by Graham Seal
Another tradition concerns a four-year-old girl who died at the telegraph station adjacent to the lighthouse during the 1870s. The coolest place to keep the body until the medical examiner could make the long trek was a cupboard, so she was locked in there. No evidence for this happening has ever been found, but now some women entering the station experience unexplained sadness, cameras mysteriously fail and dogs refuse to enter the building. Mediums also claim to have been distressed at hearing a little girl’s voice during their paranormal investigations.
After many upgrades, the Cape Otway light was decommissioned in 1994 and is now the focus of a busy local tourism industry, trading in part on its ghosts. There is certainly a folkloric basis for these stories, mostly unfounded in documentation. Now a guide at the light, Malcolm Brack, the son of a keeper, lived there for many years, and recalls that the keepers believed the signal station was haunted.
Ongoing inquiries by local historians and paranormal investigators may reveal further folklore and facts about the history of the lighthouse. Whether they do or not, the landfall light will always have the honour of having shown thousands of migrants the way to their new lives and to have saved the lives of uncounted mariners.
Tragedy on Lizard Island
Hard times forced the Oxnam family, like so many others, to leave the Cornish town of Truro in 1877. They sailed to Queensland, where their seventeen-year-old daughter Mary found work as a governess and also set up a private school in Cooktown. Mary was reportedly ‘reserved, nervous and delicate’, though her skills at the piano made her popular. She married Captain Robert Watson, part owner of the Lizard Island bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber) station, in 1880 and the following year gave birth to their son, whom they named Ferrier.
Towards the end of 1881, Captain Watson was away from the island on other business. Mary and Ferrier, accompanied only by Ah Leong, the gardener, and a houseboy named Ah Sam, were attacked by Aboriginal men from the mainland. Unwittingly, the factory and household had been set up on ground important to the local Aboriginal people, probably related to its being the home of the sand goanna, manuya. According to Mary’s diary, Ah Sam noticed smoke from the Aborigines’ camp on 27 September. Two days later Ah Leong was speared to death at the farm, not far from the cottage. At seven the following evening, Mary drove a group of Aborigines off the beach with her revolver. The next day Ah Sam was speared seven times, though he survived. There was nothing else to do but leave by sea with the wounded Ah Sam and baby Ferrier. Mary recorded their desperate voyage on a few pencilled pages:
Left Lizard Island October 2nd 1881, (Sunday afternoon) in tank (or pot in which beche de mer is boiled). Got about three or four miles from the Lizards.
October 4 Made for the sand bank off the Lizards, but could not reach it. Got on a reef.
October 5 Remained on the reef all day on the look out for a boat, but saw none.
October 6 Very calm morning. Able to pull the tank up to an island with three small mountains on it. Ah Sam went ashore to try to get water as ours was done. There were natives camped there, so we were afraid to go far away. We had to wait return of tide. Anchored under the mangroves; got on the reef. Very calm.
October 7 Made for another island four or five miles from the one spoken of yesterday. Ashore, but could not find any water. Cooked some rice and clam-fish. Moderate S.E. breeze. Stayed here all night. Saw a steamer bound north. Hoisted Ferrier’s pink and white wrap but did not answer us.
October 8 Changed anchorage of boat as the wind was freshening. Went down to a kind of little lake on the same island (this done last night). Remained here all day looking out for a boat; did not see any; very cold night; blowing very hard. No water.
October 9 Brought the tank ashore as far as possible with this morning’s tide. Made camp all day under the trees. Blowing very hard. No water. Gave Ferrier a dip in the sea; he is showing symptoms of thirst, and I took a dip myself. Ah Sam and self very parched with thirst. Ferrier is showing symptoms.
October 10 Ferrier very bad with inflammation; very much alarmed. No fresh water, and no more milk, but condensed. Self very weak; really thought I would have died last night (Sunday).
October 11 Still all alive. Ferrier very much better this morning. Self feeling very weak. I think it will rain to-day; clouds very heavy; wind not quite so hard. No rain. Morning fine weather. Ah Sam preparing to die, have not seen him since 9th. Ferrier more cheerful. Self not feeling at all well. Have not seen any boat of any description. No water. Nearly dead with thirst.
That was the final entry in Mary’s sea-stained journal. Searchers found it three months later, along with the remains of the three and Mary’s Bible.
Outrage, fear and hatred gripped the settlers in the area, fanned by inaccurate newspaper reports relying on prejudice and fear rather than the facts. Retribution against the perpetrators, actual and assumed, came swiftly. Men, women and children of the local Aboriginal groups were slaughtered, many of those massacred seemingly not of the same group that had attacked Mary’s household. And so one tragedy was made even greater.
The bodies of Mary, Ferrier and Ah Sam were buried in Cooktown, and in 1886 the citizens raised an impressive memorial fountain. The Mary Watson fountain is inscribed:
In MEMORIAM
MRS WATSON The Heroine of Lizard Island, Cooktown,
North Queensland, A.D. 1881
Erected 1886 Edward D`Arcy, Mayor 1885.
Five fearful days beneath the scorching glare
Her babe she nursed God knows the pangs that woman had to bear
Whose last sad entry showed a Mother’s care
Then—‘Near dead with thirst.’
Who was Billy Barlow?
With migrants arriving in more or less steady streams in the colonial period, ‘new chums’ became a popular stereotype. Colonial folksong and literature is full of disparaging references to newcomers who were not properly dressed or equipped, or emotionally prepared for the rigours of pioneer life. It was even suggested that they should be shipped back to where they came from when they failed to measure up:
When shearing comes lay down your drums
And step to the board, you brand new chums
With a row-dum, row-dum, rubba-dub-dub
We’ll send ’em home in a limejuice tub
The song makes fun of the unskilled and unhardened British recruits to the backbreaking shearer’s trade and profoundly masculine lifestyle. It ends by suggesting that the new chum would be better off going back home in a ‘limejuice tub’, a British sailing ship—than ‘humping your drum in this country’. Eventually the new chums either went home with their tails between their legs or became ‘old hands’ themselves, adopting the attitudes of their detractors and subjecting newcomers to the same treatment in their turn. So prevalent was the new chum that he came to be represented by a mythical figure named ‘Billy Barlow’, ridiculed in song and on stages across the country.
The earliest reference to Billy Barlow popped up in the 1840s, though the earliest song seems to date from an American minstrel song of a decade or so earlier. The newspaper review of an amateur theatrical production one 1843 evening noted, ‘Several songs were sung, and the following, which was written expressly for the occasion by a gentleman in Maitland, was received with unbounded applause.’
In this version of the story, poor Billy is left a thousand pounds by his old aunt and decides to further his fortunes in Australia. By the second verse he has already been taken down:
When to Sydney I got, there a merchant I met,
Who said he would teach me a fortune to get;
He’d cattle and sheep past the colony’s bounds,
Which he sold with the station for my thousand pounds.
Oh dear, lackaday, oh,
He gammon’d the cash out of Billy Barlow.
Things go from bad to worse; as Billy goes ‘up the country’ he is bailed up by bushrangers and left for dead tied to a tree. Eventually freeing himself, he is arreste
d because his belongings have been stolen and so he cannot identify himself. Taken to Sydney, he is eventually identified and released but on returning to his station discovers Aborigines have speared his cattle. Even nature conspires against the hapless new chum:
And for nine months before no rain there had been,
So the devil a blade of grass could be seen;
And one-third of my wethers the scab they had got,
And the other two-thirds had just died of the rot.
Oh dear, lackaday, oh,
‘I shall soon be a settler,’ said Billy Barlow.
Deep in debt, Billy is reduced to poverty and hunger—‘as thin as a lath got poor Billy Barlow’. He is arrested and imprisoned for debt back in Sydney again and listed as an insolvent, or bankrupt:
Then once more I got free, but in poverty’s toil;
I’ve no ‘cattle for salting,’ no ‘sheep for to boil’;
I can’t get a job—though to any I’d stoop,
If it was only the making of ‘portable soup’.
Oh dear, lackaday, oh,
Pray give some employment to Billy Barlow.
Despite his tragi-comic trials, Billy Barlow is not totally ground down and still contemplates repairing his fortunes in the final verse:
But there’s still a ‘spec’ left may set me on my stumps,
If a wife I could get with a few of the dumps;
So if any lass here has ‘ten thousand’ or so,
She can just drop a line addressed ‘Mr. Barlow’.
Oh dear, lackaday, oh,
The dear angel shall be ‘Mrs. William Barlow’.
So popular and pervasive was the contempt for the new chum that ‘Billy Barlow’ became a stock character of popular entertainment for decades. He assumed all sorts of guises, including rat catcher, London street clown, butcher, clerk and gold-digger, as well as the know-nothing tenderfoot of Australian tradition. Although now long forgotten, we still don’t know who Billy Barlow was, or if he ever existed outside ballads and the popular theatre of Britain, Canada, America, South Africa and colonial Australia.
The temple of skulls
On 25 July 1836, Charles Morgan Lewis and his crew were razing the Torres Strait island of Aureed to smoking oblivion. Searching for any survivors of the Charles Eaton wrecked in those parts a few years earlier, they had found what they were looking for and they did not like what they saw.
Bound for Canton (now known as Guangzhou) under Captain Morley, the barque Charles Eaton was wrecked in the little-known Torres Strait in mid-August 1834. The passengers and crew were thrown into several groups in their desperate efforts to survive. Some escaped to the Netherlands East Indies on the ship’s cutter, and one group of six managed to build a makeshift raft. Among the group were the first officer, Mr Clear; the second officer; a crewman; and three ship’s boys, one named John Ireland. After drifting through the shallow waters for several days and nights they encountered a group of islanders in canoes. The islanders demonstrated that they were unarmed and signalled the Europeans to join them in their craft. After some discussion, the castaways got into the canoes. They were paddled to a cay where they searched for food accompanied by the islanders, but it was not long before the survivors of the Charles Eaton sank onto the ground in exhaustion. Their rescuers now began to laugh and gesture in an unfriendly way and the survivors realised they intended to kill them. The first officer, a minister’s son, calmly led the little group in prayer and resignation to their fate. Completely fatigued and despite their peril, the survivors fell asleep.
Young John Ireland awoke to the sound and sight of his companions having their brains beaten out with islander clubs. Only he and another boy named Sexton were spared. Both the boys fought back; although wounded, their resistance and their youth probably saved them. Nearby, the islanders celebrated their victory dancing around a large fire, and in the flickering light Ireland saw the decapitated heads of his companions and the remains of their bodies floating in the surf.
The islanders took the boys to Pullan Island in the Torres Strait, where they met the remnants of another group of Charles Eaton survivors who had suffered much the same fate. Their severed heads, still recognisable, were also on the island. After a few months, Ireland and an infant survivor of the second group named William D’Oyley were taken on a lengthy voyage by their captors. Eventually the two passed into the care of a Mer (Murray) Islander named Duppar, who purchased them for two bunches of bananas. Duppar treated Ireland kindly, effectively adopting him, while D’Oyley was entrusted to the care of another Mer Islander named Oby.
While these terrifying events were taking place at the northern extremity of Australia, efforts were being made in England to mount a search and, hopefully, a rescue mission. The crewmen who had escaped in the cutter were eventually rescued and gave their version of events, and there were rumours that others had also escaped. Although many of these accounts and speculations were contradictory and vague, there was some reason to hope that at least some passengers and crew of the Charles Eaton were still alive somewhere. Eventually there would be several expeditions, but it was one mounted from Sydney under Charles Lewis on the Isabella that finally solved the mystery.
On 19 June, Isabella anchored off Mer. Among a large group of islanders on the beach, Lewis saw a European man. Four large outrigger canoes came alongside the Isabella, indicating a desire to trade for axes and knives. After some difficult negotiations, the islanders accepted an array of these items in return for freeing their European captive. Although he could now barely speak English, Lewis soon confirmed that the boy was the missing John Ireland.
Further negotiations and a show of strength from the armed crew of the Isabella eventually produced William D’Oyley, but the youngster did not want to leave Oby and clung crying to his adoptive father. Lewis showered gifts on Duppar and Oby in recognition of their kindness to the boys and wisely followed this up with more gifts to the other Mer Islanders. The Isabella departed a few days later, the best of friends with the local people.
Lewis had achieved a part of his goal in rescuing the two boys. But what of the other survivors? As Ireland gradually regained his English, he was able to tell Lewis more of the gruesome story and direct him to where the other survivors might be. After conversations with Darnley Islanders, it was confirmed that the second group of survivors had been murdered and their heads were kept on Aureed Island, a ritual centre for local beliefs. The Darnley people also told Lewis that the killers had eaten the eyes and cheeks of the dead, forcing their children to do the same, in accordance with the belief that this would make them strong warriors.
Lewis made for Aureed. By the time he arrived the island was deserted, as word of his coming had travelled ahead. Following a red shell-lined avenue, in the islander village he entered a low thatched hut, where he found a grisly icon of tortoiseshell, feathers and shells, in the form of a mask about five feet long by two and a half feet high. Around the edges were many skulls, held to the mask with ships’ rope. Many of the skulls were battered and cracked but in some cases could be identified as those of women and children. Lewis had found the remains of the murdered group.
Taking the ritual figure to his ship, the disgusted Lewis angrily gave orders for his men to torch the ‘temple of skulls’, as it would later be dubbed, along with any other structures. Soon the entire island was ablaze. While cutting down the remaining coconut trees, they found two more scorched skulls to add to those on the mask. Lewis renamed the place ‘Skull Island’.
The Isabella returned to Sydney on 12 October, having been away for almost twenty weeks. There was a dispute over the reward for the rescue and Lewis was denied his money. Eventually he went mad and by 1845 was totally destitute. With support from his friends he was finally awarded a significant gratuity of 300 pounds.
In 1844, a British navy ship revisited Mer and inquired after Duppar. An elderly man with grey beard and swollen limbs identified himself as the boys’ saviour. He was pr
esented with a large ceremonial axe in gratitude for helping John Ireland and William D’Oyley.
And what of the skulls? Governor Bourke had them detached from the mask and buried beneath a large altar stone in the cemetery then at Devonshire Street. As for the mask, long thought to have been destroyed by fire, it has recently been suggested that it has lain hidden among artefacts gifted to the National Museum of Denmark in the 1860s, incorrectly labelled through a series of museum clerical errors.
In 2011, Britain’s famous Natural History Museum announced that it would repatriate the remains of 138 Torres Strait Islanders souvenired, traded or otherwise acquired during the period of colonisation. Many of these items were skulls.
Chimney Sweeps’ Day
Most traditional British customs failed to make the transition from one side of the world to the other, but one May Day custom that did persist for some time in Australia was known as Chimney Sweeps’ Day. Adapted from earlier customs involving the soliciting of money on their annual holiday, chimney sweeps in larger towns and cities developed the custom of parading a roughly two-metre-high flower- and leaf-covered, bell-shaped ‘Jack-in-the-Green’. This was originally a simple floral decoration traditional to May Day celebrations. Over many years the garland expanded to the point where it completely covered the wearer. The person carrying this device danced along the street, usually accompanied by an appropriately dressed ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’, sometimes by a ‘wife’ known as Judy, and beribboned sweeps, crashing their brooms and shovels together to create ‘rough music’. Sometimes there was more formal musical accompaniment of whistle, fiddle and tabor (a small drum). The group processed through the streets, soliciting donations from passers-by. In some cases, these activities would be kept up for some days after 1 May, or even begun a day or two earlier. No doubt there was a fair bit of drinking as well.