To Dr George Cross,
The British Society of Ethnography
From Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf, 2nd August 1915
I
I felt the great desire to address you, so late in the hour and – as is suddenly apparent – at the late hour of my life. The last time we spoke was many years ago now, in the Banquet Hall of the World’s Fair mirage in that compelling city of Chicago. I think on the evening with a golden warmth hung around it, though I had still been a confused man of the cloth, and of the Empire. We spoke of your wife, and I send my best wishes to her and your family at this turbulent time. I feel compelled to clarify why I refused to bring the measurements of my residents to the New South Wales exhibit, refused to catalogue the minutiae of my brothers’ lives for all to see there against the ebb of Lake Michigan. In looking back, indeed, they are my brothers – we are bound by what we have undergone together all these years. Of course I mentioned none of this at the time, but no man would in those circumstances. Yes – no man would tell all the things I’ve come to know. Perhaps to tell all might be the sure way to ruin the great work we’ve accomplished here. But we live, Dr Cross, in different times now. I admit to striking out some pages in my journal, and at times not having transcribed all events – anodyne nonsense at any rate? Yet I remember all the events more palpable than anything before or after. Only today I thought on it again and wondered briefly if it should be noted before handing over my living body. Perhaps.
In leaving this world it is my hope it came to something, salvation in some small part, and that the work remaining to do and undo will prosper on and save those wretches from themselves, even if my doubts have remained stronger than hopes.
You may be my last hope, Dr Cross, I seem to be drawn to expunge the past to you. Alas, the state of affairs awakens truths in the spirit long denied. After many years I have recognised that in times of stress tongues either fold or flap, and having a crisis of the latter I hope you can find forgiveness for such blasphemous indulgence. Perhaps I have reached a place of understanding where I feel I must jeopardise everything so that I might be heard. And so, I have no choice but to write of the things that I have witnessed and known to have occurred on these dark plains since my arrival. Dr Cross, I hope these words might reach someone in your influence who may rectify this situation. Calamity befalls the congregation of Massacre Plains and, furthermore, the decent Natives whom I have lived amongst. You are my last sane chorus.
Before I was detained I tried to assemble my personal possessions. In doing so I unearthed the Mission’s early records and also my childhood Bible, which was the only thing I came to Australia with besides my father and mother on The Skjold, the final ship to the Colony. The Skjold rode the seas that had little kindness. Aboard in addition was master carpenter Mr Huber, and master miller Mr Schmitt. I remember them both more clearly than my parents or myself – I think perhaps because of how many had died on the journey to the New Land, and because it was always Mr Huber and Mr Schmitt who fashioned the coffins, lowering the Earth’s furniture into the sea. On reflection, I suppose those boxes must have been the least masterful thing they ever made.
Concealed inside my child’s Bible was a newspaper cutting that had survived the many years lived there in the dust bowl of the interior, clipped from The Gazette on the day of my thirteenth birthday in 1851. There in plain English was the news that physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault released his Pendulum from the roof of the Panthéon in Paris, France – proving that the Earth rotated. I have to hark back to my earliest hopes to wonder why I’d kept the one birthday clipping of the many my father saved for me, but I know the reason – how I too had always wanted to prove something. That the Heavens rotated, that they could rotate and light upon any man. Even a man here.
From the ever-flowing Murrumby River of this country, I had for nearly thirty-four years laboured to ameliorate the condition of the Native tribes. Here, a peculiar place: searing-hot days, cool nights, cattle runs and more cattle than the eye can grasp, and filled with the flora and fauna one would have classified only by the imagination. Other curiosities too, though unimaginable, that comprise of deeds too dark to remark. I’m noting all this in the recent past, since by force of hand, Prosperous Mission has been taken by the Government. I have done my best by The Book – all deeds will stand alone for judgement, eventually.
A month prior the only good news came from my Bishop via the Postmaster-General – a fob watch in recognition for my services. It was silver and heavy in the hand before confiscation, no matter it would have not brought pride noting the years coming after all that has happened. Perhaps I regret having built Prosperous Mission – where I had hoped to labour long in bestowing the benefits of the Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God upon those to whom we owe so much, but for whom we have done so little. What irony there is in the namesake itself, for my ambitions for the Mission’s prosperity was to be all my faults.
Unsavoury as this opinion is, and for reasons I cannot quite understand, there is no other place I would rather be. The night before removal I had a dream that I was trying to build something, though with faulty hands that no matter my pleading would not do as instructed. The task seemed to carry on to no end. The dream was finally ratified when I awoke to the sound of the townsmen gathered again outside my hut. I believe it was weapons they dragged across the outer walls. They’d departed, but I feared I may myself hang from the peppercorn tree for who I am, what I had done there – and now I fear I may hang abounded by wire. Because of the weight of time upon me I have decided not to be a man sent to the gallows of the secret bush or these internment fences without having said all the things I need to. To tell how wrongs became accepted as rights. I realise now that no matter what ruin befalls me, this is my pledge: I will tell that unhandsome truth, even if it will amount to last words. The circumstances of the times demand it.