38 Once Upon A Time Part 2
Amanda ventures further into once-upon-a-time land, inspired by a relative she meets in Greenough, WA, and a friend’s approach to history that insists on bringing the stories of the colonial past into present day consciousness.
I had been living in Victoria for years, first in Melbourne then six years in a small town called Daylesford. It was a shock to leave the dark, swampy, feminine zone of the Central Highlands of Victoria and arrive in the sun and wind-blasted plains of macho WA. The change was exhilarating, and it carried with it the extra charge of undealt-with cultural and family stuff found in the old stones in the hamlet.
Greenough was once a thriving farming community, a settlement of stone cottages that gradually lost life until it achieved museum status. Farming continues on the Flats but the Hamlet is now a tourism precinct managed by the National Trust.
In early 2002 I met and worked with local artists to create an exhibition that incorporated different works in buildings and spaces within the village. A fragment of writing I did at the time gives a flavour of these three months:
In the wilds of Greenough the living are few, because most of the available space is taken by ghosts. So crowded is this area with spirits that the living can only occasionally squeeze in; and then only by actively collaborating with wraiths.
My residency at the Greenough Hamlet has been a slow unfolding of relationships with the dead – as well as with the living.
In Walkaway, a small settlement that still retains its status as a living village, not far from the Hamlet, I visited the old Railway Museum. There I found a photograph from the early 1900s that showed John Nicoll Drummond and his wife Mary (born Mary Eliza Birdsall Shaw) sitting side by side. Both elders look out at the viewer, good humoured and twinkly.
Drummond family history book with portrait of James Drummond Snr and grandchild.
The encounter inspired me to dig out my copy of the family history The Drummonds of Hawthornden (Rica Erickson circa 1970s). I learnt that John was one of the first party of European settlers that drove their animals up from the Avon Valley into this region looking for new pastures in the drought years of the late 1840s. Being in Geraldton I was actually treading the same ground as this great great great great great great uncle of mine.
FIRST WHITES MEET FIRST NATIONS
John arrived on the ship, the Parmelia, the fourth of six children, with parents James Drummond and Sarah Mackintosh. Captain Stirling landed settler colonialists on the beach at Fremantle to begin the fledgling colony of Perth in 1829. James Drummond Snr had been appointed as a naturalist and eventually became the head gardener for the colony.
John took to the Derbal Yerrigan, now Swan River, roaming through the bush with his younger brother Johnson making friends with the local Aboriginal kids, becoming bush people.
I imagine the first meetings between the children of the boat people and the children of the Wadjuk Noongar tribe as being full of mutual curiosity and fascination. The Aboriginals, already fluent in different tribal languages were natural linguists and would have quickly picked up a workable English. John and Johnston were of an age to absorb new knowledge, with the language of play as common ground.
Imagine the wild, rich, fertile, terror of this place for the newly arrived Europeans. John (born 1816), at 13 years old would have been up for the adventure and the right age to take the lack of a built environment in his stride. I imagine him indifferent to the plight of pianos listing on the beach and undaunted by the necessity to grow and forage for food and build shelter at an impossible distance from everything he had ever known.
By the time they were young adults, the Drummond boys they had access to education, guns and horses and they were also connected to deep learning from their Aboriginal mentors and friends about food, water sources, tracking, hunting, the stories that animated the land. John was renowned for his legendary bush skills and ability with a gun.
Looking from my perspective these boys had an incredible entrée into First Nation’s lives and into the astonishing natural world they managed.
SPECULATIVE HISTORY
If John or Mary wrote of their experiences, these words have not survived to the present day. What I glean about John is from the Drummond history commissioned by family members and odd bits and pieces through other written sources. The book had strong input from my maternal Aunt, Judy Harper, (born in 1912 and a self-trained local historian) and her mother, my grandmother, Margaret Rose Drummond, nee Harper.
Connections with the Aboriginal people are sketchily recorded at best – my mother told me that her Aunt Eileen was ‘appalled’ that the stories of the Drummond boys and their connections with Aboriginal people, especially woman, were recorded in the family history.
I grew up knowing Aunt Eileen was ‘one of the maiden aunts’. Years later I worked out that she was one of many women who never married because their potential husbands were amongst the thousands of young men killed in World War 1. All families of my mother’s generation (Mum was 10 when the war started) had their ‘maiden aunts’.
For a while in the early 2000s, I searched out details, read books about early contact. I wrote down the basics and fed what I had learned into teasing out the imagined emotional content of first contact in a way that probably says a lot more about me than it does about life in 1829.
VIBP: VERY IMPORTANT BOAT PEOPLE
By the time I arrived on the scene in the late 50’s, the Drummonds were foundation family royalty in Perth – at least in my mum’s eyes - and definitely up there in terms of generational wealth and living in the best spots along the Swan River.
James Drummond Snr had a seat named after him in King’s Park and 60 species of plants bear his name. In the 1960s if the descendants weren’t comfortable with their first arrival status (and the label of brave pioneer) I wasn’t hearing it. I now know I grew up snug in the knowledge that I came from an ‘important’ family. We were special.
James Drummond snr was a benign presence – he arrived poor as a church mouse, but like many Scotsmen, educated and ready and eager to engage with the new world in his role as naturalist. What a wonderful gift for him. The spotlight is now on WA and its globally recognised plant biodiversity hot spots….imagine the treasures this land held before the colonists began farming, overlaying the agricultural template they bought with them from the Northern Hemisphere.
FREEZE/THAW
In an online interview, Peter Andrews, hydrologist, calls the settler colonialists out on their approach to agriculture. Peter points out, they had ‘freeze/slash/thaw in their DNA’. In farming terms, he is referencing conditions in the Northern hemisphere where the snow melts to supply lowlands - water falls on the highest peaks and runs down to water the spring meadows – Peter, not mincing words, called being a farmer under these conditions a ‘fool’s paradise’.
Drought wasn’t a biggy for the Euro farmer. But the would-be settlers, very few of them actual farmers, arrived to very different conditions in WA. The rain falls, unreliably on flat land, and extended dry periods and periodic flooding define a completely different water and land system.
OH NO NOT THE CULTURAL OVERLAY AGAIN
I know I go on about this a bit. The cultural overlay. But I figure that the way we are conditioned to see things that exclude us from really seeing what is under our noses, is an endlessly interesting study and germane to my attempt to come to terms with my own cultural prejudices and predispositions.
I learnt from cross-referencing available historical sources that James Drummond Snr spent long days wandering in the bush in company with two white ponies and two kangaroo dogs or Irish wolf hounds (depending on the source) collecting plant specimens to be pressed and sent back to the collections in Kew Gardens. It seems the local Aboriginal people didn’t mind him. He roamed freely in WA, his collecting efforts made successful because of respectful relationships he and his youngest sons formed with the local tribal people. He made himself useful to the farmers by eventually identifying the plant that was killing large numbers of the early mobs of sheep – toxic species of the genera Gastrolobium and Oxylobium.
In the Avon Valley, east of Perth, it appears the Drummond boys were atypical of other settler families in that they formed close relationships with the local people. Johnson was the son most aligned with his botanist father in gathering plant and animal specimens and his relationships with First Nations people became an entrée into worlds of knowledge denied to those who failed to connect.
That the brothers chose to form alliances with Aboriginal women as travel and sexual companions was an open secret, one which apparently created a rift between them and their father and definitely scandalised the colony. In the reading I have done I never get a whiff of what their mother, Sarah, thought about her wayward sons, nor an insight into the feeling of the Aboriginal women on the subject of their white lovers.
PERTH BEFORE
Growing up in the 60’s, I was aware of flickering, black shadows, Aboriginal lives on the periphery of my vision. I was protected from the realities of colonisation via an education geared to certain sanitised aspects of history and life in a suburb devoid of Aboriginal people – but there was enough of something stirring in the 70’s to make me question my family’s right to ascendency. As a teenager, I was acutely aware of living a privileged life.
THE ROTTNEST FACTOR
Of all the stories of displacement, violence, disease and resistance, there was one in particular that haunted me. I was in my late teens when the brutal Aboriginal history of Rottnest, a prison Island built by Aboriginal people from all over the state, came into my consciousness.
Even on the simplest level I found this was not a conversation I could have with my beloved Aunt Judy, fierce guardian of local history and admirable champion of native flora and fauna, but considerably less flexible on attitudes to First Nation’s people. “What nonsense” she said sternly. ‘What have you been reading?” when I said I was shaken to learn that an Aboriginal man was sentenced to months in jail on Rottnest Island for the crime of stealing a pipe. This was enough to kill the conversation.
It seemed the only context for colonisation was that of an inherited pride from being descended from the first settlers and the evidence of the rightness of this pride seen in many laudable achievements and landmark heritage homes. We deserve this! We worked hard!
SALLY MORGAN
I think of artist and writer Sally Morgan’s sarcastic postcards from the late 1980’s. Rottnest scene depicting holidaying white people waving, oblivious to layers of Aboriginal corpses they are standing on. I could relate to that.
I was in my early twenties – with no ability to unpick any of this – when I chose to flee to Melbourne.
HISTORY IS NOT HISTORY
When my Aunt Judy heard I had relocated to Geraldton from Victoria, she told me that her mother (my grandmother) who died when I was a teenager, met her uncle, John Drummond in Geraldton. He was an old man and Maisrie (as she was known) was 16 years old.
Margaret Rose Drummond as a teenager at school in Ireland, early 1900s
It seems incredible! In my own lifetime I had known someone who had actually met one of the first settlers who disembarked from the Parmelia nearly 200 years ago! Really we are barely a hop skip and a jump away from colonisation.
JOHN DRUMMOND AS COP
As John Drummond came into adulthood he fell into the role of negotiator. It became the custom in the small settlements of Toodyay and York for farmers to call on John to dissuade the Aboriginal people from firing the land before harvest and to talk them out of spearing the animals that arrived in numbers to eat the rich perennial grasses then prevalent across WA. The Drummonds might have been considered wild boys, but they were useful.
DEATH OF JOHNSON
On 12 July in 1845, Johnson (25 years of age) was speared to death as he lay sleeping in his Moore River camp. Kabinger, the Aboriginal man who did the deed had been accused of stealing sheep, plus Johnson was keeping company with Kabinger’s wife, so there was bad blood between them. The death was given little to no public attention even though Johnson was on official business, collecting bird specimens for the naturalist, John Gould. The newspaper reports of the time are subdued despite the sensational details, perhaps because Johnson was young and just beginning a career. Or perhaps because the thought of a young white man fraternising with an Aboriginal woman was simply too appalling to talk about in polite society. 130 years later, Aunt Aileen certainly did not want such stories to be in the family history.
John in turn tracked down his brother’s killer and shot him. The then Governor Hutt, infuriated by such lawless behaviour ordered John to be captured and bought to trial for the crime – but John went to ground, fading into the bush to live with Aboriginal friends. In the Drummond family history, it was reported that when he finally resurfaced months later (quote) ‘his own mother didn’t recognise him’.
Hutt eventually reinstated John when the settlers, sick of having their crops burnt out and animals taken, begged him to let John return to his role as mediator. It was not the first time that John fell afoul of the authorities – he was inclined to be a law unto himself and never got over a habit of flouting authority. Eventually he was given a role as a policeman - the Inspector of Native Police.
MASSACRE AT THE BOOTENAL SPRINGS
The settlers started looking northwards to the Champion Bay region (Geraldton), driven to find pasture for their sheep after several disastrous seasons on the Avon River. Drought, lack of workers and investment, had nearly scuttled the settlement and there was excitement about a rich seam of galina - lead ore - that had been found in the Murchison. The colony, constantly cash-strapped, was on the look-out for a way to create wealth.
In November of 1849, guided by A.C. Gregory under the leadership of William Burges, an expedition travelled to the Champion Bay area in the Victoria district to meet a team of miners arriving by ship. John, with a ‘Victoria Plains native, Kardakai to act as interpreter’ (Erickson p128) was included in his role as conciliator and negotiator with Aboriginal people. Diaries tell of them taking 11 days on horseback as they followed the water sources northwards from the Avon, to reach the Greenough River Flats.
I imagine the aspect at Bootenal Springs had them pulling out their surveying instruments: this freshwater oasis alive with fish and birds all set in a river plain rich with summer growing perennial grasses and dotted with large salmon gums, must have seemed like an answer to all their prayers.
At the Greenough River, a threatened attack by 70 hostile natives, was averted by (quoting Rica Erickson) ‘the delicate handling of the situation by John and Kardakai.’ John’s ‘delicate negotiations’ notwithstanding, things came to a head by 1854. The battle-lines between black and white were quickly drawn – the local Yamaji had had over two decades of bad news stories about the new arrivals and had a strong idea of what was coming.
Rumours of a large gathering of battle-ready Aboriginal men meeting in the dense bushland around the Bootenal Springs led to a posse being formed. John, speaker of language, privy to the rumours, was one of the settlers, mounted on a horse and carrying a gun who went in to (in inverted commas) ‘clear them out’.
That there was a massacre is certain, but no record remains to tell us of the body count.
LOGUE
Major Logue was of this party and wrote a diary from the 1840’s when he took land on the Flats near Walkaway, with his wife Ellen Shaw, the sister to John N Drummond’s wife, Mary. It seems he had a special hatred of the local people and talked openly about killing Aboriginals.
The Logue diaries currently being transcribed by local historians had a code – simple to crack – that talks about these murders. But no mention of this Massacre. The diaries were transcribed in the late 1890’s by a friend or employee of Major Logue so somewhere along the way a clean-up was done. Was it ok to kill blackfellas in the 1850s and the social license changed so they felt compelled to be more discreet about it in 1890s for future generations? Is it possible John Drummond and Major Logue liked each other as brothers-in-law? There are many unanswerable questions, the kind that can be teased out by writers like Kate Grenville that explore the richness of human connection gleaned from primary sources.
WATCHMEN
I just watched the first 6 episodes of a TV show, Watchmen – a fantastical swoop through race history that I found illuminating. It centres on a massacre by white citizens of African Americans in a community in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, an act of race hatred I had never heard of. Would that we had such an imaginative lens trained on WA’s early colonial years that reaches into contemporary reality – someone wants to put me in a writing team, I’m there.
MONUMENT
It has taken a long time to acknowledge this massacre in the MidWest. It was not until about 10 years ago that local historian Gary Martin from the Greenough Museum and artist Peter Damean worked with Aboriginal descendants and the Geraldton Greenough Council to acknowledge the event with a monument to Aboriginal resistance at the springs.
JOHN AS LANDOWNER
John was appointed a Sub-Protector of Aboriginals for Champion Bay and appropriated a 4,000-acre parcel of land, inland from Drummond’s Cove (formerly Smugglers cove, about 20 kms north of Geraldton). The property stretched from inland down to the sea next to the police reserve. He built a four-room stone cottage at White Peaks, that is still a family home and married Mary Shaw.
John eventually resigned as a policeman, unhappy with the restrictions of the position, to concentrate on mining and pastoral interests. There is a bit of an undercurrent here– he no doubt liked the badge and the pay, but he chaffed under authority.
MARY
Very little is recorded of Mary. I know she was considered to be a ‘catch’ – the Belle of the Swan – and that the general consensus was she married a ‘bad boy’ of the colony – someone who seems to have been both trusted, relied upon and treated with suspicion by the small group of early colonists for his strong friendships within the Aboriginal groups.
We know she lost a child. Visiting her sister Ellen Logue at Ellendale, near Walkaway on the back Greenough Flats it is reported that she fell off a horse and miscarried. They eventually adopted a 10-year-old girl called Rose Brown, daughter of a man who killed his wife and was hung for the crime.
And we know Mary was a huge fan of her husbands and never uttered a word of criticism or ever alluded to John’s youthful and late escapades – in public at least.
EMBROIDERY LESSONS
At some point before Aunt Judy died, she gave me a pillow cover embroidered with a flower motif that was the last thing that Mary Drummond was working on as she lived out her days in a house in Nedlands – she died in the early 1900s in her 90s. The embroidery is unfinished and not particularly skilful which is somehow pleasing.
JOHN DRUMMOND AS AN OLD MAN
As a strange addition to this story, in the Drummond history book there is mention of an altercation John has when in his 60s with a white man called John Fisher working on Redcliffe farm. It landed him a year in Fremantle jail on a charge of attempted murder. The argument, it is recorded, was over treatment of an Aboriginal man… John also got into strife for stealing sheep as an 89-year-old man – but no charges were laid. The Drummond history describes him as remaining as ‘alert and impetuous’ in old age as he had been in his youth.
Since writing this, I have heard whispers of Aboriginal bodies buried up near Bowes River, north of Geraldton – the true stories of the murder of Aboriginal people near the old police reserve at Drummonds Bay have not yet been told. And they may never be told. There is still strong resistance from white owners of land to not unearth the skeletons of the past, both literally and figuratively.
That John, his brother Johnson and James Drummond Snr had strong friendships with Aboriginal people and respect and understanding for their way of life is not in question. That John, cop, linguist, pastoralist, mine investor, was part of the story of the dispossession and destruction of the Aboriginal peoples’ way of life is also not under dispute. I don’t know how to align these contradictions. But I know we must talk of what happened, own the true history of the colonisation of Australia.
So while I can’t claim to be fully ‘woke’, I can say that I am gradually waking up from the deep sleep of cultural superiority that I took in with my rusks.
AMANDA STOPS BEING SO FRAGILE
So here I am. White-skinned. Not so fragile and fully inhabiting the idea that First Nation’s people must be heard, must be listened to. For all our sakes. The price Australia has paid for the privileging of white, Western culture at the expense of our own, living, eons old, on-country culture is too high. It has made all of us, much poorer.
Thanks to George Criddle for friendship and ideas, many of which enlivened and deepened the way I view my family history within the context of colonialism.
