The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (21 page)

Sharing out portions of turtle and dugong according to protocols of clan seniority could also prove hazardous: Anco seems several times to have caused offense on this score. Once he was saved from a spearing by Sassy’s intervention; on another occasion he incurred a formal curse that was said to have produced an incurable ulcer on his leg.
24

*   *   *

In 1848, after the last of his fellow castaways had died, James Morrill was for a time the only white man for some two million square miles. A decade later all this had changed. The founding of the independent state of Queensland in 1859 opened up an area for potential settlement two and a half times the size of Texas. Glowing descriptions from explorers of what was formally named the Kennedy District, based on the drainage areas of the Burdekin and Herbert rivers, soon reached would-be settlers in Britain and New South Wales. The region’s soils, rivers, and grassy open plains—created by Aboriginal fire regimes—looked ideal for sheep and cattle.

Thanks especially to the efforts of the entrepreneur and explorer George Elphinstone Dalrymple, vast new pastoral runs were opened up to squatters from about 1860, many of them Scots aristocrat families like Dalrymple’s own. Instant port towns mushroomed at Bowen and Mackay in support. By 1863 almost the entire Kennedy District had been taken up, and squatters were beginning to push northwest into the Gulf Country.
25

The seasonal hunter-gatherer range of James Morrill’s clan lay at the epicenter of this invasion. In a terse description of its impact on his clan relatives and friends, Morrill marks the beginning of one of northern Australia’s most intense and sustained bouts of frontier conflict. Naive “good intentions” on the part of some squatters like Dalrymple couldn’t soften the fact that the Aboriginal clans of the Burdekin–Herbert district experienced a full-scale assault on their estates, ecologies, and cultures. Although the Land Act of 1860 technically gave Aborigines the right to enter leased land, there were many ways to keep them out, including guns. Squatters appropriated the rich estuaries, swamps, rivers, lagoons, forests, and grasslands that the clans had inhabited for centuries, and then the same invaders literally locked the clans out of the new European economies that sprang up in their place—the pastoral runs, stations, townships, and ports. Armed resistance from Aborigines led in turn to a hardening policy of forced dispersals and shootings at the hands of specially formed troops of black police and squatter vigilantes.
26

Morrill, initially excited at news of the arrival of his countrymen in the district, was then troubled at the ensuing treatment of his kinfolk. In 1860 an attempt by “a stout able-bodied blackfellow, a friend of mine” to tell Morrill’s story to the visiting survey ship
Spitfire
ended when the Aboriginal man’s actions were misinterpreted and he “was shot dead … and another was wounded.” Soon after this, Morrill learned that the funeral ceremony of a respected clan elder had been interrupted by a gunshot from a squatter, which killed the man’s lamenting son. On top of this, cattle were reported to be milling at the Bowen River “in great numbers,” drinking the water holes dry and leaving the fish to die. Worst of all, fifteen men in “a fishing party belonging to the tribe I was living with, were shot down dead,” probably by native police.
27

Despite the accumulating carnage, Morrill could not suppress his “hopes of being restored.” Eventually he persuaded his troubled clan to let him visit the white intruders in order to negotiate an end to the bloodshed and spoliation. Yet when the time to depart finally came, his heart was torn: “They then said you will forget us altogether; and when I was coming away the man I was living with burst out crying, so did his gin, and several of the other gins and men. It was a touching scene. The remembrance of their past kindness came full upon me and quite overpowered me. There was a short struggle between the feeling of love I had for my old friends and companions and the desire once more to live a civilized life.”
28

On Sunday January 25, 1863, a bronzed, naked, and shaggy Morrill hailed two stockmen named Wilson and Hatch at Sheepstation Creek, and only narrowly averted the fate of his clan relatives by yelling out in broken English, “Do not shoot me, I am a British object.”
29

When Narcisse Pelletier made his contact with Europeans in 1875, he did so under markedly different circumstances. A small but growing frontier industry of English and Japanese trepang and pearl-shell luggers was taking over a long-standing trade with China that had previously been run by seagoing Malays. Now based in the Torres Strait, it was beginning to push southward into the rich coastal waters of Cape York. During the 1870s, marine-resource hunters eventually reached the remote waters of Sandbeach country, the territory of Pelletier’s clan, and as Louis Grin had done earlier, they were initiating contact with remote Aboriginal communities in order to lure or compel young men into working as divers.
30

In early April 1875 the
John Bell
, a brig belonging to a Scots entrepreneur in the Torres Strait called Joseph Frazer, anchored off Night Island in search of fresh drinking water. Prior to this, Pelletier’s clan had probably experienced only one European incursion into their estate. In July/August 1860 the former
Rattlesnake
naturalist Jock MacGillivray had arrived on Night Island aboard a commercial trader, searching for sandalwood to trade with China. Looking toward the mainland beach, MacGillivray glimpsed what he thought might be a young half-caste, but he was unable to get close enough to confirm the sighting. Had the Wanthaala not hidden young Anco from view, the naturalist might have featured in the discovery of another castaway.
31

Narcisse Pelletier, c. 1875
(Royal Historical Society of Queensland photographic collection)

Pelletier’s eventual reentry into European society was coerced. On April 11, 1875, the
John Bell
’s watering party noticed a wild-looking white man, complete with a wooden earlobe plug and chest scarifications, moving among a group of Aborigines. Without hesitation or consultation they “rescued” him. Pelletier, unable to speak a word of English, dared not resist his “kidnapping” for fear of being shot. His Wanthaala relatives, who,
John Bell
’s captain said, “were very reluctant to part with him,” urged Anco to jump ashore, but he was forcibly prevented.
32

A fisherman at Somerset, the small government settlement on the tip of Cape York where Pelletier was taken, reported that the castaway had been “fastened so that he could not escape.” Other observers remembered him behaving like a caged bird: he crouched on his heels, “casting quick, eager, suspicious glances around him on every side and at every object which came within his view, rarely speaking, and apparently unable to remember more than a few words of his own language.”
33

As Constant Merland would later declare, Pelletier “was no longer a Frenchman, he was an Australian.” Adopted at such a young age and then living for so long with the Wanthaala, “his naturalization was complete.” A variety of French speakers tried to question him soon after his capture, first at Somerset, then during his voyage south on the
Brisbane
, and again while he was staying in Sydney prior to returning to France. All noted his limited recollection of both the French language and his original family. George Eugène Simon, the Sydney-based French consul, captured something of the boy’s pain as he struggled to recover a lost past:

I told him the name of his village and I then witnessed some of the strangest and most painful spectacles, I think, that one might see: this wretched man made extraordinary efforts to remember; he wanted to speak to me and all that came to his lips were inarticulate sounds.… His face and eyes expressed a terrible anxiety and anguish, and something like despair which was painful. I suffered with him and almost as much as him. Sweat was breaking out on my brow as on his. Involuntarily I remembered the tale of Hoffman’s of the man who has lost his shadow and his image. I would have done anything to give him back then and there his identity, which clearly he was trying to grasp hold of again.
34

Naturally enough, the two young castaways faced different challenges when attempting to rejoin European society. Because Morrill rejoined his countrymen voluntarily, his sense of dislocation was initially less severe than Pelletier’s; moreover, he was older and had retained more of his original language and culture. He made a symbolic renewal of his ties to Protestant Christianity by getting himself rebaptized, but even so, he found himself in the precarious situation of having to reintegrate in the midst of a brutal frontier war.
35

After being welcomed as a local hero in the nearby port town of Bowen, Morrill was taken to Brisbane, where he delivered a short version of his story to a local
Courier
journalist, Edmund Gregory, who republished it as a pamphlet. From the outset, though, Morrill showed signs of unease when discussing his former life, as he tried to balance the pressure to affirm white prejudices with his private hopes of stopping the settler attacks on his people. Although the governor of Queensland, Sir George Bowen, thought him “intelligent and respectable” and arranged for him to receive a plot of land in Bowen and a government position as a customs officer, Morrill’s interview in Rockhampton with the trigger-happy police magistrate John Jardine proved less comfortable. Nevertheless, a year later Morrill was sufficiently assimilated to marry a young immigrant domestic servant, Eliza Ann Ross, who soon gave birth to their son.
36

Some settlers saw Morrill as a useful asset because of his mastery of Aboriginal language and his intimate knowledge of local geography, animals, plants, and bush medicines. A few also encouraged him to fulfill his desired role of operating as mediator with the beleaguered clans of the district. When first meeting him at Sheepstation Creek in 1863, Wilson and Hatch had immediately asked him to tell the Bindal people that “if they did not interfere with us, we should not interfere with them.” Morrill’s interpretation of the message was actually a good deal bleaker and more realistic: “I told them that the white men had come to take their land away. They always understood that might, not right, is the law of the world, but they told me to ask the white men to let them have all the ground to the north of the Burdekin, and to let them fish in the rivers; also the low grounds, they live on to get their roots—ground which is no good to white people, near sea coast and swampy.”
37

Both his clan’s and his own request of a reward for “the natives who were so kind to me” were ignored. True, one of his more sensitive confidants, George Dalrymple, decided to use Morrill as a negotiator when setting up a new township at Rockingham Bay, north of Bowen, in 1864. Morrill was taken aboard the schooner the
Policeman
and asked to jump into waist-deep water to relay a message to a band of muscular warriors who’d waded out to meet them. As Dalrymple recalled:

I told them, through Morrill, that we had come to take possession of the coast from a point on the northwest shore of the bay to a point opposite Haycock Island, and that we were going to settle there and possess it.

They said “they hoped we were not going to war with them.” I replied, “No: that we did not wish to hurt them, but that we wished to be left alone; that if they would keep off and not molest us, we would not injure or interfere with them in any way.” They seemed to understand this ultimatum, and retired slowly into the mangroves; Morrill having explained it to them over and over again, and told them to inform the neighbouring tribes accordingly.
38

Out of these “negotiations” came the Reef township of Cardwell. But the fate of a go-between in such vexed circumstances is usually to please neither side, and so it proved with James Morrill. His Aboriginal friends felt betrayed, their pleas for access to marginal land having been ignored, and his offers to help negotiate peace were rejected because settlers suspected him of conspiring with black resisters.
The Courier
suggested that “wave-like” successions of black outrages against white settlers flew in the face of Morrill’s claims about the natives’ peaceable disposition. Three months later the same paper reported on a settler who’d promised “to give [Morrill] a small piece of lead” if he tried any peacemaking on his property.
39

Though on the surface Morrill might have appeared to make a reasonably successful transition back into white colonial society, Dalrymple believed him to be “an unhappy man, trying to reconcile the hostile suspicious attitude of the settlers to the Aboriginals, with his own loyalty to the blackfellows who had looked after him so long.” As early as 1864 Morrill reached the melancholy conclusion that “the work of extinction is gradually but surely going on among the aboriginals. The tribe I was living with are far less numerous now than when I went among them.” Their only hope of survival, he believed, was to hide out in inaccessible terrain like Mount Elliot: “it is such thick scrub, and there is such an abundance of food in it, and plenty of water, that if the Aboriginals were driven from the country all around they would find safe asylum there.” He held destructive police and settler policies responsible for his clan’s rapid population decline, and blamed the disruption of their traditional way of life for the deterioration of their physical and mental health.
40