White Beech: The Rainforest Years (21 page)

‘Everything and everyone is connected to Jenny Graham. She’s a daughter of George Drumley or Darramlee. She seems to have borne her first child to Andrew Graham, a river pilot on the Southport Broadwater, in 1873; she married in 1898, and most of the Kombumerri claimants are descended from her surviving children. The entire Kombumerri Corporation for Culture are descendants of Jenny Graham.’

‘Did she have any direct connection with Numinbah?’

‘I can’t see that she did. She grew up in Beaudesert, which seems to have been the last stronghold of the Yugambeh speakers. Then she lived in Southport. Died in 1945. The most authoritative account of the Numinbah Aborigines has to be the one given by Jack Gresty in 1947, and he says that the local aborigines had died out twenty-five years earlier.’ (Gresty, 69)

Gresty, who worked for the Queensland Forestry Department, spent much of his time in Numinbah. He also had the benefit of information from William Duncan’s sons who were brought up with the local Aborigines and spoke their languages. I foraged in a drawer and pulled out a file: ‘This is Gresty’s version, “The real significance of the word ‘Numinbah’ was that the aborigines believed that the narrow valley held the mountains tightly together. The tribe had two highly prized hunting dogs; one was named ‘Numinbah’ – ‘hold him tight’ – and the other ‘Wundburra’ (‘Wunburra’) – ‘climb upwards’. ” ’ (Gresty, 60)

‘Is there any support for that?’ asked Ann.

‘Sharpe lists a word “naminbah” as meaning “hold on”, saying that it’s derived from “southern dialects”, and she gives two authorities as quoted in
Science of Man
in 1904, and doesn’t notice the occurrence in Gresty. And she doesn’t notice the geographical name either. Weird.’

I got up to put together the salad for our supper as Ann worked her way through Gresty’s word-list, which she was trying to compare with Sharpe’s. ‘I think there is a significant group of words for which Sharpe has no authority but Gresty, which would be Numinbah words rather than Nerang words, but the spelling is so peculiar it’s hard to be sure. Gresty is the only source for the names of some trees—’

I paused in the rinsing of the lettuce. ‘Such as?’

Ann read from the notes she had made, ‘Black Apple, Red Bean, Crow’s Ash, Native Elm, Red Carabeen, Black Myrtle, Pink Tulip Oak.’

‘Brilliant. All rainforest species, and none of them listed by any other informant. I’ve spent hours scanning the other Yugambeh/Bundjalung word lists and there’s only a few words that relate to rainforest. The trees they have names for are eucalypts, banksias, wattles; the animals are animals of the open forest.’

‘Well you did say that the Kombumerri called themselves “people of the dry forest”. That part makes sense at least.’

‘The problem is that the rainforest vocab might be missing because the compiler didn’t ask about rainforest species, not because the respondent didn’t have names for them. Still. It’s a clue. What’s the word given for Crow’s Ash?’

‘Um . . . “bulbar” – that’s Sharpe’s version of Gresty’s “bulburra”.’

‘Crow’s Ash is a Flindersia; the usual name given for the Flindersias is “cudgerie”, supposed to be from the Bundjalung “gajari”. Gresty’s word is completely different.’

Ann hunted through Sharpe as I laid the table.

‘Found it! Sharpe routinely changes “g” to “k”. She’s got an entry “kadhir”, which she says is a location name from a type of tree, “cudgery tree”. Her source supplies “Cudherygun where the cudgeree trees grow”. She expands that saying that it grows on a clear hill above Tyalgun, Murwillumbah area.’

‘Tyalgum, she means. Gresty gives her that word, for a fighting chieftain; she changes it to “dayalgam” and then says that “kayalgam” is the more likely form.’

‘And then spells the gazetted place-name wrong.’

Ann closed the book with a snap and we sat down to supper.

Early the next morning I brought Ann her morning cup of hot water and lemon, and asked her to come with me to the Natural Bridge. We left the car by the causeway, walked up through the rainforest along the creek, where in the dawn twilight we surprised a pademelon and her joey feeding on fallen fruit. At every step the roar of the water plunging through the hole in the roof of the cave grew louder. The air was clammy and dank. As we climbed up the path leading to the cave we could feel the ground shuddering beneath our feet. We stepped into the gloom of the cave. Ann wrapped her arms across her chest. I zipped my body-warmer up to my chin. We had no desire to creep under the guardrail, but stood motionless, awed by the white column of falling water and its reflection trembling on the black waters of the pool. The energy contained within the space is massive and utterly intimidating. Tourists however are seldom intimidated. As far as tourism is concerned the place is a mere curiosity.

As we walked out of the roar of the falling water and back down the creek, Ann shivered.

‘Disturbing, isn’t it?’

‘Definitely,’ said Ann.

I turned off the track and led Ann into the forest. I cautioned her to be careful round a group of young stingers. ‘See that?’

I was pointing at an anvil-shaped rock, with a smaller rock sitting on top of it. Ann picked up the smaller rock. A black spider ran for its life.

‘It’s got a hole in the side that my thumb just fits into,’ she said. ‘And it’s dead flat.’

‘Rub it across the stone.’

She did, and a bright red streak was suddenly uncovered.

‘Ochre,’ she said. ‘Is there ochre round here?’

‘There is, but not this close to the creek. I’ve known about this stone since the first week I was here. Every time I come here I check it, and it’s always undisturbed. The black spider is always under the pestle.’

Ann stood up. ‘You think it’s a mortar and pestle. For grinding ochre. Body paint.’

‘The way I see it there’s simply no chance that Aboriginal people didn’t know about the waterfall, the cavern and the pool, or that they hadn’t invested the place with special significance. Groom says “The natives knew the place well and kept away from it.” [66] Deep as it is in the creek gorge, it would have been easy to keep secret from all but the initiated.’

‘Why would it need to be secret?’

‘Because it would have to be sacred. Think about the topography, the deep gorge, the joining arch of rock, the wide, low cavern, the thunderous shaft of water. It’s like an image of titanic intercourse.’

‘Or something,’ said Ann, looking back to the creek.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

She chanted, and I joined in:

A savage place! As holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her daemon lover!

‘Coleridge would have got it,’ I said.

‘Coleridge was a junkie,’ said Ann.

‘I still reckon this is a sacred site,’ said I stubbornly.

I didn’t utter the words that were uppermost in my mind. ‘Secret women’s business’ are the most ridiculed three words in a nation given to ridiculing anything it cannot understand. In 1995 the struggle of Ngarrindjeri women to prevent a bridge being built from the mainland to Hindmarsh Island at the mouth of the Murray River was quashed by the finding of a Royal Commission that the evidence of the women was fabricated. In 2001, when the developers sought compensation for the cost of delays in building the bridge caused by the Indigenous people’s opposition, a Federal Court found for the women, who claimed that the island had a special significance as a burial ground. Then in December 2002 workmen laying cables for the redevelopment of the wharf at Goolwa dug up the skeletal remains of a Ngarrindjeri woman and her daughter. The secret was manifest in the topography if only the developers had had eyes to see. The last time I was there, there was no water under the bridge the whitefellas had been so desperate to build. The pleasure craft moored under it were locked in dried mud.

Ann was on to me. ‘You’re thinking women’s business, aren’t you?’

‘Yep. If you’d been a man I wouldn’t have shown you the mortar. My guess is that the cave was a place of serious women’s business, even of pilgrimage in time of special need. Infertility. Unwanted pregnancy. Maybe even infanticide. That’s why I made you get up early. I never go to the Natural Bridge unless I can be fairly certain the tourists aren’t there.’

Later in the day, when Ann had gone back to the lounger and her Rex Stout mystery and I was once more scowling at my laptop, I threw myself back in my chair.

‘There’s something odd about the way the natural bridge was found.’

Ann left her book on the lounger and pulled a chair up next to me.

‘Such as what?’

‘Whitefella history says that the natural bridge was “discovered” in 1893 by a white man called “Sandy” Duncan. He and his mate “Din” Guinea were cutting cedar round here. With them was a Bullongin man called Kipper Tommy. Duncan is supposed to have scrambled down to the creek for water for the billy and come upon the stone bridge by accident.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Guinea and Duncan have employed Kipper Tommy, right? So what’s his job?’

‘Well, he picks out the cedar, and brushes the tracks to get to it, stuff like that.’

‘One of the things he definitely does have to do is to find drinking water.’

‘So?’

‘So why did Sandy Duncan end up scrambling down a steep rocky slope to fill the billy?’

‘OK. I’ll play,’ said Ann. ‘Why did Sandy Duncan have to go look for water himself? Because Kipper Tommy wouldn’t?’

‘Exactly. He probably said something about bunyips or devils or something.’

‘Because – why?’

‘Because he knew the place was sacred. That it was secret. That would be enough, but it may also have been something that was death for a man to look upon.’

‘But how would he have known?’

‘That would depend on how far he’d got in the initiation process. The name Kipper refers to the initiation ceremony. Jack Gresty says that “kippera” was the local word for a youth, “between boyhood and manhood” [64]. Tommy was known as Kipper Tommy all his life. “Kipper Tommy” is one of the condescending nicknames that whitefellas bestowed on Aboriginal men indiscriminately, so we can’t assume just on that evidence that his initiation was never completed.’

Everybody in the Numinbah Valley knew Kipper Tommy, who eked out a living doing odd jobs for various white settlers. A correspondent who calls him ‘head of the Coomera tribe’ provided the following reminiscence to the
Gold Coast Bulletin
:

On a wet morning when us children went downstairs for breakfast, our old Aborigine friend Kipper Tomy would be there at the warm end of the kitchen . . . One Sunday morning my brother George and I . . . called at Tomy’s camp. His living quarters were a couple of sheets of bark leaning up against a log.

He was sitting by the fire with his two dogs, Carum (meaning a fast dog) and Trampum (meaning a slow walker) and cooking a goanna . . .

Not long after seeing him in the camp he called at our home limping badly and showed Dad a big growth on his groin and he had a sharp piece of broken glass with him to open it. He would not let Dad take him to a doctor, and we never saw him any more, so it had to be goodbye Kipper. (Hall
et al
., 34)

Numinbah farmer Tom Cowderoy, who calls Tommy ‘King of the small Coomera tribe’, is clearly talking about the same person.

His wife was called Ginny and they were both very fond of tobacco. They carried their pipes along in the hope of being able to beg some tobacco. If Tommy should happen to be given any, he would have to give Ginny her share. They had a son called Peter. Kipper also had two dogs called Corum and Trampum.

Occasionally he would make a friendly visit to the Numinbah blacks with his tribe and then there would be great feasting on the plentiful supply of Queensland nuts, the fish and wild game that was abundant in the valley in those days. (Hall
et al
., 54)

The Bullongin of Coomera were a clan rather than a tribe, and did not have a ‘king’. A ‘Kipper Tommy’ is mentioned in one account as one of a group of six Aboriginal boys who were kidnapped and taken by the Native Police to Port Douglas to be trained as trackers. The boys eventually escaped, walking all the way home (Gresty, 64). Other versions of the story identify the place as Port Denison, and do not mention a Kipper Tommy. The Numinbah Kipper Tommy is thought to have died in about 1904. He and his wife are said to have been buried ‘at the back of Nerang Cemetery’ but no trace of their graves can now be found (Hall
et al
., 28, 31–2, 54).

‘We don’t have any evidence that Aboriginal people avoided the Natural Bridge, do we?’ asked Ann.

‘There is a bit. Gresty says that Aboriginal mothers told their children not to hang round near the cliffs.’ In Gresty’s own words, ‘ “Do not go near the cliffs,” they would say, “for if you do, Koonimbagowgunn will roll rocks down on you.” . . . When a boulder, loosened by rain or weathering, would be heard in the camp, especially at night, coming down with a tremendous roar and a thump, mothers would say to the little ones, “There’s old Koonimbagowgunn again! . . . Remember to keep away from the cliffs, so that she cannot roll one down on top of you”.’ (67)