White Beech: The Rainforest Years (22 page)

Koonimbagowgunn, spelt ‘kunimbuggaugunn’, turns up in Bullum’s Wangerriburra vocabulary (Allen). And Steele, who says the name means ‘widow’, claims that Koonimbagowgunn’s realm was the cliffs between Dave’s Creek, which is directly opposite CCRRS on the other side of the Nerang River, and Ships Stern (Steele, Sharpe, 122, cf. Gresty, 67); a map of Lamington National Park printed in 1982 shows a part of the west face of Ships Stern actually labelled ‘Koonimbagowan’. In 1890 a series of huge landslides following months of heavy rain totally transformed the cliffscape between Turtle Rock and Nixon Creek. Tom Cowderoy’s father told him that he used to be woken up at night ‘by the noise of these landslides – great boulders, some as big as a house, giving way after the heavy rain and thundering down the cliffs’ (Cowderoy).

I went on thinking aloud. ‘It’s odd that Aboriginal people haven’t claimed any connection with a natural feature as conspicuous as the Natural Bridge. I see hundreds of tourists every time I go in or out but never an Aboriginal person. I mention the place to two Aboriginal women in an information centre and they blank me. I’ve lost count of the number of Aboriginal people who’ve said they would ask their grandparents and didn’t get back to me.’

‘But didn’t Aboriginal people travel through here?’

‘I don’t think they did. You remember Meston’s account of being taken over the mountains by Tullaman? It’s only just struck me that Tullaman didn’t take him through Numinbah.’ In the account of this excursion which he sent to the editor of
the
Brisbane Courier
in 1894, Meston says that he and Tullaman crossed the river where Nerang now stands and followed a branch of it to where it ended ‘in a beautiful waterfall wreathing its flashing waters over dark basaltic rock’, from which point they climbed up to the ‘top of the Darlington Plateau’ which had not yet been named for Lord Lamington, and turned westwards, ending up on the summit of a bare mountain at the head of the Tweed.

We are now slowly beginning to understand that Aboriginal peoples put a great deal of effort into managing their lands, by keeping certain areas clear by the use of fire, so that fresh grass attracted game. People travelling through their territories had perforce to hunt and kill the same game for themselves and so had to seek permission from the traditional owners. They had also to stick to specified routes. To travel from the caldera to the Bunya nut festival, for example, the Githabul crossed the range using scrub tunnels running along a spur of Mount Durigan and then travelled north down the Albert River (Steele). The peoples of the Nerang and the Tweed travelled to the Bunya feasting northwards along the beaches to the shores of Moreton Bay before turning inland.

There used to be a corroboree ground near the Pine Creek Bridge on a flat called Tagaballum. A huge number of Aboriginal artefacts, stone blades, axeheads and stone fragments has been found nearby. What this could indicate is that groups gathering there mounted large-scale hunts where pademelons, a favourite food source, were driven from the edges of the forest into waiting nets or on to waiting spears. More important probably is the bora ring described by John Shirley in 1910 as ‘at Munninba, between the selections of Hon. J. G. Appel and Mr Alexander Duncan’; ‘Munninba’ is a mistake for Numinbah. In 1910 the Duncans owned Portion 10v adjoining Appel’s Portion 56, a mile upstream from the junction of Nixon Creek and the Nerang. The earthworks nowadays called bora rings served as sites for all kinds of public gatherings besides the initiation ceremony or ‘bora’ – ‘kippera’ in Yugambeh. The presence of earthen rings in Numinbah implies that it was a centre of clan activities.

‘Tullaman must have taken Meston up a track well north of the Numinbah Gap because they ended up on the Lamington Plateau.’ Meston says Tullaman took him ‘south along the tableland towards the Macpherson Range, through dense scrub and rich basalt soil, dining on turkeys, wongan, bandicoots, carpet snakes, tree grubs, yams, young palm shoots, paddymella and turkey eggs’ (
BC
, 21 July 1894). What this tells us is that the Talgiburri knew how to use rainforest game and foodstuffs. Generally speaking these foods are taken at the forest edge rather than in the deep forest, while carpet snakes and bandicoots can be found in the dry forest as well as rainforest. Some caution must be exercised with Meston’s account. Meston was a promoter and a self-promoter, who was extraordinarily careless with his facts. His dates, names and places are often misremembered, and there is now no way of checking them. He was wrong about the year he crossed the Darlington Range, and wrong about one of the two men who went with him. He may also have been wrong about the way they went and what they ate. He does not include flying foxes, for example, which were typical rainforest game, and very easily taken.

‘Meston said in 1928 that the Talgiburri and the Chabooburri were extinct. What happened to them?’

‘The original smallpox epidemic in 1789 is thought to have killed half to seventy per cent of the Aboriginal population around Port Jackson; it is also thought to have extended far beyond the original area of contact [Mear]. We may assume that old people were more susceptible, and that’s your Dreaming, your knowledge, your culture annihilated right there. Three further epidemics are recorded – smallpox in 1831, influenza in 1858 and dysentery in 1865. Measles would have been a killer too, and whooping cough was around as well. Such disasters cause clans to collapse and force them to amalgamate. Besides, dispersal was a deliberate policy of the whites. Timber-getters made a point of employing non-local Aborigines who could not conspire with their clansmen against them. Generally coastal groups of hunter-gatherers are semi-settled but this is a period when Aboriginal people are being driven from pillar to post and back again, ending up all over the place, anywhere they can find a livelihood. And it’s worse than that. Untold numbers of Aboriginal people were simply murdered. Even Gresty, who was a government employee, refers to “deliberate measures for their extermination, with either official sanction or connivance” [69]. If the blacks “got bad”, which is how the settlers referred to resistance to expropriation, it was legitimate to eliminate them. The settlers either killed the Aborigines themselves or got the Native Police to do it for them [Lumholtz, 53–4, 262]. It was no secret. Did you ever hear of the Hornet Bank Massacre?’

‘Isn’t that where the Aborigines were given poisoned Christmas puddings?’

‘Yep. The Frasers also shot eleven of the local Yeeman people for spearing cattle, and they interfered with the Yeeman women. The Yeeman waited until the Fraser menfolk were away to take a horrifyingly brutal revenge. The son and heir, William Fraser, then embarked on the extermination of the whole Yeeman clan, plus any other Aborigine who got in the way. He’s supposed to have killed three hundred people, most of them before witnesses, in broad daylight. A year later, 1858, the Yeeman were said to be extinct.’

‘Was Fraser ever brought to trial?’

‘No. Aborigines couldn’t be bound by an oath on the Bible, so only evidence from a white man was admissible, and no white man would give evidence against him. Mass killings of Aborigines had been happening for years. There was no comeback. And no denying what had happened. It was in fact systematic extermination.’

The Hornet Bank outrage was by no means the first. There was a mass poisoning of about fifty people in the Brisbane Valley in 1842. In the same year, when one of the Gössner missionaries at Zion’s Hill was told that fifty or sixty Kabi Kabi people had been poisoned by flour given to them at Kilcoy Station, a hundred kilometres or so north-west of Brisbane, he confided the matter to his journal until he could safely reveal it. The Aboriginal people meanwhile spread the news of the atrocity far and wide. Flour left in shepherd’s huts was so apt to be poisoned that the Aboriginal people who helped themselves to it ate only enough to see whether fits came on, and if they did drank salt water until they saved themselves by being sick (Petrie, 208–9). When the Kilcoy massacre became known to the authorities, the attorney-general threatened prosecution but no official complaint was ever lodged and the perpetrator was never apprehended (Kidd,
passim
).

Word of the slaughter of Aboriginal peoples had already reached London, where the newly founded Aborigines’ Protection Society had in 1838 published the findings of a Select Parliamentary Committee as
Information Respecting the Aborigines in British Colonies
. From 1847 it published
The Aborigines’ Friend or Colonial Intelligencer
. The members of the society were quite clear that Aboriginal peoples had rights under common law, including the right to territory, and that the expropriation of the Australian Aboriginal peoples was illegal. However there was little they could do to protect the rights of indigenous Australians. When seven of the eleven men responsible for the Myall Creek massacre at Inverell in northern New South Wales were found guilty and hanged, the settlers adopted a code of silence. Meanwhile it was relatively easy to make a case for justification when Aboriginal people were gunned down. Without modern weapons Aboriginal people could offer little resistance; if they stole weapons, which was the only way they could obtain them, they could be pursued and killed with complete impunity.

The poisoning at Kilcoy Station was in the news again in the 1860s when general concern about the decline in the Queensland Aboriginal population began to be expressed. In 1861 Lieutenant Wheeler of the Native Police was happy to assure an official inquiry that he had dispersed the Moreton Bay blacks (Rowley, i:167); what he meant was that he and the Native Police under his command had killed them. The
Colonial Intelligencer
for March 1868 reported ‘that if the native police . . . had been properly organised for the purpose of extirpating the aborigines, they could not accomplish that object more effectually.’
The
Daily Guardian
reported on 8 August 1863:

The old Brisbane tribe of blacks which once numbered over 1000 fighting men is now nearly extinct. Their language has disappeared, and they are now compelled to have recourse to the dialect of the Wide Bay natives, who have poured in to occupy the hunting grounds left vacant by the speedy decrease in numbers of the Brisbane tribe. Six years ago, 1500 blacks might be seen at a corroboree. Now however it would be a difficult matter to muster 500. These results cannot be wholly ascribed to natural causes; they must be the effect of some process of extermination that has risen to the rank of an established institution among us. Not many years ago half a tribe of blacks was destroyed by arsenic, generously administered to them by a squatter, through a present of flour.

The Aborigines Protection Society reported in 1868 that ‘the aborigines of Australia have, in many districts, been exterminated by the combined agency of strong drink, imported diseases, and the squatter’s rifle’. Nowhere was this combination more effective than in south-east Queensland.

Ann headed back to Melbourne, and I went on struggling with the contradictory history of the devastated peoples of the Gold Coast hinterland.

Meston does not mention encountering any indigenous people on his safari through the rainforest. Tindale was not the only person who believed that they would have been Kalibal or Gilibal, who spoke a variety of the Bundjalung language called Dinggabal. When Arthur Capell visited Woodenbong in 1960 to make recordings of spoken Dinggabal, he described the language as Yugambeh/Yugumbir. The Kalibal may also be the same people as the Dijabal, the Kidabal, the Kitabool, the Kitabal, the Kuttibal, the Galibal, the Gidabal, the Gidabul, the Gidabhal, the Gidjabal, the Gidjubal, the Gilival, the Gulivul and the Githabul. What nobody is very clear about is whether they are Bundjalung. The question is material.

The Bundjalung Council of Elders Aboriginal Corporation, based in Lismore, is one of the first such councils to be incorporated, as long ago as 1989. As incorporated representatives of the Indigenous population the elders’ council is eligible to receive grants from a variety of sources, for a vast range of activities, acquiring land, developing educational and health programmes, staging events, raising the profile of the group, providing legal assistance where necessary, developing infrastructure, promoting art, performance and music, developing cultural media and educational material, recording and teaching languages, accumulating and keeping records, protecting and managing sacred sites and artefacts. An Aboriginal Corporation can be a source of considerable wealth to a comparatively small self-selecting body of people.

The Bundjalung claim Mount Warning by default because, they say, ‘the Wollumbin tribe was massacred back in the 1860s’. According to the website of Wollumbin Dowsing there was a massacre:

where the bodies of the men women and children had been mutilated and hacked into pieces which so distressed the people who discovered the massacre that they lit up beacon fires all around Mt Warning to call in all the clans to come to this place and to perform funeral rites to try and restore dignity for the victims . . . all the clever men also known as men of high degree of initiation, were assembled and sat down for 3 days and 3 nights to sing a curse into the land that would last for all time . . . The death song or curse is still being sung today from the spirit world and can be discerned by anyone who is into their listening and dowsers will find 5 metre squares of discharging energy all around.

There is no record of any such massacre in the 1860s, which cannot be taken to mean that no such thing happened, but from this description the killing must have been done with axes and clubs, which does not suggest an outrage perpetrated by Europeans. Though developers are nowadays required to consult heritage experts before applying for planning permission for new developments along the Tweed, no objection was made to a new luxury lifestyle ‘Nightcap Village’ development at Mebbin Springs on the exact site of the purported massacre (
Koori Mail
, 29 January 2009).