|
The
Extinct Tasmanians |
|
Death of
Queen Gooseberry |
Wild White Men – Romances of the Bush – Murrells, Davis, Bracefell, Fahey and Baker |
Morton Bay |
Aboriginal Death Bone |
THE EXTINCT TASMANIANS
LONDON DAILY NEWS.
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
The gravel
beds of England, for example, near the Thames and the Exe,
often contains the rudest known stone implements. They are
roughly trimmed and pointed by chipping off flakes, never by
grinding, and it is probably that they were used, unhefted by
their owners, and, like the hammer of Thor, without a handle.
These weapons are called Paleolithic, to distinguish
them from the daintier polished stone implements and
exquisitely shaped arrow heads of stone, which are called
Neolithic.
They are of incalculable antiquity, and it is natural
to wonder what kind of life the men led who manufactured them.
These artisans were, at all events, very human. You can cut as
well, or better, with an casual bit of edged flint as with the
old implements on which some amount of artistic thought has
been bestowed. Man, in fact, was bent on perfection and
improvement, even when he dwelt in England with extinct beasts
and birds. How he lived we can now partly conjecture.
Mr. Ling
Roth has gathered into a volume all that is known about the
very last people who “tooled” with rudely chipped flints, and
who have been destroyed by English rifles, blankets and
alcohol.
Of course,
we cannot conclude that because two sets of men in England
many thousand years ago, and in Tasmania yesterday, were on
the same level of culture in weapons, therefore their ways and
ideas were similar throughout. Probably our own predecessors,
so ill equipped for the struggles of life, may have belonged
to the white race, with all its superior endurance, and
intelligence, or capacity of becoming intelligent. It is only
certain that, in such respects as their relics testify to, the
inhabitants of Britain were not more civilised than the black
Tasmanians.
These
tribes were discovered, in 1642, by Abel Jansen Tasman. The
country was next visited in 1772, by Marion du Fresne, a
French sailor, and in 1777, By Captain Cook. Baudin landed
there in 1802, and in 1803, an English settlement was formed,
and, of course, shooting began. Our people killed a friendly,
or seemingly friendly, party of blacks, men, women, and
children.
In 1818,
the blacks nearly evicted the whites; by 1835, the wretched
remnant of Paleolithic men surrendered.
In 1876,
when Truganina died, the representatives of the earliest known
humanity ceased to exist.
The
Tasmanians were not beautiful in European eyes, though a
French naturalist mentions a pretty flirt who kindly blackened
the faces of his party, by way of raising them to her own
standard of the becoming. They were naked, except for a
kangaroo skin in cold weather. They made a kind of hut, better
than the Australians of the continent do, and their sepulchres
were sometimes very curiously erected. They were swift over a
short distance of ground, but had no endurance. Like the
Australians, they were wonderfully skilled trackers, and could
tell any man by his footsteps. Unlike the Veddahs of Ceylon,
they were fond of laughter and buffoonery. Some were curious
about European novelties, others were indifferent.
M. la
Billardière (1792) behaved very kindly to them, and found them
most friendly to them, and found them most friendly and
helpful. They even presented the French with their ornaments
of pierced shell. One young lady was offered a pair of
trousers, and shown how to wear them, which she did with
grace. The men almost at once learned to use European axes and
saws. One of them made experiments of a painful nature on his
own body with a burning glass, which he had seen used to light
a fire. They were astonished at finding the French white all
over.
M. Pèron
talks of “the sweet confidence which the natives had in us,
the affectionate proofs of goodwill which they lavished on us,
the frankness of their manner, and the touching ingenuousness
of their caresses.”
They were
not cannibals, it seems, but we have “eaten them up.”
One sent
the ears of all the blacks he shot as trophies in a pickle
tub. A soldier pitched a black baby with his bayonet into a
fire. Yet we have never forgiven the Spaniards in the West
Indian Islands. The truth is that, even with the early French
explorer, misunderstandings arose.
A
Frenchman was asked by the natives to light a fire they had
piled up. He did so, and did not understand that this was the
native way of asking you to tread on the tails of their coast.
They at once began to throw their long pointed spears, and to
whack with their short heavy clubs, or waddies. Europeans
never knew where to have them; easily fell into panic, fired,
and made all the blacks enemies of all the whites by the act.
Convicts,
too, behaved as they might be expected to do. There were
quarrels about women. The natives were evicted from their
hunting grounds, and speared the sheep and cattle which had
superseded them. They attacked isolated houses, they mutilated
the slain, and this is a deed which Europeans never forgive.
Women who had lived with whites became barren when they
returned to their tribes. The occasional habit of wearing
blankets gave the natives deadly chills. So they perished
utterly, victims of the ignorance and ferocity of rude, or
even criminal, early settlers.
It is an
old story, and something very much like it is being told in
Queensland today, if we may believe many accounts. In family
matters, this lost people were polygamous, old men having more
than their due share of wives. Unlike what we are told about
the primitive predominance of women – the “matriarchate”-
these Tasmanians made their wives do all the work of fishing
and cooking. Woman was a slave; but a woman led the remnants
of the tribes in their last war. The chief, if chief there
existed, was apparently the strong man with the bad temper. In
this respect society has usually been rather Tasmanian. As to
fire, they lit it either by sparks from flint or by rubbing
one stick on another – the most prevalent ancient practice.
They also carried lighted fuel about. It is curious how
inexpert the Greeks always were at fire lighting. Not only in
Homer does a man in a lonely house keep a smouldering brand,
that he may not have to walk to the nearest neighbour for a
light, but in “Daphnis and Chloe,” 400 years after our era,
the hero wanders far in search of a fire. Apparently, he could
not strike or rub a light for himself. As to food, they ate
enormously when there was anything to eat. A native woman ate
more than 50 eggs to size of a duck’s egg. A baby of eight
months tucked into a whole kangaroo rat, and topped up with a
crawfish. Twelve pounds of meat and a gallon of train oil was
an adult’s dinner. They had no sort of agriculture, but were
fond of vegetables and roasted fern roots. They hunted the
kangaroo by the Scotch method of the “Tincel”-
We’ll
quell the savage mountaineer,
As their
tincel quells the game;
They
come as fleet as forest deer,
We’ll
drive them back as tame.
They drove
the wild beasts into a narrow space and then clubbed them.
Their manufactures were string, basket work, and the flaking
of flints. The Australians, more advanced, grind their stone
weapons to an edge, leaving the rest of the stone in its
natural condition. About Tasmanian religion accounts differ.
They seem to have recognised a good spirit of the day and an
evil one of the night, and to have been qualified as members
of the Psychical Society by seeing ghosts. Probably they would
never have improved much, for nature gave them necessaries,
and they were highly disinclined to work.
“Their expression is fearful and wild when roused,
restless and treacherous when in doubt, and, when laughing, of
a made and almost convulsive gaiety. Among the aged the
expression is sorrowful, hard, and gloomy,” says Pèron.
The Tasmanians, in fact, like Goldsmith’s Ned Purdon’-
Led such
a terrible life in this world,
We don’t
think they’ll wish to come back.
But this
experience is not peculiar to savages, They had sport and
lived in the open air.
Queen
Gooseberry, widow of King Bungaree, was found dead on Friday
night at Mr. Barton’s House, Castlereagh Street, Sydney. She
had been drinking at the kitchen the previous night. Inquest
was held on 31st July 1852. Verdict – death from
natural causes.
Sydney
Morning Herald 1 August 1852.
****
ROMANCES OF THE BUSH
MURRELLS, DAVIS, BRACEFELL,
FAHEY, AND BAKER
With the exception of Buckley who was out with the
Victorian blacks from 1803 to 1835, there is no record of any
wild white man among the blacks of the other Australian
states.
In Queensland, we have five, whose periods of wild life
were as follows:
|
Murrells |
1849
to 1863 |
|
Davis |
1828
to 1842 |
|
Bracefell |
1832
to 1842 |
|
Fahey |
1842
to 1854 |
|
Baker |
1832
to 1839 |
Fahey came out as a convict in the Clyde in 1838,
escaped from a road gang on New England in 1842, and was taken
to the Bunya Mountains by a tribe of blacks on their way to
the triennial bunya feast. Among the blacks of that region,
Fahey remained for 12 years. He was adopted by the Bunya
blacks, given the name of “Gilburri,” and had his breast and
stomach ornamented with the raised “Moolgarra” scars.
In December, 1854, Lieutenant Bligh, of the Native
Bligh, brought him into Brisbane. Like Murrells and Davis he
had nearly forgotten his own language, and spoke the
“Wacca-Wacca” dialect of the Bunya tribes as fluently as an
aboriginal. He was taken to Sydney, identified by the
Superintendent of Convicts, and actually received a sentence of 12 months for
absconding 12 years before he was discovered. He was adopted
by the Bunya blacks in the year in which Davis and Bracefell
were brought back to civilization.
Bracefell escaped from the Moreton Bay convict
settlement in 1832, and was passed along from one tribe to
another until finally adopted by the Noosa blacks.
In his case, as in that of Davis and Fahey, he owed his
life to a real or fancied resemblance to a dead aboriginal.
Another convict who escaped with Bracefell was killed
because he took a dilly bag from a hollow tree, and emptied
out the bones of a defunct black so as to fill it with
oysters.
Such a desecration of the dead proved that he could not
be a reincarnated aboriginal, so he was promptly speared.
After being three years with the Noosa tribe, who named
him “Wandi,” a word for wild and also a name of the dingo,
Bracefell met Mrs. Fraser, the sole survivor of the Stirling
Castle.
She had been passed along from Fraser’s Island with her
husband and Brown, the mate of the vessel. According to her
statement, the two men were speared and she alone remained.
Bracefell waited for a chance to sneak away to the
convict settlement, where he hoped the deed would secure a
pardon for his act of absconding in 1832, four years before.
On arrival within sight of the settlement, Mrs. Fraser
threatened a serious charge before the superintendent, and
Bracefell’s courage failing him, he pointed the way for her to
go, and began his journey back to the Noosa blacks, with whom
he remained for another six years, until brought back with
Davis by Andrew Petrie and party in 1842.
He was killed in after years by a falling tree when
felling for Dr. Simpson at Goodna.
As for
Davis, so far I have found no account of his life among the
aboriginals. The absence of any one interested in saving so
valuable a record from oblivion seems incredible.
James
Davis, son of a Glasgow blacksmith, was sent out as a convict
at the age of 18, and in 1828 escaped from the Brisbane
convict station, like so many more before and after,
preferring to face the unknown solitudes and cannibal blacks,
to the horrors of the penal code, and the tyranny and
ferocious cruelty of his own countrymen.
The blacks
passed him along northwards where some one might recognise him
as a dead relative returned to life, and finally, he was
adopted by a black called Pambi Pambi, who regarded him as a
son killed in a fight.
With this
“Jinjinburra” tribe, speaking the “cabbi-cabbi” dialect, Davis
remained until rescued by Petrie’s party in 1842. He had
nearly forgotten his own language, was absolutely wild, and
could climb a tree, and use the spear, nulla, and boomerang,
as well as the blacks. His tribe’s headquarters were in the
vicinity of Mount Bopple (the name of the sleeping lizard),
and near there he was found by Bracefell, who acted as guide
for Petrie in 1842.
With the
exception of a brief vocabulary obtained from Davis by the
Rev. Wm . Ridley in 1851, a few very meager particulars by Dr.
Lang, and some desultory paragraphs, there is no record of the
remarkable life this man must have lived for 14 years among
the primitive savage cannibal tribes of the Mary River.
He was of
a morose and uncommunicative disposition, and avoided the
subject of his past life. In three short interviews I got some
interesting particulars, but he had nearly forgotten all the
language and his memory was not reliable. In 1842 he could
have conversed with the blacks from the Brisbane River to the
Burnett, but nowhere North or South. That was the area of the
Cabbi and Wacca dialects, which the tribes of that region
mutually understood. He had been speared through one thigh,
the usual wound in a row over women, and had a boomerang cut
on one knee. He also referred to many other scars from wounds
in battle or single combats.
Twenty
five years ago two old Mary River blacks assured me that Davis
had become a savage, even to the inclusion of cannibalism. One
had a very bitter memory of Davis, whom he accused of having
eaten his sister! Possibly she was his sweetheart, and “sweet
enough to eat,” a threat often made by the young men of today
to some dainty little maiden. He acted as interpreter for the
black trackers in the notorious murder of Cox, at Kangaroo
Point, in 1848, a case in which a perfectly innocent man was
tried and hanged in Sydney.
Davis
prospered in Brisbane and
died worth about £10,000, leaving £800 as a gift to the
Catholic Church, and a large amount to a well-known maiden
lady who had always been a consistent friend of himself and
wife. He gave £750 to the Brisbane Hospital. The only picture
left is a remarkably clever sketch from memory, by Oscar
Fristrom.
One
half-caste son was the only descendant he left among the
aboriginals.
In 1832 a
convict named Baker escaped from the settlement, and was
adopted by the Upper Brisbane River blacks, who called him
“Borallehn.” He came in of his own accord in 1839, and acted
as a guide to Lieutenant Gorman on a vehicle journey to the
Downs in 1841.
A Mount
Esk black who visited Brisbane was decorated with a brass
plate announcing that the wearer was “King” of his tribe. When
he returned the blacks gathered round him and asked Baker to
explain the brass plate.
When the
“king” business was described they told Baker they were “not
taking any kings,” and that the new monarch would either have
to lose his brass plate or his life!
He
preferred to discard the plate, and thus ended the first
attempt to start a royal family among the Queensland blacks.
In the
year 1846 a barque called the Peruvian, from Sydney to China,
was wrecked on some reef far east of cape Cleveland. Seventeen
years afterwards, the terrible tale of that wreck was first
told to the world by James Murrells, the white man who lived
among the blacks of the Burdekin from 1846 to 1862. The
Captain’s brother was the first to perish. All the others left
the vessel on a raft, which carried three ladies, 2 children,
2 male passengers, the Captain, carpenter, sailmaker, cook, 4
able seamen, 4 apprentices, and 2 stowaway West Indian blacks,
a total of 21.
The food
and water lasted for a brief period. They drank the blood and
ate the flesh of captured birds.
James
Quarry and his child died, and were thrown off to the
attendant sharks. Then Mrs. Wilmot and two children died, and
were followed by others, until only seven miserable survivors
remained. They used the severed leg of a corpse tied to the
end of an oar to capture sharks, the raw flesh of which was
greedily eaten by the starving people. After 48 awful days,
through terrors and horrors beyond the imagination, the
remaining survivors landed at Cape Cleveland.
In 1881 I
stood on that same spot and heard the tale told by a son of
one of the aboriginals who first appeared on the scene 14 days
after the raft was stranded. I also slept in the same cave.
Those who came ashore were Captain Pitkethly and his wife,
George Wilmot, James Gooley, Jack Millar, James Murrells and
one of the two boys.
Wilmot and
Gooley died within two days, and Millar went away in a blacks’
canoe and perished on Cape Upstart.
The blacks
treated the rest with great kindness, the Captain and wife being kept
by the Cape Cleveland tribe, and Murrells and the boy being
taken to Mount Elliott, which they called Bung-go-lung-ga
(Bunggolunga) a mountain 4050 feet in height, 20 miles south
of Townsville.
Within two
years, the Captain and wife and the boy died, leaving Murrells
sole survivor.
On the 25th
of January 1863, he walked up to two white men forming the
first station on the Burdekin.
One took
him for an aboriginal, and called to the other to bring his
gun.
Murrells shouted out, “Don’t
shoot, I’m a British object!”
He was
sent to Brisbane, and finally given a billet in the Customs at
Bowen.
He married
and had one son, who sold in 1887, for £10,000 an allotment
bought for his father at the first land sale of Townsville
land at Bowen.
History
owes a heavy debt of gratitude to Edmund Gregory, late
Government Printer, for nearly all the existing history of
Murrells, in a 43 page pamphlet published by him shortly after
Murrell’s death. Anything beyond that I found scattered widely
over newspapers and various publications, apart from what I
obtained form reliable old pioneers who knew Murrells. There
is much cause for regret over the too brief vocabulary
preserved by Mr. Gregory.
In 1881 I
checked it among the Burdekin blacks, and found it exactly as
recorded. Mr. Gregory says, “Murrells was short, and thickset,
with sunken eyes, and a wide mouth. His teeth had been worn
nearly to the gums. He suffered much from rheumatism, which
had left terrible marks on him.”
He died at
Bowen on Monday, 30th October 1865, being only 41
years of age. It is strange that Mr. Gregory forgot to record
Murrells’ name among the blacks.
They
called him “Munbawalba,” from Munba – a man, and walba –
white. They also gave him the name of “Woolgoora,” a canoe or
ship, as he came from the sea on a raft. Mr. Gregory has the
words Woolgoora and Munpa which he spells Munbah. He left no
half caste children, although he had a first and second
partner, both of whom were childless. That is the tale told to
me on the Burdekin by the old blacks in 1881.
Murrells’
son could have no recollection of his father, being only a
child when the father died.
Such is
the brief reference to the history of five men whose
experiences can never again be repeated in Australia.
Their
adoption and consistent kind treatment by wild tribes who had
never before seen a white man, can be added to the numerous
other proofs that the Australian aboriginals were among the
least aggressive, the most inoffensive, and the least
treacherous of all savage races of mankind.
Nearly every outrage
by Australian blacks was caused by the offence of whites
misled by ignorance or impelled by evil intent, the
retaliation under the law of lex talionis including
unfortunately the guilty and the innocent.
****
To the
Editor of the Queenslander,
Sir,- Five
correspondents have asked me to make this subject a little
clearer while it is still fresh in the public mind in
connection with the recent trial at Roma.
In J. D. Woods’s introduction to the “Tribes of South
Australia” there is a case closely resembling the one at Roma.
Woods says: “A curious instance of sorcery and its effects
upon the native imagination was brought to light recently in
the Supreme Court of Adelaide on the trial of a black for the
murder of another named Chunkey. This Chunkey was one who,
contrary to the custom of his race, had accumulated some money
and become the proprietor of a dray and some bullocks with
which he had followed the calling of a carrier. This effect of
civilization had not, however, weaned him from the influence
of the common savage customs, for he had at different times
carried off three women as wives from another tribe.
A man belonging to the “Bimburrie” tribe endeavoured to
rescue the women, but in doing so, was put under enchantment
by Chunkey, who pointed a human bone at him. This bone is
generally part of the femur, scraped to a point, smeared with
red ochre and human kidney fat, and having a ball of fat and
ochre rolled together at one end. The natives believe that if
this is pointed at any member of a tribe nothing on earth can
save the victim from death. They are so convinced of this that
immediately it is done, his spirits droop, he becomes
melancholy, his appetite fails, and gradually he pines away
and dies. Such an act of witchcraft is never forgiven.
Chunkey was pursued for nearly two years, and
eventually overtaken and killed by the friends of the
enchanted victim. The murder was discovered in consequence of
the murderers being found in possession of the dead man’s
property and his wives.
The murderers were sentenced to death, but the sentence
was commuted to one of imprisonment. It was proved on the
trial that amongst the Northern tribes a blackfellow who was
known to have pointed the bone at another would be pursued for
500 miles, in order that revenge might be taken upon him for
the crime.
The Moreton Bay blacks had one peculiar in which a bone
was used in a different fashion. It is verified by Thomas
Petrie, the best authority on the subject. When the bones of a
fleshless skeleton were taken down from the exposed platform
the oldest relatives burned the ribs and spine, and one old
gin, after cleaning and polishing the hip bone, would tap it
with a stone tomahawk in the presence of all the tribe. Before
each tap, she would call out the name of some blackfellow
suspected of causing the death of the original owner of the
skeleton. Finally she came to the name of some one on whom
suspicion was strongest – probably also specially disliked by
herself – and she gave the bone a tap hard enough to make it
crack. The whole tribe called out, “That’s the man who killed
him!” And the individual thus proclaimed by this aboriginal
Witch of Endor was doomed, for he would surely be killed by
some of the dead man’s relatives.
I have known a case where a blackfellow used the
ordinary death bone, made from the small bone of the
legislation, and then went as stockman on a station 150 miles
away. He came back in two years, and on the night he arrived,
was killed by an uncle of the man he bewitched. The bone
practice was never forgotten or forgiven. It was common in
some form or other to all Australian tribes.
The first
writer to mention the use of the bone in Australia was the
Rev. L. E. Threlkeld, who was stationed as a missionary at
Port Macquarie in 1824 on a reserve of 10,000 acres granted by
Governor Macquarie. The tribe there (the “Awabakal”) called
the magic crystal “Mooramai,” and the “bone” was “Murrocun.”
The crystal was used for healing wounds and curing sickness,
the “bone” for causing death by enchantment. The same process
was common to the tribes among whom I resided when a boy. The
native doctors slept all night on a grave, and the corpse
concealed a small bone in the flesh of each of their legs.
These bones the doctors could use for killing anybody without
even touching them.
At Moreton
Bay, the natives had a profound reverence for the “magic
stone,” sometimes a piece of agate, quartz crystal, or
polished black basalt. A famous chief of the Gatton tribe,
“Woonamba,” had a crystal he carried in a small bag under the
armpit, and believed that no one could kill him while the
crystal was there. It was a rather peculiar coincidence
(according to the late Fred Campbell) that Woonamba was shot
on the first day that he went from camp without his crystal.
Many of
the “bone” customs were identical with those of the witches of
England and Scotland, and the faith in magic crystals was
common to all the Eastern nations. In Ireland the Curraghmore
Crystal, owned by the Waterford family, is still employed to
cure sick people and cattle with murrain ailments.
The
Irishman who dreaded to meet a woman with red hair, or a red
petticoat, first thing in the morning, had his parallel in the
aboriginal who feared some terrible disaster if he met a gin
carrying a female opossum.
The
ancient arrowheads, regarded as “elf stones,” were reverenced
by the Irish and Scottish peasantry, and our aboriginals cured
with the magnetic passes exactly the same as recorded in Irish
and Scottish folklore, except that they used no incarnations.
It is likely that the aboriginal had the clearest knowledge of
the actual physiological effect.
So far I
have traced no aboriginal superstition that had not a
counterpart in Scotland, Ireland or Norway. There is certainly
nothing new in the “death bone” practice.
The
superstitions of the Australian races were far less in number,
and infinitely less degrading, than those of the uneducated
classes of what we call civilised races in the old countries.
There is no new thing under the sun in the nobleness,
baseness, or eccentricity of human nature, savage or
civilised.
Even the
legend concerning Fion Ma Coul’s wife, who was alive in the
daytime and dead at night, was repeated by a tradition among
the tribe at Cape Byron. This tribe also had a very close copy
of the Greek story of Prometheus; and fierce-eyed, loud-voiced
gins incited the aboriginal warriors in the battle just as
Ethna the poetess fired the valour of the Tuatha-de-Dananns at
the battle of Moytura, or as Colna-dona sang her war song to
the Icenians of Boadicea.
But this
reminds me that we are drifting away from the original
subject, so it may be well to conclude with the remark that
there is no new ethnological thing under the Australian sun,
except the boomerang- and that is likely to be a source of
controversy.
****
As a youth of 22, my first visit by land was paid to
Queensland, coming along the coast from the Clarence, via the
mouths of the Richmond, Brunswick, Tweed and Nerang. Hundreds
of the Clarence and Richmond blacks were then living, and
there were many blacks still on the Tweed and Nerang.
Four years before that time, when only 18, I came to
Queensland in the West Hartley No 2, a dish bottomed centre
board iron schooner that finished in after years on the rocks
at the mouth of the Brunswick. She came to Brisbane with a
cargo of maize from Maclean, then called Rocky Mouth, on the
Clarence.
We cleared the Clarence heads in a thunderstorm, which
practically continued all the way to Cape Moreton. When round
the Cape, and inside in smooth water, we anchored close to the
shore for three days before going on to Brisbane. The master
of the ship was Captain James Holden, who in after years kept
the Commercial Hotel at Ballina, and finally died a few years
ago at Petersham, in Sydney. He was a genial, fine, fellow,
and a skilful navigator. There being a large party of blacks
camped on the shore, I landed to interview them, and was
astonished to find them speaking a dialect quite different
from the one with which I was familiar, that extensive dialect
which extended from the south side of the Logan to midway
between the Clarence and the Bellenger, And over nearly all
New England from Armidale to Stanthorpe. It was the most
widely spread dialect in Australia, and over all that that
area there was the one negative, “Yoocum” or “Yucum.” Wyndham,
whom I knew very well, spelled it Ucum. But the Moreton blacks
knew in a moment what dialect I was speaking, and two or three
of them understood enough of the Nerang Creek language to
enable us to understand each other.
Apart from that, there were several who could speak
enough English to enable us to converse. They were a race of
fine men and women, with an abundance of food, including
oysters, crabs, dugong, and unlimited fish. They called
Moreton Island “Gnoor-gann-pin,” the negative was “goah.”
There is no sound in English, or the nha, nhee, nui, and nhin,
of the aboriginal, the nearest being nah, nee, nye, and nin.
Instead of “Gnoogee,” an Englishman says “Noogee,”
quite a different sound. The tribal name of the Moreton blacks
was “booroo-geen-meerie,” and when the first white man arrived
they probably numbered about six or eight hundred.
No other tribe was distinguished by such uniform
friendship for the white man.
There was not one murder to their credit, and, when the
Sovereign steamer was wrecked on the outer bar of the Amity
Passage in 1847, they made heroic efforts at rescue, and
practically saved all who survived.
They also kindly treated Pamphlet, Parsons, and
Finnegan , the three Illawarra timber getters who landed on
Moreton Island in 1823, and passed them on to the Amity Point
blacks, who sent them along to where they were canoed across
to the mainland, at the Russell Island of today, the
“Woongolpa,” of the blacks. They still believed they were
south of Illawarra, and started to walk North, discovering the
Brisbane River at least eight months before Oxley, and
crossing it on a catamaran somewhere about Lytton.
So that when Oxley met Pamphlet and Finnegan 8 months
afterwards at Bribie Island they told him of the river, and
piloted him into the mouth. The Moreton Islanders had the
mermaid story, and the name was exactly the same as in the
myths of the blacks of Botany Bay. They called the mermaid
Warrajamba, and there is a small river running into Botany Bay
called Warragamba, the name of the ancient mermaid of that
locality.
The blacks told me of the visit by the H.M.S.
Rattlesnake, in 1847, and amicable terms between them and the
Rattlesnake people, who included the afterwards famous Huxley,
the scientist, and McGillivray, the naturalist, but that visit
will be enlarged on when coming to a week spent by me on the
south end of Moreton three months afterwards. In these three
days I ate my first piece of dugong, my first tailor fish, and
first mangrove mullet. Then came a fair wind, and we sailed
away for the mouth of the Brisbane, passing about the site of
the present Pile Light, the Government steamer Kate, Captain
Page, with a very noisy and hilarious Parliamentary party on
board. The vessel being unable to round kangaroo Point, the
Captain anchored on the lower side, and we landed and walked
over to cross the boat ferry, which landed where the punt
comes across today at the foot of Creek Street.
Close to the landing, where there is a vacant space
today, stood the Steam Packet Hotel, kept by Harry Biggs, a
fine, genial, good looking Englishman, and a general favourite
with all classes. That was my first residence hotel in
Brisbane. Next day Biggs sent a man to show me where the
blacks were camped, in what is now Victoria Park.
There were about 60 blacks there at the time, and we
had a long and friendly interview. They were very astonished
at so young a white man knowing so much about their class
divisions, their Bora ceremony, their habits and customs, and,
being so expert with the boomerang. There were four dialects
spoken in that camp, the “Turrubul” of Tom Petrie, in which
the negative was “Waccah,” the dialect north of Caboolture, in
which the negative was “Cabbee,” the “Cateebil,” of Ipswich,
where the negative was “Yungarr,” and the Bribie dialect,
where the negative was “Nhulla.”
We may digress here to discuss the probable number of
aboriginals in the Moreton Bay district, when Oxley ascended
the Brisbane River. At best, the early men of the penal days
could only make wild guesses at the number, having no reliable
source of information, and only a small fraction of the
aboriginals ever came near the settlement.
The first mission to the Brisbane natives was that
organised by Dr. Lang, and the members arrived in March 1838,
and settled six miles from Brisbane, at a place afterwards
known as German station.
The
missionaries were German Lutherans, and included 11 men, eight
women, and 11 children.
Lieutenant Gorman’s report on that mission, on February
8, 1841, said: “There were no natives there, and no good had
been done.”
The Germans did not understand the blacks, and the
blacks did not understand the Germans.
Carlyle says that “all war is a misunderstanding,” and
in the case of the German missionaries, it led to the robbery
of the Mission station by the blacks, and the shooting of the
blacks by the missionaries.
The letter from the Rev. Johann Schmidt to the
Commandant on March 25, 1840, admitted firing at the blacks
and wounding two of them.
This missionary, Schmidt, accused the whites of
poisoning 50 aboriginals in 1842, presumably the dreadful
tragedy at Kilcoy station.
Even so early as 1841, the Rev. J. S. C. Handt wrote
complaining of the whites introducing vice and disease among
the aboriginals!
Handt’s Mission ended on March 3, 1843, and he went
away to Sydney, having accomplished nothing.
Crown
Lands Commissioner Simpson said, in his report of 1843, there
were about 3000 blacks on the coast and 1500 “wild hill
tribes.”
He gave the number who came in to Brisbane as 200, and
Ipswich 150.
In 1843 Commissioner Rolleston, stationed at Cambooya,
on the Darling Downs, reported the blacks as numerous and
warlike, and hostile to the whites.
Commissioner Simpson reported, in 1843, 5000 in his
district of Moreton Bay, and Rolleston, in 1845, reported six
tribes of 100 each on the Darling Downs.
In 1848, he reported many murders by the blacks, and
that they were driving the settlers away.
Simpson, in 1845, reported 4000 in the Morton Bay
district, and that “the coast tribes were the worst!”
In 1846 Colonel Barney spent £10 in presents for the
blacks, and in 1849 Captain Gray was killed by the aboriginals
of Bribie Island.
Clearly, all the estimates of the number of aboriginals
were quite unreliable.
The late Fred Campbell, of Amity Point, son of
Campbell, who took up Westbrook Station in 1841, and started
the first boiling down at Kangaroo Point, in 1843, told me
that he saw a fight near Ipswich in 1854, when about 800
aboriginals were engaged, and Campbell was a reliable
authority on the habits and customs of the blacks, and could
speak a fair amount of three dialects.
Other old
hands estimated the number at 1200.
Brisbane
people of today have no coherent idea of the number of blacks
of the early days, or what a splendid race of people they
were, physically and mentally. Physically they were far
superior to the average white man.
Of the
Darling Downs blacks in 1827, the botanist, Alan Cunningham
wrote: “These three natives were young men of the ordinary
stature of the aborigines of Moreton Bay, namely, six feet,
and appeared very athletic persons of unusually muscular limb,
and with bodies in exceedingly good case.” Major Lockyer, in
1825, said of the Brisbane River blacks “the natives are
naked, stout, clean skinned, well made people, a really fine
people.”
Of the
Amity Point blacks, in 1836, Backhouse, the Quaker, said they
were a “tall fine personed people, compared with the Sydney
black.”
In 1823,
Uniacke, of Oxley’s party, said of the Bribie Island blacks:
“Tall, straight fine boned women, superior in beauty to the
men; in fact, to any natives in this country I have ever seen,
two of them as handsome as any white women.”
Leichhardt,
in his letter to Lynd, in 1843, wrote: “The Moreton Bay blacks
are a fine race of men, tall, and well made, and their bodies
individually, as well as the groups which they formed, would
have delighted the eye of an artist. Their average height is
about six feet.”
In a
lecture in Sydney, he said: “The Moreton Bay blacks were fine,
well made men, and so are the coast blacks of the Alligator
River.”
Of the
Moreton Bay blacks, in 1846, Dr. Lang wrote in his
“Cooksland”: “They are strong, athletic, able bodied men,
remarkably athletic, and well proportioned, and far more of
them were over five feet eight, than under. Their height would
average five feet ten.”
Old
Brisbaneites would
remember Durramboi, the escaped convict Davis, brought in from
the Mary River, by Andrew Petrie in 1842, after 14 years among
the wild blacks.
They gave
him the name of Durramboi, their word for “little,” because he
was a small man among the aboriginals of those days.
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