From the Edge
Page 17
The settlers in the north-west did much more than ‘merely occupy’ the land. They forced Aboriginal people to submit to their occupation. Richardson denied that there had been a massacre, only the application of ‘stern justice’ to ‘savages’ who he insisted were ‘incapable of understanding any lessons but those of Might is Right’. The result of the expedition, he argued, was overwhelmingly positive. There was ‘never any further trouble with natives. They became … good servants on the most friendly terms with settlers, and soon gave up bush life and poverty to enjoy plenty of good food and other luxuries’. For Richardson, all those who had lost their lives in the cause of bringing ‘civilisation’ to the north-west were apparently war heroes, like the leader of Sholl’s boat party, John Withnell.43 When he died in 1898, the author of his obituary lauded him as one of the colony’s founding fathers. Yet the dispute over the legality and morality of what occurred at Murujuga in 1868 had continued to dominate Perth public culture to such an extent that he was forced to defend Withnell’s role, threading fabrication with outright denial.
The time came, as it comes to all new settlements in Australia, when the blacks meditated a slaughter of the whites, and they began by killing a policeman and several other white men on the shore of Nickol Bay. When the news reached Roebourne considerable consternation arose, as the whites were few and the blacks many. However, Mr. Withnell went out with his team and one or two others and brought the bodies in for burial. A meeting was held to consider what steps should be taken to assert and maintain law and order. The general opinion was that the murderers should be at once arrested, if possible, but who was to do it? For there was only one policeman left. Those present at the meeting could all find excellent reasons why they could not form members of a party to aid in the work. Finally … [Withnell] broke his accustomed silence and said, ‘Any man who could see his fellow-man brutally murdered, as those had been, and not take steps to bring the murderer to justice had no British blood in him’. After that excuses were forgotten, a party was formed and the murderers were captured.44
By the early twentieth century, the Flying Foam Massacre was increasingly remembered as an example of a handful of exposed settlers who had no alternative but to resort to violence in order to assert their possession of the land. In 1900, when the former pastoralist John Slade Durlacher finished his memoir of life in the Pilbara, in which he sympathetically (if patronisingly) documented Aboriginal culture, he typically glossed over the evidence, depicting the ‘bold’ natives as the aggressors who ‘threatened the small band of settlers at Roebourne’, before defending the settlers’ right to ‘give the offending natives a lesson that they would not forget for some time’. For Durlacher, violence and intimidation were essential components of the white man’s ‘civilising influence’. What began as an example of merciless settler violence that deeply unsettled many Western Australians in the late nineteenth century slowly lodged in settler memory as an allegory of white vulnerability.45
When John Withnell’s wife Emma (the ‘mother of the north-west’) died in 1928, her obituary included her reflections on her friendship with Aboriginal women: ‘they seemed to delight to take down my hair, of which I had plenty, and hold it out in the sunlight while the others danced around me. They not only gave me their friendship and protection, but those remaining wept in grief when I left the district’. Yet when it came to the struggle between the settlers and Aboriginal people for land and resources, the author portrayed the settlers as victims, pointing out that ‘a number of the new settlers’ around Roebourne in the early days ‘were killed by the blacks’. No mention was made of the blacks killed by the whites.46 The wealthy pastoralists of the north-west who had profited most from the ‘silencing’ of the ‘natives’ went on to become esteemed figures in Perth society, condoning and even applauding what had taken place at Murujuga in 1868. Not until 1933, when John Watson, the same man who stood in a Perth courtroom sixty-five years earlier to bear witness to the callous and inhumane actions of pearlers in the north-west, published his memoir Pearling in 1868: A Tragic Adventure, were the foundation myths of British settlement in the north-west again disturbed by the Flying Foam Massacre. Watson, who had heard eyewitness accounts of what happened and was enlisted by Sholl only months later to arrest some of the culprits on Legendre Island, recalled the events at King Bay on the morning of 18 February, when McRae’s men attacked the Yaburara’s camp.
At daylight next morning the land party came upon a number of natives in camp, several of whom may or may not have been concerned with one or other of the murders They were shot down while others took to the water only to be finished off by the boat party. I leave it to the imagination of my readers to picture the public indignation that would he aroused to-day by such slaughter, perpetrated as it was with the colourable approval of the responsible Government official of the district. The men really guilty of the murders of Bream and the constable were not in the camp where these reprisals were made.47
Watson’s recollections were indictments of colonial administration, his accusation of ‘slaughter’ yet another reminder that McRae’s and Withnell’s expeditions were less concerned with apprehending suspects than killing as many Yaburara as possible. At the time Watson’s allegations were published, Indigenous people in Western Australia were not citizens, and even when citizenship was finally granted in 1944, state legislation stipulated that ‘full rights of citizenship by Aboriginal natives’ would only be given when they had ‘dissolved tribal and native association except with lineal descendants or native relations of the first degree’ for two years prior to their application.48 Indigenous citizenship in Western Australia was first predicated on the eradication of traditional culture. By the 1930s, Aboriginal people in the Pilbara were being moved by the government to ration camps and coastal reserves such as the one at Roebourne, 50 kilometres from Murujuga, in which different tribal groups were forced to live together under the control of the Native Welfare Department and the police. The circles that the first settlers had marked out around their homesteads to signal to the ‘natives’ that they should keep out were now placed around Aboriginal people to fence them in. Watson’s memories of the Flying Foam Massacre surfaced in a settler culture that was still preoccupied with managing the Aboriginal ‘problem’.
Ever since the first settlers had arrived in the north-west, government, churches and administrators had sought to determine the course of Aboriginal people’s lives—dispossessing them, enslaving them, ‘protecting’ them, civilising them, converting them, imprisoning them, assimilating them, removing their children and deciding where they should live, work and play. There was no escape from the meddling hands of white Australia. Although Aboriginal labour had enabled the establishment of the profitable pearling and pastoral industries and formed the backbone of the Pilbara gold rushes in the 1890s, their pivotal role as founders and pioneers was rarely if ever acknowledged. For all they endured, the most remarkable feature of Aboriginal societies was their ability to adapt and survive in the face of enormous dislocation, men and women walking hundreds of kilometres back to their Country when the pearling season was over, and their elders keeping their families and culture alive as they worked and lived on pastoral stations or the ration camps and reserves created for them by the government. Yet there was no denying the dramatic impact of the invasion.
Within thirty years of first settlement, the Indigenous population of Australia’s north-west had been severely depleted by a combination of disease, violence, sudden loss of land and disruption of traditional culture. It was nothing short of a revolution. At its forefront was the experience of the Yaburara, custodians of a Country imprinted with some of the most astonishing examples of ancient Indigenous culture in Australia, and who became the first Aboriginal people to succumb to British settlement in the north-west. In the seven years between 1863 and 1870, a culture that had existed for thousands of years was decimated. For years afterwards, the evidence of mass shootings continued to mou
nt. In 1946, Edward H Angelo recalled a ‘holiday cruise’ he took through Flying Foam Passage in 1892: ‘[We] landed on a small, unnamed islet about two miles south of Angel Island. Here we discovered numbers of skeletons. On inquiring later we were told that many years previously a white man had been murdered by natives … the band had been chased in boats, found on this island and wiped out. Judging by the skeletons the punitive expedition had done its job thoroughly’.49
In 1983, the scholar who did most to document the Flying Foam Massacre, Tom Gara, concluded that he was unable to find any examples of Aboriginal people living a traditional lifestyle in the archipelago after 1870. In the 1890s, the few Yaburara who remained had ‘sought refuge in an out camp of Karratha Station’. In the twentieth century, anthropologists and archaeologists referred to them as ‘extinct’, lamenting the fact that the people who knew most about the petroglyphs of Murujuga could no longer be found, their cultural knowledge having vanished with them. Today, there are only a handful of Aboriginal people who claim ancestral links to the Yaburara.50
In October 1869, as he sailed through Flying Foam Passage, Richmond Thatcher remarked on the strangely ‘beautiful echo’, ‘the plainest he ever heard’, his words coming back to him ‘with a rapidity and force quite startling’, broken only by the shouts of pearlers ‘anchored in the passage’ and ‘natives camped ashore’. By the late nineteenth century the echo of the pearlers and the ‘natives’ had fallen silent. The Yaburara were ‘no more’. All that remained were the mysterious ‘tattooed’ figures that John Withnell had observed on the rocks of ‘every hill’. In the memory of white Australia, Murujuga became a place like so many others, one briefly lit by a frenzy of commercial activity before being discarded—a place of no utility.51
Conveyors at Parker Point near Dampier shifting iron ore from stockpile to ship, 2015
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In 1968, Charles Court, Minister for Industrial Development and the North West, and later Premier of Western Australia (1974–82), addressed a symposium in Perth on the prospects for the Pilbara in the 1970s. Court’s portfolio said it all: he was charged with responsibility for overseeing what would become the most rapid and extensive industrial development in Australian history. Since the establishment of iron ore mining at Mount Tom Price and the first shipments of ore from Dampier in 1966, the Pilbara had changed, said Court, ‘from a mendicant area to a great producer of national wealth’. It was time to think ‘big enough and bold enough’, he declared, time to show those in the ‘eastern states’ and the ‘timid types’ who doubted the gospel of development that the north-west was not ‘just a piece of nothing’. The ‘starry-eyed dream’ of blooming deserts was close at hand. With injections of overseas capital, the government would harness the rivers to provide water for new cities and towns and vast agricultural projects. The development ‘multiplier’ would begin to take effect and very soon, Court told the Institute of Engineers, ‘2 + 2’ would equal ‘9’.52
It was an old dream. Western Australian politicians and ‘development leagues’ had long been concerned that ‘Asiatics’ would swamp the north-west. Rapid development was the only solution. For all those intent on ‘keeping Australia white’, decentralising ‘the white population’ was seen as paramount in a state where over 95 per cent of Western Australians lived in Perth, a city which had a population of only 900 000 in the early 1970s.53 As far back as 1888, geologists had known that the ‘iron country’ of the Pilbara had sufficient reserves ‘to supply the whole world’ but the cost of extracting it was too high.54 Even when new markets emerged and the technology existed to overcome these difficulties, the Commonwealth government, fearful of inadvertently providing the raw materials for Japanese expansion (and much to the dissatisfaction of the Western Australian government), placed an embargo on the export of iron ore in 1938.55 Not until the embargo was lifted in 1960 did Court’s vision of transforming the ‘vulnerable’ and ‘virtually unpopulated’ north into the engine room of the state’s economy become a reality.56
The Pilbara, which owed its name to a creek in the north-west goldfields, underwent the most dramatic transformation seen in any part of Australia since the Victorian gold rushes in the 1850s. From 1960, in a succession of booms over more than four decades, the fever for Mammon that had driven the pearlers and goldminers in the late nineteenth century would strike with even greater intensity. By 1971, when vast reserves of natural gas were discovered on the North West Shelf, 100 kilometres north-west of Dampier, government ministers spoke of their obligation to ‘seize the initiative’ and ‘collectively live up to the great promise’ handed to them ‘by nature’. Relying on age-old tropes of emptiness and God-given lands, they saw no reason to negotiate with Aboriginal people. Having unleashed the potential for profit on previously unimagined levels, the forgotten, ‘almost empty’ region of the Pilbara was once again open for business.57
In the space of only five years, new towns were established—Dampier and Tom Price (1965), Karratha (1968), Newman (1969) and Wickham (1970)—and massive infrastructure projects completed: power, water, housing, airports, roads and railways. By any measure, the sheer speed and scale of the development was staggering. Murujuga, previously separated by tidal mud flats, was connected to the mainland by road and rail causeways. And in 1979, Woodside Petroleum, the company planning the development of the North West Shelf Gas, bestowed its own name on the area—‘the Burrup’, after Mount Burrup, the highest peak on the island, originally named after Henry Burrup, a bank clerk who was murdered during a robbery in Roebourne in 1885.58 The irony of linking a place where more than fifty Aboriginal people had been murdered with the name of one murdered white man seemed to escape almost everyone. The tsunami of industrial development had little time for such historical curiosities.
Only four decades after the first iron ore shipments from Dampier, Murujuga was home to a raft of industrial sites: Woodside Petroleum’s LNG processing plant at Withnell Bay, Woodside’s port at King Bay, Yara Pilbara’s ammonia plant (the world’s largest), two of Rio Tinto’s three iron ore port facilities at Parker Point and East Intercourse Island near Dampier, and Dampier Salt’s crystalliser ponds and port facilities at Murujuga and Mistaken Island, all of which continued to hunger for expansion. In the process, an even greater irony emerged: as industry stamped its mark indelibly on the landscape of Murujuga, it inadvertently led to greater knowledge of the Pilbara’s flora and fauna and recognition of ‘one of the most important sites of Aboriginal art in Australia’.59 What the Yaburara had known for millennia was finally ‘discovered’ by Europeans more than a century after the first settlers arrived on their land.
One of the first moments of discovery occurred in 1962, when proposals emerged to place an iron ore shipping port on Depuch Island. Zoologist David Ride led a team from the Western Australian Museum in a preliminary survey of the island’s rock art and flora and fauna. Astonished at what he saw, and unfamiliar with Murujuga, Ride mistakenly thought that the island was home to ‘probably a greater concentration of Aboriginal engravings than any other place in Australia’. He immediately saw the rich heritage value of the art, despite the fact, as he admitted, that they knew virtually nothing about its cultural meaning and production. But it was Ride’s ability to convey the awe he felt before the island’s rock art that shattered conventional perceptions:
I, for one, will never forget the wonder of going up Watering Valley for the first time, pausing to rest on a stone slab by a small pool and then, suddenly, coming to realise that the rocks on all sides of me and above me were covered with carvings—birds, fish, turtles, boomerangs, little stick-men, and dancing men … and there, above all, high in the wall of the gorge were the two carved men described by Wickham [during the visit of the Beagle] more than one hundred years before.60
When the crew of the Beagle landed on the same island in 1840 they carved their ship’s name on a rock, leaving their own mark on the ‘lonely picture gallery’ that looked down on them from the
walls above.61 Ride, the first of many professionals who would come to the north-west on the coat-tails of industry in the years that followed, had seen what others before him had failed to see. A century after they were first seen by Europeans, he provided one of the first positive descriptions of the Aboriginal engravings, acutely aware as he was that they represented a depth of cultural expression far beyond the brief presence of European Australia. His findings appeared to have an immediate effect on the Western Australian government. Depuch Island was abandoned as a site for industrial development and the government turned instead to the Dampier area, where even less was known about the rock engravings. Edgar Lewis, the minister who wrote the introduction to Ride’s 1964 report, stressed the need for governments and industry to ‘behave responsibly’ and avoid the ‘needless destruction … of our unique native rock art and Aboriginal culture’.62 But his admirable ideals, rare for a government MP in the 1960s, would not be heeded. Large-scale industrial development was unleashed on Murujuga, the place that would later be described by Ken Mulvaney as one of ‘outstanding and unique ecological and cultural value; with combinations of arid and tropical flora and fauna, and a sequence of rock art production possibly spanning tens of millennia’. The Western Australian government could not have chosen a more inappropriate site to exploit the ‘natural wealth’ of the north-west.63