by Mark Mckenna
In the early 1860s, there were between forty and fifty thousand Aboriginal people living in north-western Australia in approximately fifty clearly defined territories. On Murujuga and the islands of the archipelago, there were at least one hundred and fifty to two hundred Yaburara, possibly more, their numbers probably fluctuating throughout the year according to the season. Although they had no idea, in the eyes of British law their land was no longer theirs. When Major Edmund Lockyer, determined to pre-empt any possibility of French settlement in the west, hoisted the Union Jack at Albany on 21 January 1827 and claimed British sovereignty over the western third of the Australian continent, Aboriginal land became ‘Crown land’ and Aboriginal people became subjects of the Crown. What the law had claimed without negotiation—the ‘wandering natives’ were not deemed to own the land—would take many years of bloody conquest to secure.14
When the settlers arrived in 1863, Yaburara society was still intact. As custodians and practitioners of the countless rock engravings that covered Murujuga and the nearby islands, they lived in four to five distinct groups, and appeared to be on good terms with their neighbours—Ngarluma (to the east) and Mardudunera (to the west), both of whom visited them regularly. Their language, ‘meaning northeners’, was closely related to that spoken by the Ngarluma. Beyond archaeological and firsthand evidence of their diet—‘they netted, [trapped] and speared fish and turtles and, from their [log] water-craft, caught dolphins, dugongs, turtles and sharks’—we know little of their culture. Like many tribes on the north-west coast of Australia, they had long had contact with the Makassans, who had sailed the region in search of trepang since at least the mid-eighteenth century.15 As the first British settlers arrived on the shores of Murujuga, the Yaburara sometimes showed them the rock engravings, pointing out images on Dolphin Island of fish, ‘turtles, lizards, and different kinds of birds, including emus’. Gazing at these ‘drawings’, a handful of the newcomers recognised evidence of their ‘ingenuity and artistic skill’. But most who remarked on the engravings in the late nineteenth century saw only ‘rude figures on stones’ and ‘many men and women in a variety of vulgar attitudes’.16 Shocked by images of men with elongated penises and women in provocative sexual poses, they could only see what offended them. Little did they realise that for the Yaburara, who sometimes restored the images, merely to touch them was to ‘release the spiritual essence in order to maintain the balance of the natural order’.17
Within three years of the first settlers’ arrival, the north-west was transformed. Over one million hectares of land leased, a port established 40 kilometres east of Murujuga (eventually named Cossack in 1871), and an administrative centre founded 15 kilometres southwest of Cossack at Roebourne, which became the first town in north-western Australia. By the late 1860s there were well over thirty thousand sheep in the region, the first hard-hoofed animals to tramp the fragile Pilbara soils to dust. In May 1863, when Charles Nairn established the first settlement for the entrepreneur Walter Padbury, he landed his sheep at Cossack and immediately met several Ngarluma men on the beach—‘great strapping fellows … very noisy but friendly and incessantly begging for tobacco’. Three days later he asked them to lead him to water, which they promptly did. But Nairn found it too brackish. The next morning several of his sheep were dead after the water in the well ‘turned quite salt’. He watched them in the throes of death ‘frothing at the mouth and nose’, their carcasses swelling to ‘a great size’.18
Pilbara Country, inland from Karratha, 2015
Travelling north to the De Grey River in search of better country, Nairn soon realised that the ‘fine grassy country’ he saw from a distance was in fact ‘spinifex plains as far as the eye can reach’. As he journeyed north-east, he learnt from his Aboriginal guides to burn the spinifex ahead of him, the new green shoots sprouting so quickly that his stock had feed most of the way. Unaccustomed to the scale of the land, he kept looking for visual relief, exasperated by ‘nothing but the same kind of country’. The ‘dry sandy soil’ of the river channels he imagined ‘would absorb all the Rain of Australia & [still] be barren’. Not until he reached the De Grey did he become more enthusiastic: ‘this will be fine country for Maize Tobacco or in fact anything requiring good land & a warm climate’. Two years later, and not long after Nairn marked a ‘great event’—‘the first ground turned by a plough on the De Grey’—a severe drought brought the pastoralists to their knees. The country was far hotter than they had expected. Many settlers departed, convinced that the whole enterprise had been a terrible mistake. Meanwhile, the Ngarluma’s supply of roots, seeds and game was even more depleted due to the erosion caused by the sudden introduction of sheep. Long before conflict occurred, Aboriginal people struggled as Europeans occupied their most fertile land and disrupted their hunting grounds and traditional patterns of movement.19
In 1866, as the nascent pastoral industry languished in the face of the drought, the squatters turned to the other half of Gregory’s prospectus: pearls. Emma and John Withnell, wealthy squatters who held one of the largest runs at Roebourne, noticed Aboriginal people on their station wearing pearl shell necklaces. Intrigued, John joined them ‘beachcombing’ and soon had them out on his boat diving for pearls, which he immediately shipped to Fremantle and London. Other squatters told similar stories of observing ‘Aborigines’ near Nickol Bay wearing ‘pearl shell pendants’ before rushing to set up ‘a company’ to harvest pearls. It was not only Aboriginal land that Europeans assumed as their ‘property’ but the coastal waters and ocean beds too.20
Aboriginal people had collected pearl shells for thousands of years. ‘Carefully curated’ objects of adornment and ritual significance, they were ‘wrapped in soft bark or cloth and kept with an individual’s personal possessions’. Many were moved through national trade networks into the interior, far north, south and east of the continent, including Arnhem Land. The Aboriginal community at Port Essington would have known pearls from Murujuga and the Pilbara and Kimberley coasts, as would the Makassans. But European pearling entailed a completely different economy: international trade networks, exploitation of Aboriginal labour, enormous profits for a select few and intensive harvesting until resources had been totally exhausted. It was a model of development that would be repeated many times over in the Pilbara. By 1868 there were ‘swarms’ of pearling boats on the north-west coast and islands around Murujuga ‘contracting’ more than three hundred Aboriginal people. It was at this point that the Yaburara experienced the tidal wave of European invasion.21
With Cossack serving as the major port for a flourishing pearling fleet, pearlers were active in several sites near Murujuga, including Dolphin and Gidley islands. From 1866, they relied on a mix of ‘voluntary and forced [Aboriginal] labour’, competing with one another to secure the best divers, many of them women, and children as young as ten.22 Working along the north-west coast, they removed Aboriginal people hundreds of ‘miles from their home and friends’ to dive for pearls.23 As coastal people, the Yaburara were among the most accessible sources of labour, and they were regularly ‘contracted’ to dive for pearls. Essentially, this meant being cajoled or forced to sign indentures that placed them under the terms and conditions of the 1823 Master and Servant Act. Once they had placed their mark on the contract they became the property of the pearlers for months at a time, or as long as the diving season lasted. They were also subject to imprisonment with hard labour—either on faraway Rottnest Island or in temporary lockups in Roebourne—if they were caught absconding from their employment.24
At the same time as the Yaburara’s families and social networks were torn asunder by the removal of their men and women to dive for pearls, a smallpox epidemic, which began in 1866—probably brought by Malays who were also working as divers—severely depleted their population. It is difficult to tell how many died, but reports of many deaths along the coast and inland suggest that the impact was critical throughout the entire region. For the Yaburara, these were catacl
ysmic events. In order to survive, they took whatever they could from the stations nearby. At night, they left the islands and peninsula and raided the closest station at present-day Karratha, taking ‘bread … bullock meat’ and other provisions back to their campsites.25 As competition for resources increased and the large number of unattached white men began to ‘take’ Yaburara women, the seeds of violent conflict were sown. Seemingly oblivious to their own theft of Yaburara land, the enforcers of frontier justice hunted down Aboriginal ‘thieves’, captured them, chained them by the neck, walked them to Roebourne, convicted them of petty theft and sentenced them to lengthy gaol terms. Few of their captives had any idea why they had been imprisoned. In February 1868, one such expedition led to a series of events that would end in the almost total destruction of a culture that had survived for thousands of generations.
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It began with a seemingly minor incident: a Yaburara man stealing ‘flour and other stores’ from a ‘small boat’ pearling in Nickol Bay. On 30 January, Constable William Griffis, already bent on apprehending another Aboriginal man guilty of ‘petty thefts’, set out from Roebourne together with his Aboriginal guide ‘Peter’ and the ‘sailor’ George Breem to search for the culprits. ‘As usual, [they] were well armed, Griffis having a revolver, Peter a carbine, and both carried a good supply of ammunition.’ The story of what happened next and why will always be contested. The official account claims that after six days searching, Griffis finally found the man responsible for stealing the flour—‘Coolyerberri’—‘put a chain around his neck’ and tied him to a tree. That night, 6 February, Griffis, Breem and Peter camped with a pearler, Jermyn, on the shores of Nickol Bay, not far from Murujuga. Incensed by their friend’s capture and detention, a group of Yaburara men debated how to respond. According to the later testimony of the 14-year-old ‘Jacky, a native of the North West Coast’, who witnessed the discussion, considerable division emerged among them as to what they should do. Most argued that Griffis and his men should be speared to death as soon as they were asleep, while a minority such as Jacky insisted that this course of action would only incur the wrath of the settlers. The more determined among them argued that they were not afraid of the inevitable white reprisals: when they came searching for them ‘they would spear them’ too. By this time the decision was made.26
When ‘the moon had not risen high’, Jacky left them and went with the women and children and ‘the native men who were not savage’ to camp ‘over the hill’, barely four hundred metres away. Then, as he learnt shortly afterwards from one of the assailants, two hours before dawn, the others crept along the track towards Jermyn’s tent and set Coolyerberri free. As Griffis woke he was speared ‘in the chest’, his skull crushed by several men wielding tomahawks. Peter was ‘speared in the belly just as he was rising up’, and Breem, who tried to escape, was chased down and speared. Jermyn had apparently left only hours earlier for Cossack. No further trace of him would ever be found. After taking all the ammunition and ‘ransacking’ the tent, the murderers fled ‘to the westward’. Early the next morning, two ‘native boys’ alerted the pearler Henry Davis to what had taken place. Davis went immediately with them to the scene, covered the bodies, and after questioning a reluctant Jacky, who was ‘afraid’ to tell the truth, he learnt the identity of the three murderers and communicated the news to Horace Sholl, whose father, RJ Sholl, had been Government Resident at Roebourne since late 1865. Just before noon the following day, 8 February 1868, Sholl senior heard firsthand from Davis what he had seen. Sholl, who had already been pushed out of the Camden Harbour settlement further north by Aboriginal resistance three years earlier, was not about to allow the same thing to happen a second time. His response was swift: ‘as there seemed no doubt but that the intelligence was true, I ordered three coffins to be made. Our arms were also got out, and cleaned and loaded’.
Yaburara Heritage Trail, in the hills above Karratha, 2015
Sholl wasted no time in requesting a ‘few of the inhabitants of the town’ to meet with him and ‘discuss matters’. Reconnaissance parties were sent out promptly. The wealthy squatter Withnell and two other men left Roebourne that afternoon, ‘intending to ascertain the fate of Jermyn and warn the other men’. Sholl started at sunrise the next day, travelling with his son Horace and a ‘“Swan River” native, Jimmy’. The two parties met near Jermyn’s tent four hours later. They unsaddled their horses about three hundred metres from the murder scene and walked in carrying the coffins. The first body they saw was Breem’s, ‘about 50 yards to the westward of the tent’. ‘He was lying on his face with his arms stretched in front of him … [his] hands being clenched’. The spear that killed him was ‘broken off under his left arm’ having ‘penetrated his heart’. His remains were so badly ‘decomposed’ that his clothing had ‘been burst by the swollen body’ and ‘too much distended’ to enable Sholl to ‘put them in the coffin’. He had no choice but to bury Breem’s remains on the spot. Griffis’s decomposed, ‘naked’ body was ‘lying at the western entrance of the tent’. He had been so badly ‘mutilated’ that there was ‘no vestige of a face below the eyes’. Sholl wrapped his body in a ‘boat sail’ and placed it in the coffin. He then dealt with Peter’s ‘much battered’ body, which lay nearby, his ‘face (crawling with worms) a mass of corruption’. Peter was covered with ‘bags’ and placed in a coffin. The ‘stench’ from the bodies was so ‘dreadful’ it made them ‘all sick’. All of this Sholl reported in clinical detail, reading the landscape strategically, like a military officer in the heat of battle:
[their campsite] was a very badly chosen spot. From the slope, or even the summit of the hill, spears might be thrown with effect into the creek, while the mangrove belt, though thin, would afford cover for an attacking party. Even an armed party, prepared for an attack, would have to fight at a disadvantage in such a position.
Surveying the scene, he was appalled by the ‘reckless destruction’. He noticed that ‘the [victims’] clock had been thrown on the fire, but had slipped down the heap of ashes and was not burnt’. ‘It had stopped at 20m. to 4’, which Sholl thought the approximate time ‘when the murder was committed’. Picking up Griffis’s sextant and handcuff keys from the ground, he prepared to return to Roebourne with the two bodies. Jermyn’s horses had come back to camp the day before, their bridles cut, which convinced Sholl that he had probably met a similar fate to the others. Intending to bury the bodies the next day, his plans were thwarted by heavy rain, which filled the two freshly dug graves at Roebourne cemetery. Unexpectedly, he was forced to deal with the ‘awfully sudden death’ of the man who had originally made the coffins for him, carpenter James White. White drank himself to death, dying at 5 p.m. on 10 February, ‘during the heaviest of the rain’. ‘He was placed in the coffin he had made himself for Breem’ and the following morning, Sholl ‘read the service over his remains and those of the other poor men’. He had known all the men who had been killed, but none more so than Griffis, who he had worked with closely. Burying him was particularly hard. Sholl thought ‘his loss’ would be ‘much felt’ in the district. As he told his superiors, Griffis ‘was bold and fearless in the discharge of his duty, and was much dreaded by native offenders. He died while executing the law upon those who would, if not apprehended and punished, most probably have been more severely dealt with by those whom they had robbed, and possibly in that case the innocent would have suffered with the guilty’. In Sholl’s eyes, the ‘feared’ Griffis had saved the ‘natives’ he arrested from deadly reprisals by the settlers, an allegedly benign consequence of zealous law enforcement that would soon be shown to be false. His ministerial duties done, Sholl now turned to administering justice.
Aware that the ‘native murderers’ had fled to the islands near Murujuga, Sholl issued warrants for their arrest and appointed two search parties: one on land, headed by the Victorian squatter Alexander McRae, and another on sea, led by John Withnell. Lacking sufficient police officers for the jo
b, he swore in twelve ‘special constables’, including McRae and Withnell, agreeing to pay them two shillings per day for the duration of the expedition. Several ‘Swan River’ natives also joined them. It did not begin until 14 February, once the ‘horses were caught and shod, arms repaired, and provisions packed’. With the memory of the carnage at the campsite still vivid in his mind, Sholl asked McRae to read the funeral service for Breem. At 10 p.m. that evening, the members of the two expeditions departed Roebourne determined to apprehend ‘the principal murderers’ and avenge the death of their comrades.