No Roads Go By, Myrtle Rose White

Australian Women Writers Gen 3 Week 12-18 Jan. 2020

Twenty years ago this week, Gee had finished year 12, done a very good IB as it turned out and was with me in the truck. We went up to Moree and Brisbane then back to Sydney. My next load was to Moomba in northern South Australia and she had to finalize her university preferences, so I dropped her off to catch the bus to Melbourne from outside Central Station, and went off to load.

My diary for 12 Jan 2000 says that we booked her on Greyhound for $48; I dropped my front trailer at a transport yard in Strathfield; and most concerningly, that when I fuelled up I topped up my radiator which was “leaking from tap – lower RH side”. The following morning a 20 ft container was craned on and I was on my way, over the Blue Mountains – I stopped at Lawson PO to pay some bills – and out through Dubbo.

Slept at Emmadale, got fuel at Little Topar, roadhouses in the desert either side of Wilcannia, topped up my radiator again, found the alternator belt was broken. Got one in Broken Hill.

The customer, Keith Thompson, a famous trucking operator from Castlemaine, Vic, told me I was running late, which was true, and that I would have to go “the short way” on dirt roads via Tibooburra, instead of the long way round on bitumen to Port Augusta and up the Strezlecki Track (map).

The road to Tibooburra was mostly gravel, just the tops of the hills bitumenized. There I turned west onto a dirt road out to Cameron’s Corner – where the borders of NSW, Qld and SA meet, “walked around corner marker to all 3 states. Much evidence of Millenium celebrations”. Slept.

The only map I had was a map of Australia. I was following a faint dotted line which should take me past Merty Merty Station. The ‘road’ itself on the SA side was just wheel tracks in the sand through the scrub. Up I would go, veering left up each sandhill, turn back to the right at the top, and down onto a claypan baked hard in summer, look for the opening on the other side, occasional mobs of cattle to keep me on my toes. For three hours. You can only imagine my relief when I came on a very old sign post pointing to Merty Merty, a few miles on my left and Innaminka 110 on the right. I pressed on, guessed that I should turn right onto the Strezlecki, towards the columns of thick black smoke, was soon at Moomba – where I waited 8 hours due to the crane being broken down. Then, back south, towards the distant Flinders Ranges and civilization, “9.00 pm. Tea, Elsewhere Pub, Lyndhurst. 2 stubbies!”

This is the country of No Roads Go By (1932), the fictionalised memoir of a young woman whose husband took her and their young child from Adelaide to manage a cattle property in remotest outback South Australia in the years leading up to WWI. Myrtle White’s “Mrs Brown” is a city girl like the more famous Mrs Aeneas Gunn of We of the Never Never (1908) though White’s ADB entry says she was born in a tent near Broken Hill and brought up in rural Barossa Valley. White quotes Boake’s famous poem to push the connection: Out on the wastes of the Never Never/That’s where the dead men lie!

I have written elsewhere that Gen 3 had two new streams – (urban) Social Realism and Modernism – and also that many authors, particularly men, continued with the Gen 2 themes of nationalism and bush realism verging on romanticism. But during the Gen 3 period women writers, and indeed rural women generally, made a concerted effort to carve out for themselves a place in men’s bush myths. And they did this by promoting a new myth (in the original sense of archetype rather than falsehood) of the equal partnership of women with men as settler/farmers.

In the 1970s [historians such as] John Hirst [and] Judith Godden recognized that the myth of the independent bushman had been ameliorated by the general adoption of a Pioneer myth, where men tame a hostile environment to carve productive farmland out of unwelcoming bush; a myth which incidentally validates their right to be seen as the creators, and therefore the valid owners, of this land. Although it is sometimes argued that women are absent here also, Jemima Mowbray shows that during the Centenary and Sesqui-centenary celebrations of the 1930s women actively asserted their place in the opening up of the Australian bush to settlement. While Mowbray agrees with Godden that ‘the middle-class virtue of domesticity is the primary virtue celebrated within the Pioneer Woman myth’ (2006, p.4 of 20) she also emphasizes that popular representations of pioneer women show that they, as much as the men, were forced to overcome the loneliness and hardships of pioneering. (That’s me quoting from my thesis The Independent Woman in Australian Literature, 2011)

One (literary) outcome of this movement was the satirical Pioneers on Parade (1939), by Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack (Miles believed she, as Brent of Bin Bin, and Steele Rudd had invented the genre of Pioneering Lit.). But I’m afraid I’m yet to read it.

This Australian myth, or story, of women sharing the hardships and responsibilities of farming equally with men continues to need to be asserted right up to today – and was for instance, part of Michelle Scott Tucker’s stated motivation for reevaluating the role of Elizabeth Macarthur in the opening up the Australian wool industry.

So No Roads Go By plays, or played, an important part not just in selling the romance of the outback, in which all Australians like to believe, but in asserting women’s role in what is often pictured as an almost totally male domain. Although, like Gunn, she mostly plays the frail little wifey.

There is not much to the story, but it’s competently written, and White had a few other books published on the back of it. Interestingly no people or places are named, so her husband is The Boss and her daughter, Little’un. If the station itself is not Merty Merty, then it’s pretty close. One ‘lost’ stockman is clearly drinking at the Tibooburra pub.

She endures shocking heat in primitive houses, with dust storms, rolling sand dunes, a rabbit plague, and seven years of nothing to eat but beef and dried vegetables. Is pregnant two times, more than a days travel from the next house let alone the next doctor, and so must must spend months in ‘the city’ (Adelaide).

Little’un is quickly at home in the bush, but the two sons born during the course of the book are sickly. The author herself never seems comfortable, not surprisingly, with the help unreliable and The Boss away mustering for weeks at a time. The stockmen seem to be mostly white, and the local Indigenous people* are barely mentioned. Late in the book White says that there is very little evidence there ever were any.

 

Myrtle Rose White, No Roads Go By, first pub. 1932, illustrated by Elizabeth Durack 1954, this edition (pictured above) Angus & Robertson, reprinted 1956

see also:
Jemima Mowbray, Examining the Myth of the Pioneer Woman (pdf here)

I was motivated to find this among my father’s books after Sue/Whispering Gum’s recent post, Random thoughts from the mid-1930s (here). Sue is also contributing two Monday Musings on Christina Stead to AWW Gen 3 Week. The first is (here).

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*The people of this area are probably Wadikali (or Evelyn Creek mob) of the wider Yarli language group, but I can’t find websites for them under these names.

Sugar Heaven, Jean Devanny

Australian Women Writers Gen 3 Week 12-18 Jan. 2020

Lisa has reviewed the 2002 scholarly edition of Devanny’s working class classic to provide a lucid account of both the novel and its theoretical underpinnings.

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ANZLitLovers LitBlog

Last week there was a substantial donation from an Australian mining magnate to the bushfire relief effort. While all donations are much needed, reactions varied, from approval of the philanthropic gesture, to outrage that our economic system enables an individual to be in a position to give away $70 million. Read on …

Pinjarra Massacre

My original post on the Pinjarra Massacre of 28 October 1834, sometimes mendaciously called the Battle of Pinjarra, was ‘Following My Review of That Deadman Dance’ on 6 June 2015 (here). I have now updated it to include more material from the time. The image above is a segment of a stunning piece of work, not attributed to any artist that I can see, advertising the Pinjarra Massacre Memorial: Touring Exhibition, May 2015 (here).

For the information of non West Australians, Pinjarra is about 80 km south of Perth and inland of Mandurah and the Peel Estuary. The Bindjareb, the original inhabitants of that region, are one of 14 language groups making up the Noongar nation of south-western WA.

The Pinjarra Massacre was the result of an ambush of the Bindjareb people by a force of 25 armed men led by Governor Stirling. The stated intention was to quell unrest arising from the recent expansion of white settlement. The result was one dead on the British side and at least 20 dead on the Bindjareb side. Chris Owen, author of Every Mother’s Son is Guilty (review coming) speculates in an article in the Guardian of 18 Nov. 2019 that the Bindjareb death toll may have been as high as 80 (here).

A newspaper report of the time (below) states that Stirling’s party faced 70 men armed with spears who retreated to the river and mostly attempted to hide

Those who were sufficiently hardy or desperate to expose themselves on the offensive, or to attempt breaking through the assailants, were soon cleared off, and the remainder were gradually picked out of their concealment by the cross fire from both banks, until between 25 and 30 were left dead on the field and in the river. (The Western Australian Journal, Sat. 1 Nov. 1834)

Some ‘battle’! Bindjareb Park (here) memorializes the dead.

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The following letter, by Associate Professor Simon Forrest, Curtin University Elder in Residence, appeared in the West Australian of 1 June 2015. As you will see, he is responding to an earlier letter:

“The story of the events on October 28, 1834, near what is now the town of Pinjarra has historically been referred to as the Battle of Pinjarra.

The letter by Alex Munro (21/5) says the modern day reference to the battle as a “massacre” is historically incorrect. The battle, he says, occurred because of an attack on settlers in the Swan River Colony and the burning of the flour mill at South Perth, now the Old Mill.

His letter faithfully keeps to the non-Aboriginal version of events. Any efficient analysis of John Septimus Roe’s journal of the punitive expedition will, together with research around the historical events leading up to the battle or massacre,  question Mr Munro’s viewpoint.

Although the South Perth mill is part of the story, it was not burnt by Noongar, as implied by Mr Munro. The Aboriginal leader, Calyute, and his men did raid the mill to take flour that was normally given to them but because of a not so good season of crops in Guildford, flour was rationed and the first to miss out was the Noongar.

Also contrary to what Mr Munro states as an attack by Noongar on the colony is not so.

Governor James Stirling was certainly concerned about a possible alliance of the local Noongar groups that may have led to an attack on the colony but it never eventuated.

One of his reasons to travel to the Pinjarra area was to try to stop the Bindjareb people (this is where Pinjarra gets its name) joining such an alliance.

The West Australian of the time listed 21 Noongar who were killed, including women and one child. If the conflict at Pinjarra on that fateful day was a battle, a battle normally takes place between armies of warring men, but this was not the case.

Also, if it was a battle,  the armed conflict between the two groups of men may have taken possibly five minutes because Noongar men were only armed with spears.

Roe’s journal states the conflict started at around 8am and the killing of Bindjareb people continued until around 10am. The use of the word “battle” becomes questionable and a word like “massacre”, particularly from a Noongar perspective, challenges the view of the perpetrators.

It is also interesting to note that Stirling endeavoured to keep his expedition secretive. Only he and Roe left Perth on horseback, so Noongar spies would not get information about an armed expedition.

On the way to Peel’s place in modern day Mandurah, Stirling arranged reinforcements to his expedition at points along the way.  When the expedition left Peel’s place the expedition now numbered 24, comprising five civilians (including Roe) and 19 mounted police and soldiers (including Stirling).

On that fateful morning Stirling’s group surrounded the Bindjareb Noongar on three sides.  The initial skirmish that started with one of the two smaller groups of Stirling’s men and the Bindjareb men led to the rest of the Bindjareb retreating in the direction of the Stirling-led larger group hiding behind a hill, as stated in Roe’s journal: “On approaching an abrupt rising ground, the rest of the party halted out of sight”.

Stirling’s group opened fire as the Bindjareb tried to escape towards the river.

This event has been well researched by Noongar scholars and non-Aboriginal scholars.  I take many people to Pinjarra and follow Stirling’s exact route and talk about the events of the day in a spirit of reconciliation, an acknowledgement of our shared history.

The “Battle of Pinjarra” was certainly not a battle, and it may not have been a massacre. But we know the leader of the Swan River Colony led a secretive, punitive expedition to attack a group of Bindjareb people, living and camping on their land, as they had done for many thousands of years.

The Bindjareb retaliated against Stirling’s punitive force, fighting for their freedom, land, culture and way of life.”

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THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL,

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1834.

ENCOUNTER WITH THE NATIVES IN THE PINJARRA DISTRICT, ON THE BANKS OF THE MURRAY.

The report of this successful and decisive encounter with the Natives of the Murray, who have for some time been the terror of the neighbourhood was received with general satisfaction, — an opinion having prevailed that the system of lenity and forbearance hitherto adopted by the Government was not calculated to ensure safety to either the lives or property of the settlers. We have not space to revert to the many atrocities committed by the tribe, upon which at length retribution has fallen ; they are, however, within the recollection of our Readers, having but recently transpired, and will fully justify the severity of the punishment. – A Gentleman, an eye witness, has obligingly favored us with the following narrative of the encounter ; from the respectability of the party, the accuracy of this report may be implicitly relied upon.

The party consisted of His Excellency Sir James Stirling, Mr. Roe, Capt. Meares and his son Seymour, Mr. Peel, Capt. Ellis, Mr. Norcott, with 5 of the Mounted Police (one sick), Mr. Surveyor Smythe, one soldier to lead a pack-horse, Mr. Peel’s servant, Corporals 2, privates 8, of H. M.’s 21st Regt. – to leave at Pinjarra. In number 25.

On the night of the 27th of October, the party bivouacked at a place called by the natives “Jim jam,” about 10 or 11 miles in a direct line E.N.E. from the mouths of the Murray, where is abundance of most luxuriant feed for cattle, at a broad and deep reach of the river flowing to the N.W., and at this time perfectly fresh. After an early breakfast, the whole encampment was in motion at ten minutes before six the next morning, steering south-eastward for ” Pinjärra,” another place of resort for the natives of the district, and situated a little below the first ford across the river, where it was intended to establish a town on a site reserved for the purpose, and to leave half the party, including the military, for the protection of Mr. Peel and such other settlers as that gentleman might induce to resort thither.

Crossing the ford, where the river had an average depth of 2½ feet, and was running about 1½ miles an hour to the north, an easterly course was taken for the purpose of looking at the adjoining country; — but the party had not proceeded more than a quarter of a mile over an undulating surface of the richest description, covered with nutritious food for cattle, when the voices of many natives were heard on the left.

This being a neighbourhood much frequented by the native tribe of Kalyute, which had long been in the almost unchecked commission of numerous outrages and atrocious murders on the white people resident in the district, and which had hitherto succeeded in eluding the pursuit of the parties that had been searching for them since their treacherous murder of private Nesbitt of the 21st Regt., and spearing Mr. Barron only a very few weeks ago, the moment was considered propitiously favorable for punishing the perpetrators of such and other diabolical acts of a similar nature, should this prove to be the offending tribe.

For the purpose of ascertaining that point, His Excellency rode forward a couple of hundred yards with Messrs. Peel and Norcott, who were acquainted both with the persons of the natives and with their language, and commenced calling out and talking to them for the purpose of bringing on an interview. Their own noise was, however, so loud and clamorous, that all other sounds appeared lost on them, or as mere echoes. No answer being returned, Capt. Ellis in charge of the Mounted Police, with Mr. Norcott his assistant, and the remaining available men of his party, amounting to three in number, were despatched across the ford again to the left bank where the natives were posted, to bring on the interview required.

The instant the police were observed approaching at about 200 yards distance, the natives, to the number of about 70, started on their feet, the men seized their numerous and recently made spears, and shewed a formidable front; but finding their visitors still approached, they seemed to feel unable to stand a charge and sullenly retreated, gradually quickening their pace until the word “forward” from the leader of the gallant little party brought the horsemen in about half a minute dashing into the midst of them, the same moment having discovered the well known features of some of the most atrocious offenders of the obnoxious tribe. One of these, celebrated for his audacity and outrage, was the first to be recognised, at the distance of 5 or 6 yards from Mr Norcott, who knew him well, and immediately called out “these are the fellows we want, for here’s the old rascal Nöonarr;” on which the savage turned round and cried, with peculiar ferocity and emphasis, “Yes, Nöonarr, me,” and was in the act of hurling his spear at Norcott in token of requital for the recognition, when the latter shot him dead.

The identity of the tribe being now clearly established, and the natives turning to assail their pursuers, the firing continued, and was returned by the former with spears as they retreated to the river. The first shot, and the loud shouts and yells of the natives, were sufficient signal to the party who had halted a quarter of a mile above, who immediately followed Sir James Stirling at full speed and arrived opposite Capt Ellis’s party just as some of the natives had crossed and others were in the river.

It was just the critical moment for them. Five or six rushed up the right bank, but were utterly confounded at meeting a second party of assailants, who immediately drove back those who escaped the firing. Being thus exposed to a cross fire, and having no time to rally their forces, they adopted the alternative of taking to the river, and secreting themselves amongst the roots and branches and holes on its banks, or by immersing themselves with the face only uncovered, and ready with a spear under water to take advantage of any one who approached within reach.

Those who were sufficiently hardy or desperate to expose themselves on the offensive, or to attempt breaking through the assailants, were soon cleared off, and the remainder were gradually picked out of their concealment by the cross fire from both banks, until between 25 and 30 were left dead on the field and in the river.

The others had either escaped up and down the river, or had secreted themselves too closely to be discovered except in the persons of eight women and some children, who emerged from their hiding-places (where in fact the poor creatures were not concealed) on being assured of personal safety, and were detained prisoners until the termination of the fray. It is however very probable that more men were killed in the river, and floated down with the stream.

Notwithstanding the care which was taken not to injure the women during the skirmish, it cannot appear surprising that one and several children were killed, and one woman amongst the prisoners had received a ball through the thigh. On finding the women were spared, and understanding the orders repeatedly issued to that effect, many of the men cried out they were of the other sex, but evidence to the contrary was too strong to admit the plea. As it appeared by this time that sufficient punishment had been inflicted on this warlike and sanguinary tribe by the destruction of about half its male population, and amongst whom were recognised, on personal examination, 15 very old and desperate offenders, the bugle sounded to cease firing, and the divided party reassembled at the ford, where the baggage had been left in charge of four soldiers, who were also to maintain the post.

Here Capt. Ellis had arrived, badly wounded in the right temple, by a spear at 3 or 4 yards distance, which knocked him off his horse; and P. Heffron, a constable of the Police, had received a bad spear wound above the right elbow. No surgical aid being at hand, it was not without some little difficulty the spear was extracted, and it then proved to be barbed to the distance of five inches from the point.

Having re-crossed the river in good order, with the baggage on three horses, the whole party formed a junction on the left bank, fully expecting the natives would return in stronger force, but in this were disappointed. After a consultation over the prisoners, it was resolved to set them free, for the purpose of fully explaining to the remnant of the tribe the cause of the chastisement which had been inflicted, and to bear a message to the effect that “if they again offered to spear white men or their cattle, or to revenge in any way the punishment which had just been inflicted on them for their numerous murders and outrages, four times the present number of men would proceed amongst them and destroy every man, woman and child.” This was perfectly understood by the captives, and they were glad to depart – even under such an assurance ; – nor did several of their number, who were the widows, mothers and daughters of notorious offenders shot that day, evince any stronger feeling on the occasion than what arose out of their anxiety to keep themselves warm.

The severe but well-merited chastisement which had thus been inflicted, upon this troublesome people, who had rendered themselves equally the bullies of all the tribes around and the dread of the settler, made it very evident that the post which it had been in contemplation to establish on the very spot could not with, common prudence be thought of until a little time should develop the consequences likely to arise from the encounter.

Under these circumstances, and as Capt. Ellis was displaying alarming symptoms of torpor and delirium, accompanied by great weakness and continued flow of blood from his wound, it was considered desirable to return to Mr. Peel’s establishment at the mouth of the Murray Estuary with as little delay as possible. The party accordingly started at ten o’clock on their return, came out on the shore of the estuary at the distance of ten miles west, and in ten miles more arrived at Mr. Peel’s station at 4 o’clock on the same afternoon, by fording the several mouths of the Murray, about which the traces of natives were both numerous and very recent.

Captain Ellis was supported in his saddle during greatest part of the homeward journey by a man riding on either side of him, and became quite delirious. Having been copiously bled by Corporal Malone of the 21st, surgical assistance was sent for express from Fremantle, and at 4 o’clock next morning, when His Excellency and the Surveyor-General mounted on their return to Perth, both the wounded men were doing very well.

Thus terminates, for the present, an affair which is calculated to produce very beneficial effects on a complete nest of hornets, which had rendered themselves the pest of the surrounding country, and whose murders of Mackenzie, Budge, Wood, Nesbitt and some others, besides their almost successful attempts on the lives of Jenkins, Barron, Layman, &c, have thus fallen heavily on their own heads, – leaving as the only subject of regret that Kalyute and some other similar characters were, according to the accounts of the women, absent in another part of the country; being most probably in the vicinity of the settlement, where so many traces had been observed.

It would be an act of injustice to close this short narrative of the proceedings of the day without testifying to the efficient services and manly bearing of the handful of Police who commenced the attack, led on as they were in so able and spirited a manner by Capt Ellis and Mr.Norcott ; nor can less be said of the detachment of H. M.’s 21st Regt. and the Civilians who were present on the occasion, – all of whom, being fully impressed with the justice and necessity of the measure, contributed their utmost to achieve the result. It were presumptuous to do more than merely allude to the personal conduct of His Excellency Sir James Stirling throughout the whole business, whose promptness and decision in carrying into effect what his energetic mind as rapidly conceived, led to his rendering this affair of an hour as complete and masterly a manoeuvre on a small scale as could well be accomplished.

The Natives of the Perth district and the neighbourhood of the Swan, who have for the last few days visited us, doubt the account of the numbers killed, but generally evince a satisfaction that the atrocities of the Murray tribe, to which they have all been exposed, have met with this merited chastisement. Their expressions of gratification are, however, mingled with suspicion of our good intentions towards them ; and their commendation of the act is not unfrequently followed by the inquiry ‘Now, now, white man Swan River man babin’ (friend ),

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THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL,

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1834.

On Wednesday last, Captain Daniell of H. M.

21st Regt, returned to head-quarters with a portion

of the detachment stationed at the Murray, ac-

companied by Mr. Norcott, Superintendent of

police, and two of the Mounted Police, as it has

not been considered necessary to retain so large a

force at that station any longer. A constant patrol

has been kept up in the neighbourhood of the

settlement at Peel Town since the affair with the

Natives at Pinjarra, and several parties have con-

tinued to scour the country in various directions ;

the only party, however, which traversed the

country in the immediate vicinity of the scene of

action was directed by Captain Daniell, accom-

panied by Lieutenant Armstrong of the 21st Regt.,

Mr. Norcott, and Mr. Peel, notwithstanding the

unfavorable state of the weather which, it may be

remembered, we had during the past and previous

week.

On arriving at Pinjarra, they found that the

bodies of the natives who were killed, were all

decently interred, in one spot there being three

graves of large dimensions, about twelve feet each

in length, supposed to contain the members of

separate families, and at a short distance from

them were the graves of thirteen men. The party

was unable to reach the quarter where the heavi-

est firing took place, owing to the brooks being

much swollen, from the incessant rains; but it

was generally believed, that in this spot, also,

there were several graves,—and but one opinion

prevails, that, during the night after the encounter,

the natives returned and buried their dead, in the

manner we have described.

Captain Daniell’s party bivouacked within 400

yards of the scene of action, and returned to their

quarters, at Peel Town, after a three day’s march,

without crossing any recent traces of the natives.

The vicinity of the Canning River, it is thought,

will be visited by the remnant of this obnoxious

tribe ; and, indeed, a rumour has reached us, com-

ing, we believe, from the natives of the Swan

tribes, that Galute, the villain who has been the

subject of frequent notice in our columns, has

speared two natives of their tribe, in consequence

of the death of one of his women, who happened

to receive a fatal shot in the affray.

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see also:
Wardandi Massacre, Wonnerup/Lake Mininup WA, 1841 (here)
Cocanarup (Kukenarup) Massacre, Cocanarup Station, Ravensthorpe WA, 1880s (here)

An Outback Marriage, AB Paterson

This is a really odd cover image as the marriage in question definitely didn’t involve a blushing maiden in a long white dress, but was conducted by a dying missionary in an outback pub between a couple of rough nuts who probably weren’t very sober at the time. Which two rough nuts is the mystery this piece of light fiction by Australia’s most famous Bush poet sets out to solve.

I’m not a student of, or even very often a reader of, poetry and part of the reason for that is the Bush Doggerel forced on us as ‘poetry’ at school. Still, some of the Bush Ballads, in the tradition of the Scottish Borders form revived by Walter Scott, were ok, and the best of them were penned by Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson (1864-1941).

Paterson grew up on properties near Yass (300 km southwest of Sydney), in the foothills of the high country, Miles Franklin country. He went away to school at Sydney Grammar, failed to get a scholarship to uni and settled for doing his articles as a solicitor. His career as a writer began with the submission of stories and poetry to the Bulletin. He was a war correspondent during part of the Boer War and later served in the First World War. Interestingly, his entry in Wikipedia says “In 1908 after a trip to the United Kingdom he decided to abandon journalism and writing and moved with his family to a 16,000-hectare (40,000-acre) property near Yass.” An Outback Marriage was published in 1906.

Paterson was immensely popular for his ballads and no doubt hoped that An Outback Marriage, his first novel, would build on that.  HM Green writes in his seminal History of Australian Literature: “Banjo Paterson and Steele Rudd each published a couple of novels of which one is worth a mention. Paterson’s The Shearer’s Colt (1936) is a slight but entertaining story …”. So no luck there!

Franklin, 15 years his junior, idolized Paterson. She writes of young bushmen taking turns to recite excerpts of his work, and in My Career Goes Bung, has Sybylla go back to the flat of Australia’s “one great literary man”. Much of An Outback Marriage is set in ‘Franklin country’, and so I wondered how Franklin felt on reading Paterson’s first novel, which is clearly inferior to her own (published in 1901). I turned to Franklin’s diaries. On 6 and 7 October 1943 she was re-reading An Outback Marriage “in connection with an ABC talk”.

It turns out that in 1903 George Robertson (of Angus & Robertson) told Paterson to take his ms “to little Miles Franklin & get her to put the blood and tears into it.” MF made some suggestions which were not well received. But, she writes, “The association then proceeded with my interested investigation of the most sophisticated man who had so far attempted to woo me sexually. It was an exciting experience – but that is another story.”

MF’s opinion, now, of the book is scathing –

It was as if he gathered up all his knowledge of bush life and carpentered it up into a longer tale than those in his bush verses. Reading it now I see its resemblance in design to Mrs Campbell [Rosa] Praed’s successes. He has an heiress who is sent home to be educated. There is a bright new chum, Jim Carew. There are love affairs but the brightness seems forced & the fun mechanical. Jim Carew and a Gordon, of the family who are managing the heiress’s station, go north to look for the next of kin to Carew’s ancestral estate. This is done creakingly to drag in buffalo hunting in the north. That sort of thing queers the whole story. The novel is cynical and shallow.

The story turns on whether the heiress’s father had earlier married up north the sister of one of his Irish neighbours, an excuse for lots of lawyering, Paterson’s other profession, or whether the blushing bride had married some other bushman, and initially at least, whether there was a bride at all. I don’t need to say any more except that Paterson deals entirely in racial stereotypes, and no it’s not just the times. The Irish settlers are thieves, liars and drunkards. The Chinese smoke opium. The Blacks, including the women, are great horsemen; they are kept working long after the (white) men have settled down for a smoke; away from white influence they are dirty and lazy; and when they get in the way they are shot.

I looked in Trove for reviews contemporaneous with the novel’s publication. Mostly they were glowing – “we do not know a better Australian novel” (Sydney Sunday Times, 25 Nov 1906), “He can tell a story in prose as well as in verse” (Albury Banner, 30 Nov 1906);  interestingly, their first point of comparison was often with cowboy stories from the US. There is one suggestion that the novel grew out of an earlier serialised story, ‘In No Man’s Land’ (Orange Leader, 27 Sep 1906) – which might coincide with the section, pages 120-180. But the Bulletin Red Page says it best: “… one suspects that the author does not imagine his book a masterpiece. Yet it has its niche – a cheerful Australian yarn, lightly told.” (6 Dec 1906).

The Red Page story also criticises the book’s plain blue cover in comparison with much better presented English and American works. So it’s likely the plain blue hardback from Viking/Penguin which I read was intended as a facsimile.

 

AB Paterson, An Outback Marriage, first pub. 1906. Republished Viking/Penguin, Melbourne, 2009

Paul Brunton ed., The Diaries of Miles Franklin, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004

The Lake Condah Aboriginal Mission, Keith Cole

Brona’s AusReadingMonth Bingo, November 2019 – [Free]

With #AusReadingMonth drawing to a close, I still have Tas and Free to go on Brona’s Bingo card, so I have made the practical decision to knock off Free first, because the book, pamphlet really, I have chosen is much shorter, 50pp. I may still get Bruny read and written up in time, I’m having a break, doing grandfather duty while daughter, Gee is overseas at a conference.

Lake Condah is in western Victoria (map), about 300 km west of Melbourne and I think the mission is more or less contiguous with Budj Bim National Park, formerly Mt Eccles, one of the many extinct volcanoes in the Western District. For three years in the 1960s Dad was headmaster and we lived in the schoolhouse at Macarthur nearby, in the Anglican parish of Condah. The vicar’s house was in Condah and I was an altar boy but I don’t remember ever going there, not even on our routine ‘Sunday drives’ (much more fun to go to the beach at Yambuk or Port Fairy).

The mission closed in 1918. Some Aboriginal people remained in the area, though I have written before that I was completely unaware of them. I was in the scouts, as was a boy known universally as Darky, but … no, I didn’t make the connection. We had a lot of freedom and three or four of us would routinely go away camping for the weekend, without leaders, often at Mt Eccles which has a “bottomless” lake in its crater, completely surrounded by steep cliffs, and a big cave and some smaller caves which we would explore (which still gives me nightmares).

Checking Wikipedia I discover that Budj Bim was active up to 8,000 years ago, overlapping Aboriginal occupation by at least 30,000 years.

So, to the book, which Dr Keith Cole, a teacher and researcher in this area*, self-published in 1984:

[Anthropologists] estimate that when white people arrived, about 300,000 Aborigines were living on the continent, of whom between 11,000 and 15,000 were located in what is now Victoria. These Victorian Aborigines were divided into thirty-eight tribes of varying sizes. The Lake Condah Aborigines, known as the Gournditch-jmara (frequently spelt Gunditjmara), were part of a much larger group whose language and people were known as Manmeet.

By 1886 [that is, within 100 years] the number of full-blood Aborigines living in Victoria had fallen to 806 … This dramatic decline in numbers was the result of killing and poisoning by white people, the diseases which they introduced, coupled with the consequent trauma and alcoholism of a dispossessed people.

Manmeet does not appear to be a name that is currently in use, but I assume it coincides with the large area of western and central Victoria in this map of the main Aboriginal language groups  (for more information about the map, see my Aboriginal Australia page)

Gunditjmara is still very much in use for the people of Victoria’s west coast, with their language being known as Dhauwurd wurrung (here).

In 1841, Chief Protector of Aborigines George Augustus Robinson reported, regarding a swamp to the north of Gunditjmara country,

an immense piece of ground trenched and banked, resembling the work of civilized man but which on inspection I found to be the work of the Aboriginal natives, purposefully constructed for catching eels.

Robinson estimated that the system of channels measured “some thousands of yards” (2km) in length and covered an area of “at least 15 acres” (six hectares). Of course, this did not fit the narrative of Aborigines as stone age hunter gatherers and was ignored for another 135 years (The Conversation, 8 Feb 2017 here. The Age, 22 May 2019, World Heritage listing here).

I also looked in Bonwick’s Western Victoria: The narrative of an educational tour in 1857, but could see no reference to Condah, though some to the murder of Aborigines (I guess that means another book to be reviewed).

Cole writes:

The Aborigines of Western Victoria were different from those living elsewhere in Australia in several ways. In the first place they built permanent huts made of wood and stone with roofs of turf and branches… In the second place [they] constructed stone races, canals and traps with woven fibre nets to catch eels and fish… Stone walls, huts and cairns built near these fish traps are dated about BP 8,000.

From settlement in 1834 up to 1851 Victoria’s white population grew to 80,000 (plus 1.4 million sheep and 100,000 head of cattle). Within another five years the goldrushes had blown that out further to 300,000. The Aborigines did not give up without a fight but they were basically wiped out. Protectors were tried, unsuccessfully, from 1838-50, and then Missions. Lake Condah Mission was started in 1867, after a failed attempt to get the Gunditjmara to live with their traditional enemies at Framlingham Mission (Warnambool).

The mission, run by the Church of England, soon had 20 or so 2 room timber huts for the 70-80 Aborigines, about half of whom were children, and bluestone buildings for the superintendent and teacher, and for the school which also served as a church.

The Aborigines … were allowed to hunt and fish one day of a week, but with permanent rations this was more of a pastime for them. Their formal ceremonial life had long gone, even before they came to the Mission.

The Aboriginal census of 1877 showed that only 45% of Aborigines in Victoria were living on Missions or stations, though 66% in the Western District, including 81 at Lake Condah, 69 at Framlingham, and 77 on stations – presumably farm workers and their families. The Western District at that time was broken up into enormous, and enormously profitable, properties, ‘stations’, of tens of thousands of acres, underpinning the wealth of the Victorian squattocracy well into the C20th.

In 1886, the Aborigines Protection Law Amendment Act was enacted, forcing all mixed race people off the missions. “They were now thrown into the midst of a highly critical and racist society and told to act as white people”, while the bank crashes and consequent depression of the 1890s made the prospect of employment effectively impossible. The government appropriated mission lands and refused to make available land for housing homeless and unemployed Aborigines, until 1910 when the Act was amended again to be less onerous. But in 1918 the Mission was closed and its remaining inhabitants transferred to Lake Tyers at the other end of the state.

Aboriginal families continued to live nearby and to use what remained of the Mission buildings as a community centre, until in the 1950s the (Bolte) government leased out all the remaining land for farming by soldier settlers.

At the time of writing (35 years ago), some restoration work had commenced under the aegis of Victoria’s 150th anniversary.

This is a well produced book with lots of photographs and maps. I wonder why Dr Cole self-published, but maybe he preferred to be in control.

 

Keith Cole, The Lake Condah Aboriginal Mission, self published, Bendigo, 1984

Photo credit, 1. Budj Bim, Lake Surprise: Planeta.com 2. Fish traps, Bruce Pascoe

Books referenced in the text:
K Cole, The Aborigines of Victoria (1982)
MF Christie, Aborigines in colonial Victoria, 1835-86 (1979)
Since:
Lindsey Arkley, The hated protector : the story of Charles Wightman Sievwright, protector of Aborigines 1839-42 (2000)
Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident (2014) Lisa/ANZLL’s review here)
also:
Lucy Frost ed., Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin (1998). Annie Baxter (1816-1905) was the wife of a squatter at nearby Yambuk
James Bonwick, Western Victoria (first pub. 1858)
Camilla Chance, Wisdom Man (2005) here

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* The bio reads: Dr Keith Cole has spent much of the past eighteen years doing research among the Aborigines of the Northern Territory and Victoria. He was founding Principal of Nungalinya College, Darwin, from 1973-1978. Dr Cole is the author of a number of historical and anthropological books about Aborigines.

Google brought up nothing except some similar books about Aborigines in the NT by Reverend Dr Keith Cole.
Keith Cole’s year of birth was 1919.

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Queensland!

Journal: 039

Queensland is the odd state out. Australian states typically have one large metropolitan centre, with 70-80% of the total population, plonked down around a convenient port, and a mostly empty hinterland. But Queensland’s rural-metro split is much closer to 50:50. And that makes a real difference.

Right-wing Labor governments alternate with very right-wing Liberal-National governments; the police force is institutionally racist (I believe no Qld policeman has ever been convicted of killing a Black person (more here)); Queensland is Australia’s bible belt, though that seems to be spreading into suburbs Australia-wide, not to mention the Lodge; climate-change denialism is rampant: – institutionalized water-theft from inland rivers; widespread land clearing, coastal mangrove clearing; coal mining and fracking for gas prioritized over agricultural production; sugar cane farming and coal ports destroying the Great Barrier Reef.

And yet it is a beautiful place with lovely people (who invariably ask you to agree to 3 impossible things before breakfast – usually concerning God, greenies and commos).

So, my last trip: crossing back over the poor, dead Darling at Bourke; up through Cunnamulla (if you haven’t yet, see the movie), Charleville, Roma, Injune. Drop down into the Carnarvon Gorge National Park, 180 km of cool, tall timber (yes, some clearing) one of my favourite spots in all Australia and I don’t see the best of it from the road. Into Central Queensland coal country. My first delivery to a mine near Nebo, then over the Great Divide to Mackay and up the coast to Townsville.

They weren’t ready for the second delivery, so I left my trailers at the depot and went off for a shower, a sleep, a day off, shopping.  No secondhand bookshops that I could see. I asked at Mary Who?, where I bought Islands and The Old Lie, and the lady there said that as far as she knew they were all gone.

Late in the afternoon I headed up the coast again, too late to see Hinchinbrook Island bright green in a brilliant blue sea as you come over the last hill, but still a presence in the dark, then on through Innisfail and up into the range.

Parking for the night in a tourist centre car park and in the morning out into the morning mist and lush greens of the Atherton Tablelands.

Loaded and tied down 92 round bales of hay with the help of Tim and Matt, young contractors from Toowoomba; headed south on the inland road (map): Mt Garnet, Charters Towers, 370 km of ‘development’ country, looking perenially newly cleared – I think the scrub keeps growing back – to Clermont and so back through Emerald, and on to Roma, turning east to Miles then south to Condamine where I parked up for the night in the main street, walked to the pub, was offered a shower before I thought to ask, truckies are special in the bush, and sat down to vegie pasta and wine.

Years ago Uncle S and Auntie M – mum’s younger sister – and their kids, my cousins, left Sea Lake for a larger, only partially cleared farm at Tara, southern outback Queensland brigalow country which had broken a lot of hearts according to my father, whose own father had gone broke as the town chemist in nearby Chinchilla during the Depression. The drought is breaking hearts today, though there’s still water in the dams, hence my load of hay, not for the property now farmed by cousin George, but for a couple of his neighbours. They took a trailer each, no mucking about, just got the tractor out and pushed the bales off into rough heaps beside the track.

The second delivery, to TJ – 50ish, dirty blonde hair, ice blue eyes, hard man – was way back off the road, dirt track winding through the scrub for a kilometre maybe, then an old weatherboard house, verandahs all round, surrounded by tired garden, abandoned trucks, tractors, cars, somnolent pig dogs chained to truck bodies I’m sure they could drag behind them if sufficiently aroused. And goats.

TJ’s father had been a horse breaker and brumby catcher. There was on old Leyland Beaver, just outside the shot above, which had roamed the west of the state, towing a road train of single deck crates, bringing horses in to the property and out to all the rodeos. TJ and I made a few miles, truckin’ in olden days, and then got on to the subject of the dances which country towns in our youth held Saturday nights, for everyone from 12 to decrepitude. I’m still laughing every time I think of a young TJ hugged to a matronly bosom, only the back of his head still visible, feet barely touching the ground as he was whisked around the floor.

George’s brother, a fellow truckie, had seen where I was heading on Facebook, and invited me to stay the weekend. The long weekend, Queens Birthday, as it turned out. So I headed to Toowoomba, left my trailers in the road train assembly, parked my truck in his driveway, well one of them, it’s a big house, and settled down for a couple of days of drinking, TV, and rugby – met more of his neighbours in a couple of hours, watching the League Grand Final in a next-door multi car garage/men’s shed, than I’d met of my own in 50 years.

My cousin’s wife’s from Tara. Knows TJ. Says he’s a manager in a government office in town.

 

Recent audiobooks 

Jacqueline Winspear (F, Eng), Birds of a Feather (2004) – Crime
Kurt Vonnegut (M, USA), Cats Cradle (1963) – SF
David Leavitt (M, Eng), The Indian Clerk (2007)
Lorenzo Marone (M, Ita), The Temptation to be Happy (2015)
Nayomi Munaweera (F, Sri/USA), Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012)
Amitar Ghosh (M, Ind), Sea of Poppies (2008)
Ruth Rendell (F, Eng), Thirteen Steps Down (2004) – Crime DNF
Karen Robards (F, USA), The Fifth Doctrine (2019) – Thriller
BV Larson (M, USA), Tech World (2014) – SF
Hilary Mantel (F, Eng), Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985)

Currently reading

Peggy Frew, Islands
Claire Coleman, The Big Lie
Elizabeth Jolley, Milk and Honey

Leyland Beaver road train, Quilpie Qld

 

The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, David Ireland

Feature Author 2019: David Ireland

A few years ago, when I was just starting out in this business, I listed ten works I thought were contenders for the Great Australian Novel (here). The list holds up pretty well, Voss is still clearly no. 1. I need to make room for Benang and The Swan Book. And The Pea Pickers, I’m not sure what induced me to leave it out back then, I wouldn’t now. The big problem is just how long it is since I have read most of them, more than forty years in some cases, including The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971) which I see from the inscription “Happy Birthday, 1973, with lots of love from the Young Bride”, I got almost hot off the press.

It, as it happens, stands up very well to re-reading, though I’m sure I see things I didn’t see first time round, particularly Ireland’s problem with women. As I wrote earlier (here) David Ireland (1927- ) is a generation older than us boomers, he was in his forties before his first work was published and I think had been for most of the preceding years a blue collar worker, notably in the Silverwater (Sydney) oil refinery complex, the setting for this, his second, where he calls the complex ‘Clearwater’, on the ‘Eel’ River (Paramatta Eels football team. Get it?)

With hindsight I can see now that his politics are ‘Hansonite’: nationalistic, pro-worker and anti-union, the cry for help of a worker deep in the bowels of the system, hating the foreign owners who take all the benefit of his labour (all Ireland’s workers are he’s), hating the white collar parasites who have no knowledge of what his work entails, but on whose decisions he depends, hating that his ability to progress or even to remain employed is completely out of his own hands.

All the workers at Clearwater, at the refinery operated by the 100% foreign owned ‘Puroil’, are prisoners, prisoners of the system, bearing deep blue ankle scars genetically inherited from their shackled convict forbears.

… prisoners were allowed to drift jobless to the few large coastal cities from all over Australia as soon as they left school, to choose their place of detention… They weren’t compelled by others to apply to any one place of labour, but they understood that once accepted for detention their boss or commandant had power over them just as great and far more immediate than the government of the country.

‘The Unknown Industrial Prisoner’ is a slogan graffitied overnight on oil storage tanks, is the name of a work fashioned from twisted paper clips, is an artwork of roughly cut and welded metal displayed in a gallery to the loud acclaim of people who have never seen a scrap-metal yard.

The work is divided conventionally into chapters: 1. One Day in a Penal Colony, 2. Termitary [a termite mound housing the shiny bums, overlooking the refinery], 3. The Home Beautiful … But is broken up again into short, named sections of half, one or two pages. I think Ireland prefers (or maybe, is only able) to write this way, in short bursts, so his novels are collages of ideas and stories.

If the novel has a narrative arc at all, it is the actions and reactions of the workers (operators) as Puroil makes a series of blundering upgrades to the refinery to get it to the stage where it will run without operator involvement. The protagonists are the Samurai, a skilled operator and mostly willing worker; and the White Father, who maintains ‘the Home Beautiful’, a few shacks in the mangroves on an island within the refinery boundary, where a beer fridge and six prostitutes on rotation provide the workers with more comforts than they enjoy at home.

They are opposites in that the Samurai believes in the power of a job well-done, where the White Father believes life should be enjoyed right now. Another worker, the Glass Canoe (a name used as the title of a later Ireland novel), represents a third extreme. He is incompetent, but believes that if he works, studies and puts himself forward Puroil will recognise his devotion to the job and raise him to foreman. His decline into madness illustrates the futility of expecting bureaucracies to make rational or even informed decisions. Every decision made by every person within Puroil, except the better operators, and they are never recognised, is driven entirely by self interest.

Is this a post-modern novel? I don’t have enough theory to say. But it is beyond Social Realism. Philosophically it is Absurdist, a demonstration that meaning cannot be found in work, that the bureaucratic workplace is inherently irrational. (Prime Minister) Malcolm famously said at about this time, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy”. What he meant, and this is Ireland’s thesis, is “Life isn’t meant to be fair.”

There are dozens of supporting characters – the plant manager, the Wandering Jew, who is kidnapped late in the novel and taken to the Home Beautiful to meet his workers, gets drunk and joins in the dancing; Blue Hills whose wife the Samurai uses, because he can, but she does manage to take a small revenge; Two Pot Screamer, one of two operators writing a book (this book?); the Python, the Black Snake, the Brown Snake, shiny bums with power over the plant operators; and so on.

The operators sleep on the job, are led into dud agreements by the company union, drink, steal, lie or run with the prostitutes (the Sandpiper prefers doing it outside), make informed, ignorant and random adjustments to the plant causing chaos and constant pollution – in addition to the ongoing pollution of river and air that Puroil  pays to keep ‘hidden’.

This is a brilliant book; innovatively written; an insider’s account of the madness of large organizations; an account of modern slavery giving the lie to the myth of the independent, larrikin Australian worker.

 

David Ireland, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, Angus & Robertson, 1971. My edition, A&R Classics, 1973.

Other reviews:

The Unknown Industrial Prisoner Lisa/ANZLL (here)
Burn I found intolerably racist and could not finish.
The Glass Canoe (here), Lisa/ANZLL (here)
A Woman of the Future (here) see Bonny Cassidy Sydney Review of Books (here)
City of Women (here)
The World Repair Video Game (here) Lisa/ANZLL (here)