Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  The arrival in Australia of the Aborigines is, of course, merely the start of the story. They also mastered the continent. They spread over it with amazing swiftness and developed strategies and patterns of behaviour to exploit or accommodate every extreme of the landscape, from the wettest rainforests to the driest deserts. No people on earth have lived in more environments with greater success for longer. It is generally accepted that the Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture in the world. It is thought by some – the respected prehistorian John Mulvaney, for instance – that the Australian language family may be the world’s oldest. Their art and stories and systems of beliefs are indubitably among the oldest on earth.

  These are obviously important and singular achievements, too. They provide incontestable evidence that the early Aboriginal peoples spoke and cooperated and employed advanced technological and organizational skills at a time much earlier than anyone had ever supposed. And how much notice do these achievements get? Well, again, until recently, virtually none. I had this brought home to me with a certain unexpected forcefulness when, after leaving Alan and Carmel and flying to Sydney, I went for an afternoon to the State Library of New South Wales. There while browsing for something else altogether I came across a 1972 edition of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Archaeology. Curious to see what it had to say about the findings at Lake Mungo three years earlier, I took it down to have a look. It didn’t mention the Mungo findings. In fact, the book contained just one reference to Australia’s Aborigines, a sentence that said: ‘The Aborigines also evolved independently of the Old World, but they represent a very primitive technical and economic phase.’

  That was it – the entire discussion of Australia’s indigenous culture by a scholarly volume of weight and authority, written in the last third of the twentieth century. When I say these are the world’s invisible people, believe me these are the world’s invisible people. And the real tragedy is that that is only the half of it.

  From the first moment of contact the natives were a source of the deepest wonder to the Europeans. When James Cook and his men sailed into Botany Bay they were astonished that most of the Aborigines they saw sitting on the shore or fishing in the shallows from frail bark canoes seemed hardly to notice them. They ‘scarce lifted their eyes from their employment’, as Joseph Banks recorded. The creaking Endeavour was clearly the largest and most extraordinary structure that could ever have come before them, yet most of the natives merely glanced up and looked at it as if at a passing cloud and returned to their tasks.

  They seemed not to perceive the world in the way of other people. No Aboriginal language, for instance, had any words for ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ – extraordinary omissions in any culture. They had no chiefs or governing councils, wore no clothes, built no houses or other permanent structures, sowed no crops, herded no animals, made no pottery, possessed almost no sense of property. Yet they devoted disproportionate efforts to enterprises that no one even now can understand. All around the coast of Australia the early explorers found huge shell mounds, up to thirty feet high and covering at the base as much as half an acre. Often these were some distance inland and uphill. The Aborigines clearly had made some effort to convey the shells from the beach to the mounds – one midden was estimated to contain 33,000 cubic metres of shells – and they kept it up for an enormously long time: at least 800 years in one case. Why did they bother? No one knows. In almost every way it was as if they answered to some different laws.

  A few Europeans – Watkin Tench and James Cook notably – viewed the Aborigines sympathetically. In the Endeavour Journal Cook wrote: ‘They may appear to some to be the most wretched people on earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans. They live in a tranquillity which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition: the earth and the sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary for life . . . they seemed to set no value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own.’ Elsewhere, he added with a touch of poignancy: ‘All they seem’d to want was for us to be gone.’

  Unfortunately, few others were so enlightened. For most Europeans, the Aborigines were simply something that was in the way – ‘one of the natural hazards’, as the scientist and natural historian Tim Flannery has described it. It helped to regard them as essentially subhuman, a view that persisted well into the twentieth century. As recently as the early 1960s, as John Pilger notes, Queensland schools were using a textbook that likened Aborigines to ‘feral jungle creatures’. When they weren’t subhuman, they were simply inconsequential. In the same period, a Professor Stephen Roberts produced a fat and scholarly tome entitled A History of Australian Land Settlement, which managed to survey the entire period of European occupation and displacement without mentioning the Aborigines once. Such was the marginalization of the native peoples that until 1967 the federal government did not even include them in national censuses – did not, in other words, count them as people.

  Largely for these reasons no one knows how many Aborigines were in Australia when Britons first settled it. The best estimates suggest that at the beginning of occupation the Aboriginal population was about 300,000, though possibly as high as a million. What is certain is that in the first century of settlement those numbers fell catastrophically. By the end of the nineteenth century the number of Aborigines was probably no more than 50,000 or 60,000. Most of this decline, it must be said, was inadvertent. Aborigines had almost no resistance to European diseases: smallpox, pleurisy, syphilis, even chickenpox and the milder forms of influenza often cut swathes through the native populations. But where Aborigines remained, they were sometimes treated in the most heartless and wanton manner.

  In Taming the Great South Land, William J. Lines details examples of the most appalling cruelty by settlers towards the natives – of Aborigines butchered for dog food; of an Aboriginal woman forced to watch her husband killed, then made to wear his decapitated head around her neck; of another chased up a tree and tormented from below with rifle shots. ‘Every time a bullet hit,’ Lines reports, ‘she pulled leaves off the tree and thrust them into her wounds, till at last she fell lifeless to the ground.’ What is perhaps most shocking is how casually so much of this was done, and at all levels of society. In an 1839 history of Tasmania, written by a visitor named Melville, the author relates how he went out one day with ‘a respectable young gentleman’ to hunt kangaroos. As they rounded a bend, the young gentleman spied a form crouched in hiding behind a fallen tree. Stepping over to investigate and ‘finding it only to be a native’, the appalled Melville wrote, the gentleman lifted the muzzle to the native’s breast ‘and shot him dead on the spot’.

  Such behaviour was virtually never treated as a crime – indeed was sometimes officially countenanced. In 1805, the acting judge-advocate for New South Wales, the most senior judicial figure in the land, declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances, settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and ‘inflict such punishment as they may merit’ – as open an invitation to genocide as can be found in English law. Fifteen years later our old friend Lachlan Macquarie authorized soldiers in the Hawkesbury region to shoot any group of Aborigines greater than six in number, even if unarmed and entirely innocent of purpose, even if the number included women and children. Sometimes, under the pretence of compassion, Aborigines were offered food that had been dosed with poison. Pilger quotes a mid-nineteenth-century government report from Queensland: ‘The niggers [were given] . . . something really startling to keep them quiet . . . the rations contained about as much strychnine as anything and not one of the mob escaped.’ By ‘mob’ he meant about one hundred unarmed men, women and children.

  The wonder of all this is that the scale of native murders was not far greater. In the first century and a half of British occupation, the number of Aborigines intentionally killed by whites (includi
ng in self-defence, during pitched battles and in other rather more justifiable circumstances) is thought to be about 20,000 altogether – an unhappy total, to be sure, but much less than one-tenth the number of Aborigines who died from disease.

  That isn’t to say that violence wasn’t casual or widespread. It was. And it was against this background, in June 1838, that a dozen men on horseback set off from the farm of one Henry Dangar, looking for the people who had stolen or driven off some of their livestock. At Myall Creek they happened on an encampment of Aborigines who were known among the white settlers of the district as peaceable and inoffensive. Almost certainly they had nothing to do with the rustled cattle. None the less their captors tied them together in a kind of great ball – twenty-eight men, women and children – led them around the countryside for some hours in an indecisive manner, then abruptly and mercilessly slaughtered them with rifles and swords.

  In the normal course of things, that would almost certainly have been that. But in 1838 the mood of the nation was changing. Australia was becoming an increasingly urbanized society, and city dwellers were beginning to express revulsion for the casual slaughter of innocent people. When a campaigning Sydney journalist named Edward Smith Hall got hold of the story and began to bray for blood and justice, Governor George Gipps ordered the perpetrators tracked down and brought to trial. When arrested, two of the accused protested, with evident sincerity, that they hadn’t known killing Aborigines was illegal.

  Despite clearly damning evidence at the subsequent trial, it took a jury just fifteen minutes to acquit the defendants. But Hall, Gipps and the urban public were not lightly pacified and a second trial was ordered. This time seven of the men were found guilty and hanged. It was the first time that white people had been executed for the murder of Aborigines.

  The Myall Creek hangings didn’t end the slaughter of Aborigines so much as drive them underground. They went on sporadically for almost another century. The last was in 1928 near present-day Alice Springs when a white dingo hunter named Fred Brooks was murdered in uncertain circumstances and at least seventeen and perhaps as many as seventy Aborigines were chased down and killed by mounted constabulary in reprisal. (A judge in that case declared that the police had acted within the law.) But the Myall Creek case was undoubtedly a defining moment in Australian history. Though it gets at least a mention in almost all history books these days, I hadn’t met anyone who had been there or even quite knew where it was, and it seemed apparent from the descriptions I had read that the authors had drawn exclusively from historical sources. I wanted to have a look.

  It takes a little finding. From Macksville the next morning I drove sixty miles up the Pacific Highway to Grafton, then headed inland on a steep and lonely road up and through the Great Dividing Range. Four hours later, in hot and empty sheep country, I reached Delungra – a petrol station and a couple of houses with long views over mostly treeless plains – and there I turned down a back road that followed a twisting, sometimes nearly washed-out course on its way to the small town of Bingara twenty-five miles to the south. A couple of miles short of Bingara, I came to a small rickety-looking bridge over a half-dry creek. A little sign announced it as Myall Creek. I pulled the car into the shade of a river gum and got out to have a look. There was no memorial, no historical plaque. Nothing at all to indicate that here, or at least somewhere in the immediate vicinity, was where one of the most infamous events in Australian history took place. To one side of the bridge was a forlorn rest area with a pair of broken picnic tables and a good deal of shattered bottles in the stubby grass around the edge. In the sunny middle distance, perhaps a mile away, stood a large farmhouse, surrounded by fields of unusually verdant crops. In the other direction, and much closer, an overgrown track led to a white building. I walked along it to see what it was. A sign announced it as the Myall Creek Memorial Hall. It wasn’t much of a monument to a terrible slaughter, but at least it was something. Then on a wall of the building I noticed a hand-painted sign and discovered that it had nothing to do with the slaughter; it was a memorial for the dead of two world wars.

  I drove on the last couple of miles into Bingara (pop. 1,363), a hot and listless village with a dozing main street. It looked like a place that had once known prosperity, but most of the storefronts now were either empty or taken up with government enterprises – a health clinic, an employment advice centre, a tourist information office, police station, something called a ‘Senior Citizens Rest Centre’. An old and improbably large movie house still announced itself as the Roxy, but clearly had been shut for years. In the tourist information centre I was received by a pleasant-looking middle-aged lady who bobbed to her feet at the sight of a customer. I asked her if they had any information about the massacre, and she gave me a crestfallen look.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about that,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ I said, surprised. The place was full of leaflets and books.

  ‘Well, it was a long time ago. I believe the children study about it in school, but I’m afraid it’s not something visitors ask about very often.’

  ‘How often? Just out of interest.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said and clasped her chin as if that was a real poser. She turned to a colleague who was just emerging from a back room. ‘Mary, when was the last time someone asked about Myall Creek?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the colleague, equally stumped. ‘I couldn’t say – no, wait, there was a man who asked about it maybe two months ago. I remember now. He had a little goatee. Looked a bit like Rolf Harris. I can’t remember the last time before that.’

  ‘Most visitors want to go fossicking,’ the first lady explained.

  Fossicking is to hunt for precious minerals.

  ‘What do they find?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, lots – gold, diamonds, sapphires. This used to be a big mining area.’

  ‘But you have nothing at all on the massacre?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ She seemed genuinely regretful. ‘I tell you who can help you and that’s Paulette Smith at the Advocate.’

  ‘That’s the local paper,’ added the colleague.

  ‘She knows all about the massacre. She did some kind of study on it for college.’

  ‘If anybody can help you, Paulette can.’

  I thanked them and went off to find the Advocate. Bingara was an oddly interesting little town. It was small and half dead and on a road to nowhere, yet it had not only a tourist office but also its own newspaper. At the Advocate office I was told that Paulette Smith had popped out and that I should try back in an hour. Slightly at a loss, I went into a café and ordered a sandwich and a coffee, and was mindlessly consuming both when a lady, red-haired, late-thirtyish and looking faintly breathless, abruptly slid onto the seat facing me.

  ‘I hear you’re looking for me,’ she said.

  ‘News travels fast here.’ I smiled.

  She rolled her eyes ironically. ‘Small town.’

  Paulette Smith was rather intense but with a sudden, disarming smile that would flash at odd moments, like a broken sign, and then be lost at once in the greater intensity of what she was telling me.

  ‘We didn’t learn anything about the massacre when I was growing up,’ she said. ‘We knew it had happened – you know, that a long time ago some Aborigines were killed out by the creek and that some white people were hanged for it. But that was about it. We weren’t taught about it in school. We didn’t, you know, make school trips out there or anything.’ The smile came and went.

  ‘Did people talk about it?’

  ‘No. Never.’

  I asked her where exactly it had happened. ‘Nobody knows. Somewhere on Myall Creek Station.’ (Station in the context means a farm or ranch.) ‘It’s all private property now, and they’re not real friendly to trespassers.’

  ‘So there’s never been any kind of archaeological dig or anything? You don’t get academics poking around?’

  ‘No, there’s not that kind of interest in it. Anyway,
I don’t think they’d know where to look. It’s a big property.’

  ‘And there’s no memorial of any kind?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Isn’t that odd?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But wouldn’t you expect the government to put up something?’

  She considered for a moment. ‘Well, you’ve got to understand there was nothing all that special about Myall Creek. Aborigines were slaughtered all over the place. Three months before the Myall massacre 200 Aborigines were killed at Waterloo Creek, near Moree.’ Moree was sixty miles or so further west. ‘Nobody was ever punished for that. They didn’t even try to punish anybody for that.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  She nodded. ‘No reason why you should. Most people have never heard of it. All that was different about Myall Creek was that white people were punished for it. It didn’t stop them killing Aborigines. It just made them more circumspect. You know, they didn’t boast about it in the pub afterwards.’ Another flickering smile. ‘It’s kind of ironic when you think about it. Myall Creek’s not famous for what happened to the blacks here, but for what happened to the whites. Anyway, you wouldn’t be able to move in this country for memorials if you tried to acknowledge them all.’

  She stared dreamily for a moment at my notebook, then said abruptly: ‘I have to get back to work.’ She made an apologetic look. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been much help.’

  ‘No, you’ve been a great help,’ I said, then I thought of another question.

  ‘Are there any Aborigines here now?’

  ‘Oh, no. They’re long gone from round here.’

  I paid for my lunch and returned to the car. On the way out of town, I stopped again by the bridge and wandered a little way up an overgrown lane that led on to part of the station property. But there was nothing to see and I was a little afraid of snakes in the tall grass. So I returned to the car and retraced my route across the dusty plain and on towards the distant blue slopes of the Great Dividing Range.