James Arden volunteered twice for service in the First AIF. On the first occasion, in 1916, he was 43 years of age, a labourer, and described himself as a ‘Natural Born British Subject’. The authorities were more explicit the next time: in 1918 a recruiting officer didn’t bother to record Arden’s height or his weight but bluntly described his complexion as ‘Aboriginal’.1

Complexion Aboriginal: The details from James Arden’s service dossier. Note the way Arden describes himself as both natural born and a British subject, declaring his Indigenous descent but also claiming the entitlements of white citizenship. Lake Condah Mission (then Arden’s place of residence) was officially closed after the First World War, and after the Second World War the land was broken up for soldier settlement. All applications for land from Gunditjmara veterans were refused. It was not until 1984, after a series of legal challenges against the mining company Alcoa, that the government intervened and returned fifty-three hectares of the original Lake Condah reserve to Gunditjmara people. This landmark decision was long overdue recognition of traditional ownership, connection to country and the importance of cultural heritage. NAA: B2455, ARDEN JAMES courtesy National Archives of Australia.

Arden and his family had been ‘removed’ to Lake Condah Mission Station in June 1912. Lake Condah was a government reserve situated on the traditional lands of the Gunditjmara people of western Victoria. Here, so-called ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal people were provided with rations, clothing and accommodation – if they were well behaved. Defiance of the station manager could lead to expulsion from the settlement, and allowances for ‘the natives’ were never enough. In 1916 (in the face of a wartime economy), the Victorian Government made the decision to replace clothing only when ‘absolutely necessary’. Aboriginal people like James Arden endured the Western District’s freezing winter in bare feet, light cotton trousers and threadbare clothing.2

On the traditional lands of the Gunditjmara people: A view of the ruins of Lake Condah Mission. The church played a central but divided role on the reserve and elsewhere – an institution Arden’s children were forced to attend was embraced by many other members of the community. Despite his earlier differences with white missionaries, Arden would be buried in the church graveyard, and ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus’ was one of the hymns sung at the service. The church’s restoration is an aim of the Lake Condah Sustainable Development Program, which hopes to promote healing and reconciliation in the community. The original steeple was demolished in the 1950s, long after the station had been resumed for white settlement. Courtesy Michael Coleman.

Perhaps it was the attraction of regular meals and a decent woollen coat that persuaded Arden to enlist. Perhaps a white man’s wage would enable him to provide for his wife and six children. James Arden also belonged to a proud warrior tradition. Gunditjmara people had bravely resisted white incursions on their traditional lands since the mid-nineteenth century.

What was clear from the outset was that James Arden was deeply dissatisfied with the treatment meted out on the station. When he arrived in 1912, there was no furniture or bedding in the small timber hut his family were allocated. Arden was told he was not permitted to wander about the place ‘at will’, receive visitors from outside, or neglect to send his children to religious services. James Arden protested that these restrictions were a breach of his rights:

[He] announced in a loud voice that he intended writing . . . about the way the Board and Constable Gleeson had treated them in sending them to a place like this without any comforts.

Arden declared he would be ‘frank’ and ‘straightforward’: ‘I think Sir I know my place as a man ought to’ but ‘I have only spoke for my rights’ and no one has a right to ‘interfere with my family’ or ‘keep them down under’.

White authorities at the station soon complained that Arden was a troublesome ‘native’, apt to complain, quick to defy and ‘as rude and ruder than I have ever seen any Black’.3

It says much about the arbitrary authority of life on a station that James Arden hoped white army officers might be any more mindful of his rights than government-appointed missionaries and officials. Arden marched into Ballarat training camp in March 1916 but never went to war. No sooner had he arrived than he contracted meningitis. After 196 days service he was discharged medically unfit from the Army.

The authorities conceded that Arden contracted meningitis ‘as a result of [his] war service’. Its effects were crippling: ‘I am not the same man as I was before I left the Station,’ he wrote in 1917, ‘this sickness has left its marks on me.’ Arden complained that he ached from ‘head to foot’, ‘the [hurt] in my head is something awful when it starts to ache, the pains go all through my body’. The effects were mental as much as physical:

I feel tired of life since I got this sickness, I feel I don’t care what becomes of me, I am what you call dead weary, the doctor says it will be a very long time before I ever recover and when I do I will never be fit for active service.4

With a condition as severe as this, Arden was granted a pension – a little over three pounds a fortnight for himself and his family. He had also accrued back pay – twenty-four pounds in all. It was a pittance for a man with seven dependents, but enough to cause resentment from the authorities. Within a few weeks of his release from hospital, W L Galbraith, Manager of Lake Condah Station, challenged Arden’s entitlements:

Arden . . . must [be ordered to] leave the Station immediately, [and] no further rations [should] be supplied [to his family]. This man is strong enough for any class of work and only scheming underhand falsehoods gave him this money. The Ardens are always trying to cause mischief.5

At the heart of all this ‘mischief’ was a challenge to white authority. It wasn’t just that Galbraith insisted Arden was a ‘healthy, strong native . . . able to earn his living’, his idleness was seen as a bad example to others; it undermined the work ethic white authorities laboured to instil in the ‘natives’. Galbraith went on:

Since Arden received the military pension, he does nothing but drive around the country . . . Arden’s home at the present time is a camping ground for natives who will not work and these loafers give me a great deal of worry, annoyance and [come] to the station without [my] permission.6

For her part, Mrs Galbraith, the manager’s wife, dutifully compiled instances of that ‘rude black’s’ wilful extravagance:

If the Board could daily see the way Ardens waste their £3-2-6 weekly. They would quickly come to the conclusion to move them from the place, Arden’s wife’s temper and language is intolerable, they come and go as they like, [and] are a curse to the peace of the place. He also intends buying a billiard table, is going to Hamilton to buy £65 piano [and] they have £58-50 in the bank. I have had no peace since he returned [and] their children are dressed in finery far above their station . . . [it] seems dreadful that great fat powerful man with such a income living on government food, meat, milk and butter.7

With both the manager and his wife threatening resignation, the government decided to take action. In February 1917, James Arden received a curt letter from the Board:

Re the renewal of your Licence to reside at Lake Condah Station, I am directed by the Board to state that as you are in receipt of a pension from the Commonwealth Government in consequence of your being incapacitated in connection with warlike operations, such pension amounting to £3-5-0 per fortnight for your children, it is considered that as you and your family are being maintained by the State, the pension should be handed over to the Board to be utilised in the maintenance of yourself and family or to be held in trust.8

It took Arden less than forty-eight hours to respond to the Board’s ultimatum. And just like that first day on the Station, he was resolved to ‘speak for his rights’:

[Y]ou . . . say that the pension I am receiving should be handed over to the Board to be utilised in the maintenance of myself and family or to be held in trust, Sir, I beg to say that I cannot see my way clear to hand my money over to the Board, I think I deserve the money I am getting, no one knows the pains and suffering I underwent with Meningitis and I furthermore state that I have started a banking account of my own, so rather than do what you have asked me to do and hand over my money to the Board, I have made my mind up to remove from here and to leave the Station, I have done all work which was to be done on the place here before I went and enlisted . . . 9

James Arden found life outside the station was far from easy. Despite the Galbraith’s allegations of an extravagant life on the pension, he struggled to provide for his own family, let alone others who came to depend on him. By June 1917, Arden had taken on care of his sister-in-law and her children, another family seeking refuge from the mission. ‘I would not see anyone go hungry,’ he explained. Nor did a man as weak and sick as James Arden find it easy to find work. Ploughing a field sent pain shooting down his back; his old life as a rural labourer was simply no longer tenable.

The Arden case tells us much about attitudes towards Indigenous Australians in the early twentieth century. On the one hand, the authorities told Aboriginal people to work hard to advance themselves; on the other, to dress their children ‘in finery’ or drive about the countryside like a white man was to put on airs ‘above their station’. Frugality and independence were all very well, but a bank account of one’s own challenged the paternalism on which the authority of the station depended. And whilst the Board was very quick to accept W. L. Galbraith’s claim that James Arden was a drunken ‘nuisance’, there was never any investigation of Arden’s claim that both the manager and his wife were all ‘too fond of their drink’ and ‘not fit to manage an aboriginal station’.10

When James Arden tried to enlist a second time in 1918, he was rejected as medically unfit by the authorities. He returned to Lake Condah soon after the end of the war. By that time, the station had been disbanded and many Aboriginal families again uprooted and relocated to Lake Tyers Reserve on the other side of Victoria. James Arden died in June 1935 after a long illness related to his war service. By then, he was 68 years of age (one of the ‘eldest residents’), still caring for country and occupying the buildings of the old mission. That July, his wife, Christine, wrote to the Repatriation Department asking for a contribution towards her husband’s funeral and burial expenses. He was a serviceman, she explained, ‘a private soldier. . .  in the 39th Battalion’, and as entitled to that grant as any other veteran. In one last triumph for a man who had always spoken up for his rights, James Arden was buried at government expense.11

Gunditjmara Anzacs are still remembered by the community, and Dave Arden assisted by Paul Kelly has put the story of his grandfather to song. The refrain in the chorus of ‘Freedom Called’ would have met with James Arden’s approval: ‘When freedom called, Gunditj men and women stood tall.’

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: The authors respectfully acknowledge the Gunditjmara people of western Victoria and their elders, past and present. This story draws on the service dossiers of James Arden NAA: B2455 ARDEN J; NAA: B2455 ARDEN JAMES; and the Arden family’s Aboriginal case file NAA: B337, 28 Arden, James and Family; the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines, Correspondence Files, VPRS1694 units 2, 3 and 4; and contemporary newspaper reports. The authors would like to thank Dave Arden, Damien Bell (CEO of the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation) who kindly facilitated Monash University visits to Budj Bim and the old Mission and Uncle Daryl Rose (of the Budj Bim Indigenous Tour Company) who ably led staff and students over the site. Thanks are also due to Damien Williams, who represented Monash University in this important cultural collaboration. For further reading on the management of the missions see Keith Cole, The Lake Condah Aboriginal Mission (Bendigo: Keith Cole Publications, 1984); Jan Critchett, Untold Stories: Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1998); Iris Lovett-Gardiner, Lady of the Lake: Aunty Iris’s Story (Melbourne: Koorie Heritage Trust, 1997) and Aldo Massola, Aboriginal Mission Stations in Victoria: Yelta, Ebenezer, Ramahyuck, Lake Condah (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1970). The best introduction to the Gunditjmara’s ongoing connection to country is by Gunditjmara people themselves, see The Gunditjmara people with Gib Wettenhall, The People of Budj Bim: Engineers of Aquaculture, Builders of Stone House Settlements and Warriors Defending Country (Heywood: EM Press Publishing for the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, 2010). The authors gratefully acknowledge Jessica Haughton whose work on the Lake Condah and Framlingham settlement suggests rewarding insights into the Indigenous politics of the era. We have also consulted the oral histories from Gunditjmara people available on Radio National Website abc.net.au/missionvoices/lake_condah/. For more information on Dave Arden or to hear ‘Freedom Called’ see daveaarden.com/.

1 NAA: B2455, ARDEN, J.

2 Memo from Chief Secretary’s Office, 4 May 1916, M. Austin to the Manager, Mr Galbraith, 5 July 1917 PROV Aborigines Protection Board, Accounts and Requisitions, 1 January 1916–1 January 1919, V/AF/092/03/01, VPRS 1694/P/0000, Unit 000002.

3 Letter from James Arden to Mr Callaway, Lake Condah, June 1912; Edith Bagnall to Chief Protector of Aborigines, 27 January 1917, Victorian Public Records Office, Correspondence and Reports, 1 January 1917, V/AF/091/01/05, VPRS 1694/P/0000, Unit 000003, Dscl 1917.

4 Letter from James Arden to Mrs Bon, Dunmore West, 12 June 1917; Letter James Arden to WL Galbraith, 7 July 1916; ibid.

5 Letter from W.L. Galbraith to The Secretary, Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, 23 February 1917, ibid.

6 Report from (Sgd) W.L. Galbraith, Manager to Acting Secretary, Department of Defence, Melbourne, 13 June 1917, ibid.

7 Letter from Mrs Galbraith, Lake Condah, 24 February 1917, ibid.

8 Memorandum from the Secretary, 20 February 1917, ibid.

9 Letter from James Arden to W.J. Ditchburn, Lake Condah, ibid.

10 Letter from James Arden to Mrs Bon, Dunmore West, 12 June 1917; ibid.

11 Portland Guardian, 17 June 1935; NAA: B2455, ARDEN, J.