by Mark Mckenna
They had little time to lose if they were to beat the monsoon season. Over the next three weeks, the settlement was quickly evacuated. Everything Keppel saw during this short time—‘the heat and moisture of the climate, the land-locked harbour, the swamps and mud-banks, the mangrove marshes; and, in the case of Europeans, want of fresh … and vegetable diet, and of mental occupation and excitement’—confirmed his view that Victoria could never succeed. He was the last of the British to arrive and be immediately transfixed by Aboriginal culture. He walked inland with Aboriginal guides, watched corroborees of over two hundred and fifty people—three days of singing, dancing and feasting—and left praising their intelligence, ‘talent for mimicry’ and humour, although he was ‘disgusted’ by many of their cultural practices. One experience in particular remained with him: the burning of Country.
The conflagration spreads with fearful rapidity and violence, consuming everything in its way, creeping up the dry bark of the trees, running along the branches to the withered leaves, and involving everything dead or alive in one common ruin, until the whole country, as far as the eye can reach, is in a grand and brilliant illumination, which, to be fully appreciated, should be seen. It is accompanied by a low murmuring sound, interrupted now and then by the loud report of the fall or bursting of some large tree, well calculated to increase the melancholy of poor wretches worn out with sickness, and without hope of relief.53
Unlike Aboriginal people, for whom fire represented the promise of renewal of Country, Keppel imagined ‘the final destruction of our world’. He saw a land unfit for European settlement, consumed by an Armageddon-like inferno, devoid of both history and future. While he was busy loading the Meander with the settlement’s stores, Keppel lost his surgeon and one seaman to ‘fever’. They were buried in the cemetery, McArthur not even able to abandon the settlement before presiding over two more funerals. Just as Aboriginal people had helped to off-load Bremer’s ships a decade earlier, they now assisted McArthur and Keppel to evacuate, making the long trek from the settlement to the jetty and back again. For their help they were given some tobacco and several banteng cattle, ‘kangaroo dogs’ and horses that could not be taken on board. Keppel asked one Aboriginal man whether he would ‘take possession of the Governor’s house’ after they had departed. ‘I suppose I must’, he replied.54
On the morning of 30 November, when the garrison ‘marched down’ from the settlement to the pier led by the Meander’s band, the majority of Aboriginal people were busy searching ‘for what they could find among the ruins of the buildings’. After the initial waves of grief, they appeared uninterested in their friends’ imminent departure. Arriving at the pier, the 21-gun salute that had heralded British possession of the country in 1824 now signalled their retreat. That evening, before sunset, Keppel and McArthur carried out their orders: ‘We destroyed … what still remained of the settlement’. All leftover stores and provisions were smashed. The decked boat was blown up. This would apparently ensure that ‘other parties’ such as the Dutch or French would not ‘try their hands at a settlement on the same spot’. The very people who had struggled for more than a decade to build the settlement now reduced it to ruins. What Aboriginal people made of this almost gleeful act of destruction is difficult to know.55
On 1 December 1849, McArthur left Victoria Settlement never to return, the chalk-white cliffs that beckoned him in 1838 receding into the distance as the Meander sailed out of the harbour. He had devoted ten years of his life to a misadventure. The British government’s attempt to take advantage of the many ‘busy pushing capitalists, who [were] searching every quarter of the globe’ for trading opportunities had failed miserably. Over forty lives had been lost. Aboriginal people had been right all along. The white birds that had brought the British to Port Essington had come again to take them away, just as they had done at Raffles Bay.56
There had been other failed colonial settlements in Australia such as Risdon Cove in Tasmania (1803–04) and Kingscote on Kangaroo Island in South Australia (1836–39), but none had lasted as long as Victoria Settlement. After more than a decade’s struggle, what had been gained? In the eyes of the British government, the decision to abandon Victoria was not a relinquishment of sovereignty. On the contrary, the garrison’s decade-long existence demonstrated British sovereignty over Australia’s north and the entire continent. Any attempt by a rival power to usurp that sovereignty would be seen as an ‘infringement of the rights of the British Crown’. Strategically, it had been a success. Rival imperial powers had been warded off. The ‘ring-fence’ around Australia had been closed. Victoria could be left to the Aboriginal people to whom it once belonged. Only two years after the settlement was abandoned, Thomas Beckford Simpson, commissioned by the New South Wales government, arrived at Port Essington searching for Ludwig Leichhardt, who had mysteriously vanished on his third overland expedition. ‘Jim Crow’, who ‘spoke English well’, greeted him warmly and even slept on board his ship. Simpson was disappointed by the devastation that greeted him. ‘All the houses in the barrack Square were destroyed … the new hospital had been burnt in fact all the buildings with the exception of the Commandant’s house (which was gutted) and the officers’ Cook house had all been destroyed … the various roads and pathways through the settlement were scarcely discernible’. Only the cemetery was undisturbed.57
Remains of the ‘magazine’, Victoria Settlement, Port Essington, 2014
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The legacy left behind by McArthur and Keppel—particularly introduced wildlife—became the seed of future environmental destruction throughout northern Australia: banteng cattle (now the largest population in the world), water buffaloes, pigs and wild dogs. In their wake came cattle farmers and pearlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aboriginal people like ‘Jack Davis’ and ‘Flash Poll’, who were children during the days of the settlement, survived into the early twentieth century, surprising European visitors to Victoria with their Queen’s English, ability to recite prayers and psalms and their fond memories of McArthur and the marines. Eventually, however, Aboriginal people on the Cobourg Peninsula fell prey to the same lethal combination of violence, disease and forced removal encountered by so many others throughout Australia. After the ravages of a smallpox epidemic in the late nineteenth century and their removal to Croker Island in the 1950s and 1960s, not one Aboriginal person remained on the peninsula in the 1970s. Not until the passage of the Northern Territory government’s Cobourg Aboriginal Land and Sanctuary Act in 1981 did a small number of Aboriginal communities return to live on the peninsula. Today, only forty to fifty Aboriginal people reside there, sharing the management of the Garig Gunak Barlu National Park. Aside from the National Parks Office, situated 20 kilometres from the ruins of Victoria Settlement, no Europeans live there. More than one hundred and fifty years after the British deserted Victoria Settlement, Europeans remain occasional visitors to Indigenous Country. In 2015, some of the artefacts that were collected by the British at Port Essington and eventually deposited with the British Museum in London—including ‘the oldest known didgeridoo in existence’ and one of the oldest bark paintings in Australia—were exhibited at the National Museum in Canberra. Muran clan representatives Carol and Don Christophersen saw the objects not only as an opportunity to connect with their cultural heritage but also as a ‘sad’ reminder that ‘the collection of artefacts and the collection of human remains during the English occupation’ went hand in hand. Today, the Natural History Museum in London still holds the remains of ‘two West Arnhem Land people—a man and a girl’.58
As the Meander sailed away from Port Essington in December 1849, Keppel described how his crew held ‘corobories [sic] and dances so often, that frequently afterwards the kangaroo dance was as well performed on the main deck of the Meander, many thousand miles from the place where it originated, as we had seen it on the spot’. While Aboriginal people were left with English and the storied ruins of the settlement, the Br
itish left Port Essington dancing like the ‘natives’ they had originally disparaged. Both cultures had been transformed by their encounter with one another. Yet no-one on the Meander, McArthur included, realised that Victoria Settlement was close to the place where many Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land and beyond believed that the creation ancestor Warramurrungunji first ‘emerged from the Arafura Sea at Cobourg Peninsula’. In 2004, Croker Island Aboriginal elder Tim Mamitba told the story to Nick Evans and Murray Garde.59
We’re not certain where Warramurrungunji came from, but she came ashore on the northern part of Croker Island, having crossed the ocean. Once she was here, she gave birth to many children. And she healed herself by sitting on a combination of sand and hot ashes in that place where there are now many sand dunes … She first came ashore at Malay Bay … In each place she left some of her children. She kept on like that, leaving children in many places. She used to carry them on her shoulder in a dilly bag. She would assign each group a country, telling them, ‘You’re going to speak this language’. She also went to Eastern Arnhem Land, and she travelled inland, placing all the groups of children in different places and giving them different languages. We don’t [know] where she lay to rest. Maybe much further inland, where the kangaroos and wallabies live. The escarpment country. We don’t really know where she’s buried, where she is now, but we know she started from here on Croker Island …60
In one variation of the story recorded by Paul Foelsche, an inspector of police, in 1881, it was said that Warramurrungunji reached Port Essington and found it ‘good country’. There ‘she made a large fire’. ‘When this burnt down, the sea rose to its present level, while inland fresh water filled in all the springs and waterholes. [She] then left there the first group of humans, gave them their language and name, and continued inland.’ These were the stories that Aboriginal people chose not to communicate to McArthur, the creation stories that could not be overwritten by Father Angelo’s prayers or eradicated by a decade’s contact with British civilisation. Aboriginal people from Port Essington and beyond had found a way to coexist with the newcomers and retain their culture. At the same time they recorded the detail and drama of this encounter in their stories, songs, dances and art. Across Arnhem Land, world-heritage rock art sites document every stage of the region’s contact history: Makassan prau (the earliest painted before 1664), European ships, decorated hand motifs that probably have their origins ‘in the gloves worn by Europeans at the Victoria Settlement’, four-wheeled horse-drawn buggies, rowboats, English letters and numbers, pipes, coffee mugs and tobacco tins, Ludwig Leichhardt astride his armour-plated horse, images of Europeans on horseback brandishing Martini-Henry rifles, and also of missionaries, steamships, cattle, buffalo hunters, Chinese gold seekers, bicycles and early Qantas planes, all sitting side by side with the more familiar X-ray images of traditional art thousands of years old.61
The memory of this history is imprinted indelibly on every aspect of Indigenous culture in Arnhem Land. The rock art is their ‘history book’. They can never forget. Yet even today, non-Aboriginal Australia has forgotten much of its own colonial history and remains largely ignorant of Indigenous history. Few better examples can be found than the story of Victoria Settlement at Port Essington, one that was unwittingly played out in the place where the creation ancestor first came ashore many thousands of years ago to lay the foundations of Indigenous culture in the far north of Australia.62
CHAPTER THREE
‘Hip Bone Sticking Out’: Murujuga and the Legacy of the Pilbara Frontier
THE ‘CENTRALISED CONTROL room’ is dominated by two giant 15-metre screens which allow complete ‘visibility of performance’ from any vantage point; each huddle of computers represents a distant site or function centre. Employees gaze up at monitors stacked two or three high, shifting their attention constantly between as many as eight different screens. Everyone is somewhere else.
From this extraordinary technology hub in Perth, Rio Tinto ‘integrates production’ across the company’s mines in the Pilbara, all of which are more than fifteen hundred kilometres away. Four hundred operators synchronise ‘a system of 15 mines, four port terminals, and a 1700 kilometre rail network’. Trains and trucks are controlled and repaired remotely, while every step of the supply chain—mines to rail to port to ships—is closely monitored. Closed-circuit television in 200 locations across the Pilbara provides Rio with what it proudly calls ‘whole system visibility’.
Rio Tinto Operations Centre, Perth, 2015
The Rio Tinto ‘Operations Centre’ brings to mind television images of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, in which engineers and scientists appear anxiously before their computers, tracking every moment of a rocket’s flight into space. I later discovered that Rio had consulted NASA when designing the centre. No other space in Australia reveals as much about the way in which technology has changed our relationship with place. We not only observe places and people from a comfortable distance, as Joseph Banks spied Aboriginal people with his hand-held telescope in 1770, we haul them in from thousands of kilometres away, entering, controlling and altering their distant environments without being physically present. The natural cycles of ‘real time’ no longer apply. Rio’s Operations Centre never sleeps, operating twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, saving many of its employees from working in an indescribably hot, semi-arid region that many believe is best experienced by remote control.1
Vast areas of Australia exist in the national imagination in conveniently one-dimensional terms. Few better examples can be found than the Pilbara, a region of over 500 000 square kilometres in Australia’s north-west that George Seddon aptly described as ‘not precisely defined: the land between the Murchison-Gascoyne to the south and the Great Sandy Desert and the Kimberley to the north’. In geological terms, the Pilbara is one of the oldest regions in Australia, containing rocks over 3600 million years old and one of the world’s ‘best preserved fragments of ancient continental crust’. For geologists, the area is internationally renowned as a ‘field laboratory’ for ‘studying the early history of the Earth’. But for the majority of Australians, the Pilbara is a metaphor for mountains of iron ore, a fly-in fly-out El Dorado—the site of the mining boom that began in the 1960s and erupted most spectacularly in the early twenty-first century, driving the nation’s economy and enabling the Australian government to save the country from the Global Financial Crisis.2
In Perth, the corporate logos of the Pilbara’s mining and energy companies tower over the CBD skyline—BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Woodside. There is no doubting the major source of the city’s wealth. But like most Australians, few of Perth’s residents have firsthand experience of the Pilbara. The mining revenue flows in as if from a faraway galaxy, the physical reality of Pilbara the place always kept at a safe distance. Even when mining magnate Lang Hancock first saw the region’s iron ore in the early 1950s, he did so by flying over the landscape. Surveyed from above, excavated from afar and scanned for every last ounce of its mineral wealth, the landscape of the Pilbara is frequently reduced to its economic potential alone. As Fortescue Metals Chief Executive Andrew Forrest lamented in 2012, ‘there is literally several billion tonnes of iron ore in the Pilbara stranded by lack of infrastructure’.3
Few Australians know the Pilbara or its sub-regions intimately; the area entered national consciousness as a vast, history-less quarry when industrial development began in the 1960s. And like many other regions of the country, its past is known only by a handful of historians, archaeologists, geologists, local enthusiasts and, of course, Aboriginal people, whose oral, story-bound culture is inherently historical. To date, the connection between the rivers of lucre extracted from the Pilbara’s mines and the history of the region since Europeans arrived in the 1860s has not been understood. Nor has Australia managed to fully comprehend the source of the Pilbara’s most exceptional and enduring wealth—its Indigenous cultural heritage. In a region where many towns were establish
ed barely fifty years ago, the pre-industrial past can often appear insignificant compared to the scale and pace of recent development. History of all kinds—geology, archaeology, Indigenous and non-Indigenous—is easily obscured by industry’s gargantuan shadow.