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Two hunters knelt on the wet ground beside the small, grey doe kangaroo and began pulling their spears from its chest. Hunting in this cold, wet weather was always successful because in the rain, both large and small game are easy prey. Their tracks are clearly seen by the hunters and the animals are generally not so alert, with the weather hampering their vision and hearing. When the hunters’ approach is masked by the rain, they can easily move up on their unsuspecting target.
Bidgup lifted the kangaroo onto his shoulders while his younger brother, Meedo, collected the spears and other weapons and they began to walk along the trail for home. They were camping at Boorloo, the tribal land at Yellagonga, a peace loving man, and his people.
Bidgup passed a firm green stick through the shanks of the kangaroo, then, with the help of Meedo, they lifted it onto a limb of a banksia tree. Meedo squatted on the ground beneath the paperbark trees and began looking for sharp cutting stones but before he could select any Yellagonga called everyone to a meeting. All except the babies, the old people and the sick, moved closer to their leader’s
shelter and stood or sat around the fires, waiting anxiously to hear what he had to tell them.
Yellagonga spoke with a clear voice. “We all know that these strange men, the gengas, have been coming to our land for a long, long time.” Everyone nodded.
“My grandfather told me about them when I was a little boy. They usually sailed up the river in small boats, searching for fresh water and food, then left. But these gengas are different. And you know what happened not so long ago when Dayup and the others were invited to follow some of them to the river. The genga leader spoke to our men in his language, so they didn’t understand what he said.”
Those Nyungar men about whom Yellagonga was speaking had no idea what was happening when they met Captain Fremantle. The Captain told the men, the traditional owners who had gathered on the muddy banks of the river, “My government has advised me to meet with you and discuss this matter with you and seek your approval before giving your country an English name.”
Dayup glanced at his kinsmen then stared back at the white man who was speaking. He knew by his manner and the way that the other men kept saluting him that he must be an important man, but what was he saying? Dayup only wished he knew what this stranger was talking about. When Captain Fremantle realised that his words were not being understood he decided to try sign language. This language barrier prevented a formal discussion; how could a stranger indicate in sign language that he was giving a foreign name to their traditional land? It was an impossible task and the Nyungar men became even more confused with the pointing and waving. Nevertheless, Captain Fremantle continued.
“All agreed, er, um gentlemen,” he said standing to attention.
The Nyungar men glanced once again at Dayup, who was just as stunned and confused as they were. He put his hands out in front of him and shook his head in despair and frustration. He truly wished that he understood the language. He turned to his kinsmen and told them, “I don’t know what he is talking about.”
“I take it that we are all agreed and that I have your consent,” said Captain Fremantle, nodding to the Nyungar men who stood motionless, staring blankly at him.
“Thank you gentlemen.” He stood back, looking resplendent in his naval uniform, and announced in a loud voice, “I name this land Western Australia.” Then he raised his eyes to the limestone cliffs and saluted smartly at the flag fluttering in the wind; the red, white and blue of the British Empire.
The gunboat HMS
Challenger
in which Captain Fremantle had arrived remained anchored in the estuary for several weeks. It had been sent ahead of Captain James Stirling and the settlers. The Nyungar people grew accustomed to seeing it there and sometimes watched in silence as members of the crew rowed up and down the river.
“Well, today,” said Yellagonga, continuing his message, “Yalbung and Beeboo and their sons were hunting for possums near the river when they heard voices of men and the cries of frightened women. They told me that there were other very strange noises, sounds never heard in this part of the country. All this seemed to be coming from over the sandhills.
“They climbed the sandhills cautiously, crawling through the small shrubs until they reached the top and peered over the dunes. Normally this beach is deserted white, sandy expanse, but instead, a strange sight greeted them. Below, strewn along the shore, was an array of belongings, all sorts of things that these strange people
brought with them. What’s more, they brought their women with them this time,” said Yellagonga.
“What does this mean?” asked Moody, his uncle.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Perhaps they were shipwrecked.”
What it did mean was that the first European settlers had arrived. Their landing in June 1829, during the wet, winter weather was a disappointing introduction to their new home. There they sat in their fine clothes, huddled together under a canvas shelter and watched glumly as the rain poured down on their trunks containing silk gowns, fine china, mementos and other personal belongings.
“The rain will ruin our furniture and piano,” cried one of the women. “Do something, somebody, please. Save them please.”
“We’re doing our best, ma’am,” answered a sailor as he tethered one of the horses to a wooden crate. “We have to bring all the livestock ashore first.”
The other women remained silent, there was nothing they could do under the circumstances. Nothing but sit and stare at their precious possessions being soaked by the rain, in a land which was a wilderness to these downhearted ladies and gentlemen.
“Where is the Arcadian land that we heard so much about, the land of rustic paradise?” queried Christopher Marsden, a businessman from London. “This certainly isn’t the place.”
The others nodded in agreement. “We should never have come, Arthur,” said one tearful woman to her husband.
She clung tightly to his arm. Arthur Carberry had joined the new settlers because he wanted to become a member of the landed gentry and fulfil his lifelong ambition. How he had envied his rich country men in the past when he had watched them gallop by in their scarlet jackets, during the fox hunt back home in England. On this desolate beach he looked at the two foxes in the large cages in front of him.
He hoped to find good, fertile land and become very wealthy. His wife tightened her grip on his arm and sniffled tearfully. Carberry patted her hand gently and tried to comfort her, “Captain Stirling made a simple miscalculation, that’s all. It couldn’t be helped.”
A simple miscalculation indeed! What really happened, according to historian Robert Hughes in his book
The Fatal Shore,
was that Captain James Stirling sailing in the
Parmelia,
had been leading a voyage that took over eight months. He was anxious to take possession of a land grant of half a million acres of Nyungar land, which the Colonial Office neither bought nor owned but merely claimed for Britain and the Commonwealth, and a bonus of almost a quarter of a million acres of his own choice on arrival. Once he had settled and established a new colony, he would become its first Lieutenant Governor.
Their sea voyage was almost over. He never anticipated that others might find this location just as appealing as he did, so he was totally unprepared for the sight that greeted him as he approached the mouth of the river. There, anchored in the estuary, was the
Challenger.
The sight of the gunboat under its master, Captain Charles Fremantle, caused him to panic. He was so anxious to make port that he tried to take a short cut and ran his ship, with its cargo and passengers—the first English settlers to this part of the country—onto the rocks. Fortunately, no one was drowned.
Captain Stirling also discovered that his rival, Captain Fremantle, had gone ashore, claimed and took formal possession of not just one hundred thousand acres, but of one million square miles of territorial land, naming it Swan River Colony.
For the European settlers on the beach at what is known today as Cottesloe, the worse was yet to come. The terrain appeared unproductive—thick, tangled creepers grew under foot and when the weather fined up, they were plagued by swarms of mosquitoes and other pests.
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All those who arrived with Captain Stirling, and others who settled before 1830, had the right to choose an area of land wherever they fancied. The best land was taken up by the more wealthy, influential people who had the responsibility of maintaining their customs. They were advised to “keep up their Englishness” at all costs. This meant having picnics, fox hunts and balls. These activities were welcomed by the new landed gentry, who came from working class backgrounds. They delighted in dressing up for these occasions and being regarded as members of a social group which previously they had only observed and perhaps envied from afar.
The more adventurous settlers discovered that further up and beyond the Swan River colony there was an abundance of fertile land in which they could grow anything.
The Nyungar people, and indeed the entire Aboriginal population, grew to realise what the arrival of the European settlers meant for them: it was the destruction of their traditional society and the dispossession of their lands. Bidgup and Meedo complained to Yellagonga after several attempts at unsuccessful hunting trips.
“We can’t go down along our hunting trails,” Bidgup told him. “They are blocked by fences.”
“And when we climbed over the fence, one of those men pointed one of those things—guns—at us and threatened to shoot us if we went in there again,” said an irritated Meedo.
“There are huts and farms all over the place. Soon they will drive us all from our lands.”
Yellagonga had no answer or words of encouragement for his cousins. He wasn’t certain about anything anymore. Where there was once bush, there were now tents, huts or houses. Soon the white people would take his land from him and there would be no recourse for any injustices committed against his people.
Cut off from their natural food source, the Nyungar people expected these white settlers to share some of their food with them.
“We will take a sheep, they have plenty, they won’t miss one,” said Bidgup. His young brother Meedo agreed.
“If there isn’t going to be any sharing of food, we’ll help ourselves.”
When the brothers were caught spearing a sheep they were the first of many Nyungar men to be brought in to be sentenced under the English law. They received several years imprisonment and were transported to Rottnest Island Penal Colony. Their people stood on the banks of the muddy river as they sailed away to their prison. Their elderly parents and wives and children wept and wailed, while others watched silently as they were shoved roughly, their legs in irons, into a boat and sailed down the river, out to the open sea. They were never seen again. Hundreds of others followed them, bound in chains, across the waters into the unknown. A few escaped, others served their sentences and were returned to their homelands, while others were dropped off in strange towns along the coast. Some
men remained incarcerated on the island for the rest of their lives.
The white settlers were a protected species; they were safe with their own laws and had police and soldiers to enforce these rules.
One evening, Moody, Yellagonga’s uncle, brought back some distressing news from the people at the Lake Monger and the Nyungar people knew their lives were in serious danger. “A big meeting was held there last week and one man was punished for breaking the white men’s law and the troopers came down and took several men away.”
It became apparent then, that the Aboriginal social structure was not only crumbling, but it was being totally destroyed.
“It seems,” added Moody, “that our laws are not being recognised by these strangers.” The Nyungar people were hurt and confused when they were punished for carrying out their own traditional laws, handed down to them by the Dreamtime spirit beings.
“Yet when old man Udja complained to the magistrate that a white man stole his wife, Nella, he was given a bag of flour and told to go home,” Moody reminded them. “That old man expected the same form of justice under the white man’s law. He never got it.”
How many more were pacified with gifts of food? The whites had created two sets of laws; this was very confusing for the Nyungar people to understand and accept. There were unending conflicts between the traditional owners and the white invaders, with reports of merciless killings on both sides. The white settlers used muskets, swords and guns against the Nyungar people, who retaliated with spears. Soon, Aboriginal people all over the state learned to acknowledge the white man’s brutal strength and their cruel use of superior weapons and were forced to accept the white system of justice and punishment.
The Europeans ventured further inland and like
bushfires out of control, they could not be stopped. Confrontations between Nyungar and the invaders became more frequent and the practice of “might is right” prevailed throughout the colony. Driven off their traditional lands, the Aboriginal people of all areas (except the Central and Western Desert regions) became a dispossessed and devastated race. The people discovered, too late, that the white invaders were human beings and not spirits.
The colonists took advantage of the Aboriginal cultural beliefs to further their own gains. The Nyungar people who once walked tall and proud, now hung their head in sorrow. They had become dispossessed; these teachers and keepers of the traditional Law were prevented from practising it. They had to fight to find ways to return to their secret and sacred sites to perform their dances and other ceremonies that were crucial to their culture and whole way of life.
Their pain and suffering remained hidden and repressed, silent and deep. They remembered the corroborrees and songs that they were forbidden to dance and sing, unless commanded by government officials. No longer would the corroborrees be shared and danced by scores of feet, kicking up the dust in the moonlight around the glowing fires. Warriors with painted bodies and plumes of feathers on their ochre-covered heads would become faded images, buried in the past. The important dates on their seasonal calendars would be forgotten.
The British Colony was said to be an excellent settlement for hiring labourers and most colonists preferred Aboriginal workers to others. “Black servants, I find,” wrote George Fletcher Moore in his
Diary of Ten Years,
“are very serviceable in this colony; on them we eventually depend for labour, as we can never afford to pay English servants the high wages they expect, besides feeding them so well. The black fellows receive little more than rice—their simple diet.”
As a further insult by the white invaders, an act of goodwill in the form of an annual distribution of blankets to the Aboriginal people was established. This generally occurred on Queen Victoria’s birthday. The
Illustrated Melbourne Post
of 20 August 1861, page 9, described this event as, “a sorry return for millions of acres of fertile land of which we have deprived them. But they are grateful for small things and the scanty supply of food and raiment doled out to this miserable remnant of a once numerous people, is received by them with the most lively gratitude.”