by Mark Mckenna
In January 1882, a passing fishing vessel discovered the bodies of Ah Sam, Mary and her child. Mary was reportedly found with ‘her head resting on the tank with baby Ferrier at her breast and a loaded revolver at her side’.73 She had died from thirst while Ah Sam had died from his wounds inflicted at Lizard Island. As the press told the story, she had been forced from her home by the ‘Northern blacks’ and drifted helplessly at sea, bravely clutching her babe and revolver to the last, her diary at her side.74 Her final plaintive entries—‘self very weak really thought I should have died last night … have not seen any boat of any description (no water nearly dead with thirst)’—were repeated so often they became the cry of the whole community.75 As soon as her body was found, Watson was exalted as a ‘noble soul’, the woman with a ‘kind and loving heart’ who became an Australian ‘heroine’ virtually overnight.76 Lizard Island became synonymous with her disappearance and death. Few recalled that it was from the ‘summit of Lizard Island’ in 1770 that James Cook spotted ‘openings in the reefs’, through which he eventually passed out to sea.77 When the bodies arrived in Cooktown for burial, ‘every public organization’ joined with the town’s residents in honouring the ‘courageous mother’. A memorial was erected in 1885 by ‘public subscription’, its white sheen of innocence still visible on the town’s main street today.78 For most of Cooktown’s history, the Watson memorial stood not far from the Cook memorial, erected in 1887, as the only monuments in town. Over time, Mary Watson’s story became an allegory of the bravery, integrity and irreproachable nature of the entire settler community. In Cooktown, ‘every child’ had heard the story: Watson and Ah Sam were apparently ‘greater figures’ than ‘Burke and Wills or any of the other tragic personalities’ in Australia’s history.79 Well into the 1950s, the story was published in newspapers throughout Australia, often in melodramatic tones that repeatedly emphasised the ‘treachery’ of the local ‘Aborigines’, which it was claimed far exceeded ‘that of the Aborigines in any other part of Australia’. Like the martyr Watson, the settlers were the noble victims of unjust Aboriginal attacks. They were not the perpetrators of war.80
Mary Watson’s voyage depicted on Cooktown’s history pavement, 2016
For Cooktown and north Queensland, the legacy of a frontier in which extinction was seen as ‘the blacks” natural destiny was profound and long-lasting. Lutheran missionaries at Cape Bedford recognised the tragic effects of ‘a number of terrible bloodbaths … in which almost all fathers of children who are now ten years or older were killed’. Observing the remaining ‘Cooktown blacks’ in 1898, WE Roth, Northern Protector of Aborigines, remarked on their ‘demoralised’ appearance and found it difficult to obtain information from them about ‘the habits and customs of the old days’.81 Suspicion, fear and animosity lingered on both sides well into the twentieth century. As the Brisbane Courier admitted as early as 1880, ‘all these years of unrelenting hostility and indiscriminate murder … have not left very friendly feelings behind them’.82 Interviewed a century later, Sister Denise Burns of Cooktown’s St Mary’s Convent, the great-great-granddaughter of John Savage, the town’s mayor in the late 1880s, recalled her father’s deep-seated fear of ‘the blacks’ in the early twentieth century.
I know that my father certainly … talked about the blacks as he used to call them and they were obviously frightened of them the way my father used to talk … [he] had some stories where he could vaguely remember of things the blacks did that had made him a bit hostile … towards [them] … it wasn’t a happy relationship … given just the attitude of my father and the fear in him about the blacks.83
The legacy of fear and hostility was passed down from one generation to the next. For Cooktown, north Queensland and Australia, it would take far longer to overcome the residue of mistrust than it took to create it. As the Guugu Yimithirr and Aboriginal people throughout Queensland entered the period of government ‘protection’ from 1897 and were moved onto missions and reserves, the settler economy that had displaced them was already in decline. By the 1890s, it was widely acknowledged that the alluvial goldfields were completely ‘worked out’. In the space of thirty years, Cooktown’s ‘heyday of prosperity’ was already gone. As one columnist observed in 1897, the future outlook was bleak: ‘beyond the mineral fields Cooktown has few other resources … [and] the pastoral industry, even at its best, cannot be counted as much’.84 Although a handful of Chinese businessmen remained until the early twentieth century, most Chinese moved on to other mining fields once the gold and tin had dried up, many encouraged to return home by unfair taxes and the passage of legislation (1877) restricting Chinese immigration. In the 1920s, the thousands that had thronged in Cooktown’s streets fifty years earlier had been reduced to a mere 600 people, and by the early 1950s the town’s population had dwindled to several hundred.85 The Aboriginal population of Hope Vale and Bloomfield missions, whose ancestors the first wave of miners and pastoralists had tried to ‘disperse’, now outnumbered the white population. The overwhelming image in the town was one of poverty and desertion; logs and rocks holding down corrugated iron roofing, pubs and businesses closed and goats wandering the empty dirt streets. Like so many other former mining towns across Australia, Cooktown had gone from boomtown to vanishing point in seventy years. In 1941, a visiting journalist described Cooktown as ‘moribund’, the ‘Ghost Town of the North’.
A white road drooping amid palm-trees, broad-leaved bananas and weeping figs to a ramshackle wharf now seldom visited by large steamers; a dilapidated township with fine public buildings fast falling into decay … a signal-station hill commanding one of the loveliest river views in Australia, a wide estuary of sapphire gleaming under a sky of king-fisher blue … To-day, whole blocks of buildings in the centre of the town have fallen down … It is hard to picture Cooktown in the days when it was the second port in Queensland … the blacks have vanished from the environs of Cooktown, early Cooktown history recording more than one attack upon townspeople who ventured too far into the scrub. The blacks have disappeared, but so have the Chinese and most of the whites …86
Beset by the ravages of fire (1919) and cyclones (1907 and 1949), its population further depleted by economic depression and war, Cooktown’s tale of hardship and struggle continued. Yet it was now cast through an increasingly popular memory of the early mining and pastoral days as ‘wild and romantic’ in which the contribution of Aboriginal labour and the frontier wars were almost entirely absent. Remembering the town’s ‘historic association’—James Cook, the ‘glories of the Palmer gold diggings’ and Cooktown’s natural beauty (the ‘Queen of the North’)—became another form of forgetting.87 There were two histories separated by a deep chasm: Cooktown’s, largely imagined as a ‘non-Aboriginal space’ and told as if Aboriginal people had barely existed, and Aboriginal oral history, which resounded with stories of the white man’s destructive impact—‘all these people gone’.88 As the Europeans and Chinese slowly deserted Cooktown, the Guugu Yimithirr remained in their Country, thanks to the extraordinary figure of Georg Heinrich Schwarz, the Lutheran missionary who arrived in 1887 and presided over ‘Hope Valley’ mission near Cape Bedford from 1890 until 1942.
By the turn of the century, Aboriginal people who were not employed were potentially subject to forced removal onto reserves or missions. Men regularly left their communities to work as divers in the bêche-de-mer trade. Traditional patterns of movement, culture and kinship had long been disrupted. ‘Whole clan areas were bereft of owners, and whole languages were left with few if any speakers.’89 On this ever-shifting and still violent frontier, Schwarz’s mission became even more important as a place of cultural refuge. Cooktown itself relied heavily on Aboriginal labour. In the 1920s there were up to forty women and children working as ‘houseboys, housemaids and nurses’, most of them unpaid.90 Despite the efforts to keep ‘Aborigines’ out of town, they continued to ‘come in’, drawn by all the vices that Schwarz was keen to protect them from, particularly prost
itution, opium and alcohol. Determined to isolate Aboriginal women and children from the corrupt influences of town life, Schwarz kept children away from their parents in order to keep them at school. He separated boys from girls, and by the time the girls had reached marriageable age their presence drew many Aboriginal men from across the peninsula to the mission. By the early twentieth century, Schwarz, who was largely dependent on government funding for his project’s livelihood, was also receiving children who had been removed from their families across Cape York Peninsula by the government’s protection agencies. Against the odds, he established a tight-knit community that nonetheless remained open to constant waves of outside influence. Hope Valley became home to Aboriginal people from all over north Queensland, its mighty anchor a stern, compassionate and strictly enforced Lutheran moral code. As a self-described ‘third-generation legatee of mission protection’, Noel Pearson explained how Schwarz believed that the Guugu Yimithirr language ‘best conveyed the gospels’ to the ‘hearts’ of his people. For the majority of the mission’s residents, Guugu Yimithirr was not their first language, but it gradually became the mission’s lingua franca. For Pearson, although ‘the missionaries’ kindness and humanity were mixed with the racialism of the time’, Schwarz was a ‘hero’ because he preserved Guugu Yimithirr language and culture and that of countless Aboriginal people across the peninsula. As another mission resident, Guugu Yimithirr elder Eric Deeral, reflected towards the end of his life: ‘I would not be here if it had not been for the mission. Nor would my language’.91
In some respects, Schwarz and his Aboriginal community shared a common bond. They were both outsiders. During World War II, when fear of Japanese attack reached fever pitch in north Queensland, Schwarz was interned in a camp for German ‘aliens’ while the mission’s population was evacuated from Hope Valley to Palm Island and Woorabinda, 170 kilometres south-west of Rockhampton. Aboriginal people living on fringe camps around Cooktown were left alone, suggesting that Schwarz and his community were targeted because of his German ancestry. But there were other reasons. As many Hope Vale residents later believed, their ‘long association’ (well into the twentieth century) working with Japanese fishing boats also marked them as suspect in the eyes of the government. While Cooktown’s residents at least had prior warning of the evacuation—women and children were moved to Cairns as the town became an advance operational base—neither Schwarz nor anyone in the mission community was consulted about the move. On 17 May 1942, shortly after the Battle of the Coral Sea, trucks arrived and took everyone away. Eric Deeral, who was a boy of ten at the time, remembered the day for the rest of his life. ‘We were shocked to see trucks with soldiers with tommy guns … we didn’t know where we would be taken to.’ Schwarz was barred from returning, while the mission was not re-established until 1950 when it was re-christened Hope Vale.92
The evacuation of Aboriginal residents from Hope Valley, 1942; image from Cooktown’s Milbi (Story) Wall, 2016
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Born in Hope Vale in 1955, Eric Deeral’s niece, Alberta Hornsby, ‘lived mainly with [her] grandparents’, ‘Uncles and Aunties’, and for a short while on Starcke Station, north of Cooktown. ‘My father applied for an exemption from the Aboriginal Protection Act in the 1960s’, she recalled, ‘and we left the mission and went to live in Malanda [on the Atherton Tableand]. My father worked on a dairy farm. Living on the outside was very hard for my parents, I think. I remember longing for the security of my grandparents’. When I spoke with Alberta in Cooktown, she recalled vividly how her father ‘hated the fact that Aboriginal workers’—their wages were sent back to the mission—‘were only given basic rations’ during ‘the station days’. ‘Dad protested that they should all receive tomato sauce from the station owner.’ But he ‘got a hiding from his older brother’ for making a stand. ‘Don’t you forget the station owner is the boss’, his brother admonished him, yet another reminder of how loyalties were rarely if ever neatly divided between white and black communities. Sent away at the age of ten to attend high school in Albury—‘a government and church initiative for assimilation’ that her parents believed was ‘the right thing to do’—Alberta was billeted to a Lutheran family. There, in the late 1960s, she found herself invited to the mayor’s office to take part in ‘National Aborigines Day’. ‘Together with another girl, I must have been the only school-age Aborigine they could find in Albury’, she said, smiling. Alberta fell pregnant at the age of sixteen and returned to live at Hope Vale, working in the mission’s administration as a single mother. Within a year she had ‘run away’ to Cooktown. Her adult life was spent shifting from Cooktown to Cairns and Brisbane in 1972, where she worked in the Golden Circle canned fruit factory and spent time with her uncle, Eric Deeral, who, in 1974, as a member of the National Party, became the first Aboriginal person to be elected to Queensland Parliament. Lunching with Eric Deeral at Parliament House, Alberta was drawn closer to the world of political and historical discussion. As for the early frontier times, both Eric and her father preferred to look forward: ‘they never dwelt on bad stuff’, she said. After moving back to Albury for a while—‘I had a good relationship with my foster family, it was my second home’—Alberta finally returned to Hope Vale in the early 1990s where she was reunited with her uncle Eric, with whom she already shared a passionate curiosity about Guugu Yimithirr history and culture.
Looking back on her youth in 2016, Alberta explained her attitude towards her Guugu Yimithirr heritage and life under government regimes that sought to dictate so much of her existence: ‘I grew up being a victim’, she said forcefully, ‘and whilst I was a victim, I don’t want to live with it now. If we go on being victims we’ll always have that attitude—you owe me’. Alberta’s cousin, Noel Pearson, has expressed his admiration for his people’s ‘determination to survive in the teeth of hardship and loss’ and at the same time encouraged Aboriginal people across Australia to leave behind the destructive impacts of ‘victimhood’, so often linked to a culture of welfare dependence. One of the most striking aspects of the long history of Cooktown’s frontier is that both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people emerged from the experience, albeit in very different ways, relying on narratives of adversity. From the 1870s until the last quarter of the twentieth century, stories of suffering, loss and survival underwrote both settler and Aboriginal cultures. Both believed they had rebuilt their communities several times over in the face of insurmountable odds. Both saw themselves as hard done by and as dogged survivors. Yet their histories and communities were still largely seen as separate entities.93
Looking north-west, Cooktown harbour, 2016
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Footprints ‘upon the sand’; ‘fires still burning’; clam shells and ‘roots of wild yam’ visible in the smouldering coals. ‘Houses’ and campsites deserted. No matter how far they pursued them, Cook’s men could only find traces of their presence. On 16 June 1770, as the Endeavour tried to get ashore, Joseph Banks spied four ‘Indians’ through his ‘glasses’ and watched as they ran away along the beach. When the ship was finally moored ‘within 20 feet of the shore’ two days later, he was again disappointed to find only ‘old frames of … houses and places where they had dressed shellfish’. To walk five or six kilometres inland was unnerving. The ‘steps of men’ were everywhere yet ‘neither man nor beast’ could be seen. Even when the ‘natives’ could be glimpsed momentarily, ‘they ran away as fast as they could’. For the next three weeks, while the Endeavour was repaired at Gangaar, the Guugu Yimithirr adopted one strategy towards the newcomers: avoid and observe. As Banks admitted, they had ‘discovered us before we saw them’.
In the absence of face-to-face contact and finding themselves unexpectedly stumbling through unknown country in the wet tropics, nightmarish visions arose. One of Cook’s men returned from ‘the woods’ claiming to have seen ‘a creature as black as the devil … [with] two horns on its head’. It was a flying fox. Everything about the country was ‘strange’:
wolf-like creatures, ‘slender’, ‘mouse’-coloured animals ‘the full size of a greyhound’ that ‘jumped like a hare’, and flowering plants with blazing colours that appeared otherworldly. Nature itself seemed to take on a monumental form: pyramid ‘anthills’ that Banks thought resembled ‘stones’ he had seen in ‘English Druidical monuments’ and that his fellow naturalist Daniel Solander likened to ‘Rune Stones’ in Sweden. Marooned until they could find a safe way out, they lived as hunter-gatherers: shooting ‘dinner’, collecting ‘wild yams’ from the ‘swampy areas’, hauling enough fish for a kilogram per man and searching for ‘Indian kale’ to supplement whatever meat they could find with ‘a few greens’. When the foraging was over there was the never-ending task of collecting botanical specimens and other objects of interest. Over two centuries later, some of the cuttings that were eventually deposited with the Natural History Museum in London can still be found pressed in the pages of Banks’s copy of Paradise Lost.94