Relations between coastal clans and sea-faring Europeans provide an interesting contrast to contact on the land frontier. There were some important differences. Europeans who landed from ships were usually in quite small parties–no more than could conveniently fit into a rowing boat. They were necessarily on foot and had little knowledge of the terrain beyond the tree line or the dunes. The journey by dinghy both to and from the shore was often hazardous, doubly so if potentially hostile blacks were standing on the beach. While stretching uncertain sea legs they could not hope to catch up with local blacks seeking to avoid them either by flight or concealment. When Europeans came upon parties of Aborigines we can assume that it was because the blacks had made a deliberate decision to meet the white men. Though there were violent skirmishes on every part of the Australian coast peaceful contact may have been more common on the shore than it was inland. Both parties stood to benefit from amicable meetings–the Europeans could obtain water, local intelligence and perhaps sexual release; the Aborigines access to the white man’s goods without the disadvantages of permanent European settlement. The belief that meetings on the coast were potentially peaceful seems to have been established among the Europeans sailing remote shores and may have influenced their behaviour. Searcey, the Northern Territory pioneer, wrote in 1905, that it was a ‘well known fact’ that whites from the sea were ‘better received than those coming from inland’.1
Aborigines participated in maritime industries from the early years of European settlement. They were involved in sealing and bay-whaling around the southern coasts during the first half of the nineteenth century and in pearling and bêche de mer gathering around in the northern ones during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. Sea-based industries were probably less disruptive of Aboriginal life than either mining or pastoralism. The Europeans who harvested the sea had no need for land other than small plots for bay-whaling stations and bêche de mer processing depots. Bay whaling fitted easily into accustomed patterns of life along the southern coasts. Coastal clans were used to gathering in large numbers to eat whales cast up on the beaches and may have assumed, as they had done in the past, that Aboriginal magic was responsible for bringing the whales into shore. The Europeans for their part were able to supply local Aborigines with large quantities of unwanted whale flesh. Around the northern coasts from the north-west of Western Australia to the Gulf of Carpentaria the European search for bêche de mer would have been immediately comprehensible to clans who had seen for centuries the seasonal coming and going of the Macassar men.
While sealers, pearlers and whalers had no hunger for land they often relied heavily on Aboriginal labour for the profitability, and even the survival, of their industries. Bass Strait sealers depended on Aboriginal women from northern Tasmanian clans while at some of the bay-whaling stations Aboriginal crews manned rowing boats, receiving the same pay, or share of the profits, as the whites. The Commissioner for Crown Lands in the Monaro wrote in 1842 of three boats crewed by blacks at Twofold Bay. They were:
stationed on the opposite side of the bay to the other fishermen and they adopted the same habits as the whites. They lived in huts, slept in beds, used utensils in cooking, and made the flour into bread; but as soon as the fishing season was over, they all returned to their tribes in the bush.2
In northern Australia Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were even more extensively employed. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century a thousand or more blacks a year worked during the pearling and bêche de mer seasons.
Traditional expertise was carried over into the maritime trades much as it was on the pastoral frontier. Local knowledge of the location of beds of shell launched the north-western pearling industry. Aboriginal skill and endurance in the water ensured its success on both the east and west coasts until the diving dress was generally adopted in the 1880s. The expertise of the Tasmanian women on both sea and land allowed the European sealers to survive on bleak Bass Strait islands. James Kelly observed their hunting techniques when on Tasmania’s east coast in 1816. The women walked to the edge of the water and wet themselves all over to prevent the seals from smelling them. They swam to the rocks where the seals were lying and, keeping to the wind-ward, they crept up to the reclining animals and lay perfectly still allowing the seals to inspect them:
The women went through the same motions as the seal, holding up their left elbow and scratching themselves with their left hand, taking and keeping the club firm in their right ready for the attack. The seals seemed very cautious, now and then lifting up their heads and looking round, scratching themselves as before and lying down again, the women still imitating every movement as nearly as possible. After they had lain upon the rocks for nearly an hour, the sea occasionally washing over them … all of a sudden the women rose up on their seats, their clubs lifted up at arms length, each struck a seal on the nose and killed him.3
The predominantly male work force of the northern maritime industries sought Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island women for sexual gratification. The degree to which blacks assisted them in this pursuit varied widely according to time and local circumstances. On some occasions Europeans abducted women and kept them by force just as their land-based counterparts did on the pastoral frontier. Torres Strait Islanders told a government official in 1882 that the white men had so ill-treated their women in the past that when a boat was sighted the young women were buried in the sand and kept there until the Europeans sailed away. Yet at other times local communities actively participated in the trade extracting the best possible deal for the services of their women. On both the northwest coast and around Cape York the pearling fleets supported a large and lucrative prostitution industry. Aboriginal clans reorganized their pattern of migration to travel down to the sea coast when the pearling luggers were laid up for the monsoon season and remained there until they sailed away again. The demand for the young women was such that all other clan members could live off the proceeds of their copulation for the duration of the layup season.
The complexity of Aboriginal motivation was apparent also in the recruitment of labour for the sea-based industries. Force and fraud played a major role in the beginning as it had done in the early years of the labour trade in Melanesia. There is considerable evidence of this from all parts of the continent. In the papers of the Tasmanian settler, J. E. Calder, there is reference to a group of island men who sailed to Port Phillip during the 1820s where they enticed a party of young women on board and then sailed for the Bass Strait Islands where the women were bartered for seal skins. A pioneer of the north-west coast of Western Australia remarked that the method of obtaining labour for the local pearling industry was ‘better imagined than described’; it was ‘sufficient to say that it was crude’.4 Having been obtained in diverse ways the blacks were kept for as long as possible. They were ‘planted’ on off-shore islands on both the north-west and north-east coast during the off-season and picked up when the luggers put to sea again; they were abandoned in coastal towns like Broome, or Thursday Island or Cooktown, far from home, where further recruitment was the only means of survival.
But force and fraud probably became less important with time. The Queensland and Western Australian Governments began to exercise some supervision around the northern coast from the 1880s and the blacks themselves rapidly grew wise to the ways of the white men. Force and fraud after all could only work once or twice. To suppose otherwise is to assume that the Aborigines were unable to learn from experience. The essential weakness of the European position must be re-emphasised, along with a realistic assessment of what had to be done to recruit labour by force. The white men had to come ashore on a little known coast; protect themselves against attack; catch observant and fleet footed blacks on their own intimately known territory; secure captives; and then take them off the coast in small rowing boats. If the trade were to continue in the use of force this operation would have to be repeated many times over.
It is apparent that many blacks chose to work on the pearling luggers and bêche de mer boats–incited by their own curiosity, a desire to gain European goods, or to escape punishment or other trouble at home. After recent research on the North Queensland coast Anderson concluded that the relationship between the Aborigines and the lugger captains was not entirely a matter of oneway exploitation. For the blacks employment on the boats was often ‘a way out of strife and tension on the domestic scene’. He concluded that there was evidence ‘of men escaping the consequences of an adulterous affair, and of men dissolving an unsuccessful or undesirable marriage by simply going out on a lugger’.5 The Europeans were, then, often used for Aboriginal ends. They provided a new means to implement an old custom–the traditional device of ‘resolution of conflict by fission’.6
The experience of labour on the luggers seems to have been woven into traditional patterns of life in other ways as well. The missionary E. R. Gribble noted how at Yarrabah the return of the men from the pearling fleets at the beginning of the wet season was marked by a distinctive ceremony. They were, he wrote:
given a great welcome by the natives, and a peculiar ceremony was gone through on the arrival, as they came along the beach in a compact body, they were met by John and an old man, who conducted them along until they sighted the camps, they then stopped short, and facing each other gave a shout, then facing about marched on, each man singing and beating time with a spear on a shield; getting close to the camps a woman met them, bearing in her hands two green boughs, and, dancing along in front of them, led them to a cleared space in front of the little huts … here they stopped, and standing in a circle continued singing, with the woman dancing round the circle, shaking the boughs over their heads until another woman from a group standing near rushed up, and putting her head over the shoulder of one of the men gave a yell and this concluded the ceremony.7
Another important aspect of recruitment was the co-operation of influential older men with the Europeans in order to encourage young men, and young women in some places, to ship with the whites. There is evidence of this from several parts of the continent. In her study of white-Aboriginal relations in Tasmania Ryan has drawn a clear picture of the relations between the Bass Strait sealers and the clans of the north-east coast. The blacks altered their pattern of movement about their territory remaining on the coast throughout the summer in order to keep in contact with the Europeans who bartered hunting dogs and other commodities for the temporary use of young women for their labour and sexual favours. The coastal people abducted women from traditionally hostile clans to meet increasing demands from the Europeans. This picture of relations between the sealers and the Tasmanians was confirmed by such visitors to Bass Strait as James Kelly in 1817 and William Hovell and Dumont Durville during the 1820s. Hovell met sealers and their Aboriginal concubines and discovered that:
the way these men get those Girls and Women is by purchasing or more properly speaking bartering for them of the different chiefs along the East Coast of Van Diemens Land.8
Some girls, he believed, left without regret; others resisted strongly but were forced by the older men to go with the Europeans.
The situation on the north coast later in the century seems to have been very similar. Young men were encouraged to sail with the whites by the old men who received a commission from the lugger captains. When demand was high the elders could extract substantial rewards. During the 1902 season, for instance, officials at Thursday Island issued permits for 990 recruits but only 334 were forthcoming. W. E. Roth, the Northern Protector of Aborigines, noted how the blacks had taken advantage of this situation to demand large bonuses of tobacco and flour in advance. The desire of the old men to gain exclusive possession of the young women was possibly another reason to send the youths away with the Europeans. Roth concluded that about one third of recruits were married and on their return they usually found their wives living with one or other of the old men. Anderson’s work on the oral history of Bloomfield River people led him to the belief that the old men had used the pearling luggers:
to increase their own power and wealth by acting as recruiters of young males for work on the boats–a service for which the old men received tobacco, flour and decreased competition for wives.9,10
Working conditions in the maritime industries were often harsh and there was a high mortality rate from disease, personal violence and work-related accidents. Yet many Europeans quickly appreciated that good conditions and fair treatment resulted in greater productivity and certainly less tension on the cramped and stinking luggers. On the other hand the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were more than passive units of labour. They could use the universal stratagems of forced and unwilling workers–going slow, feigning sickness, losing and breaking equipment or simply refusing to find shell under the water. As Europeans rarely dived they were ultimately at the mercy of the blacks who did. A pioneer of the north-western pearling industry wrote in 1886 that ‘a kind of freemasonry exists between the men’. At times they agreed amongst themselves not to bring up shell. He referred to a ‘notable instance’ when divers of four ships declared for days that they could find no shell. When eventually Malay divers were sent down they found the shell stacked in heaps on the bottom.
Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were in many respects the experts about coastal waters. European and Asian skippers often came to depend on their judgement. The blacks made many of the day to day decisions about diving in much the same way that Aboriginal stockmen determined many questions relating to the management of cattle herds. In fact European pearlers and bêche de mer seekers were probably more dependent on their black assistants when out on the coral reefs than were the squatters on their inland pastoral stations. An official report of 1880 on the Torres Strait pearl fishery concluded that the Aborigines and Islanders were ‘quite capable of taking care of themselves’. In fact the divers had:
almost entirely their own way, and will not bear any superintendence from the whites whilst fishing, so that the practical part of the getting of the shell i.e. the management of the boats, the locality of the fishing, the times of fishing, besides the actual gathering of the shell is entirely left to the divers.11
But the prevalence of peaceful contact around the coasts should not obscure the significance of Aboriginal resistance to sea-faring Europeans. It took many forms. Ships lying at anchor in estuaries or close inshore were raided in many parts of the continent. This was particularly common along the Queensland coast where the sheltered, island studded, waters inside the Barrier Reef gave Aborigines an offshore mobility unmatched elsewhere. The use of outrigger canoes in Torres Strait and along the north-east coast increased the range of blacks living along shore lines and on nearby islands. Reef waters were hazardous at night and ships frequently anchored till dawn leaving them vulnerable to nocturnal attack. This was particularly so in such waterways as the Whitsunday and Hinchinbrook Passages.
Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (and Papuans as well) launched numerous attacks on Europeans living at isolated bêche de mer stations. Many young men recruited for pearling or bêche de mer voyages eventually turned on the white men killing them or throwing them overboard and then sailed the commandeered vessel back to their mainland or island homes. It was often done simply to get home, sometimes long after an agreed contract period had expired. But boats were also taken to run them ashore, strip them of everything useful and then scuttle or burn them. It appears that eventually groups of young Aborigines and Islanders set out systematically to recruit, kill the Europeans or Asians, take the boat and then if possible repeat the process.
Attacks on the Europeans in the bêche de mer and pearling industries around about Torres Strait were serious enough to create deep concern in coastal communities. A writer in the Cooktown Independent claimed in 1890 that in the previous sixteen years at least 100 Europeans who had sailed from the port had been killed by Aborigines, Islanders and Papuans and many others, as a consequence, had been ‘driven back upon southern civilization’.12 The accuracy of this assertion is difficult to determine. Yet similar anxiety about Aboriginal resistance was voiced in official government reports. One on the fisheries of North Queensland published in 1890 was eloquent with European disquiet:
Of late years, and in the Torres Straits district more particularly, outrages committed by these labourers; in which the boat-owners or their agents have been assaulted and lost their lives, or the boats with stores on board have been stolen, have become so frequent as to paralyse the industry to a very large extent.13
Fertile, well watered river valleys notch the east coast of Australia. In most of them Aboriginal clans had their first prolonged contact with timber getters cutting cedar and other valuable trees in sub-tropical and tropical rain forest. They, in turn, were followed by small farmers who grew potatoes, maize, bananas and other crops in patches of cleared land. The overall pattern of race relations was similar to that on the pastoral frontier but there were some significant differences which require comment. Heavy forest provided food and sanctuary for resident clans for many years in some places and slowed down the impact of the Europeans although customary patterns of clan migration and local ecologies were disrupted. Water was normally much easier to find than in the dry inland and many local groups continued to have access to estuaries, stretches of coastline, and off-shore islands.
Conflict commonly arose over the question of access to European crops. Blacks not only refused to concede that white farmers had suddenly become the ‘owners’ of small pockets of clan territory, they also attempted to secure a share of the new vegetable foods which grew there. The increasing pressure on traditional food supplies intensified their determination to harvest the new crops growing on their land. Whenever they could they reaped ‘by stealth the product of a tract of land they are themselves too indolent to cultivate’14 as the Sydney Gazette complained in 1805. Inter-racial tension was often seasonal, culminating when grain crops ripened and potatoes matured. ‘These enormities’, noted the same paper ‘are periodical in their commencement’; the blacks were most threatening ‘when the fields of ripened maize were open to their pillage’.15
Aboriginal raids on the crops often involved many hands. Several acres of maize were taken in one night from a Moreton Bay farm in 1846 and there were similar raids on the corn crop on the Don River in the 1870s, farmers losing 100 bushels or more in a single week. On the Herbert River a few years later a farmer complained that he had lost all his banana crop, one half and one third of successive corn crops, and all of a third one, while from another property the local blacks took all the sweet potatoes, most of the corn and a hundred bunches of bananas. A Barron Valley selector wrote to the Herberton Advertiser in 1888 detailing the impact of black raids on his property:
I deem it my duty to make known to intending settlers the losses, through blacks, I have suffered during the present year. On January 12th they visited my selection; stole corn, and were shot at leaving a dilly bag and bone bodkin, used for husking corn, behind them. On the 13th they again stole corn … on nine occasions between the 12th of January and April 5th the niggers stole corn. On the 14th April, 23rd and 30th May, and June 4th, they stole corn. Off 4 acres planted in July I gathered 10 bushels; off 4 acres planted in November 6 bushels; and off 2 acres in January I got nothing–the niggers had the rest. They have now started removing English potatoes and pumpkin.16
During successful raids on European crops the Aborigines clearly employed many of their traditional hunting skills–stealth, patience and the ability to move without sound. Farmers at Bowen complained in 1873 that the blacks had succeeded in taking crops growing within ten yards of their huts. The Wild River Times reported in 1887 that tents were raided while selectors were working only fifteen paces away. The Commissioner for Crown Lands at Maryborough explained in a letter to his superior in Sydney in 1852 that the local clans had taken his sweet potatoes despite a watchdog and a paling fence six and a half feet high. He had, he said, found blacks actually ‘lying within five yards’ of his sitting room at 8:00 o’clock in the evening. They had been watching him write at his table while their companions ‘dug the potatoes at about twenty yards further off down the hill’.17 When Aborigines gathered potatoes they often carefully replaced the stalk and leaves. There were reports of this from places as widely separated as Albany, Portland and the Tasmanian Midlands. It is not clear if this was done simply to escape detection, as the Europeans assumed, or if it was related to the traditional practice of replacing parts of yam plants after harvest. But in his reminiscences of pioneering in Tasmania and Victoria G. T. Lloyd had no doubt about the deliberation involved in Aboriginal tactics. ‘Potatoes were rooted up and carried off by the hundred weight’, he wrote:
whilst the cunning fellows re-arranged the ridges so neatly as to hide all appearances of their having been disturbed, erasing their footmarks also with brushwood as they retired. In this manner many industrious farmers found themselves most unaccountably mistaken in their estimate of their crop.18
Both Aboriginal and European population densities were higher in the fertile coastal valleys than on the pastoral frontier. Properties were very much smaller and European neighbours closer together. To be successful Aboriginal raids had to be stealthy and well organized and usually conducted at night. A writer in the Wild River Times observed in 1888 that the local blacks evinced ‘a knowledge and cleverness in the manner in which they plan and carry out their raids’, which, he concluded, ‘could scarcely be rivalled by London cracksmen’.19 Trickery and deception were called into play to secure the crops of vigilant resident selectors. In 1804 the Sydney Gazette reported that blacks on the Georges River had made a social call on a farmer’s wife and kept her talking while others cleared a whole acre of corn and carried the cobs off in canoes. Eighty years later Atherton Tableland clans found a way to rob a German selector who had up till then foiled every attempt made on his crops. An Aborigine approached his hut making rude and insulting gestures. He took the bait and chased his tormentor into the nearby forest. While he was gone a small party moved quickly into his hut and took everything–food, clothes, tools and other personal possessions. The fate of the impulsive German selector illustrated the fact that in many respects the conflict between white and black in small farming districts was more evenly balanced than in all but the most marginal pastoral country and much more even than on the mineral fields of north Australia.
In most parts of Australia mineral discoveries were made after the initial phase of settlement. Miners typically entered districts where Aborigines had already undergone considerable acculturation and where overt resistance had been crushed. But in north Queensland and in one or two parts of Western Australia miners leap-frogged ahead of the most remote pastoral stations and came into contact with clans whose members had never experienced permanent white settlement. The Gilbert was probably the first such field to be followed by the Etheridge, Mulgrave, Palmer, Hodgkinson and Croydon Rushes. Of all forms of European economic activity mining was probably the most devastating in its effects on resident Aborigines. Numbers alone were of decisive importance. Hundreds of miners arrived en masse at sites of promising finds. Even on small fields the Europeans rapidly outnumbered local clans and prospecting parties fossicked their way into the remotest corners of Aboriginal territory. Innumerable sacred sites must have been desecrated as the Europeans scrambled across the ancient landscape in their frenetic search for mineral wealth. The impact of alluvial miners on the environment was massive and immediate–they gouged up the soil, polluted the streams, pillaged nearby stands of timber. The average mining camp had relatively few animals which could have compensated local Aborigines for the destruction of vegetable food and the shooting and driving away of indigenous animals.
Mineral rushes put unrelenting pressure on the Aborigines forcing them to seek safety in whatever sanctuary of scrub or mountain left to them. The European impact was exacerbated by the long dry season of north Australia which must have been a lean time for local blacks even before the whites arrived. Of all the European activities mining must have appeared to be the least rational, the most incomprehensible. A correspondent writing from the Etheridge field believed that the local Aborigines were very curious ‘as to what the white men were rooting up the sand and soil for’. Their first belief, he remarked:
was that the object was something to eat, and, as the prospectors proceeded further up the river, down they would come, and commence rooting also in the abandoned holes. This they did perseveringly as the prospectors could see on their way down the river again.20
Miners felt little need to accommodate the blacks. Unlike squatters and farmers who were settling on the land the diggers were transients without commitment to the soil they so industriously turned up. They had little use for Aboriginal labour and the preponderance of European numbers obviated the need for the sort of negotiation noted on the pastoral frontier. They often lived in canvas and galvanized iron packed in from the coast rather than in bark huts made from nearby trees; they ate and drank commodities produced in factories in Sydney or Melbourne or even the northern hemisphere and rarely developed the sort of relationship with the environment which elsewhere led Europeans to an appreciation of indigenous knowledge and expertise.
Blacks in the mining areas were often forced into resistance from the earliest period of European intrusion. Violence did not escalate slowly out of personal vendetta as in many districts of older settlement; in many places it was open and indiscriminate from the start. The local clans developed tactics to deal with the specific problems of the mining frontier. They made frequent attacks on the bullock teams supplying the remote mine fields, choosing night time for raids at known staging points along the dray roads and they speared large numbers of horses both to immobilize the Europeans and to eat their large animals. Sudden, well organized raids were launched against prospecting parties in the remoter parts of the mineral fields. Tents were constantly robbed, silently and skilfully, while miners worked nearby claims. So persistent were these robberies that it became customary on northern fields for one man to remain in camp during working hours to guard the tent. But despite their spirited resistance mining pushed the Aborigines to the edge of starvation more rapidly than any other European activity giving their attacks a desperation not often matched in other parts of the continent. ‘The white men occupy their only hunting grounds’, wrote a Palmer River resident in 1877, ‘and in default of the fish, roots and game of the waterholes and creek bottoms, they are in a manner compelled to eat horses and bullocks’.21 Aborigines presented, ‘a very emaciated appearance, as a rule. They appeared to be in very great distress and were, in many cases, starving.’22
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century Aborigines in a number of localities in northern Australia had their first continuous contact with missionaries rather than with pastoralists, pearlers or miners. This was true at Yarrabah, Bloomfield, and Hopevale on the east coast of Cape York and Mapoon and Weipa on the Gulf of Carpentaria; of Daly River and Beagle Bay in the North West; and of Hermannsburg in the Centre. The relations between Aborigines and pioneer missionaries were exceptional enough to merit a brief mention.
The reaction of local clans to the sudden appearance of missionaries appears to have followed a common pattern. After cautious surveillance from a distance one or two men ventured to meet the white people. Gradually the numbers visiting the missionaries increased and when mutual confidence had been established women and children followed their men folk into the embryonic stations. Individual visits were prolonged till eventually semi-permanent camps developed on the mission reserves and young children and old people were left behind while their kinsfolk faced the rigours and dangers of the bush. The greatest advantage of the missions was that they provided a sanctuary from the depredations of white pastoralists, miners or pearl fishers and from those of traditional Aboriginal enemies as well. Both black and white foes were constrained from attacking clans actually camped within reach of the missionaries.
Blacks who lived for part of the time on mission reserves seem to have carefully chosen the time of their visits to coincide with the leanest and least pleasant period in the bush–the dry season around Hermannsburg, the time of the cool, wet south-easterlies on the east coast of Cape York. Poland, the German missionary from Hopevale, wrote realistically of what motivated local clans to come into the mission:
April! Australian Autumn. Not much more fruit to be gathered in the bush. The cold wind makes fishing harder and less rewarding. The natives and their dogs are getting thinner. They are beginning to feel cold, their tobacco is almost at an end. So they have to make the bitter decision to give up their free and easy life for a while and go to the mission station and work there.23
The missionaries were important as a source of desired European commodities like steel axes, flour and especially tobacco. Work on the mission station and attendance at often incomprehensible prayer meetings was an accepted price to pay for access to them. But the blacks soon learnt how to bargain for more generous supplies. A local clansman told the Trappists at Beagle Bay that it was a case of ‘no more tobacco, no more ‘allelulia’. 24 The blacks were able to play the missionaries off against the other Europeans, quickly appreciating the political possibilities inherent in the situation where different groups of white men were pursuing irreconcilable objectives. ‘They do not like working in the fields’, noted a north Queensland missionary, and they consider that ‘our issues of food and tobacco are not very generous’. The Aborigines asked him pointedly, ‘Does the One up in Heaven tell you to give us so little?’25 The missionary retorted that the gospel taught that he who did not work would not eat. With that the blacks replied by praising the townspeople of Cooktown for their generosity to the blacks.
Whatever success the missionaries had with Aboriginal children the adults strongly resisted the attempts to proselytise them. ‘They hold so firmly to their fables’, wrote Kempe of the Hermannsburg blacks, ‘that they have already told us straight out that we tell them nothing but lies’.26 At about much the same time Poland was writing of his difficulties with the Aborigines at Hopevale. He had endeavoured to explain the significance of Christmas but the adults looked at him with an ‘air of utter disbelief’. They said mockingly that their ears were blocked to his message because they had to sleep on the ground all the time.27
But blacks often developed the ability to appease the missionaries and keep on good terms with them. Poland gave an account of an exchange he had with a group of men just returned from a fishing trip. They had explained how the eldest member of the party had tied up the wind to facilitate their journey and that he could also make rain. The discussion continued with the missionary exclaiming:
‘Oh, don’t talk such rubbish, I am telling you the truth; only God can let the rain come’.
‘Of course he is right’, says the rainmaker and looks mockingly at his friends.
‘Be quiet and don’t mock him’, says another one a little anxiously.
‘Don’t make him angry’, another one repeats.
‘He may not give us any tobacco otherwise’.
‘Now let him talk!’, exclaims one man, ‘haven’t I been telling you all along? He talks well and we ought to stay with him’.28
Poland concluded ruefully that the ‘bored look’ on the face of the last speaker left him in no doubt about the total insincerity of the statement. On other occasions the Aborigines deliberately played down to the low opinions of their ability held by the missionaries. ‘We blacks simply can’t learn’, missionary Hoerlein was told at Bloomfield, ‘our heads are too hard. Nothing ever goes in. Learning is only for white people like you.’29 The missionary’s task was all the more difficult because the Aborigines often thought that by letting their children receive instruction they were actually working for the benefit of the white men. The experience of the German missionaries at Moreton Bay in the 1840s was typical of misunderstanding apparent elsewhere. The mission diary for May 1842 contained the passage:
they consider still their attendance a labour for us, from which they suppose we derive advantage and threaten us sometimes, when they are not quite pleased, no more to work in the school for us.30
Aborigines found many advantages in the missionary presence, especially in those areas where they continued to have ready access to their own country and the food it provided. But conflict emerged in regard to the education of the children and the questions of marriage and burial where Christian and Aboriginal traditions met head-on. The missionaries attempted to suppress traditional mortuary ceremonies and endeavoured to prevent the tribal marriages of young girls who had grown up on the stations, although it is quite likely that the girls sometimes used the missionaries in order to avoid the dictates of the old men. E. R. Gribble described the tension resulting from the struggle over who would bury the body of a little girl who died at Yarrabah in 1895:
After placing it in the coffin I waited some time before putting on the lid; one old woman stepped up and put an old garment and several pieces of bark into the coffin. Then I placed the lid on, and as soon as I did so the old women set up a most fearful din, and acted in a truly disgusting manner, rolling in the sand, throwing it at the coffin and over each other … They did not want the whites to have anything to do with the dead.31
The missions set up in remote localities in the late nineteenth century did shield the Aborigines from some of the worst excesses of frontier contact. It is probable that around the missions the decline of the population was less dramatic, and that demographic recovery occurred sooner, than in many other parts of the continent: health on the missions was normally better than in the typical fringe camp. But the missionaries mounted an intellectual challenge to Aboriginal society and culture far more deliberate, and consistent, than any other group of Europeans in colonial Australia. It was most apparent in the separation of children and parents by the establishment of dormitories which became common on Australian missions established during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Developments at Yarrabah during the 1890s illustrated a common trend. Gribble summed up his objectives in a number of reports written in the middle of the decade. In the first one of September 1895 he explained that the dormitory was nearing completion, an event eagerly awaited because the Europeans would ‘then have the children more under control’. By having them ‘under lock and key at night’ the mission staff would be able to ‘prevent the camp natives taking them off at all hours for corroborees etc’.32 The old people objected strongly to the incarceration of the children, complaining that the boys and girls were ‘getting too much like white fellow.’33 News of the missionaries’ behaviour spread quickly to clans living in the hinterland. Gribble described an incident which took place a few months after the opening of the dormitory. He was travelling in the bush with two black guides some distance away from Yarrabah. The party approached a camp on a creek bank just before sundown. The local men came up to the visitors and interrogated the two guides. Gribble described the following exchange:
At first little notice was taken of me, the people being busy questioning the two boys while I stood a little apart. Presently one man asked Harry who I was, and on his saying quietly the one word ‘Missionary’, the effect was wonderful to behold, the women gave me one look full of fear, then clasping their children tightly, vanished; the men stood their ground, but looked as if they would like the ground to open and swallow either me or themselves.34
Gribble subsequently learned the reason for the hostile reception. Aborigines for miles around had heard of the mission, he wrote, and the idea was ‘among them that we intend taking their children forcibly from them’.35
Colonial towns played an important role in the history of contact and acculturation. Almost every European community on the continent had at least one fringe camp at some time in its history. Many blacks were driven into these camps just as Aborigines elsewhere were forced onto pastoral stations by the violence of the bush and dwindling indigenous food supplies. ‘They are driven from many stations in the bush’, wrote a government official in Rockhampton in the 1860s, ‘and their dogs which they use for hunting are poisoned … so that the use of their own country is literally taken away from them’.36 A similar situation was outlined by an Aboriginal woman interviewed in the bush near Cooktown in 1899. She was camped with a small family group which had just returned from town with meat and bread. When asked why she and her kin did not go into the bush and live off the land she replied: ‘White fellow along a yarraman, too much break him spear, burn yams, cut him old man with whip, white man too much kill him Kangaroo.’37
But while some Aborigines were pushed in towards the towns others went willingly in the same direction. Curiosity enticed many as did the possibilities for gathering food and tobacco by scavenging, begging, casual labour and prostitution. The larger towns were able to supply a considerable amount of food for people who were accustomed to making use of almost everything edible in their environment. The outskirts of the pioneer towns became convenient locations for clans to meet and hold ceremonies, battles, corroborees and initiations. They could draw on both the town and neighbouring bush for food and were safer from attack than in the hinterland. It seems probable that clans frequently changed the venue of regular gatherings to take advantage of the towns and even altered ceremonial calendars to coincide with such European occasions as the distribution of blankets to Aborigines on Queen Victoria’s birthday, 24 May. E. J. Eyre observed the movement of South Australian clans in towards Adelaide in the 1840s. He wrote that:
Large towns are frequently the centre of meeting for many, and very distant tribes. The facility of obtaining scraps by begging, small rewards for trifling jobs of work, donations from the charitable, and a variety of broken victuals, offal etc enable them to collect in large numbers, and indulge to the uttermost their curiosity in observing the novelties around them, in meeting strange tribes, and joining them either in war or festivity, in procuring tools, clothes etc to carry back and barter in their own districts … Thus, Adelaide is nearly always occupied by tribes from one part or another of the country: on an average, it will support probably six hundred in the way I have described, though occasionally eight hundred have met there.38
The conviviality of fringe camps may have attracted Aborigines in from the bush. The interest was not the European settlement as such but the large Aboriginal gatherings which it made possible. As with so many other features of contact history the blacks appear to have used the Europeans and their towns for their own ends. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner remarked that in traditional society:
the most prized goods of life were to be found, and were deliberately sought, in large associations. Everywhere, it seems, there was a propensity for bands to foregather as long as physical conditions allowed and sociability persisted.39
Complaints from townspeople all over Australia emphasised the constant activity of the fringe camps; the succession of corroborees, ceremonies and fighting. ‘One night there is a marriage, another a death, and another a pitched battle’, wrote a Darwin resident in 1874, ‘there is always some occasion for noise and riot’.40
The acute problems which developed in the fringe camps–disease, malnutrition, addiction to alcohol or opium, the psychological tensions of sedentary living–were widely reported by European observers. Yet the dangers may not have been immediately apparent to the blacks who set up camp for the first time on the outskirts of colonial towns. Campsites rarely began as permanent homes, the transition from nomadism to sedentary living often took a generation or more. ‘Townblacks’ shifted camp regularly even though distances moved were increasingly confined within a shrinking circle of territory. Fringe dwellers continued to shift from places where kin had died in much the same way as they had done before the white men came and such sites may never have been re-occupied.
Though European men wore deep tracks to the blacks’ camps on their nocturnal search for sexual excitement the life of fringe-dwelling communities continued without much interference from the townspeople. The distance between town and camp probably suited both the whites and the blacks. The two or three miles typically separating the two settlements allowed the Aborigines to continue with many aspects of traditional life which would have been disrupted if they had lived closer to the Europeans. A recent study of a part-Aboriginal community in southern inland Queensland reported the recollections of old people about their earlier life in the camp on the outskirts of town. Despite the desperate poverty that had characterised their situation what they remembered was ‘the warmth, lack of boredom, fewer responsibilities, having fun and being together away from the prying eyes of whites’.41
One of the problems created for the blacks by the establishment of European towns was the degree to which the traditional owners of a town site could control the access of more distant clans to both the town itself and the food and tobacco available there. This issue was probably a major source of conflict all over the continent. The ‘inside’ clans appealed to tradition, the ‘outsiders’ felt that the arrival of the white men had radically altered the situation. Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines in Adelaide, noted the tension between the local blacks and those coming in from the Murray who told him they were ‘intending to take over and expel Adelaide blacks from town’. For their part the local people abused children from the Murray clans who were going to school in Adelaide, accusing them of ‘obtaining food in a territory to which they had no hereditary right’.42
Conflict between Aborigines and settlers spilt over into the outskirts of a number of small pioneer townships. Blacks speared horses and cattle and occasionally the citizens themselves close to town and townspeople lived with high anxiety, loaded guns and barricaded doors. In places like Maryborough, Cardwell and Port Lincoln the fear of Aboriginal attack appeared to threaten the future of the settlements while acute anxiety about the local clans was probably the major reason for the desertion of Gilberton in 1873. Town blacks for their part appear to have used fringe camps as a base for raids on sheep and cattle in rural hinterlands. After such an excursion they returned quickly to the relative security of the town where even the most ruthless squatters were constrained from exacting revenge. ‘The cunning fellows know they are safe in town’ wrote a Maryborough resident in 1867 ‘where it is next to impossible to catch them, and dispersing is not permissible’.43
In some towns the blacks became accomplished thieves and burglars combining their growing understanding of European society with the stealth and patience of the traditional hunter. This development can best be illustrated by reference to Maryborough during the first twenty years of its history. During the 1850s the resident Commissioner for Crown Lands made many complaints about the local black burglars. In 1855 he remarked that their movements were so stealthy and they were ‘such adepts in the Commission of robberies which they perpetrate during the night’ that it was impossible to detect them. The following year he noted that they were becoming ‘very expert in house robberies’. They removed panes of glass to release window catches, cut away sections of wall to loosen bolts, put children through small openings to undo locked doors.44 The local paper observed some years later that black burglars behaved ‘as though they had served an apprentership in London or New York’.45 Food was the main objective, stores and drays the most common target. During six weeks in November–December 1855 there were twenty six separate robberies in Maryborough which netted the local blacks at least 1500 pounds of flour and 800 pounds of sugar as well as meat, tea, clothes, bedding and utensils.
Yet it is likely that many blacks in fringe camps would have preferred to come to a negotiated settlement with the Europeans ensuring them of adequate food and protection from arbitrary violence. There was an incident in Rockhampton late in 1865 which had direct bearing on this question. A group of ‘town blacks’ demonstrated outside the home of the Police Magistrate. The local paper reported that ‘they signified that peace and safety was only assured by the payment of a blackmail in the shape of flour, tobacco and white money.’ It is intriguing to consider if such overtly political action was common but merely unreported or not even recognized as such by the white community. The response of the Rockhampton authorities was predictable. On hearing of the occurrence the police sergeant and two mounted troopers ‘dispersed the vagabonds’.46