CHAPTER 20
LOST WOMEN, LOST TRIBES
European fears about the peril white women faced from Aboriginals on the frontiers expressed themselves in two extraordinary incidents. The Sydney Herald of 28 December 1840 carried a letter from the usually phlegmatic Angus McMillan, discoverer and resident of Gippsland. On the coast near Corner Inlet, McMillan had found at an abandoned Aboriginal camp a cache of European clothing, male and female, including a new brown Macintosh cloak stained with blood. There were various items of cash, decorations, British blankets, a thermometer tube and a musket, and a number of London, Glasgow and Aberdeen papers of 1837 and 1838. There were two children’s copy books, one Bible printed in Edinburgh and one set of the National Loan Fund regulations respecting policies of life insurance. Enclosed in three kangaroo-skin bags was the dead body of a male child about two years old. The local physician, Doctor Arbuckle, examined the body and found the child to be European.
McMillan’s party had caught a glimpse of Aboriginal males driving women in front of them. One of them ‘we noticed constantly looking behind her, at us . . . on examining the marks and figures about the largest of the native huts we were immediately impressed with the belief that the unfortunate female is a European—a captive of these ruthless savages’.
This sighting established the existence of the lost woman for many people on the frontier and in Melbourne. The story, as if drawing on people’s nightmares, revived periodically. As one poet in the Melbourne Argus wrote,
Unhappiest of the fairer kind;
Who knows the misery of thy mind,
Exposed to insults worse than death
Compell’d to breathe the pois’nous breath
Of a rank scented black;
To yield to his abhorr’d embrace,
To kiss his staring, ugly face,
And listen to his clack.
The power of the concept of the tender white woman subjected to heathenish embraces of savages was not peculiar to Gippsland or to Australia in general. But it provided a further reason to pursue and harry the blacks, especially the Kurnai, who, as well as allegedly keeping a white woman against her wishes, were doing a certain amount of concrete harm to stock and shepherds.
Some Kurnai were also dying in revenge killings between clans, produced by deaths from imported infections. No death was un-caused in the eyes of Aboriginal society, and punishment for increased deaths that we would consider ‘natural’ was compounded by the Aboriginal need to readjust the balance of the world by often deadly retaliation. George Augustus Robinson reported in 1844 that the Westernport tribes had been all but wiped out on this basis by the Brataualung of the Port Albert area. Then Melbourne Blacks led by Lal-lal and Billy Lonsdale killed at least thirty Brataualung in 1847. Thus death compounded itself amongst the indigenes.
In 1846 there were further reports of the sighting of a white woman; again the Aboriginals were said to be driving her before them. That year John McDonald, proprietor of the Scottish Chiefs Hotel in Melbourne, wrote to the Argus to say that he believed a woman named Anna MacPherson was the captive of the blacks of Gippsland. She had been a passenger on the Britannia which had sunk on the Gippsland coast in 1838. A Sydney source claimed that she was the Irish wife of a brewer, a Mrs T Capel. Others said her name was Lord. A public meeting was held in Melbourne and a subscription was gathered to send an expedition to Gippsland. Led by a former trooper named de Villiers and by the businessman James Warman, the party took off for Corner Inlet, carrying with them a number of handkerchiefs on which was printed in English and Gaelic: ‘White Woman!—there are 14 armed men, partly White and partly Black, in search of you. Be cautious; and rush to them when you see them near you. Be particularly on the lookout every dawn of morning, for it is then that the party are in hopes of rescuing you. The white settlement is toward the setting sun.’
What the expedition found was not a white woman but the skulls of dead Kurnai—the banks of streams and rivers were sown with them. A native seemed to intimate, however, that the white woman was living with a man called Bunjeleene in the Snowy Mountains. Another native mentioned that the white woman liked to sing Psalm 100, ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands’.
While de Villiers and Warman were searching for the woman, Captain Henry Dana, a squatter and head of the border police, was moving with his posse from Cape Otway to the west of Melbourne, where he had been massacring natives, to Gippsland in the east. He had found that armed and uniformed natives were willing to kill distant tribespeople to whom they were not related by blood or mysteries. Warman’s expedition and Dana’s, independently of each other, tracked the mysterious white woman into the Snowy region.
Warman found plenty of signs of Dana’s work—Snowy River Aboriginals lying dead of gunshot wounds. The native police, said a shocked Warman, were ‘harpies of Hell misnamed police’ and there were Europeans who were not far behind them in savagery. Dana’s expedition claimed to have come close to finding the woman—they had found a native cloak allegedly belonging to her. One party claimed to have seen her footprints, but according to the Argus back in Melbourne, Bunjeleene concealed her whereabouts by putting possum skins on her feet.
There were some who dared surmise the white woman did not really exist and was a figurehead washed ashore from a wrecked ship. But another expedition was sent out under Sergeant Walshe of the border police and contact was made with Bunjeleene, who presented the party with a female native from Port Phillip, and said he had no other alien women. In the end Bunjeleene and his two wives and two sons were held at native police headquarters at Narre Warren. One of his wives died there and then, in late 1848, so did Bunjeleene.
Now men began to report seeing the remains of a white woman and child put to death. Doctor Arbuckle examined bodies at Eagle Point and said that there was no doubt of one of them being a white female ‘which was easily evident from her head’. She had supposedly been murdered by Bunjeleene’s brother to stop another man enjoying her.
The Gippsland Land Commissioner, Charles Tyers, would conclude ‘my firm opinion is, and it is the opinion of Mr La Trobe, that there never was a white woman amongst the blacks’. He believed that no less than fifty Kurnai had been killed in the hunt for the woman. But even after the fruitless searches, the myth survived, enlivened by the tremors and twitches of European frontier males, men who would have disdained to show any superficial fear, men who could be described as doughty, but who could not deny the profound and unsolicited manias of the inner soul. There was even a story that the woman had survived and returned to Scotland to her husband in Lorn. Indeed, Campbell Macleod, a direct descendant of the Campbells of Lorn, was at Buchan in Gippsland when he heard that one of the native police had found part of a Bible in the bush and went out looking for the woman. Instead he found nice grazing country on the Snowy and took possession of it.
Relative to this tragic chimera of the white woman of Gippsland are the remarks of the droll George Dunderdale, the Lancashire man who was clerk of the courts in Gippsland. He wrote of the Kurnai, ‘When a race of men is exterminated somebody ought to bear the blame, and the easiest way is to lay the fault at the door of the dead.’
In the other great tale of a captured white woman, the woman at least existed. She was Scottish, as some claimed the phantom of Gippsland to be. Her name was Eliza Fraser, the wife of James Fraser, Scots captain of the Stirling Castle, a 500-ton (510-tonne) brig, and a man in his fifties ailing from an unspecified disease. At the point where the Great Barrier Reef extends three hundred kilometres out into the Pacific, the Stirling Castle jagged itself irretrievably on an outcrop of the Great Swain Reefs, now Eliza Reef. When the ship struck and foundered, the survivors took to the lifeboats. Amongst them were the sickly Captain Fraser and his pregnant wife, Eliza, a woman in her mid-thirties. A few days after leaving the wreck, rowing southwards towards the settlement at Moreton Bay, Eliza gave birth in the well of a longboat to a baby who died soon after.
The story of Eliza then intersected with the equally remarkable one of her ultimate convict rescuer, whose exceptional experience of remote New South Wales formed a fitting prelude to Eliza’s rescue.
MOGWI
An Irishman from County Louth, John Graham was transported in 1824 for concealing lengths of hemp in his apron and removing them from the premises of his master. He travelled to Australia from Cork on the same transport as brought notorious Captain Patrick Logan of the 57th Regiment. Logan’s name would become associated with Moreton Bay and the energetic exercise of the lash and treadmill. The ship’s guard and convicts disembarked at Sydney in 1825.
Graham was first assigned to work on the Darling mills, a steam-powered flour mill outside Parramatta. On a night in September 1826, however, he stole objects valued at 37 shillings. He was sentenced to secondary transportation for seven years, and was shipped just before Christmas 1826 to the relatively new Moreton Bay penal settlement, a place designed to fulfil the hope that transportation would become an object of fear. Governor Brisbane, for whom it would be named, had decreed that it be a harsh place. Between 1826 and 1842 under the command of Logan and others, it became a place of howls and degradation. During a six-month period in 1827, more than one-third of the convict population received punishment.
A valley on the river on which the penal settlement stood was a communally held treasure of the native people of an extensive area. Seasonal plenty in one form of food or another always allowed Aboriginals to gather for overarching ceremonial duties. On the Murray River it was wild fowl and freshwater crayfish in springtime, whereas in the Australian Alps it was the bogong moth. A stranded whale presented an occasional bonanza for all coastal peoples. To the northwest of the Moreton Bay settlement, great numbers of natives, a thousand or more, are estimated to have gathered every third year for the feast of the bunya-pine nut. The bunya pines showed fruit every year in January and February, but produced a lavish supply of edible seeds or nuts only every three years. The seeds were roasted and eaten or could be ground into flour. To partake of the festival people came up the coast to the Bunya Mountains and Blackall Range from the Richmond River (in present-day northern New South Wales), and across from the (Queensland) coast running north to Fraser Island.
The first commandant, Bishop, and his successors tried to get on with the native people of the region and induced them to return runaways or bushrangers. The Aboriginals did not particularly want to receive the mogwi—the white ghosts—and thus returned many prisoners, the Aboriginal women in the bush often screaming so loudly at the apparition of an escaped convict that soldiers were guided to the escapee.
The initial act of running or absconding was relatively easy. During January 1826 twenty men ran. In the twelve months from February 1828, 123 men out of a total convict population of 415 tried it, and most returned soon to camp to face a flogging of from 100 to 300 lashes. That same year thirty-two convicts were given 300 lashes for absconding and 171 men each received 100 lashes. Nor did this stop under later commandants such as the sociable Irish veteran soldier Foster Fyans, who had been reprimanded on Norfolk Island for going soft on the former naval captain turned thief John Knatchbull, and was not willing to take that risk again.
John Graham first ran from the penal settlement in mid July 1827. Though a small man, he was lithe, and had good luck in the hinterland and did not return to give himself up until he had calculated his seven-year sentence of transportation had expired, in 1833. Graham was one of those absconders who were recognised by the Aborigines as a recently dead loved one returned to the earth. The local Aboriginal practice of removing the skin from a corpse made the white skin of the convict convincing, though it created uneasiness—as would any resurrection. Yet it was on this basis that a number of convicts managed to live in the bush in various directions from Moreton Bay.
Graham later claimed that when he first encountered Aboriginals they called him Moilow after a recently deceased elder. His clan territory was identified to him. Moilow’s widow, Mamba, accepted him as her returned husband and he acquired two grown sons. He learned to nourish himself on game, fish and the flour made from pounded coastal bracken.
On a search northwards in partnership with an escaped Leicestershire convict, George Mitchell, Graham pushed up the coast intending to reach the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Makassan prahus, and the two of them were probably the first Europeans to cross the Tropic of Capricorn by land. On the way they spent three months amongst the tribe on what would be ultimately named Fraser Island. North of Hervey Bay, however, they were turned back by the absence of succouring Aborigines, a shortage of food and difficult terrain. The explorer Allan Cunningham would later interview Graham and had no doubt that he had reached the vicinity of Broad Sound and Shoalwater Bay north of present-day Rockhampton, before returning to the tribe who had taken him in, the people of the Noosa area.
Another escapee, James Davis, who returned to Moreton Bay after years amongst the natives, had cicatrices on his chest, wore necklaces and armlets and went by the Aboriginal name Duramboi. When John Graham, believing his sentence expired, turned himself in, he was similarly marked and was similarly very secretive about major Aboriginal ceremonies. The Presbyterian preacher John Dunmore Lang met James Davis in 1845 and was fascinated by the phenomenon of the escapee turned Aboriginal Lazarus. ‘I was much pleased with the good feeling exhibited by the man [towards Aborigines], who appeared sincerely to regret this loss of [Aboriginal] life as well as property.’ Davis assured Lang that if he, ‘or any other person at all acquainted with the habits and feelings of the natives’, were employed as a liaison, then peace and harmony could be maintained between the squatters and the Aboriginals.
In south-eastern Queensland there were three mutually unintelligible Aboriginal language groups—Panjalangic to the south of Brisbane, Durrbulic in the Brisbane area and Waka-kabic in the area to the north where Graham, Davis and most other absconders lived with the natives. The Waka-kabic speakers were the prime keepers of the bunya-pine ceremonies which occurred near present-day Dalby. For ceremonial reasons the absconding convicts would be passed from tribe to tribe, as John Dunmore Lang said, like a blind man being passed around soliciting charity in Scotland. Some of them were so long with the Aborigines that they forgot English. Of Davis, son of a Glasgow blacksmith, Lang noted, ‘he could not speak “his mither’s” tongue’. Another escapee, David Bracefield or Wandi, ‘the great talker’, could not remember English for some time after his return, and often combined Waka-kabic and English into a sort of dialect.
Bracefield had spent some time with Graham in the Maroochydore-Noosa area in 1829, but gave himself up after two months. When he next absconded in 1831 he moved to the north of Graham’s area. There he was adopted as the reincarnated son of Eumundy or Huon Mundy, a powerful man of the Noosa hinterland, who protected him for the next six years before he again gave himself up. Bracefield would then abscond once more in 1839, and stayed in the bush until the abandonment of Moreton Bay as a penal settlement.
After John Graham’s return to confinement in 1833, he found that time endured while absent from Moreton Bay did not count towards time done, and so he was still stuck in the settlement. The natives would turn up in groups of six or seven to visit him, most particularly male relatives. When they left, ‘it was distressing to witness their grief, yelling and tearing their skin,’ Captain Foster Fyans recalled.
Because of Graham’s usefulness as a negotiator with the surrounding Aboriginal people, he was treated as a trusty and achieved the status of a constable or convict overseer. His knowledge of the coast north of Brisbane was also valued by Foster Fyans, and led to his inclusion in the party sent to rescue the Stirling Castle survivors.
RESCUING ELIZA
News of the wreck of the Stirling Castle came to Moreton Bay through two of the crew being found on Bribie Island, but also by way of Aboriginal visitors to John Graham at the convict settlement. An expedition commanded by Lieutenant Otter and
including Graham set out at once by ship for the Noosa River—in those days named Huon Mundy’s River after the well-known Aboriginal elder of the hinterland. Landed, Graham reverted to nakedness and greased himself with charcoal and animal fat, taking with him some bread and a potato, since his tribe loved carbohydrates. First he learned of the presence of two ‘young ghosts’ near Lake Cooroibah and, finding them, bought them back from the natives, saying that they were his two sons. The next morning, after the ship had moved to Double Island Point, Graham went into the bush again, carrying bread once more. He came upon two women who told him that Eliza Fraser had been taken to the ceremonial area of Worwa near Lake Cootharaba. He learned also that Baxter, the ship’s second mate, was nearby at the southern end of what would ever after be named Fraser Island where the longboat originally put in and where Captain Fraser had died, or been killed.