australia.

  South Sydney were the first premiers, and an Australian team, ‘the Kangaroos’, was selected to leave for England to play in the northern winter of 1908–09. Dally Messenger was the star of that first touring team. One test match against England was played and drawn at Everton. James J. Giltinan, the backer of the English tour, ran out of money and was not able to return all of his players to Australia. Some of them, like Jim Devereux from North Sydney, who scored the first try in the first game of the Australian Rugby League, played for the English club Hull, and it would be 1918 before he returned home.

  ‘I would be idle to deny that the League made a spectacular display,’ wrote Gordon Inglis, a sporting commentator, but ‘neither schools nor university are likely to waver in their allegiance to Rugby [Union]’. Indeed, many splendid players stayed with the Union and represented the national team, the Wallabies, across the world. So eastern Australia retained twin rugby obsessions which would, for the time being, drive out what the Victorians thought of as the true national game.

  In the meantime, though the League continued to poach players from union, union officials in Australia increasingly looked upon the playing of even one rugby league game as a loss of amateur virginity and a transgression of gentlemanly principles and amateurism. The adherence of the private schools and the university to rugby helped create a class difference between the two games. At a schoolboy level, rugby league was played not by the Great Public Schools but in the main by state schools and Catholic parochial and brothers’ schools. Often in eastern Australia when a person said, ‘I support rugby union myself’, he was not stating necessarily a sporting preference but the fact that he had been to one of the better schools.

  No such distinction existed in Melbourne, where everyone, from the chairmen of banks to factory workers, were crazy for their game. But when it came to football, Australia remained unfederated.

  CATTLE STATION BLACKS AND DROVERS’ BOYS

  In remote Australia, there were other games afoot. Aborigines sometimes worked for European dingo hunters, crocodile and buffalo shooters, for the snakeskin and possum-skin collectors and gold and tin miners, the latter at such places as Bamboo Creek south of Darwin, and in small camps in the Pilbara and Kimberley. Tin miners used Aboriginal women to ‘yandy’ the tin, that is, to use the normal plant-collecting coolamon to wash light soils away from the heavier, remaining flecks of tin. The use of Aboriginal women in gold and tin camps was sexual as well, and their treatment varied. One witness said that in the early 1900s at the Starcke River tin and gold mine north of Cooktown in Queensland, two brothers named Webb maintained a rough code of honour in the camp, and beat severely a man who attempted to have sex with an Aborigine without her consent.

  Sometimes Aboriginal men employed to wash soil brought in only enough mineral to keep the European prospector happy, and sold the residue themselves. In Western Australia, at the Shaw tin fields in 1906, Aborigines washed tin out of the soil quite profitably. Early in some of these relationship with Europeans, the Aborigines were negotiating as equals.

  Once the mustering of cattle or the shearing of sheep had been attended to, Aboriginal stock workers were sometimes put to work diving for shell and pearls off the coast on behalf of their pastoral bosses. Those on the tropical coasts of Australia found that working on a pearl lugger was adventurous but hard, and involved great risks to health. During the 1880s the diving suit was introduced, but even where it was used Aborigines still did not want to work as deep-sea divers, even though experienced divers could have a share of the profits and a cash advance of up to £100. In Darwin many Aborigines worked as servants—by the end of World War I one out of every five local natives was a Darwin domestic, retiring in the evenings to humpies in the mangroves of Frances Bay or elsewhere. Most European children in the north of Australia were raised by Aboriginal domestics and were sometimes suckled by them.

  But the vast majority of native peoples employed in the Northern Territory worked in the cattle industry, where their wages were lower and their living conditions more squalid than those of white stockmen. Various acts passed between 1897 and 1911 in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory set down rations, clothing, medical care and wages as essential obligations for those who attained a permit to employ Aborigines, but the regulations, over such reaches of space and bad roads, were hard to police and did not specify minimum wages. Payment was in fact often in rations, which attracted stockmen and their families but took them away from traditional food sources.

  Many Aboriginal men and women, however, liked working on the cattle stations, riding stock, chasing cattle which broke away from the herd, mustering, and exercising all the skills that went with it. Their capacity to track also allowed them to find stock in remoter parts of the enormous stations. All this earned them a respect not easily extended to them elsewhere in Australian society. In the case of just bosses, native stockmen came to admire the station boss who worked so closely with them. There were some bosses who in the off-work season helped their stockmen and women to travel back to their country for ceremonies and even to their ceremonial sites. Often, though, after a time in the bush, they found that they were not the hunters their parents had been, and so came back to the station for rations. One Aborigine would eventually complain to author and boundary rider Bill Harney, ‘Having no clothes to change into [they were issued only one set of clothing at a time] we were always dirty . . . our hands were our plate, our pannikin was a used tin from a rubbish heap.’

  Women, sometimes domestics in the station, were also cattle workers themselves. They dressed the same as the stockmen and were equally good riders. The institution of ‘the drover’s boy’ came into being. The bush aphorism declared that, ‘Women drovers work all day in the saddle and all night in the swag.’ At Hermannsburg mission west of Alice Springs, the German Lutheran missionaries criticised the pastoralists for luring young Aborigines away, using the women to drove cattle and for sexual partners. Women were kept for purposes of sex on all stations, the missionaries asserted, and syphilis was widespread amongst both white stockmen and Aborigines.

  Sometimes Aboriginal stockmen decided to escape the station. In 1905 Pierce Smith, who managed Hodgson Downs (near Minyeri) for the Eastern and African Cold Storage Supply Company, was beginning to set up in his own right on the edges of that property, and recruited a Marra couple named Tiger and Jenny. One night in 1906 the pair absconded from the station and made a camp on a high hill. Smith tracked them down next morning and tried to talk them into returning. Tiger declared that he wasn’t going back. ‘By and by you shoot me there longa house.’ Smith now raised his rifle in any case and shot both Tiger and Jenny. Tiger died quickly, but Jenny was wounded and crawled up to Tiger’s side. Other Aboriginal stockmen with Smith rode up the hill and comforted her, and then helped to cover Tiger’s body with leaves and branches. Jenny was taken away for treatment. In distant Melbourne the Commonwealth of Australia was legislating for an entire federated system, but up in the north each station boss was his own unconfederated master of the locals.

  FOR FEAR OF JAPAN

  Australians became galvanised by the Japanese success against the Russians in 1905, and would not cease
to be alarmed by them until their overthrow as a world power in the 1940s. It is hard to imagine now the shock to the whole world of the defeat of Russia by an Asian nation—and not merely the defeat, but the near obliteration of the Russian navy. Japan and Russia had clashed in 1904 over control of Korea and Manchuria. The war had begun with a Japanese attack on the Russian naval base of Port Arthur (Lu-Shun), which the Russians had leased (by duress) from China. The Russians had also been attacked in Manchuria and forced to withdraw. But the greatest shock to the status of white men came when two-thirds of the Russian Baltic fleet, which in October 1904 had sailed around the world to confront their enemy, was sunk in Tsushima Strait between Korea and the coast of Japan. Despite Australia’s immediate apprehension, the hope remained that the British navy would always protect Australia from the Japanese, but the British had recently renewed the naval treaty they had signed with the Japanese in 1902. The treaty agreed that Korea should become Japan’s sphere of interest and China remain Britain’s, but it bespoke a certain unease as to whether Britain could hold the Japanese in the northern Pacific.

  Australian concern generated the popular 1909 book by C.H. Kirmess, The Australian Crisis. Kirmess was the nom de plume of Anglo-Australian newspaperman Frank Ignatius Fox, a friend of Deakin and a subscriber with him to the doctrines of Protectionism and White Australia. The fear men such as he harboured was that Britain might not take adequate action to support Australia in a clash with Japan, and this was eloquently expressed in the novel. Downing Street does not react strongly when Japanese forces invade northern Australia. Britain has to choose between its Pacific ally, Japan, and its Australian kinsmen. ‘For immense issues were at stake: on the one hand, the estrangement of a proud nation [Japan] whose alliance was invaluable in Asia; on the other, fierce colonial resentment. British interest, paramount to all other considerations, demanded dilatory treatment of this awkward complication.’ And dilatory and evasive treatment is what the British give in Kirmess’s novel. While British diplomacy applies itself to Japan, the invader establishes himself, opposed only by the Australian White Guard, on the four-square but embattled resistance front. When, at the novel’s close, the White Guard have been defeated, the British put an imperial garrison into the Northern Territory, and ‘the excellent relations between the garrison and the invaders increased the disgust of the Commonwealth patriots’.

  Worst of all, white women, British and Australian, breed with the invaders and beget ‘little brown babies . . . and the white heirs of the continent had to stand by impassively condemned to look on and to record the event’. Apart from a frenzy over miscegenation, there emerges in the novel both an admiration and a fear of Japanese ingenuity, social cohesion, engineering and hygiene. The Japanese are at the same time too clever and too debased to have a right to Australia.

  The Big Five, by Ambrose Pratt, a Sydney Bohemian lawyer and former supercargo on a blackbirder, was another novel of Australian dread, published in 1911. It begins with the British doing what Australians had always feared they would do—withdrawing their fleet from the Pacific. The result is the establishment of a large colony of Asians in the Northern Territory. At this the Australians form, again, a ‘white guard’ to fight the Japanese, but at the close of the novel they are overwhelmed.

  The Australian colonies cherished Britishness to the extent that in South Australia in 1856, legislation had been passed to exclude non-British settlers and naturalised aliens from membership of the legislature. And even being a naturalised alien was a limited good. Until Australian Federation, a naturalised subject of one colony did not become a formerly foreign naturalised subject of the United Kingdom or another colony unless he went through a legal process. Thus one could be naturalised in, say, South Australia but revert to being an alien as soon as you crossed the border to Victoria. This was a constant grievance in the colonial German press. But colonial Britons pointed to the Lutheran schools in South Australia and along the Murray in New South Wales where classes were conducted in German, and based on the Prussian system of education, and declared that the German settlers felt superior to the Australo-British. Lutheran church services were entirely in German as well. But the desire for a naturalised form of citizenship which would be good for the whole continent was probably one of the reasons the German community would vote for Federation.

  Martin Basedow, born near Hamburg, was the owner-editor of the Tanunda Deutsche Zeitung, founded in 1863, which became in time the Australische Deutsche Zeitung. He was interested in German community issues but also social questions, the Labor movement and Australian Federation. He declared that the Germans, with their ‘honour, sentiment, gemutlichkeit, obedience to superiors’, were natural collaborators with the British. Such talk was partially lip service, because some in the German community rather hopefully foresaw Australia and New Zealand breaking with Britain. His father-in-law, the reforming Lutheran pastor Dr Carl Wilhelm Ludwig Muecke, who often wrote for Basedow’s paper, had said in 1875, ‘Not Germans, not Englishmen: we want to be Australians.’ Basedow himself argued that if the British government empowered Australia to make treaties with foreign countries, then only the monarchic link would remain and the colonies might be neutral should the United Kingdom go to war. But German ambitions in New Guinea and the Pacific in general in the 1880s put the German–Australians at odds with the British-derived Australians. German society believed that the British Empire was on the wane, and so to an extent did the German community in the United States and Australia, and that it was a mere inevitability that the German Empire would replace it.

  The dreams of Martin Basedow would be subverted by world events. Once war broke out, naturalised Germans were immediately suspected of collabor-ating with intelligence-gathering networks based in the consulates. Consular officials and German businessmen were interned under the Trading With the Enemy Act, 1914. Unhappily, the spread of anti-German hysteria resulted in the reporting of innocent people of German origin or background. Some Germans might even have sought internment as a means of survival. Any German reservists who happened to be travelling in Australia or passing through when war began were also interned, as were the sailors on German vessels in Australian ports. Once rounded up, German colonial officials, and nationals and their families in New Guinea and elsewhere, were also brought to camps in Australia. But to intern German-born naturalised citizens, and native-born Australians of German ancestry, required a special act of Parliament, which was quickly passed as the War Precautions Act, 1914. Nearly 7000 enemy aliens were interned from 1915 to 1919, and of these 4500 were residents of Australia before the outbreak of war. This included some 700 naturalised British. Thousands more lived under suspicion in the wider community and were not interned. Did the authorities act in relation to aliens on the basis of genuine information, or were they behaving as frenzied British jingoes?

  The argument could go either way, but things could have been much worse for local Germans and Australians of German descent. At the opening of hostilities there had been a public desire for more sweeping detention than that. War committees had been set up in Australian universities, and Professor Archibald Strong of Melbourne was the eloquent spokesman of the university intellectuals when he argued that for a generation Germans had been schooled in the belief that Germany’s destiny was to dominate Britain and seize all its colonies. Perhaps he was overstating the issue when he declared: ‘Australia still has to learn, or still to feel acutely, that she has even more stake in the present war than has England.’ But he was certainly voicing a popularly held belief.

  Many academics toured Australia warning that German Kultur—German achievements and the way they underpinned German destiny—was a great threat, and so young men should enlist, and trade unions should not hinder the war effort. The Bryce Report on German atrocities in Belgium—named to honour its chairman, Viscount James Bryce—arrived in Australia soon after its publication in Britain and America in early 1915, and it featured highly
coloured accounts of German savagery in Belgium and sharpened Australian anti-German fury. As a result, German Australians such as Dr Eugen Hirschfeld, who had worked to spread the German language in schools, and Carl Zoeller, a prominent businessman in Brisbane, together with various Lutheran pastors, were interned and afterwards deported. German clubs whose name or program included that fatal word Kultur were closed down.

  Britons, now uppermost on the local council, or able to control and compel the alarmed naturalised German Australians, proposed that the name of Germanton, a prosperous farming town north of Albury, should be changed. The name Germanton had arisen, people pointed out, only because John Christopher Pabst and his family ran a hotel store on the Great South Road around which the town had coalesced. The undersecretary of the Department of Lands proposed to the citizens of Germanton the names Kitchener and Holbrook, and the council chose Holbrook, the latter name being that of the commander of the submarine AE2, who had won a Victoria Cross for sinking Turkish shipping in the Dardanelles in December 1914.

  The German-born felt a natural sympathy for their motherland, probably all the more so as their adopted country treated them with scorn. In May 1915 Paul Schmoork was arrested after mentioning German military superiority in a hotel in Jindera. August Heppner from Gerogery was arrested in an Albury hotel for basically the same crime. F.W. Scrimes, the teacher at West Gerogery, claimed that German parents were punishing their children if they praised the valour of the Australians at Gallipoli or if they sang the soldiers’ song ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. Some local Germans sported pictures of Germany and even of the Kaiser and Bismarck in their houses. There was by now such a fury against Germans that when fifty members of the Albury militia battery marched to the railway station to catch a train and become part of the AIF, some of them were asked to fall out of the ranks and remain behind. They were all young men whose parents were natives of Germany.