Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf ’s letter to Dr George Cross,
2nd August 1915, continued
VI
Please forgive my lengthy digressions, I simply wish to illustrate everything in order for you and for whomever this may reach, to have a proper understanding of our Mission life.
There was order and grace to our lives at Prosperous Mission, the township built with the young men who had become fathers, and their children who were growing with the instruction of Godly ways, formal education and most comfortingly, some of their own family members that had remained wild, unwilling to join our Mission, but who visited in peace and goodwill.
Although over these years I knew of and had witnessed the increase of the Native labour system occurring in the plains, and visitors were less frequent. As such – fewer young men lived at the Mission as they had been captured and compelled, I dare say with force, to touch the pen to assignment papers impossible for them to understand. Furthermore, they then become the Bond Service Property of a fellow on a Station. And when they subsequently ran away, which they most certainly did, a warrant was issued for their arrest, the Police were set in motion, then they are run down or ferreted out, sometimes here at the Mission, taken to the Police Depot and chained for weeks before being returned to these monstrous Station men who wave in victory paper copies of the Masters and Servants Act. Thus fracturing those beloved families I’d worked so hard to keep intact.
In the sixth year of our Mission, we had a closeknit, and, in so far as was possible, a protected community of weavers, fishermen, children of God, education and good Providence – our crop of bearded wheat yielded for two years straight. We had births, and, naturally, some of the ageing residents did die. I was surprised to learn that the Natives had a great reverence for the dead, and I allowed them to conduct their private ceremonies before we hammered together coffins, and marked out a permanent cemetery under a copse of trees. It eased me a great deal knowing that of those who passed at the Mission, all had taken baptism beforehand, some at my assurance, yet with their total acceptance, on their deathbeds.
At the turn of the seventh year of the Mission, a great disruption seemed to take hold of the community of Massacre Plains. Social issues were becoming increasingly hostile; the Government had come down heavily on the immigrant goldminers, and the Worker newsletter had printed three issues within the year, igniting division between what were called the silvertails and the hoi-polloi. Though both factions of society, mind you, were agreeable in their prejudice against the Native.
One evening, a group of white men broke down the fences and entered our reserve. Asleep in my hut, I awoke to the great chanting of the horsemen calling out for enacting ‘vengeance’ and suffering an ‘eye-for-an-eye’. I immediately threw on my pantaloons and boots, retrieved the shotgun from its high place upon the shelf and raced to the yard. The girls and women were screaming and running, first to the men’s hut; but on seeing that the White men had barricaded it and set the men’s quarters alight with their torches, they ran towards myself in a swarm. I let them pass, and the women and girls began to pour into my hut for safety. Into the yard, the Native men were leaping from the windows of their own quarters as the fire began to lick and flame. I demanded to know the business these intruders had; however intoxicated they were with spirits, they remained atop their horses, armed with whips and gripping their rifles with alarming certainty. The six of them, yelling over the top of one another replied that our Blacks, ‘Niggers’ they referred to them, had speared their cattle and I knew by their tense faces that I could not resort to reason or Scripture. That they were set on vengeful murder that evening. The Blackfellows meanwhile had scattered from their large hut to camouflage themselves within the bush.
I reached the White men who were still mounted on their horses and pointed my rifle at their beasts. I demanded they take their leave or I would fetch for the authorities. I admit, my hands were shaking and my nerves were unsettled. I felt immensely out of my depth. Keller, without a weapon, was gathering those frightened children who could not fit into my hut into the schoolhouse. I held the rifle at my shoulder, and tried as I might not to shake with it, when one of the White men, illuminated by the fire, galloped his horse around the centre of the square and approached me at speed and, with his boot to my head, knocked me to the ground.
Throughout much of the rest of the ordeal I lay unconscious on the dirt of our very own open square. When I awoke in the care of Keller, the men’s dormitory quarters were sending cinders into the sky. A horse lay by the fire, dead with a spear through its chest. The White horsemen had fled taking two women with them, much to the distress of the female residents whose wails echoed beyond the acacia pines.
Keller immediately informed me that a Blackfellow who tried to stop the kidnap of the women had been lashed with a stockwhip upon the neck and dragged from the pommel for numerous turns, on his back and his front, before being shot. I remember even through the smoke that the scent of blood was strong. I touched the top of my head absent-mindedly, but the smell of blood was not my own. I came from the dirt to assist the injured Blackfellow. I staggered towards the shape on the ground and fell there on my knees and was sorrowed to find it was Wowhely, a good and honourable man about half my age, my friend. On seeing me approach he said he was frightened. A pool of darkness had seeped over his chest and stained the hands of his brothers and my own. I realised that I was only useful for giving prayer. I said to him, ‘You needn’t be scared because the Lord Jesus is always near those who put their trust in Him, those, like you, Wowhely, who are passing through the dark valley.’
A song began to come from the mouths of the men then, it rose up from Wowhely’s lifeless, bloodied body and seemed to carry lit into the night sky, a song that surely caused angels to cover their faces and weep. The next day the Natives held their ceremony in private. The following day we laid Wowhely’s prepared and blessed body to rest in the eternal home of the cemetery. The cemetery that had been swelling in size, growing with the suffering that hung like a pall of locusts over the plains.