White Beech: The Rainforest Years (23 page)

Aboriginal survivors who have consulted both government archives and their own elders are now demanding withdrawal of rights and privileges from groups claiming to be Bundjalung and the restoration of their traditional lands to the distinct peoples of the caldera. Chief among the peoples now claiming their birthright are the Githabul, some of whom accuse the Bundjalung of cultural genocide, claiming that the ‘(Ngarakwal/Githabul) and the other distinct peoples of the Northern New South Wales, South East Queensland region are being subject to forced assimilation as Bundjalung’. The Githabul are now emerging as the dominant clan group along the Border ranges, with law and history on their side.

In February 2007, the Federal Court of Australia found for the Githabul people against the crown, and recognised their title to 1,120 square kilometres of national parks and state forests in northern New South Wales. The Githabul were represented by Trevor Close, who had been given financial and legal assistance in training as a native title lawyer and presenting the claim by the Canadian government. It was the first time any native title claim had succeeded in New South Wales. The Githabul won because they passed the state government’s ‘credible evidence test’. They were able to bring forward not only their language, which is still spoken, but also continuous family histories supported by documentary evidence from the United Aborigines Mission. As well as lands in New South Wales the Githabul claimed the summit of Mount Lindesay, which lay beyond the border in Queensland. In September that year the Beattie government recognised that claim as well. On 29 November 2007, on Woodenbong Common, Justice Catherine Branson signed the Indigenous Land Use Agreement that recognised the Githabul title.

When it happened I rang Ann and gave her as good an account as I could of the Githabul negotiations, because she has a lifetime of training negotiators behind her and I knew she’d be interested.

‘Close didn’t claim any private property, not even crown leasehold. Apparently native title claimants may not lay claim to freehold land or even to crown land in current leasehold, which seems unfair, to say the least.’

‘How near did they get to Cave Creek?’

‘They got a chunk of the Border Ranges National Park which brings them to the western edge of the Lamington plateau. I don’t think they’ll stop there, because they claim the Ngarakwal/Ngandawul as a moiety and that gives them an interest in Mount Warning.’

The success of the Githabul claim is by no means the end of the story. On August 31 2009 Ngarakwal/Githabul activists made a submission to the Tweed Shire Council protesting against the perpetuation of the Bundjalung myth, the misuse of information from Indigenous elders and the lie of the dual identity of Mount Warning. According to Githabul elder Harry Boyd, Mount Warning is not Wollumbin the cloud-catcher and has nothing to do with any warrior king. The whole caldera is Wulambiny Momoli or ‘scrub turkey nest’, a ‘djurebil’ or increase site where hunting is forbidden so that Brush-turkeys may replenish their numbers. He and his supporters denounced the ‘Bundjalung nation’ as a white fiction. ‘There is no Bundjalung nation, tribe, people, language, culture, clan, nor horde. No Bundjalung anything.’

It was my turn to visit Ann in Melbourne, where I gave her a progress report.

‘The Ngarakwal, Tindale’s Arakwal, now say that the real Bundjalung are the Clarence River people; they also say that the Tweed Bundjalung are well aware that they are descendants of Islanders, and not Aboriginal at all.’

‘Is that true?’ asked Ann.

‘Who would know? These days you daren’t even ask the question. Most people would say it’s immaterial. Islanders lived with Aboriginal people and married into the clans, so they are entitled to self-identify. Besides the Torres Strait Islands are Australian.’

Ann frowned. ‘People were blackbirded from all over the South Seas. They weren’t all Australian by any means. Still. What next?’

‘Uncle Harry Boyd says he’s preparing a title claim that will cover as far as Nerang.’

Ann laughed. ‘Well, that should answer your questions once for all. Is Close involved?’

‘Close has gone to Western Australia. He had some sort of dust-up with his people, and he’s gone.’

‘What happened?’

‘There was a meeting of the Githabul Elders Council in Kyogle in April 2009, where Close wanted to raise issues about the handling of public money by the corporation. Apparently the director of the elders’ council took exception; according to Close, he and his three sons waylaid Close on his way out of the meeting, forced him back into the hall and knocked him to the ground. Twenty or thirty people then gave him a hiding and he only escaped serious injury because his aunts intervened. This was the bloke who had had the biggest win of any native title claimant ever in New South Wales, on the floor, getting a belting from the people he’d been working for for sixteen years.’

‘That’s a terrible story,’ said Ann.

‘That’s not all. The elders made a complaint to the police and Close found himself up on a charge of assault. He had the bad luck to come up in March 2010 in front of a magistrate who disbelieved his testimony which was disputed by the community. Close’s aunts denied that he had been forced to the ground, or that they had had to protect him. Close ended up with a criminal conviction and was released on bond.’

‘You need to talk to him, don’t you?’ said Ann.

‘I’m not sure. I haven’t been able to track him down. Now that he’s said to be working in the resources industry I’m not sure that I want to.’

‘There’s one big stone still unturned. You ought to drop in to IATSIS on your way home.’

So I did.

The Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is part of the Australian Museum complex, a range of handsome black buildings on the bank of Lake Burley Griffin. When I rang about the deposit made by the Ngarakwal people about the caldera, I found out that it had been placed on closed access. The issue had become so heated and the language so inflammatory that I would have to ask permission of the authors before I could see it. There were other things I could see, and the librarians, who could not have been more helpful, made sure that I did.

I was struggling to decipher an old microfilm of ‘Bundjalung Social Organisation’, the 1959 Sydney University Ph.D. thesis of anthropologist Malcolm Calley, when I read:

The McPherson Ranges seem to have restricted intercourse between New South Wales and Queensland clans: besides being rugged and inhospitable they were infested with
boiun
(
ogres
) and
derangan
(
ogresses
) whom only the accomplished magician would dare face. Most
boiun
were
brothers
of the clansmen in whose country they lived and would not harm them, but at least some of the McPherson
boiun
had no such affiliation and so were doubly dangerous. Of one of these,
Ililarng
, it was said that ‘he had no friends’. It seems that no clan occupied the mountains themselves and that parties travelling to Queensland bunya feasts avoided them and followed the beaches.

If no clan occupied the mountains themselves, then no clan claimed CCRRS. This had to be my answer, unsatisfactory though it was.

I ferreted through all Calley’s boxes of papers hunting for one more scrap of information. At the bottom of the last one I came across the penny notebook where he jotted down the notes of his original conversation with his Aboriginal informant. On one page he had scribbled:

Ililarng = vampire – a spirit that removed corpses from graves by magic and fed on them – found in very rugged country – head of Albert R. Lamington. Informant Tom Close.

The name ‘Ililarng’ was written in phonetics. I sat still, holding the small slip of paper as if it were a sacred relic, overhearing in imagination Trevor Close’s kinsman speaking seventy years ago of the lonely ghoul that is the tutelary spirit, the
genius loci
of Cave Creek. My grove is sacred to a single friendless ogre. I poked around for more information and sure enough Sharpe recognised ‘boiun’, though she spelt the word ‘buyuny’. They are ‘fairymen’ who infest parts of the mountains and the clanspeople leave them to it.

Ann rang from Melbourne.

‘So, who owns CCRRS?’

‘I do.’

‘You’ve only got a whitefella title bought from another whitefella. I thought you didn’t believe in Australian freeholds.’

‘I don’t.’

Australian freehold is not a historic title testifying to generations of occupation and use of the land but created by a stroke of the pen. I held freehold title to my land for what it was worth, but I didn’t think it was worth much.

‘What I found out at IATSIS is that Numinbah Johnny told the truth. Numinbah is a place of demons. CCRRS is in no-man’s-land.’ (Holmer, 1971)

‘So how does that fit with your idea that the Natural Bridge is a sacred site?’

‘The buyuny are ghouls, so they’d be right at home in a killing zone. When I find a human with a better claim I’ll hand it over.’

Whenever I look at the forest, and the creek, and the animals and birds who live here, it seems utterly barmy that anyone could imagine that she owned all this. Do I own the great python sliding through the forest as slowly as a glacier, or the Red-necked Pademelon that is hopping into range of those implacable jaws or the unnamed orchid that nods from the rock-ledge above them? According to Australian law I don’t own any mineral wealth that lies under the soil, but apparently I can lay claim to the rare creatures that live above it. I can certainly prosecute anyone removing materials animal or vegetable from the property without my permission. The only way I can make sense of my anomalous situation is to tell myself that I don’t own the forest; the forest owns me.

The Pioneer

The person who is credited with opening up the valley of the upper Nerang is a man called Frank Nixon. Legend has it that when his property in the Tweed Valley was flooded out at the end of 1873 he went over the McPherson Range in search of pastures new, helped by Aboriginal people who showed him the way through the Numinbah Gap. This version of events may yet turn out to be historic truth, but the documentation of the Nixons and their in-laws the Brays, alongside whom Frank Nixon was living at the time, makes no mention of any flood, let alone a huge one, while Nixon’s own account suggests that he found his way to the Queensland half of Numinbah by a different route altogether. Local historians tell us that he had ‘the assistance of his employee Tune, a South Sea Islander or Kanaka as they were known at the time’ (Hall
et al.
, 51), so Numinbah Valley had two pioneers rather than one.

The Islander’s name was not ‘Tune’ but Toon, and he was from Ureparapara, one of the Banks Islands, now part of Vanuatu. We know this because in 1885 Frank Nixon’s younger brother Arthur published a series of articles under the heading ‘Sketches of the South Sea Islands’, in which he sang the praises of Ureparapara:

The inhabitants make splendid servants, being intelligent, faithful, and docile. I had one many years ago, a boy called Toon, and when I found I had no more use for him I gave him to my brother, with whom he has remained ever since – a period of over ten years. No inducement would make him go back to his own country, beautiful though it is. He reads and writes well, has his banking account – no mean one either – and a number of cattle and horses, but added to all he is true as steel and more faithful than a dog. (
SAR
, 18 February)

Arthur’s way of praising Toon by comparing him favourably with a dog must strike us now as repellent. Family historians are anxious to have us believe that the Nixon family were descended from abolitionists, but Arthur talks about Toon as if he was his property to give away. As ‘Nixon’s employee’, Toon became a well-known character in Numinbah, often to be seen ‘bringing any needed supplies up from Nerang by packtrain’ (Hall
et al
., 51). If I am ever to decide whether the Pioneer was a blackguard or a hero, I need to know just what became of Toon. He is the more difficult to trace because Toon would have been a nickname given him by his white bosses; to trace him I need his true Islander name.

Toon probably came to Numinbah as Nixon did, via the Tweed. Nixon’s brother-in-law Joshua Bray and his brother-in-law Samuel Gray had begun planting sugarcane on their properties on the Tweed in 1865. By the mid-1870s they were entirely reliant on Islander labour (Bray Diaries, 11 March 1874). In 1875, when the sugar pioneer William Julius was looking for labour to work his sugar plantation at Cudgen, he had to round up 200 Islanders, described as having ‘completed their contracts in Queensland’ (Boileau, 110–11). Toon is mentioned in the Bray Diaries twice, on 25 and 26 February 1874, his name there spelt Thoon.

The Nixons had not been in Australia long before they were involved in the ‘recruitment’ of Pacific Islanders to work in the cane fields. Nixon’s younger brother, George Louis Nixon, was only a boy when he was taken on as a midshipman on the sailing sloop
Lavinia
which regularly visited the South Seas. In 1872 while the
Lavinia
, ostensibly collecting bêche de mer, was anchored in the Mboli Passage off the island of Florida in the Solomons, Islanders boarded the vessel and massacred the crew, apparently in reprisal for outrages perpetrated by other recruiting vessels. Louis escaped only because he and the captain were away in the longboat looking for a safer anchorage (
BC
, 7 August).