by Mark Mckenna
Murujuga National Park comprises only 42 per cent of the peninsula. Angel Island and the entire Dampier Archipelago are excluded. Despite the fact that anywhere between five thousand and ten thousand examples of the peninsula’s rock art have already been lost due to industrial development since 1965, countless images continue to remain unprotected in the land earmarked for future industrial development. For decades, politicians have pleaded that they were ‘unaware’ of Murujuga’s significance. Even when they belatedly acknowledged that the peninsula was ‘the greatest cultural heritage site in Australia’ and perhaps ‘the world’, as the current Premier of the state Colin Barnett claimed in 2006, they have continually failed to honour their words when granted the opportunity to govern. Their ears are tuned to the siren song of development, one that has already littered Australia with the wastelands and deserted towns left by past mining.84
Thylacine petroglyph, Angel Island, Flying Foam Passage, 2015
The struggle to value Murujuga’s Indigenous heritage is the struggle to truly ‘see’ Indigenous cultural heritage as worthy of the same protection as non-Indigenous heritage. The thylacine engraving on Angel Island, which has stood for many thousands of years, is entirely unprotected. Yet the remains of European settlement such as Cossack, barely one century old, have been carefully preserved. Others, like Roebourne gaol, a place of immeasurable suffering for so many Aboriginal people in the Pilbara, has been saved as a heritage tourist destination. Our failure to ‘see’ is rooted in the long history of prejudice that we have yet to fully overcome. The legacy of the frontier endures in Australia’s national imagination, with its lingering visions of a vast, ‘empty’ country that must be made useful at all cost.
Out on the waters of the Dampier Archipelago, the view back to the coast is unforgettable. Mountains of salt and iron ore stand piled on the shoreline. Ships queue to load their cargo. Gas flames burn on the horizon. The clattering din of industry drifts across the waves. The town of Dampier appears encased in the development that gave birth to it. Yet long after the reserves of gas and iron ore have been exhausted and the industrial plants and ports have turned to dust, the rock art will hopefully remain, its abiding presence transcending all that we have rushed to establish on Murujuga in so little time.
CHAPTER FOUR
On Grassy Hill: Gangaar (Cooktown), North Queensland
THE HILL RISES abruptly from the water’s edge. From its windswept crest the eye scans 360 degrees: north towards Hope Vale Aboriginal land and along the wilderness coast of the Cape York Peninsula; south over Cooktown, its handful of grid-pattern streets and ‘historic’ buildings dwarfed by Mount Cook; east to the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea; and west across the snake-trail of the Endeavour River and the Great Dividing Range beyond. Here, on Grassy Hill, where the south-easterlies blow so hard they would take you away, the vastness and majesty of the continent seems tangible. The tip of Cape York Peninsula is still 800 kilometres to the north, the sprawling cities of Australia’s south-east two to three thousand kilometres away. Whichever way I turned, the undeniable presence of the country—ancient, abiding and storied—towered over the meekness of the tiny settlement below. I had come, like so many others, with the knowledge of what happened here in 1770, drawn by the sheer weight of the story. It was impossible to stand on Grassy Hill and not imagine James Cook’s ailing ship out on the water, desperately seeking ‘refuge’ in the harbour below.
The Endeavour River, Cooktown, from Grassy Hill, 2016
Long before the Guugu Yimithirr saw the Endeavour on the horizon in June 1770 they had heard news of its progress along the coast. Far to the south, on the beaches of K’gari (Fraser Island), the Badjala and Dulingbara had followed the path of ‘a mysterious white-winged object passing along the surface of the ocean like a gigantic pelican’. Some on the island saw it ‘coming up and going back with the wind at its rear, like a sand crab’.1 While the Guugu Yimithirr were prepared for the vessel’s appearance—reports of the sighting of a ‘strange large canoe’ had travelled north from Cape Tribulation—they were certainly not prepared for its entrance into their waters nor did they expect the visitors to stay. They were accustomed to seeing the smaller, transitory craft of the Torres Strait Islanders and the Makassans ‘looking for fish, dugong, beche de mer, trochus or shells’. What they saw on this day was otherworldly. Early on the morning of 17 June they watched as James Cook’s Endeavour entered the river mouth, its white sails billowing like clouds floating on the water’s surface. Led by two small boats that Cook had sent ahead to warn him of the dangerous shoals that ‘lay in [his] way’, he anchored the leaking ship about a mile offshore before finally beaching it on the southern riverbank. For the next three weeks, as Cook’s men patched up the Endeavour and until tentative contact was finally made, the Guugu Yimithirr closely observed the visitors’ every move. In years to come, they would refer to Cook and his crew as ‘Wangaar’: ancestors who had finally returned from the east, ghostly white. It was a deeply spiritual explanation that would prove ominously prophetic.2
Little more than one hundred years later, the foot of Grassy Hill would be inundated with thousands of white men ‘hurrying to and fro, [their] tents rising in all directions’. A police station, courthouse and customs office would quickly follow.3 Close to where the Endeavour was repaired in 1770, at the ‘foot’ of Grassy Hill’s ‘western slope’, ‘sailors and labourers’ landed ‘horses and cargo’ in their rush to reach the Palmer River goldfields.4 From the summit, the arrival of a procession of steamers was signalled daily from the flagstaff. Whitewashed timber buildings clawed their way up the slopes. ‘Old whalers’ set up their boiling-down works below, extracting oil from the livers of sharks and dugongs.5 In the 1870s, a complex culture that had evolved over 30 000 years and managed a rich and delicately balanced environment was ripped apart by hordes of miners and pastoralists in pursuit of Mammon. For the Guugu Yimithirr who survived, and for many Aboriginal people across Australia, ‘Captain Cook’ became the first of the British invaders and all of them—a series of cataclysmic happenings both past and present—more a body of story than a man.
James Cook climbed Grassy Hill alone on 30 June 1770. Sending some of his younger men to ‘take a plan of the harbour’, he walked at low tide ‘upon the hill over the south point to take a view of the sea’. Looking through his telescope, he scoured the harbour, trying to gauge the extent of the shoals that blocked his safe passage out to sea. He was uneasy with what he saw. There ‘were a number of sand banks or shoals laying all along the coast’.6 The thought surely crossed his mind that he would never see England again. In the future, many would climb Grassy Hill in his memory, combing over every word of the ‘immortal’ navigator’s journal, highlighting the ‘perilous’ situation of his ship after it struck the reef, praising his resourcefulness and ingenuity and that of his men, and seeking to erect ‘a shrine to the man’ who ‘found Australia for England’.7 They remembered fondly that it was at Gangaar that Cook’s crew first saw the kangaroo (an approximation of ‘gangurru’ in the Guugu Yimithirr language) and where the Endeavour’s artist, Sydney Parkinson, created the first written record of an Aboriginal language (about 150 Guugu Yimithirr words), and they dutifully printed his name on their maps. Gangarr became Cooktown. Waalumbaal Birri became the Endeavour River. Gaya became Mount Cook. Milngaar became Mount Saunders.8 Overwriting Indigenous Country with the names that Cook had sprinkled along the coastline of the peninsula, they managed, as one newspaper columnist quipped in 1954, to ‘convey nothing appropriate’, because names such as Cape York and Prince of Wales Isles were taken from the titles of ‘the disreputable’ family of King George III, ‘giving a raffish Regency air to the place’.9
In June 1819, when Phillip Parker King landed the Mermaid in ‘the very same spot that Cook landed his stores upon forty-nine years’ earlier, he was mindful that he was the first British navigator since 1770 to visit the site of the ‘enterprising commander’s’ ordeal. In early J
uly, he found pieces of coal near his tent. Consulting Joseph Banks’s journal he realised that Cook’s crew had taken the ship’s ‘coals’ ashore. King was jubilant. He had found a ‘relic’ from the Endeavour. He was the first in a long line of souvenir hunters who would give anything to hold even the tiniest vestige of Cook’s presence in their hands.10 In 1886, the ‘Working Men’s Association’ of Cooktown offered a 300-pound reward for the cannons that Cook had thrown overboard to lighten the Endeavour’s load.11 The ‘historic’ tree to which Cook had allegedly moored the Endeavour was destroyed by fire in 1917. Undeterred, locals preserved the ‘old relic’ by propping up the ‘piece of blackened and ancient log’.12 By the 1930s, the town itself was imagined as ‘sacred’ to Cook’s memory, ‘a place of pilgrimage’ for all those who valued the ‘history of the new nation’.13 There were claims (apparently supported ‘by Aborigines’) that a ‘cairn of stones’ erected by Cook stood at the summit of Mount Saunders, his name—‘carved with a chisel’—still visible on one of the stones. The search for the ship’s ‘ancient British naval guns’ and anchors continued.14 In 1969, an American scientific expedition found the Endeavour’s cannons, telling The New York Times that Cook was the ‘Christopher Columbus of Australia’.15
Two years later, divers found the Holy Grail—the only anchor that Cook failed to retrieve from the seabed before his departure in August 1770, which now rests in the James Cook Museum in Cooktown. Carried away by the discovery of the relics and the increasing enthusiasm for local history, Sir Raphael Cilento, former president of Queensland’s National Trust and one of the founders of the museum, described Cook’s storage tents, blacksmith’s forge, pigpens and sheep drying nets spread at the foot of Grassy Hill as a ‘transient British settlement’ which had ‘the appearance of a tiny sea-side village’.16 If the Guugu Yimithirr saw Cook as the embodiment of all that happened to them in the process of British colonisation, their usurpers came to worship him as the saintly father of white Australia, the first white man to plant the seed of ‘civilisation’ in far north Queensland. By the late twentieth century, Cook’s name was everywhere: inscribed on the highway north from Cairns, memorialised in Cooktown’s parks and museums, emblazoned on motels and tourist memorabilia, and eulogised on the lookout at Grassy Hill. The place that had been his for only seven weeks became his eternally in his absence. Far more than Botany Bay, Cooktown remains very much Cook’s town. The great man has never left.
Courthouse and other buildings at the foot of Grassy Hill, circa 1890
The story of Cook’s narrow escape from shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef and the seven weeks he spent at the mouth of the Endeavour River in 1770 gradually came to obscure much of the history of Cooktown and the far north. For most of the twentieth century, it not only helped to conceal the land’s true discoverers and custodians—the Guugu Yimithirr—it hammered home their dispossession with every telling. Cooktown’s ‘historic’ status in Australian history, reaffirmed annually from 1959 through the re-enactment of Cook’s landing, initially offered only one role for Aboriginal people: polite withdrawal. As Guugu Yimithirr elder Eric Deeral often pointed out, the Discovery Festival that accompanied the re-enactment from the 1970s only tended to reinforce the myth that Cook discovered Australia. And it cast a pall over what another Guugu Yimithirr elder, Noel Pearson, has described as ‘one of the bloodiest episodes in the colonial occupation of this continent’.17 The history of this brutal frontier—its remembering and forgetting and the society that emerged in its wake—lies at the heart of a remarkable transformation. Nearly two hundred and fifty years after the Endeavour was repaired on Gangaar’s shores, the story of ‘Captain Cook’—long seen by many Guugu Yimithirr as synonymous with their dispossession—became an instrument of reconciliation and the basis for a new understanding of Cooktown’s and Australia’s founding moment.
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In the 1870s, at a time when many parts of south-east Australia had already been settled for well over fifty years, far north Queensland was still imagined as a ‘silent wilderness’.18 The settlement of Gangaar that followed the discovery of gold was nothing less than an overnight invasion. There was little time for the Guugu Yimithirr to adapt and little possibility of negotiation. The newcomers—‘men of all nationalities’: British (including a large Irish contingent), French, German and Chinese (who came from other colonies and southern China)—had only one object in mind: to ‘ventilate the rich … resources of the district’.19 After James Mulligan returned with almost 3 kilograms of gold from panning along the Palmer River in September 1873, waves of miners followed in his wake. Other fields nearby were quickly exploited. Within months, thousands of ramshackle dwellings were ‘struck up’ close to where the town stands today—‘miserable huts, zinc sheds, any blessed thing that would shelter from the sun’s fierce heat was used as habitation’. The British talked of Cooktown as the ‘next capital of northern Australia’. For the Chinese, whose commercial acumen and market gardens quickly made them essential to the viability of the town, it was the ‘new Canton of the south’.20
In 1874, three to four thousand people were camped at the foot of Grassy Hill alone. Estimates of the influx in the first few years varied enormously; some said 15 000, with 12 000 of those being Chinese; others thought as many as 30 000, with 18 000 Chinese. The constant stream of new arrivals outstripped the harbour’s capacity. In the rush to land animals and cargo, horses were slung up suspended by the stomach; after being launched over the ship’s side they were ‘plunged into the water’ just inside the mouth of the Endeavour River. Many drowned as they swam or were towed ashore. No sooner had men arrived and made their first forays inland to the Palmer goldfields than many returned complaining that Cooktown’s reputation was unfounded. Rumours of ‘thousands of ounces’ turned out to be ‘hundreds’. Conditions were harsh. On the long trek to the fields, food and water were often scarce. The sharp-edged grass stripped ‘the skin and flesh’ from horses’ legs. Rain was either non-existent or came down in ‘incessant’ tropical downpours. Tracks were barely passable. By May 1874, ‘the first comers’ had already taken up the best mining sites. Ships full of ‘disappointed men’ began to return south.21 But those with more patience and resilience persisted. Still more came than left. Ashore, the whole scene was ‘noisily busy with workmen’. Pubs sprang up faster than general stores—the ‘Captain Cook’, ‘the Sovereign’, ‘the Red Lion’, ‘the Royal’ and ‘The Digger’s Arms’; more than fifty were erected within the first two years, along with a thriving Chinatown, joss house and market gardens. Nearly everyone’s aim was to get rich and leave. The highly mobile population was constantly replenished by new arrivals. Even today, much of north Queensland retains a large itinerant population. Yet for all the ‘hazy and mysterious’ dreams of a northern capital, few were committed to building a new society.22
To read the Cooktown and Brisbane newspaper reports of frontier violence on north Queensland’s goldfields in the 1870s and 1880s is to confront one of the most brazen examples of a ‘relentless war of extermination’ in Australia’s colonial history.23 The violence is forever etched in the language used to describe what occurred. As miners headed out into the fields determined to extract their share of riches, competing with one another as much as with the untamed environment, the attitude of many was to shoot the Guugu Yimithirr on sight. As the Cooktown Herald trumpeted as early as 1874: ‘when savages are pitted against civilisation they must go the wall. It is the fate of their race’.24 Observers remarked on the miners’ ‘warlike appearance’ as they walked to the goldfields in gangs: ‘arms and ammunition form as much a part of the digger’s outfit as his pick and shovel or his blanket’.25 ‘Protected’ by the ruthless Native Police Force that had arrived with them on the first ships, many miners saw the experience as an opportunity to hone their military skills: ‘rifle and revolver practice during camping time has become quite an institution’.26 While they noticed the natives’ ‘wonderfully constructed dams in
the river for catching fish’, they also occupied their campsites, eating the food that had been left behind as Aboriginal people retreated to higher ground.27 Wary of attack, the miners regularly burnt the grass around their camps for protection, which they guarded day and night. The names they gave to the places where the terrain left them vulnerable to ambush (‘Hell’s Gate’) or alternatively marked their glorious victories (‘Battle Camp’) indicated the ferocity of the ‘race war’ that would last for nearly two decades.28
From the very first incursion inland, there is overwhelming evidence that the war was the result of unprovoked violence on the part of trigger-happy miners eager to assert their authority. Initially ignorant of the lethal power of firearms, there were reports of Aboriginal men ‘grasping the very muzzles of the rifles’ as they attempted to ‘wrest them from the hands of the whites, standing to be shot down rather than yield an inch’.29 When the Guugu Yimithirr and their southern neighbours, the Guugu Yalandji, adjusted their strategies and responded by spearing cattle and horses or attacking groups of miners on their trek to the fields, reprisal killings were swift and merciless in their execution. Newspaper accounts of such expeditions from Cooktown require little elaboration: ‘they murdered two out of one party and had to pay dearly for it’; ‘whenever the black troopers came across … [Aborigines] they made short work of them’. When the ‘diggers’ surrounded groups of ‘natives’, wrote one letter-writer, ‘then commences the work of slaughter; they are fired upon, and those who are only wounded, are knocked on the head by either tomahawk or Snider [rifle] after which bloody scene the bodies are burned’.30