by Don Watson
‘The Rivers of Babylon’ in Where the Rivers Meet: New Writing from Australia, Manoa
Vol. 18, No. 2, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2006
W. E. Roth
1904
(5). The Treatment of Aboriginal Prisoners.
When starting out on such an expedition, the constable takes a variable amount of provisions, private and Government horses, and a certain number of chains. Both he and his black trackers, as many as five of them, are armed with Winchester rifles. A warrant is taken out in the first place if information is laid against certain aborigines, but when the police go out on patrol, and the offence is reported, the offenders are tracked and arrested without warrant. Very often there is no proper information laid, in that it is verbal: when already out on patrol, there may be no information at all. Blacks may be arrested without instructions, authority, or information received from the pastoralist whose cattle are alleged to have been killed; the pastoralist may even object to such measures having been taken. Not knowing beforehand how many blacks he is going to arrest, the policeman only takes chains sufficient for about 15 natives; if a large number are reported guilty, he will take chains to hold from about 25 to 30. Chains in the Northern, not in the Southern, portion of this State are fixed to the necks instead of to the wrists of native prisoners. Authority for this is to be found in No. 647 of the Police Regulations, which states that “the practice of chaining them by the neck must not be resorted to except in cases where the prisoners are of a desperate character, or have been arrested at a considerable distance in the bush; or when travelling by sea, they are near the land to which they belong and it is necessary to adopt special measures to secure them. Even then the practice must not be adopted if it can be avoided.” Children of from 14 to 16 years of age are neck-chained. There are no regulations as to the size, weight, mode of attachment, or length of chain connecting the necks of any two prisoners. When the prisoner is alone, the chain is attached to his neck and hands, and wound around his body; the weight prevents him running away so easily. According to the evidence of the Commissioner of Police, when there is more than one aboriginal concerned, the attachment of the chain would be to the saddle of the mounted police officer but only when absolutely necessary; such an accident as a native neck-chained to a bolting horse has not yet happened, to his knowledge. The mode of attachment of the chain round the neck is effected with hand-cuffs and split-links; the latter bought, privately, i.e., at the expense of the arresting constable, from a firm in Perth, and undoubtedly with the knowledge of the Police Commissioner. The grave dangers attendant on the use of these iron split-links, and the difficulty of opening them in cases of urgency or accident, are pointed out. The fact of the connecting chain being too short is also dangerous, because if a prisoner fell he would be bound to drag down the prisoner on either side of him; yet the Wyndham gaoler has noticed the length of the chain joining two natives’ necks to be twenty-four inches, the cruelty of which he remarked upon to the escorting police. As far as one witness can find out from police and natives, the chains are never taken off when crossing rivers and creeks. In addition to the neck-chains, the prisoner may be still further secured with cuffs on his wrists (as your Commissioner has seen in photographs of constables escorting the chain-gangs), or on his ankles. Apparently unknown to the Commissioner of Police, chains are used for female natives not only at night, but sometimes during the day; these women are the unwilling witnesses arrested illegally for the Crown. The actual arrest usually takes place at daylight in the morning when the camp is surrounded, and occasionally the (armed) tracker is sent in by himself first. Accompanying the police may be the manager, or stockmen who have volunteered to come, but as the manager does not prosecute and the stockmen are not called as witnesses, this voluntary action on the part of the station employees may admit of another construction. For instance, of the two constables examined, one takes no precautions at night to prevent the assisting stockmen and trackers having sexual connection with the chained-up female witnesses and yet supposes such intercourse to go on: the other never watches his trackers, who might carry on in this way, and never takes any notice of these things – it would have caused trouble if he did. It is noteworthy that these same two constables, together with two others, are charged by natives with intimacy with the women: the females brought in as witnesses are usually young ones. About six or seven is the largest number of guns in the arresting party, perhaps such a quantity is accounted for by remembering that as many as 33 prisoners have been secured on the one occasion.
The larger the number of prisoners and witnesses, the better, pecuniarily, for the police, who receive from one and sixpence halfpenny to two shillings and fivepence daily per head, or as it is called in the North-Western vernacular “per knob” . . .
To secure a conviction the accused are accordingly made to plead guilty – at the muzzle of the rifle, if need be. At this your Commissioner is not at all surprised, considering his firm conviction in the truth of a statement made him by a native lately released from gaol, where he had served a sentence for cattle-killing, to the effect that one of the batch of prisoners originally arrested with him was shot by the escorting constable in the forehead, the victim in question being very sick at the time. Owing to the informant’s lack of proper pronunciation, your Commissioner unfortunately cannot absolutely identify the murderer’s name, though he has reported the matter to the proper authorities. With regard to the young women witnesses, their prostitution by the escorting police, the trackers, and stockmen, etc., who have aided in hunting them down, has already been referred to; partly for this reason and partly to gain their acquiescence in the subsequent court proceedings, their treatment on the way down, as compared with the men, is tempered with perhaps a little more mercy in the way of food and comparative freedom. Though these women are allegedly as guilty as the men, one constable states that he is acting under instructions in not arresting them; on the other hand, they are chained or otherwise prevented getting away; they are practically asked to turn informers; they are never cautioned in the proper sense of the term when giving evidence against their husbands, and thus do not in the slightest degree realise the harm they may be doing. The excuse made for bringing in these women at all is that the constable can get no other native evidence, or that “the grown-up men are those that kill the bullock; there are no young boys in the tribes; the squatters have them all”. The accused male prisoners still less understand their position. On their arrest, which may even be before any evidence detrimental to them had been received, they are asked (apparently without being cautioned) whether they have killed a beast, but not necessarily informed with what they are charged; they do not at the time thoroughly understand what the charge is, but might a few hours later, evidently after the gins’ evidence had been suborned. The police tracker is the medium of communication, occasionally has to converse through a second interpreter, and camps with the prisoners and witnesses before the case is brought into court. No witnesses are ever brought in for the defence . . .
c. In the Gaols. – Your Commissioner visited the gaols at Carnarvon, Broome, Roebourne, and Wyndham, and is able to place on record his high appreciation of the humane supervision and considerate treatment exercised by the gaolers over their aboriginal prisoners. Approximately there are about 300 native prisoners in the gaols throughout the State. Two very degrading and yet remedial features of the prison system are the neck-chains, and their continuous use – morning, noon, and night – usually throughout the entire period of sentence.
At Wyndham, when boys aged from 14 to 16 have been charged with cattle-killing, the Resident Magistrate has cautioned, convicted, and released them without imprisonment: at Derby, when a young boy comes into court the Resident Magistrate prefers to give a small sentence and to find him an employer. At Hall’s Creek the whole brutality of the present system is brought into prominence when the acting Resident Magistrate sentences a child of 10 years of age to six months’ hard l
abour for “that he did, on or about 10th September 1904 at Cartridge Springs, unlawfully kill and carry away one head of cattle, the property of S. Muggleton, contrary to statute then and there provided.” The same magistrate has sentenced another infant of 15 to nine months for killing a goat, and at least eight other children, between 14 and 16 years of age, to two years’ hard labour for alleged cattle-killing.
Findings of the Royal Commission into the Condition of the Natives,
29 December 1904, In Sharman Stone (ed.), Aborigines in White Australia,
Heinemann, Melbourne, 1974
Brendan Ryan
2012
Blister Country
The anger of living in the country
remains with you, becomes a hard stare
across a playground, a bar, a supermarket checkout.
Here, we look after our own.
of talking business with men, problems with women.
Of being bashed in pub toilets
of being jeered at for wearing black
of fleeing each weekend, the town closing for the
footy.
Saturday night, four men lined up at a urinal,
nobody speaks.
Stunted trees, lemon-tinged rye grass
lava blisters formed by pressure from below.
A moonscape of low-lying paddocks
the country nobody inhabits.
A wild place, I’ll nurture, carry to the grave.
There’s nothing flash in hummocks of rock
Old Crusher Road snaking through Harman’s Valley,
and what became of the lava flow.
Here, wind is another language to rub against
buffeting faces, breaking capillaries across cheeks.
Where fence lines hum off-key,
a place so strange and compelling
a boy rides a motorbike down the paddock
to shoot himself.
The tension between rains prises the dirt apart,
crickets scurry.
Some kind of friction rises from within.
Travelling Through the Family,
Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets, Melbourne, 2012
Oscar de Satge
1901
1
When we reached Rannes, a sheep and cattle station belonging to the Messrs. Leith Ilay, who had been assisted in their large undertaking by Mr. Thomas Holt, of Sydney (who thereby earned the name of the “Haymaker”), shearing operations were in full swing, and there seemed to be a large number of highly-paid hands about. To protect this outside station there was a sub-inspector of Native Police, one white sergeant, and half a dozen black troopers, who camped at some little distance from the homestead, which consisted chiefly of a lot of rough bark buildings, whilst on the opposite side of the head station the native blacks were encamped to the number of several hundred, their fires extending over a mile. These blacks, we were told, were by no means civilized yet, and given to robbing the huts of the outlying shepherds. They were daily employed in stripping bark for the manager, who paid them by the occasional gift of a bullock . . .
2
August, 1861, was a glorious season for the country we came to explore; abundant and unusual rains had fallen early in the month, filling the many little creeks that headed from Peak Range. The country, which chiefly consisted of black and chocolate-coloured loam, had evidently been burnt before this late rain by the blacks, and the undulating plains that lay under the picturesque peaks that formed the so-called range were clothed with a carpet of burnt feed, forming a vivid green dotted with a variety of wild flowers, also many kinds of wild peas and vetches, wild cucumbers, and other trailing plants I did not then know. Never after, during my long experience of the district, did I see it in such splendid condition – I might, indeed, say glorious – as when our little party ascended this low range, and dropped on the rolling downs the other side . . .
3
As we descended from that preliminary survey of our realms to be, and followed the biggest watershed we could make out and trace with our glasses, our spirits rose, and mutual exclamations of interest were the order of the day. The spare horses could hardly be driven along, so anxious were they to crop the sweet burnt feed. Huge kangaroos lazily turned round to gaze at the new intruders before hopping majestically away; bronzed-wing pigeons sprang up on every side with the strong whirr of perfect condition; the grey-headed wild turkey or bustard stalked about in robust alarm; whilst occasional mobs of the statelier emu trotted round us with their usual curiosity. Nature, in fact, both as regards season and time, was at its fill, before the hand of the white man had been able to set its riches to good account. To my last day will I remember with gratification that first impression of the Peak Downs, with its many glories of anticipation . . .
4
We soon learnt that the eastern end of Peak Downs had suffered nearly as much as our end. Lilyvale had been cleared out, and at Capella two teams and teamsters had been swept away at their camp at dead of night. Our losses at Wolfang were found to be not far short of 5,000 sheep, and we heard of heavy losses at other stations, such as Gordon Downs and Yamala; whilst fencing, new fencing mostly, too, had suffered enormously.
We were also very anxious to learn the fate of Clermont, my electoral town, which lay at the junction of Wolfang with Sandy Creek, some eight miles below us, but it was some little time before news could get across. When our stockman came he brought news that carcases of our sheep were to be seen in the tree tops along the creek, and also caught on the roofs of such houses as were left standing in Clermont, the lower portion of which had been swept clean away, having been injudiciously built between Sandy Creek and the Clermont Lagoon. The houses on the Sandy ridge beyond the Lagoon had escaped. Four or five people were missing, and stories were told of a cottage, the corner posts of which had not been sunk in the ground, waltzing down the flood with lamps alight. The editor of the local paper had passed the night, with many others, in the forks of some neighbouring trees . . .
Pages from Journal of a Queensland Squatter,
Hurst and Blackett, London, 1901
George Seddon
2006
Weeds are stateless persons with no civil rights, subject to arbitrary execution. They are dissidents against the established order, that of an hierarchical and apparently static world, and therefore must be excluded, ruthlessly exterminated or expelled beyond the boundaries of society to the furthest corners of the earth. In this, they resemble the British settlement of Australia in the late eighteenth century, and inversely, the White Australia policy one hundred years later.
A familiar definition of a weed is that it is a plant out of place, a splendidly ambiguous concept. Who decides the proper place and rank of a given plant, and by what criteria is it considered to be out of it? A kinder definition is that a weed is a plant whose use we have not yet found. Weed-dom is always contingent; belladonna might not be tolerated in backyards where there are children, but be cultivated in a homoeopath’s garden.
Weeds come in three categories: agricultural weeds that inhibit production, or are thought to do so, environmental weeds, and weeds of the garden, the latter two being complex and thought-provoking. In being stateless, weeds invoke official wrath, at both state and federal levels in Australia, where we have a National Weeds Strategy that defines a weed as ‘a plant which has, or has the potential to have, a detrimental effect on economic, social or conservation values’. I suppose we all have the potential to become criminals in certain circumstances; ‘potential’ seems to me an awesomely inclusive term. There are also State Weed Plans. The plan for Western Australia (2001) tells us that ‘prevention, early detection and early intervention are the most cost-effective means of weed management’; that in ‘Australia’s agricultural systems, weed control costs have been estimated at 20 per cent of production costs’; and that ‘Without a substantial change in the way weed problems are tackled, the long-term impact of weeds on the economy, envi
ronment and community may approach, or even exceed, that of salinity.’
Agricultural weeds are a human construct, defined pragmatically and anthropomorphically, and have been around for a long time. Poor mad King Lear was crowned with them:
As mad as the vex’t sea; singing aloud;
Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds,
With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.
Here the antithesis is explicit: the corn is sustaining, and the weeds are its (and thus our) enemy. Presumably there were no weeds in Eden, but out of it, agricultural weeds have grades. Some are formally defined by agencies of state as `noxious’, meaning harmful (to man or man’s beasts).
Environmental weeds are almost the reverse, defined anti-anthropomorphically. There is some overlap between agricultural weeds and environmental weeds, but most of the latter are garden plants that have leapt the garden wall. Thus human actions have become a corrupting foe to the purity of the state of nature before the Fall. The last group, garden weeds, again have some overlap with agricultural weeds, but differ greatly in values, which are individual, personal, and usually have a strong aesthetic and cultural component.
What all three groups have in common is that their status as weeds comes from their being contrary to human intentions and design, although the intentions and values are diverse, and held by differing social groups. In being contrary to design, they are the other side of the coin. No design, no weeds. That is why they are discussed in proximity to my chapter on design. A ‘weed’ is the antithesis of a ‘desirable’ plant, and both belong in the domain of intentionality: without design intentions, there can be no weeds, because they are negatively defined.