The late-stage Lemkinian extermination of the Kabi People Ray Gibbons 1 Abstract Queensland Aboriginals suffered a rolling genocide across multiple phases from invasion to deportation and repression, group by group, area by area. We deconstruct this fractal-like process in a companion volume.1 For now, we will briefly focus on one particular language group (the Kabi of the Sunshine Coast) for one particular phase of Lemkinian repression (deportation and detention to Barambah). We find that there are disturbing similarities between genocidal aetiology and morbidity for Barambah (Kabi) and Wybalenna (Palawa). We are led to the conclusion that the Queensland Government might have learned from the humanitarian disaster of Wybalenna, but instead chose to replicate the Tasmanian process and its genocidal mechanics. Publishing history First published 2019 Front-cover A native of the Kabi tribe, Maryborough, Queensland From Rev. J. Mathew’s book Two representative tribes of Queensland . . .". London, 1910. See Ray Gibbons (2015), Deconstructing Colonial Myths the massacre at Murdering Creek The image can also be found at: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Two_Representative_Tribes_of_Queenslan d_-_A_Native_of_the_Kabi_Tribe.jpg 1 Ray Gibbons (2019), Deconstructing Queensland Genocide (in draft). This document include a massacre database. 2 Contents The late-stage extermination of the Kabi People ............................................................................................. 4 Introduction to Kabi country: a stolen homeland ............................................................................................ 7 The Population of the Kabi: pre-invasion to ‘living under the Act’ ................................................................. 20 Mary Valley .................................................................................................................................................. 21 Noosa Heads ................................................................................................................................................ 21 Cooloola/ Fraser Island ................................................................................................................................ 22 Maryborough/ Mount Bauple ...................................................................................................................... 23 Nambour ...................................................................................................................................................... 24 Manumbar ................................................................................................................................................... 24 Mungar – the last corroboree ...................................................................................................................... 24 The Politics of Kabi Genocide: Invasion and Depopulation ............................................................................ 25 1840 – 1900: Queensland Pastoralism and Aboriginal Genocide ................................................................ 26 1840 – 1860: Cooloola Shire ........................................................................................................................ 30 1860 – 1897: Queensland Government ‘Dispersal’ policy............................................................................ 31 1890: Tewantin ............................................................................................................................................ 33 1898 – 1903: Meston ................................................................................................................................... 34 1915: Forced relocation of remaining Kabi survivors .................................................................................. 36 1897 – 1971: ‘Living under the Act’ ............................................................................................................. 38 2016: Kabi population recovery ................................................................................................................... 40 Barambah detention centre: part of Queensland’s gulag system ................................................................. 41 Barambah summary .................................................................................................................................... 42 Barambah removals ..................................................................................................................................... 63 Barambah comparison between removals and deaths in any one five-year period: 1905 - 1939 ............... 67 Barambah comparison between cumulative removals and cumulative deaths for the period: 1905 - 1939 .............................................................................................................................................................................. 68 Pearson correlation index between cumulative removals and cumulative deaths for the period: 1905 - 1939 ...................................................................................................................................................................... 69 Barambah mortality statistics ..................................................................................................................... 75 Originating regions for Barambah removals: 1908 – 1936 ......................................................................... 85 Barambah genocidal mortality statistics: 1905 to 1939 .............................................................................. 86 Barambah epidemic disease outbreaks: 1905 – 1939 ................................................................................. 90 Comparative Wybalenna genocidal mortality statistics .............................................................................. 93 Contemporary Indigenous genocidal mortality and morbidity statistics ................................................... 102 Deconstructive Analysis: Chief Protector of Aboriginals - Role and agency ............................................... 108 Queensland ‘removals’ by Aboriginal ‘Protector’ and period .................................................................... 115 Barambah Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 118 Comparative dispossessory pattern: the Kabi of the Wide Bay/ Burnett/ Caboolture; and the people of southwest Queensland ....................................................................................................................................... 121 3 Figures Figure 1 Kabi country ............................................................................................................................ 11 Figure 2 Kabi Country – the Sunshine Coast from Redcliffe to Mooloola ............................................ 12 Figure 3 Kabi Country - the Sunshine Coast from Mooloola to Noosa, and part of Cooloola .............. 13 Figure 4 Kabi Country - central Fraser Island ........................................................................................ 14 Figure 5 Kabi country - northern Fraser Island ..................................................................................... 15 Figure 6 Kabi country - Conondale Range and environs ...................................................................... 16 Figure 7 Kabi country - the Gympie district .......................................................................................... 17 Figure 8 Kabi country - the Maryborough district ................................................................................ 18 Figure 9 Kabi country – the Manumbar district .................................................................................... 19 Figure 10 Early Pastoral Occupation of Queensland 1840 - 1866 ........................................................ 28 Figure 11 Hospital and store buildings at Barambah Aboriginal Settlement, 1911 ............................. 43 Figure 12 Barambah comparison of removals: 1905 – 1939 ............................................................... 65 Figure 13 Comparison between actual Barambah removals and deaths: 1905 – 1939 (five-year data bundles) ................................................................................................................................................ 67 Figure 14 Comparison between Barambah cumulative removals and cumulative deaths: 1905 - 1939 .............................................................................................................................................................. 68 Figure 15 Pearson correlation plot: Barambah cumulative removals against cumulative deaths: 1905 - 1939 .................................................................................................................................................... 70 Figure 16 Pearson correlation plot of each variable. X: cumulative removals; y: cumulative deaths . 71 Figure 17 Barambah demographic data 1905 – 1939 .......................................................................... 80 Figure 18 Barambah infant mortality 1906 - 1938................................................................................ 80 Figure 19 Barambah Mortality statistics, 1910 - 1936 .......................................................................... 82 Figure 20 Rations being issued to Barambah inmates, 1907 ................................................................ 84 Figure 21 Originating regions for Barambah removals: 1908 - 1936 .................................................... 85 Figure 22 Barambah normalized mortality statistics: 1905 – 1939 ...................................................... 86 Figure 23 Barambah actual annualized birth and death statistics 1905 – 1939 ................................... 87 Figure 24 Barambah cumulative birth and death statistics by year 1905 - 1939 ................................. 88 Figure 25 Barambah mortality statistics ............................................................................................... 89 Figure 26 Barambah disease epidemics: 1905 - 1939 .......................................................................... 91 Figure 27 Barambah disease aetiology and ranking, 1910 - 1936 ........................................................ 92 Figure 28 Total recorded deaths from Acute Respiratory Disease (ARD) and other causes at Wybalenna: 1833 – 1846 ...................................................................................................................... 93 Figure 29 British introduced diseases in Tasmania ............................................................................... 99 Figure 30 Palawa deaths by age range (1835 to 1876) ....................................................................... 100 Figure 31 Cumulative number of recorded Tasmanian clashes by year: 1824 - 1831........................ 101 Figure 32 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mortality and morbidity statistics, 2011 - 2013....... 104 4 Figure 33 Leading broad causes of death, by Indigenous status, 2008–2012 (per cent) .................. 105 Figure 34 Life expectancy at birth, by sex and Indigenous status, 2005 – 2007 and 2010 - 2012 ..... 106 Figure 35 Reports on Aboriginal detention centres............................................................................ 114 Figure 36 Number of Aboriginal 'removals' in Queensland, by Protector and period ..................... 115 Figure 37 Queensland Chief Protector of Aboriginals, 1897 - 1942 ................................................... 118 5 Preface The late-stage extermination of the surviving Kabi people - while under Government ‘protection’ – from what is now called the Queensland Sunshine Coast is necessarily associated with the Government’s establishment of an Aboriginal detention facility at Barambah under the provisions of the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld), and subsequent Aboriginal protection acts. Barambah near Murgon in traditional Waka Waka territory operated as an internment camp for Aboriginals who were rounded up from southeast Queensland, including the Kabi. Barambah was gazetted as a Salvation Army Aboriginal mission from 1900 when it was handed over to the Queensland Government in 1905 before being renamed Cherbourg in 1931.2 During this period, Barambah was little more than a punitive death camp, bearing many of the genocidal characteristics of Wybalenna on Flinders Island where surviving Palawa were detained and died between 1834 and 1847.3 They died from neglect, from the lethal conditions of life, just as they would on Barambah. There are many who will argue that both facilities – Wybalenna and Barambah - were set up for the welfare and protection of remnant Aboriginal populations who had survived the ‘dispersal’ process, and that the extraordinarily high proportional death rates were an unintended consequence of humanitarian concerns. This document will show otherwise. 2 See, for example: https://www.qld.gov.au/atsi/cultural-awareness-heritage-arts/community- histories/community-histories-c-d/community-histories-cherbourg 3 See, for example: https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/W/Wybalenna.htm 6 The late-stage Lemkinian extermination of the Kabi People Queensland Aboriginals suffered a rolling genocide across multiple phases from invasion to deportation and repression, group by group, area by area. We deconstruct this fractal-like process in a companion volume.4 For now, we will briefly focus on one particular language group (the Kabi of the Sunshine Coast) for one particular phase of Lemkinian repression (deportation and detention to Barambah). We find that there are disturbing similarities between genocidal aetiology and morbidity for Barambah (Kabi) and Wybalenna (Palawa). We are led to the conclusion that the Queensland Government might – and should - have learned from the humanitarian disaster of Wybalenna, but instead chose to replicate the Tasmanian process and its genocidal mechanics. Introduction to Kabi country: a stolen homeland We now know little of the range and reach of Aboriginal groups, including that of the Kabi speaking people, they were destroyed so quickly. In general, ethnographers dispassionately equate a ‘people’ in a certain area with a language group. That is, a language group may comprise several different but co-located groups of people within a geographic area, all sharing the same language. In 1887, Mathew includes within Kabi territory: […] the Manumbar Run in the southwest corner of the Burnett District, the country watered by the Amamoor and Koondangoor Creeks, tributaries of the Mary River, and the Imbil Station.5 In 1910, Mathew further writes:6 The territory of the Kabi coincided approximately with the basin of the Mary River but extended along the coast beyond that basin both to the north and south. Its coast- line extended from near the 27th parallel northward to about the mouth of the 4 Ray Gibbons (2019), Deconstructing Queensland Genocide (in draft). This document include a massacre database. 5 John Mathew (1887), Mary River and the Bunya Bunya Country: 152 https://ia601406.us.archive.org/16/items/australianracei02currgoog/australianracei02currgoog.pdf; EM Curr (1886- 1887), The Australian Race, volume 3: 152 – 209 https://archive.org/details/cu31924026093827 6 In this territorial description, Mathew is referring to the Mary Valley Kabi group whose language had been adopted within a much wider area. Or perhaps, those people in the Mary Valley should have been given a different name that was not implicitly ambiguous. John Mathew (1910), Two Representative Tribes of Queensland: 66 – 68 http://www.gubbigubbi.com/two_representative_tribes_of_queensland_john_mathews.pdf Norman Tindale made use of Mathew’s work: http://archives.samuseum.sa.gov.au/tindaletribes/kabikabi.htm https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-230054338/view http://archives.samuseum.sa.gov.au/tribalmap/ 7 Burrum River, a distance of some 175 miles;7 measured across the land, the distance from point to point would be about 130 miles. 8 The maximum width, measured westward from Double Island Point, is 85 miles.9 In addition to the mainland, there was Fraser or Great Sandy Island, about 85 miles long with an average breadth of 12 miles, so that the Kabi country altogether had an area of about 8,200 square miles.10 Compare this territorial boundary with that of Tindale: Inland from Maryborough; north to Childers and Hervey Bay; south to near head of Mary River and Cooroy; west to Burnett and Coast Ranges and Kilkivan; at Gympie; not originally on Fraser Island although Curr (1886) mentions them as there. Mathews (1910) refers to fifteen local groups or hordes shared between his two language areas, Kabi and Wakka, excluding his Patyala, which are the Batjala of Fraser Island, a separate tribe. Kabikabi country is essentially a rain forest environment with open areas cleared by firing the scrub. Dry forest country of their neighbors was called ['naran’], literally 'outside.' The Hervey Bay folk under the hordelike name Dundubara behaved much like a separate tribe, Dundura was seemingly the tribal form of their name. Members of this tribe were disturbed by the arrival of strangers of many surrounding tribes in the years of the ripening of bunya pine seeds.11 John Steele includes, within the Kabi group: Sunshine Coast (Undanbi and Nalbo people); Cooloola (Dulingbara); Fraser Island (Dulingbara, Badjala and Ngulungbara); Conondale (Dallambara); Mary Valley (Kabi); Maryborough District (Badjala and Dowarbara); and Manumbar District. He writes that:12 The Kabi language group lies along the coast from Redcliffe to Fraser Island and in the Mary River catchment area. […] 7 ca. 282 kms 8 ca. 209 kms 9 ca. 137 kms 10 ca. 21,238 square kms. By comparison, the area of Tasmania’s main island is about 64,5109 km 2. 11 http://archives.samuseum.sa.gov.au/tindaletribes/kabikabi.htm https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-230054338/view 12 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in Southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 160 – 162. 8 The first written account of a Kabi language was made by the Reverend William Ridley in 1855 when he interviewed the ex-convict James Davis in Brisbane. Davis had, as an escapee from Brisbane Town, lived with the Aboriginals in the Wide Bay and Burnett districts from 1829 to 1842; he had been adopted by the Ginginara clan of the Burnett and had received the “moolgarrah” scars. In publishing this language in 1856, Ridley gave its name as Dippil, and he stated that it was spoken by “the aborigines around Durunduran, on the north side of Moreton Bay, and thence towards Wide Bay and the Burnett district.”13 The Reverend John Mathew collected an extensive Kabi vocabulary near Yabba, on the ranges between the Mary and Burnett catchment areas between 1865 and 1881. His work, first published in 1886, established the language name as Kabi instead of Dippil.14 Since then the Mary Valley has been considered the home of “classic” Kabi. Other vocabularies from various districts within the Kabi territory have been recorded. A comparison of the vocabularies leads to the conclusion that a uniform language was spoken along the coast from Redcliffe to Fraser Island, and this is corroborated by William Mackenzie, who spoke many dialects of the region. The Dallambara, on the Conondale and Blackall Ranges at the head of the Stanley and Mary Rivers, had a language intermediate between Kabi and the Dungidau language to the south, but is generally classified with the Kabi group.15 In 2014, a Sunshine Coast Council study concluded that the Kabi language area extended in the south to the Caboolture River: Research throughout the twentieth century has concluded that the inhabitants of the Sunshine Coast were members of the Kabi language group (Wells 2003, Steele 1984, Watson 1946, Mathew 1910) (refer Figure 11.3a). 13 Ibid, citing HS Russell, The Genesis of Queensland: 274, 278, 284; W Ridley, Kamilaroi, Dippil and Turrubul. 14 Ibid, citing EM Curr (1886 – 1887), The Australian Race, volume 3: 152 – 209 https://archive.org/details/cu31924026093827 15 Citing LP Winterbotham (1955), Vocabularies in Dalla, Wakka Wakka and Dungi Dau 9 Thus, the Kabi language area is known as the area along the coast around the Burrum, Mary, Noosa, Maroochy, Mooloolah and Caboolture Rivers and out to Maryborough, and included the area from Gympie out to west of Kilkivan (Tainton 1976:16). A persistent theme in ethno-historical accounts is a distinction between coastal and inland people. For example, Winterbotham (1957:8-9) states that Gaiarbau (a Jinibara man who knew of and interacted with Kabi Kabi people) informed him that: ‘the coastal tribes collectively called themselves Bugarnuba, but that to him they were known as Mwoirnewar, or salt water people. This term is applied to the Gabi Gabi, Undumbi, and Dulingbara’.16 16 Sunshine Coast Council, B11 Cultural Heritage, Chapter B11 - Indigenous cultural heritage and native title 18Sep14.pdf: 537 http://eisdocs.dsdip.qld.gov.au/Sunshine%20Coast%20Airport%20Expansion/EIS/Volume%20B%20chapters/C hapter%20B11%20-%20Indigenous%20cultural%20heritage%20and%20native%20title%2018Sep14.pdf 10 Figure 1 Kabi country17 17 John Mathew (1910), Two Representative Tribes of Queensland: 66 – 68 http://www.gubbigubbi.com/two_representative_tribes_of_queensland_john_mathews.pdf 11 Figure 2 Kabi Country – the Sunshine Coast from Redcliffe to Mooloola18 18 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 161 12 Figure 3 Kabi Country - the Sunshine Coast from Mooloola to Noosa, and part of Cooloola19 19 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 176 Lake Weyba, the area of our Murdering Creek case study, is in the middle of the map. 13 Figure 4 Kabi Country - central Fraser Island20 20 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 188 14 Figure 5 Kabi country - northern Fraser Island21 21 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 198 15 Figure 6 Kabi country - Conondale Range and environs22 22 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 207 16 Figure 7 Kabi country - the Gympie district23 23 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 222 17 Figure 8 Kabi country - the Maryborough district24 24 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 228 18 Figure 9 Kabi country – the Manumbar district25 25 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 238 19 The Population of the Kabi: pre-invasion to ‘living under the Act’ We will use the name Kabi for the associated language group, not the sub-group in the Mary Valley, not unless there is a qualified reference, say: Mary Valley Kabi. Pre-contact Kabi population estimates are difficult to assess because, within about 50 years from first white contact, almost all the Kabi people ‘disappeared’. We will rely on firsthand accounts of the Kabi population size by area during various times in the post-contact period when the genocidal process was well underway. We know little of the Kabi population size before the arrival of British ‘settlers’. There were perhaps many thousands, of which a reported one hundred and twenty were located in the Noosa Heads area and possibly across to present day Eumundi. To arrive at population estimates by area, we will rely on anecdotal evidence at different times. Settlers were generally disinterested in understanding the people they were dispossessing, the Government more so. For modelling purposes, we will use a pre-contact Kabi population estimate of 4000 to 7000 people spread across the entire geographic area of their range, according to Mathew’s limited ethnography, with 5000 a ‘rule of thumb’, which makes it comparable to the Tasmanian Palawa population pre-contact. ‘Settler’ is widely used in works of Australian history; but invader is more appropriate. The meaning scope of the word ‘invasion’ can range from benign, to displacive to predatory to genocidal to apocalyptic. In Australia, the Anglo-invasion veered sharply to genocidal. For some areas such as the Mary Valley, the Aboriginal presence was almost completely removed and has yet to recover in even a small way. In 2006, the Peter Beattie led Queensland Government proposed a Traveston Crossing dam to hold 150 gigalitres at its planned completion in 2035. Mary Valley residents set up an action group to complain about being displaced. I could not help noticing the irony; I’m sure the original settlers had no such qualms about displacing the local Kabi. I mentioned the hypocrisy to a historian friend at Mount Wolvi, but she looked at me incredulously. The Traveston plan, although fiercely defended by Anna Bligh, was rejected by Federal Minister Garrett in 2009. The Mary Valley Kabi had no such reprieve, nor any Aboriginal group across Queensland as pastoralists advanced their Government-supported homicidal interests, a racist scorched earth policy where the Indigenous population was denied any land rights whatsoever. 20 We will attempt to build a demographic picture of each local Kabi group, based on the fragmentary record. This will allow us to establish the parameters of the Lemkinian process as it scythed through the population. Mary Valley EM Curr writes: 26 [The homelands of the Mary Valley Kabi were] bounded by Manumbar Run in the southwest corner of the Burnett District, the country watered by the Amamoor and Koondangor [sic] Creeks, tributaries of the Mary River, and Imbil Station. Since 1865, the tribe has been rapidly dwindling away. In 1881, it did not comprise a score of individuals, and the few survivors rarely visited their old haunts, but hung about the neighbouring diggings. There were, in 1865, three or four people who appeared to be of great age, notably one woman who required to be carried about, and was tenderly cared for; now there is none very old. The mortality among children has been as great as among adults. Lung diseases were prevalent thirty years ago, before the influence of White men had been much felt. A slow consumption, rheumatism, and indigestion may fairly be considered as inherent in the tribe. Since contact with White people, the effects of these complaints have been greatly aggravated; strong drink and prostitution have undermined constitutions naturally robust, and made them an easy prey to concomitant diseases. 27 With the invasion of pastoralists, the destruction of the Mary River Kabi took a mere sixteen years from 1865. Noosa Heads 1839: In John Steele’s insightful ethnography, he refers to Bracewell: ‘According to Bracewell, the headland at Noosa was the home of the 120-strong Uwen Mundi clan in 1839’. 28 26 Although the book was authored by EM Curr, this particular contribution was by John Mathew. 27 EM Curr (1886 – 1887), The Australian Race, vol 3, Mary River and Bunya Bunya country: 153. 28 JG Steele (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in southeast Queensland and the Richmond River: 180, citing FJ Watson (1946), Vocabularies of four representative tribes of south eastern Queensland: 112; Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences: 317; G Langevad (1979), The Simpson Letterbook: 1 21 It is members of this group who were probably the victims of the Murdering Creek massacre in 1864. Cooloola/ Fraser Island EM Curr writes of the ‘Great Sandy or Fraser’s Island’: This island, the Aboriginal name of which is Thoorgine, was first occupied by the Whites in 1849. At that time the population was split into nineteen tribes, amounted to about 2,000 souls, of which 300 or 400 still (in 1879) remain. This reduction in numbers is attributed by the Chief Commissioner’s informant to drink, venereal, and the slaughter by the Black Police.29 1850s: Further north, the Kabi Cooloola area extends from Noosa to Double Island Point and beyond to Fraser Island where the Dulingbara people, part of the Kabi language group, found their home. According to Steele, Lake Cootharaba was held by the Carburrah clan30 and its beach behind the Lake to Double Island Pont and then along Rainbow Beach to Inskip Point and Tin Can Bay was used as a pathway between the Noosa Lakes and Wide Bay at the southern end of Fraser Island, where, ‘in the 1850s, the Aboriginal population was estimated at two or three thousand’.31 Steele writes: David Bracewell, who spent a year on Fraser Island in 1839-40, estimated that tournaments on the island were attended by thousands of Aboriginals, and that the people covered the beach for a distance of six kilometres. Three “tribes” of Kabi-speaking people occupied the island – the Dulingbara, the Badjala, and the Ngulungbara. The Dulingbara have already been mentioned as the people of the Cooloola district, but they also owned the southern end of Fraser Island from Hook Point to Woongoolbver Creek. The Badjala owned the central part of Fraser Island from Woongoolbver Creek to Yidney Creek, as well as the mainland shore from Kaur Creek to Hervey Bay and inland as far as Mount Bauple. The Ngulungbara owned the northern half of the island, including Bowarrady, Indian Head and Sandy Cape.32 29 EM Curr (1886 – 1887), The Australian Race, vol 3: 144. 30 The use of Anglo-ethnographic terms such as clans and tribes is now discouraged as they do not necessarily reflect Aboriginal culture and tradition. 31 Steele, Ibid: 187 32 Citing LP Winterbotham, The Jinibara tribe of south east Queensland: 9 and map. 22 It is considered that three languages (corresponding to the three “tribes”) were spoken on Fraser Island. The best-documented language is Badjala; surprisingly (for a language of the Kabi group) the negative word was wakka rather than kabi. In the other languages of the island the negatives were cabbee (probably the language of the Dulingbara) and wahr (possibly the language of the Ngulungbara). 33 In all parts of the island the people were grouped into clans of fifty to a hundred, and the clans were of two types – those of the scrubs at the centre of the island, and those of the beaches.34 1879: Steele provides further ethnographic information based upon EM Curr whom we quoted earlier: E. M. Curr in his monumental work The Australian Race, gave a short summary of some features of the Fraser Island people, supplied in 1879 by the Chief Commissioner of Police. Briefly, the Aboriginal name of the island was Thoorgine. The population had been two thousand in 1849, and was split into nineteen clans. 35 Maryborough/ Mount Bauple 1842: Steele writes: The earliest account of Aboriginal life near Mount Bauple was recorded by Andrew Petrie in May 1842. Travelling by boat from Brisbane with Henry Stuart Russell, Joliffe and others, he met the convict David Bracewell (or Bracefield) at Noosa and persuaded him to accompany them. With Bracewell as guide he explored the Mary River by boat to seek sheep runs and to find James Davis. They reached the head of navigation near Tiaro on 12 May and discovered that hundreds of Aboriginals from far and wide had gathered for a corroboree re-enacting a poisoning of Aboriginals near Kilcoy.36[…] In 1876 there were still Aborigines living at Tiaro.37 1856: George Loyau recorded that about three hundred Aboriginals gathered for a corroboree in Maryborough in 1856. It was attended by people from the Dawson, the Burnett, Kolan, and Fraser Island. The corroboree was held on “the flat just below the 33 Citing Meston, Report on Fraser Island: 5 (nd). 34 Citing Langevad, op. cit., The Simpson Letterbook: 1 35 Steele, Ibid: 189 citing EM Curr (1886 – 1887), The Australian Race, volume 3: 144 – 145. 36 Steele, Ibid: 229 citing CC Petrie (1904), Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences: 258 - 264 37 Steele, Ibid: 231 citing G Mills, Blacks at Tiaro and Lagoon Pocket, Gympie in its Cradle Days (1952) 23 rise on which Cheapside Street is now situated, and at that time surrounded by dense jungle”.38 1857: George Loyau writes: North of Graham’s Creek is Six Mile Creek where “a monster gathering of the Burnett and Wide Bay blacks” was held shortly after the bunya season of 1857.39 1862: Meston, in his journey around Queensland, was able to observe at first hand the effects of Aboriginal depopulation through the inroads of pastoralism, including that for the Maryborough area: Graham’s Creek, according to E Armitage, was the site of the last bora ceremony held in the district; the year was 1862, and the ring was near the present Graham’s Creek railway station.40 Nambour 1862: Tom Petrie records that he saw around 500 blacks at a corroboree on what he called Petrie’s Creek near Nambour in 1862.41 Manumbar 1856: Steele reports: ..four hundred Aboriginals assembled in February 1856 for a bunya feast at a sheep station of Mortimer and Anderson, fourteen miles from Yabba.42 Mungar – the last corroboree 1876: FJ Watson arrived at Mungar in 1876 as a boy. He records: The writer remembers a dhur or circle, in which a yauar took place for the last time in 1876. It was situated about half a mile from where Mungar Junction is now located. 38 Steele, Ibid: 234 citing G Loyau (1897), The history of Maryborough: 3, 183. 39 Steele, Ibid: 233 citing GE Loyau (1897), The history of Maryborough and Wde Bay and Burnett districts: 185 40 Steele, Ibid: 233 citing A. Meston, Queensland railway and tourists’ guide: 89 41 CC Petrie (1904), Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland: 23, 192; 42 Steele,id: 240 24 The circle was some forty feet in diameter and was surrounded by stakes about three feet high, driven into the ground and leaning a few inches outward from the centre, and each a few feet apart. As a small “new-chum” boy the writer was residing in a cottage, recently built in the bush, a few hundred yards from the ring, and well remembers lying awake, and in some awe at the noise made by the blacks, until well into the small hours. This staked ring was destroyed not long afterwards by a bushfire caused by a railway engine when the railway from Maryborough to Gympie was being constructed.43 The Politics of Kabi Genocide: Invasion and Depopulation In Australia, genocide did not suddenly arrive across the continent. Australia was too big. Genocide arrived area by area as Britain established each new invasive beachhead, borne aloft by British expansionist policy and the rule-based order of settler sovereignty, embedded in the incurious frontier politics of imposed Indigenous suffering. The pattern was always the same. The Aboriginal loss would be Britain’s gain. So it was for the Kabi. Their world was about to end. Of the Australian Aboriginal population collapse generally, LR Smith writes: The 19th century depopulation resulted in there being a gross excess of males in the population in settled areas in the early years of this (twentieth) century. The Aboriginal groups beyond the frontier of permanent settlement presumably also had a high level of masculinity as a result of traditional practices, but nowhere near as high as the remnant groups in pacified areas. In the last century the overtaking of Aboriginal groups by the frontier of settlement would have meant drastic depopulation through slaughter, disease and kidnapping, with – apparently always – greater losses of women than men. 44 Across Australia, there were no Aboriginal population census data before 1881, and no Colonial estimates until 1898. Smith concludes: No figures before about 1900 can be accepted as reliable, and the period of decline is almost entirely undocumented, as mentioned, 20,585 Aborigines were returned as 43 Steele, Ibid: 232 quoting FJ Watson (1946), Vocabularies of four representative tribes of south eastern Queensland: 94 44 LR Smith (1980), The Aboriginal Population of Australia: 128 25 living in the areas covered by the collectors at the 1881 census, but a further 50-odd thousand were claimed to be in the remote north and northwest. If these people ever existed, two thirds of them died in the next twenty years. Only five years later in 1886 the number returned had dropped to just under 12,000 and the estimated total was reduced to only 20,000.45 1840 – 1900: Queensland Pastoralism and Aboriginal Genocide Any genocidal process has a chronology. Targeted extermination is always difficult to collapse into a short period although many oppressors have tried. For Queensland, it required about 60 or so years of diligent Government-led labour, of carefully crafted racist policies and legislation, of land alienation, of extermination and repression, of introduced disease, of sexual predation and kidnapping, of social engineering, of collective greed, of a normative settler psychopathy for which there is still evidence today in political movements such as Hansonism or in the all too recent redneckery of Jo Bjelke Petersen and his Indigenous antipathy. Many historians have written of the spreading pastoral frontier, the frenzied land rush that drove Aboriginal dispossession, and the genocidal practices that followed in a Government-led process of mass murder, forced relocation and apartheid, the diseases, the tearing apart of families, the destruction of culture, the mental anguish. Queensland was a fractal element in the overall Lemkinian pattern, and Ross Fitzgerald will summarize the process for us: The rapid spread of pastoral settlement in Queensland was a remarkable achievement comparable to the great movement west in North America. 46 A series of quick incursions rather than a slow advance, it began with the overlanding epic, celebrated in later Australian poetry and prose. From as far away as Victoria, pastoralists moved steadily northward, passing beyond the settled districts, penetrating well into North Queensland. Jane Black records the exploits of a number of early pioneers, including the trek of the Anings around 1860: A member of their family had described their journey as something like that of the Israelites, but in their case the Covenant was replaced by a large covered van bought in Melbourne to transport their ration supply, and their camp and travelling outfit, which bore on its 45 Ibid: 122 46 Ross Fitzgerald (1982), From the Dreaming to 1915 A history of Queensland: 133 citing LE Skinner (1978), Pastoral Frontiers of Queensland in Settlement of the Colony of Queensland: A seminar by John Oxley Library. 26 sides “Melbourne Ice Co” in large letters, which must have startled folks along their route.47 The ambitious newcomers were a different breed from the “Pure Merinos”, relying more on courage and experience than on breeding or natural right to realize their hopes of prosperity. Many were proven bushmen with squatting experience on southern properties. Others had simply been lucky on Victorian gold-fields. Two dominant features characterized the men of the new pastoral frontier – restlessness and recklessness. In the rush north and west, run after run was taken up and promptly abandoned for new land further out. For the small man, there was always risk, and conflict – with Aborigines and the natural environment. Manny, prepared to gamble with their knowledge of tropical conditions, placed themselves heavily in debt in order to “make a good start”. Land was divided into pastoral districts, each controlled by a lands commissioner as had been the case under New South Wales administration. As settlement rushed north, three new districts – Warrego, Kennedy, and Mitchell - were thrown open. On the north coast, Kennedy, stretching from Broad Sound to Rockingham Bay, was the first new district to feel the boom’s full effects. Here, settlement followed hard on the heels of exploration by Dalrymple (1859) and Mackay (1860). Bowen, the base for future pastoral expansion in North Queensland, was established in 1861.48 47 Ibid: 133 – 134 citing Jane Black (1931), North Queensland Pioneers: 5 48 Ibid: 134 27 Figure 10 Early Pastoral Occupation of Queensland 1840 - 186649 49 Ibid: 135. Also see: SH Roberts (2016 (1924)), History of Australian Land Settlement 1788 – 1920, the squatting occupation of Queensland: 146. Within twenty six years, whites occupied more than two thirds of Queensland, with the exception of the far north and far west. Evans estimates that, in Queensland in 1862, the pastoral frontier was advancing at the rate of 200 miles a year (about 320 kms). [See: Evans, Raymond, ACROSS THE QUEENSLAND FRONTIER in Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, eds Bain Attwood and S.G. Foster (2003): 63 – 75.] The fastest spread of pastoralism was in the five years from 1862, when more than half the area of the State was occupied. It was a blitzkrieg of opportunism; Aboriginals were simply swept aside, their rights ignored; if they resisted, they were exterminated. In 1901, (op. cit.) Meston 28 The Meston Report and its Aftermath:50 By the turn of the century, race war had decimated Queensland’s large Aboriginal population. Within sixty years, their numbers had fallen from well over a hundred thousand to no more than fifty thousand. The great majority of survivors were in the less accessible areas of Cape York. With the sharp decline in male Aborigines, abduction of native women and children became almost commonplace. In his Reminiscences of Queensland, W. H. Corfield relates how Sergeant O’Connor, the Native Police officer, presented him with a black boy who had been suitably drilled by his troopers. 51 A flourishing trade in Aboriginal children grew up which continued into the twentieth century. Percy Galbrath, the northern protector, later complained of the obnoxious practice of police supplying their friends with Aboriginal children. “This practice has been going on for years, and, with the exception of one or two cases personally known to me, without good results to the children: they change masters and mistresses, prostitution and disease follow, they can only speak pidgin English, and finally become pariahs among both blacks and whites.” 52 Throughout the far north, the prostitution of Aboriginal women left a legacy of disease. Dr W. E. Roth stated in 1901 that venereal disease was Very prevalent in the North-western districts, and along the Peninsula coast- line, especially on its lower Gulf shores, and, of course, is common in the neighbourhood of white settlement generally. At Cloncurry I reported 19 May 1900 that the few remaining blacks are nearly all diseased at Camooweal (27 June 1900) that nearly all the 35 individuals in the local camp are suffering more or less from venereal; at Normanton, Dr Rendle (25 August 1900) states that about half the blacks (out of a total 176) are suffering slightly from the same complaint; At Mount Garet, Dr Shorter (3 November 1900) reports that acknowledged that the pastoralists were engaged in a ‘race war’, but if so, the war was extremely one sided, one in which the Queensland Government was actively engaged. 50 Ibid: 215, 217 51 Ibid, citing WH Corfield (1921), Reminiscences of Queensland, 1862 – 1899: 59 http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/n00002.html 52 Ibid, citing H Reynolds (1972), Aborigines and Settlers The Australian Experience 1788 - 1939: 33 – 34, quoting V&P, 1904: 871 29 the natives are reeking with syphilis, etc. Disease amongst the blacks is undoubtedly a source of danger to whites.53 A few years before Roth, WE Parry-Okeden,54 the police commissioner, had also made an extensive tour of the north. After witnessing the ravages of race war, he submitted a report in 1897 recommending the abolition of the Native Police. Parry-Okeden’s belated plea for “a better order of things” was largely due to Archibald Meston, whose authoritative report presented in 1896 has been described by CD Rowley as “the most decisive in the Queensland history of Aboriginal affairs.”.55 In order to highlight the injustice of dispossession, Meston employed legal and statistical arguments. He wrote tellingly: It seems well to consider our debtor account with the aboriginals. Queensland has so far alienated about 10,000,000 acres of freehold land, and leasehold about 300,000,000 for pastoral occupation. For this we have received about six and a quarter millions in cash, and for the leasehold land we receive £332,800 annual rent. Since the year of separation, 1859, or even since 1842, we have not expended £50,000 for the benefit of the aboriginals, and have never since then or before, paid them a single shilling in cash, clothes or food, or even an acre of land.56 1840 – 1860: Cooloola Shire In 2001, the Cooloola Shire celebrated a ‘golden past’: The coming of Europeans rapidly impacted on traditional Aboriginal society. Aboriginal people resented the invasion of their lands by settlers with their flocks and herds, because it resulted in interference with their food and water supplies and traditional social arrangements. Although they fought back, they were successful in 53 Citing H Reynolds (1972), Aborigines and Settlers The Australian Experience 1788 - 1939: 6, quoting V&P, 1904: 4, 6-7. Also see Ray Evans, Half-Savage and Half-Starved: the condition of the Aboriginal Remnant, in Evans, Saunders and Cronin (1975), Race Relations in Queensland Exclusion, Exploitation, and Extermination: 85 - 101 54 http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/parry-okeden-william-edward-7965 55 Citing CD Rowley (1970), The Destruction of Aboriginal Society: 175 referring to Archibald Meston (1896), Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland. However, Meston’s report gave the Queensland Government opportunity for even more repressive measures under the guise of humanitarian policy, introducing more than seventy years of ‘Living under the Act’, when many Aboriginal lives were rigidly controlled. 56 Archibald Meston (1896), Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland: 4 30 stemming the tide only during the 1840's, when they greatly outnumbered the settlers. During the 1850's, the activities of the Native Mounted Police, who were based at Maryborough and Yabber, broke Aboriginal resistance and made the district safe for the European immigrants who arrived during the 1860's. By the time of the Gympie Gold Rush, surviving Aborigines either lived on the stations and worked for the settlers, or tried to maintain their traditional lifestyles in the remote swamps and forests of coastal Cooloola.57 […] During the 1850's, Aboriginal hostility to European settlement made the valley of the Mary River a violent frontier. By the 1860's however, the activities of the settlers, assisted by the Native Mounted Police, had markedly reduced Aboriginal numbers. Their resistance broken, surviving Aborigines lived and worked on the sheep and cattle stations, or sought refuge in the scrubs and swamps of the Cooloola Coast and Fraser Island.58 1860 – 1897: Queensland Government ‘Dispersal’ policy One of the most powerful voices against Queensland’s policy of Aboriginal ‘dispersal’, a euphemism for extermination by paramilitary police, was the journalist, Carl Feilberg, who wrote in 1880: This, in plain language, is how we deal with the aborigines: On occupying new territory the aboriginal inhabitants are treated in exactly the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there. Their lives and their property, the nets, canoes, and weapons which represent as much labor to them as the stock and buildings of the white settler, are held by the Europeans as being at their absolute disposal. Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away, entirely at the caprice of the white men. The least show of resistance is answered by a rifle bullet; in fact, the first introduction between blacks and whites is often marked by the unprovoked murder of some of the former—in order to make a commencement of the work of "civilising" them. Little difference is made between the treatment of blacks at first disposed to be friendly and those who from the very outset assume a hostile attitude. As a rule the blacks have been friendly at first, and the longer they have endured provocation without retaliating the worse they have fared, for the more ferocious savages have inspired some fear, and have therefore 57 Cooloola Shire … a golden past (2001), published by Cooloola Shire Library Service: 17 https://www.gympie.qld.gov.au/documents/40008872/40011644/CooloolaShireAGoldenPast.pdf 58 Ibid: 21 31 been comparatively unmolested. In regard to these cowardly outrages, the majority of settlers have been apparently influenced by the same sort of feeling as that which guides men in their treatment of the brute creation. Many, perhaps the majority, have stood aside in silent disgust whilst these things were being done, actuated by the same motives that keep humane men from shooting or molesting animals which neither annoy nor are of service to them; and a few have always protested in the name of humanity against such treatment of human beings, however degraded. But the protests of the minority have been disregarded by the people of the settled districts; the majority of outsiders who take no part in the outrages have been either apathetic or inclined to shield their companions, and the white brutes who fancied the amusement, have murdered, ravished, and robbed the blacks without let or hindrance. Not only have they been unchecked, but the Government of the colony has been always at hand to save them from the consequences of their crime. When the blacks, stung to retaliation by outrages committed on their tribe, or hearing the fate of their neighbors, have taken the initiative and shed white blood, or speared white men's stock, the native police have been sent to "disperse" them. What disperse means is well enough known. The word has been adopted into bush slang as a convenient euphuism for wholesale massacre. Of this force we have already said that it is impossible to write about it with patience. It is enough to say of it that this body, organised and paid by us, is sent to do work which its officers are forbidden to report in detail, and that a true record of its proceedings would shame us before our fellow- countrymen in every part of the British Empire. When the police have entered on the scene, the race conflict goes on apace. It is a fitful war of extermination waged upon the blacks, something after the fashion in which other settlers wage war upon noxious wild beasts, the process differing only in so far as the victims, being human, are capable of a wider variety of suffering than brutes. The savages, hunted from the places where they had been accustomed to find food, driven into barren ranges, shot like wild dogs at sight, retaliate when and how they can. They spear the white man's cattle and horses, and if by chance they succeed in overpowering an unhappy European they exhaust their savage ingenuity in wreaking their vengeance upon him, even mutilating the senseless body out of which they have pounded the last breath of life. Murder and counter murder, outrage repaid by violence, theft by robbery, so the dreary tale continues, till at last the blacks, starved, cowed, and broken-hearted, their numbers thinned, their courage overcome, submit to their fate, and disease and liquor finish the work which we pay our native police to begin. 32 This is the ordinary course of events, but occasionally a variation occurs, and the process of quieting the blacks is unusually prolonged. This is particularly the case in the North, where the blacks are more determined, better armed, and have more mountain and scrub retreats than in other parts of the colony. In the Cape York Peninsula the race conflict has hardly diminished in intensity since the whites began it by robbing and shooting the blacks on the occasion of the first rush to the Palmer. The struggle has been obstinate and fierce, and although an unusually large and costly body of police has been for years engaged in exterminating the aborigines, and few whites miss a chance of shooting any they may encounter, the strength of the tribes has not been broken. No doubt their numbers have been greatly thinned, but they have not been cowed. Consequently there is no part of Queensland in which more European lives have been lost, or where the bush is so thoroughly unsafe for the single traveller. it is difficult to estimate the extent of the loss that has been directly incurred, and still more difficult to calculate the indirect injury suffered by the district. Prospecting for minerals could only be carried on by well armed and equipped parties—and this in itself has been a serious drawback to the European miners. But the heaviest loss is being experienced now that the mining excitement has subsided. For, as the writer to the Cooktown paper says, there is plenty of good soil inviting settlement; but how many men dare fix their home in the bush when they know that neither their property nor their lives will be safe from the attacks of desperate savages, whose natural cunning has been intensified by their long struggle for life with the whites. Evidently settlement must be delayed until the work of extermination is complete—a consummation of which there is no present prospect— or until some more rational and humane method of dealing with the blacks is adopted. It is surely advisable, even at this the eleventh hour, to try the more creditable alternative, and to see whether we cannot efface some portion at least of the stain which attaches to us. We shall recur to this subject, and indicate what in our opinion that alternative ought to be. —Queenslander, May 1, 1880.59 1890: Tewantin Few have written more movingly of the fate of the Kabi than RJL Adams: 59 Carl Feilberg (1880), The Way We Civilize: 3 – 5 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Way_We_Civilise 33 As the nineteenth century drew to a close the Gubbi Gubbi were a people virtually without hope. Their numbers had been ravaged by the Europeans’ diseases; by their social disorders such as promiscuity and alcoholism; by their rifles, and by their deliberate attempts at extermination through poisoning. They had no lands they could call their own and their very autochthony appeared doomed. Local historian, Alisa Dawson, in fact, records that “in 1890 there were only about 150 Kabis remaining in the Tewantin area”. 60 1898 – 1903: Meston Archibald Meston (1851 - 1924) was Southern Queensland Protector of Aboriginals from 1898 to 1903.61 Cheryl Taylor (JCU) writes of this early apartheid era, when Meston was helping establish an overtly racist system of Aboriginal ‘reserves’, in reality, detention centres; the machinery of ‘Aboriginal protection’ under the 1897 Act62 and its amendments would continue to control Aboriginal lives until at least 1971, during which time detention centres became rigidly controlled labour camps. Archibald Meston’s political appointments and Government-sponsored reports, two of which provided a basis for the ironically entitled Aboriginal Protection Act of 1897, (Queensland Aboriginals and “Report on the Aboriginals”) are often referred to in analyses of Queensland history. This professedly humane legislation, frequently identified as a principal determinant of Aboriginal post-settlement experience, established a rigid system of reserves63 amounting to a Queensland version of 60 RJL Adams (2000), Noosa and the Gubbi Gubbi: 177 citing Alisa Dawson, Early Chronicles of Cypress Land, Noosa Council Library Service call number ANF 994.32 COO,.P.9 61 http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/meston-archibald-4191 62 https://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/resources/transcripts/qld5_doc_1897.pdf 63 For a list of Queensland reserves and missions, see: http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/82602/missions_and_reserves.pdf ‘Between 1898 and 1939, more than 7000 Aboriginal people were removed to 64 missions and reserves established throughout Queensland’: http://www.qhatlas.com.au/content/missions-and-reserves . ‘By 1934, one third of Indigenous people in Queensland were living on missions’: http://www.rqi.org.au/wp- content/uploads/2012/01/qld_history.pdf . Between 1905 and 1939, historian Thom Blake determined that a total of 1587 Aborigines were removed to what was euphemistically called the Barambah ‘settlement’ in Kabi country. Thom Blake (2001), A Dumping Ground A history of the Cherbourg settlement: 34 On Barambah between 1910 and 1936 inclusive, 1,107 Aboriginal people died from various internal (infectious) and external (diet/ water/ accident/ sanitation related) causes. 99 deaths were recorded as due to senility or old age. 428 deaths were attributed to various forms of Acute Respiratory Disorder. See: Thom Blake (1992), A dumping ground : Barambah Aboriginal settlement 1900-40: 174 , PhD Thesis https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:185624 34 Apartheid.64 By encouraging the imposition of minutely detailed bureaucratic controls, it destroyed Aboriginal autonomy, in practice until new legislation was passed in 1965 and 1971. Beyond the leading part which Meston played in the framing of the Act and in his office of Protector, he acted also as racial intermediary and interpreter of Aboriginal culture to the state’s white population. The hundreds of poems, stories and articles, many dealing with Aboriginal issues, which he published over the fifty-year span between 1870 and his death on 11 March 1924, were Meston’s chief means of raising his profile and maintaining himself in these roles. […] Meston’s “Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland” was based on a journey of 8,000 kilometres “by steamer, whaleboat, dinghy, horse and on foot” undertaken over four months in 1895 through the most remote parts of the State, including the unsettled parts of Cape York. As a reward for his services, in April 1896 he was appointed Protector of Aborigines for southern Queensland. To his chagrin, the senior position in the north, where, as he wrote in his Report, “the most difficult and serious work is to be done” was given to Dr. Walter E. Roth. As Protector, Meston arranged for the transportation of over four hundred Aborigines from locations in southern and western Queensland to four main coastal reserves, the largest being Bogimbah Creek on Fraser Island. Although he maintained that this intervention was a success, the Aborigines’ exile from their homelands, the intermingling of hostile tribes, and the poor nutrition and health care on the reserves resulted in hardship, despair and death. Meston’s aggressive methods of control, which included severe beatings and the overnight handcuffing of men and women to trees, contributed to this outcome, and it is against this background that his credentials as spokesman for Aborigines must be assessed. He remained Protector until 1904, when he was retrenched in favour of Roth, who was appointed Chief Protector for the whole state. With an interval in Sydney from 1909 as Director of the Queensland Intelligence and Tourist Bureau, Meston continued in Brisbane as Government consultant and free-lance journalist until his death from tetanus on 11 March 1924. 65 64 This repressive 1897 Act, co-drafted with Police Commissioner Parry-Okeden, ‘became a model for the institutionalisation of Indigenous people at a national level, being followed by similar legislation in Western Australia (1905), the Northern Territory (1910) and South Australia (1911).’[Judith McKay, Paul Memmott (2015), Staged Savagery: Archibald Meston and his Indigenous exhibits: 200 http://press- files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n2179/pdf/article07.pdf The Act was legislated with the support of Harold Tozer, the Queensland colonial secretary in Sir Hugh Nelson’s ministry. 65 C. Taylor (2006), Constructing Aboriginality: Archibald Meston’s Literary Journalism, 1870 – 1924: 1 - 2 (available online as a pdf). Also see: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/download/.../9554 : 121 - 122. 35 1915: Forced relocation of remaining Kabi survivors Adams continues the story: The situation for the hinterland Gubbi Gubbi was virtually the same as those for the Tewantin area. The last mention of the original inhabitants was in 1915 when the Gympie Times wrote ‘a number of blacks who have resided in these districts for many years past, were removed by the police to Taroom station’.66 Who were these last Aboriginal people? What was their demography? Adams informs us that they: Were mostly old folks and their lamentations at being taken away were very agonising to listen to and can only be understood by those who have heard a blackfellow wail.67 Adams provides us with the final sordid chapter on Kabi genocidal treatment by the Queensland Government within the context of state-wide Indigenous repression, so compellingly captured by Ross Fitzgerald.68 Adams writes” Notwithstanding the taking of the Gympie Murries to Taroom, as mentioned, Nurdon Serico 69 states that most of his people were taken to the government mission at Barambah, with a number going to Myora on Stradbroke Island and some to Purga near Ipswich. He is confident that the reason behind this breaking up of his people was a definite attempt to deprive them of their traditions and thus ultimately, to have them cease to exist as a cohesive people. Serico’s mother, Evelyn, was taken from her home lands near Tucheko in the Mary River valley, to Barambah at the age of six years, in 1915, with her mother. Although Mrs Serico is possessed of a remarkably gentle nature and bears no malice towards those responsible for her harsh handling in past events, she is adamant that the policy in existence at 66 Adams, Ibid: 17 citing Patricia Towner (1989), Kabi Country: 1 67 Adams, Ibid: 177 citing Leisuretime Magazine, July 30, 1994 – August 12, 1994 ‘Local aboriginal numbers decline as they succumbed to settlers’ diseases’. 68 Ross Fitzgerald (1982), From the Dreaming to 1915 69 Evelyn Serico, mother of Eve (Fesl) and Nurdon, was Adam’s Kabi interviewee on 10th and 31st August 1996 in Brisbane. 36 Barambah at the time of her arrival was definitely designed to break the spirit of her people. No Murrie there, for example, was allowed to converse in his or her own language since, it was said, Koorie languages were “Devil’s language”. This prohibition was imposed by missionaries, she added, even though Barambah was a government-run reserve. Mrs Serico recalls that her enforced journey from her home lands to Barambah was a hazardous one. She and others of her people were placed upon buckboards, very basic horse-drawn vehicles with virtually no suspension, and were taken firstly to Eumundi. After an overnight stay there they were taken on to Murgon, with a final leg then to Barambah. On their arrival at the reserve her people found living conditions very elementary and even harsh. Food consisted generally of damper and tea, the former having to be prepared by her people themselves after they had to pick up their ration of flour and other ingredients from the administration. The Murries grew their own vegetables, but a proportion of these was collected by the administration for their own consumption. Meat was available on the strict, and very limited ration, of 1 lb [pound], or less than half a kilogram, per adult male and half this amount for each woman and also for each child. The ration was only available weekly, on a Saturday and Murries had to call at the Reserve shop to obtain it. The effect of the paucity of meat was exacerbated by the fact that local fish and game supplies were quickly hunted out by the desperate Murries. This had the twofold disadvantage that, firstly the people were not able to augment their food intake, and secondly, they were not able to practice their innate hunting traditions, thus causing their skills to languish. There was some small consolation for the people in the fact that the tea ration mentioned was available daily, made in the administration boiler, with a bell being sounded at 3 pm to allow people to collect their supply. Mrs Serico recalls that the first superintendent she encountered at the time of her arrival at Barambah was generally lacking in empathy for his charges. His name she gave as Lipscombe, and as an example of his lack of caring she said that her people were not properly provided with warm clothing or blankets, even though there were regularly deposits of ice in gullies on the reserve due to severe frosting in winter. The level of clothing supplied to the Murries was also very sub-standard; the women, for example, having to wear dresses made from flor sacks: something they found quite soul-destroying, and which she concluded, was meant by the authorities to be just 37 that. Just as deliberately soul-destroying was the fact that no Murries at Barambah were allowed to leave the reserve without official approval, and certainly not for the purpose of visiting nearby Murgon. They were thus virtual prisoners there, a point underlined by the fact that although they were required to undertake considerable physical labour on the reserve, they never received any payment of any kind for their services. On a more sinister note, any Murrie not full-blooded was taken from his or her parents, and these parents had no further access to their children or information as to what became of them. This was allowable under legislation in place at the time of Mrs Serico’s forced transfer to Barambah and as Eve Fesl states it,70 Government endorsement of the existing practice of removing Koorie children from their parents and forcing them into institutions or dormitories or “reserves”, for the purpose of controlling and training them to be slaves for the white community, was first enshrined in “protection” legislation in Queensland in 1897. 71 1897 – 1971: ‘Living under the Act’ It is now a melancholy matter of Australian factual history: the forcible breaking up and relocation of Aboriginal families, a process facilitated by Government eugenics policies that were carried on the back of marginalization, deportation, then segregation, what we may now term apartheid, but more than apartheid, internment under inhumane conditions where the morbidity and mortality rate of the inmates was extreme, corresponding to Lemkinian genocide. The machinery of malodorous Indigenous public policy - including genocide - needs its propaganda, its alternative facts, its confected reality. Like the Orwellian new-speak of today where our hard-fisted and secretive border protection policy means that refugees are kept in offshore detention without adequate medical facilities to deter, so the propaganda goes, queue-jumping ‘boatpeople’ dying at sea, Indigenous refugees under the 1897 ‘Act’ were relocated under ‘Aboriginal protection’ policy to prevent their ongoing extermination and exploitation by pastoralists and settlers for whom prosecutions were rare. 70 Citing Eve Fesl (1993) Conned!: 108 71 Adams, Ibid: 177 - 180 38 If we peer behind the propaganda, neither past nor present policy was (or is) for the good of the refugee; it was (and is) to protect and preserve the sensibilities of predominantly Anglo-society where far right racist ideology remains endemic away from the capitals such as Brisbane, generally increasing according to the remoteness. There is no better documentary record of the Queensland Government’s repressive and overtly racist culture in this end-stage Lemkinian process than Rosalind Kidd (2005), The Way We Civilize, in particular, the criminal role of Patrick Killoran, the Queensland Government’s Director of Native Affairs from 1964 to 1985. Of Barambah in 1913, she writes: In a surprise visit Howard [the Chief Protector] discovered a filthy hospital and dying pneumonia patients unattended. His internal report condemned the lack of interest and outright neglect of the settlement nurse, and also of the visiting medical officer Dr Junk, who attended the large and debilitated community only a half day each month.72 Howard then defended the death rate: Settlements are used as a dumping ground for cases that the charitable Missions are not always eager to receive.73 In 1918, Barambah conditions had worsened: ..there were few houses for the almost six hundred people living at Barambah; most families made do with bark gunyahs which freely leaked rain and frequently iced over internally in winter. Almost as soon as they arrived at this southern settlement, families transported from Ayr and Springsure succumbed to the appalling conditions. Only one blanket per person was allocated. In that year alone, twenty-six people perished from influenza. Called to report on the punitive death rate, visiting medical officer Dr Junk described conditions as “most conducive to sickness”. Uncovered latrines invited typhoid. The “hospital” was grossly overcrowded, with a tiny badly smoking kitchen: it was so tainted with death that people feared to go near it. No 72 Rosalind Kid (2005), The Way We Civilize: 67 73 Ibid: 68 39 beds were provided for ailing venereal disease patients at the “lock hospital”, and infectious patients were confined in an open-sided shed. Even children in the dormitory had to sleep on the ground, their single blanket, meagre clothing, and scant and inferior diet contributing directly to endemic skin diseases.74 Yet there is no hint of these fearful conditions in Bleakeley’s official account. Health at Barambah, he declared, “generally has been fairly good”.75 Mark Copland not only wrote a doctoral thesis on the subject of ‘removals’ under the ‘Act’, but also built a Removals Database. His focus is on Queensland, but it was a similar pattern across Australia. Mark summarizes: The policy of removals affected every Aboriginal family and community living in the state of Queensland between 1897 and 1971. Even if they were not directly affected, all Aboriginal people living during this period knew of the policy and adapted their lives accordingly. This past policy continues to have an impact in contemporary Australian society. Debates over native title in the 1990s centred on whether Aboriginal people retained rights in the sol following the effects of dispossession. In 2005, Aboriginal people still need to prove a “continuing connection” with country in order to have their native title rights recognized as part of the federal government’s legislative framework of native title. Removals are an important factor when claimants endeavour to “prove continuing connection” to land.76 2016: Kabi population recovery In 2016, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Census population77 of the Sunshine Coast was 5,716, of which 5,169 were Aboriginal, an increase of 1,520 over 2011. 78 74 Ibid, citing QSA A/69778, November 1918, Barambah Inquiry. 75 Ibid: 81 76 Mark Copland (2005), Calculating Lives: the numbers and narratives of forced removals in Queensland 1859 – 1972: 15 https://www120.secure.griffith.edu.au/rch/file/305535d7-d7f5-a050-cc91- 1b5ffd8bb399/1/Copland_2005_01Thesis.pdf Aboriginals fearfully recall this period as ‘living under the Act’, referring to the Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897, which was repealed in October 1839 and replaced with an even more oppressive Aborigines Preservation and Protection Act, 1939. Among its clauses: Reserves (Section 22, clause 1) The director may by writing under his hand from time to time cause any aboriginal, save and except an aboriginal to whom this section does not apply, to be removed from any district to a reserve and kept there for such time as may be ordered by the Director. In 1971, this act was replaced by the Queensland Aboriginal Act, 1971 and the Regulations of 1972. For a harrowing discussion, based on victims’ accounts, see: Bill Rosser (1985), Dreamtime Nightmares. 77 The Census Aboriginal demographic data includes those people who identify with Aboriginal culture or who may have an Aboriginal ancestor. 78 https://profile.id.com.au/sunshine-coast/indigenous-keystatistics 40
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