Rufus Gordon Rigney and Cyril Spurgeon Rigney were two brothers who went to war. Ngarrindjeri men, they were born where the Murray stretches down to the sea, on Port Macleay Aboriginal Mission, a hundred miles south of Adelaide.

Port Macleay is the name Europeans used – a name imposed by the first white missionary. Raukkan, meaning ‘meeting place’, has been the Aboriginal name for this place since time immemorial. The traditional lands of the Ngarrindjeri people extend from Lake Alexandrina, where Raukkan is situated, twenty miles up the Murray; they include the length of the Coorong and encompass coastlands as far as Encounter Bay. By the turn of the twentieth century the best of that vast estate had been taken by white farmers; the mission was established on a narrow strip of the Narrung Peninsula, on what most saw as marginal country. Over-clearing by the whites destroyed the habitats where Aboriginal people had hunted for generations, increased salinity levels in the lake and generally damaged a fragile ecology. It was a pattern of environmental degradation mirrored throughout much of Australia.

Ngarrindjeri people will always remember: The war memorial at Raukkan. Here, vivid Indigenous imagery is put to a commemorative purpose. In 1924, a returned man from the community marched at the end of the Anzac Day procession in Adelaide – but Aboriginal people have also devised their own ways of remembering. Note the church in the background where the memorial windows to the Rigney brothers (and two other men who died in the Great War) is set. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

Port Macleay functioned as a Christian mission until 1916, after which the Aborigines Protection Board established by the government administered it. ‘Protection’ was a misnomer. At the time Rufus and Cyril enlisted, Ngarrindjeri people were not permitted to speak their language, the community was isolated and institutionalised, and traditional practices were vigorously discouraged. Instead, the mission trained Aboriginal people to work on the fringes of the white economy. Both boys recorded their occupation as ‘labourer’ on their attestation form when they signed up for war.

Perhaps it was the hope of something better than toiling on a farm that persuaded Rufus and Cyril to enlist; perhaps – as for many white recruits – it was the lure of travel and adventure. In Rufus’s case at least, it may have been the strong sense of family obligation at the core of Aboriginal culture. Cyril signed up in April 1916; Rufus would follow his elder brother to war four months later. Both lads wrote on their enlistment papers that they were 19, but Rufus was actually 16. Had they been white, they would have required their father’s consent, but the Protector of Aborigines – not the boys’ parents – was deemed to be the legal guardian of all Indigenous people. William Garnet South, a man Rufus had probably never met, duly signed his papers.

It turned out to be his death warrant. Cyril was killed at Messines in 1917. Rufus died at Passchendaele three months later.

We know little of the circumstances of Cyril’s death, or whether his remains were recovered from the battlefield. Like thousands of other troops from all over the world, the body of this Ngarrindjeri man was swallowed up by the Ypres Salient. Rufus was initially reported missing rather than killed in action, and the uncertainty regarding his fate prompted a series of Red Cross enquiries by his family.

Swallowed up by the Salient: Cyril Rigney’s name appears alongside thousands of others on Menin Gate’s Memorial to the Missing. The attack on Messines Ridge launched the Third Battle of Ypres – in the next few months it would cost the AIF 38 000 casualties. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

‘He was wounded in the hop over at Passchendale [sic],’ George Fox told the authorities, ‘shot through the lungs, . . . [he] was left in a shell hole’. Another of his comrades hurried to wrap a bandage around the wound but the lad was ‘very bad’.1 Private Rigney died not long after in the hands of the Germans.

Almost ninety years after the brothers left Australia, Victor and Verna Koolmatrie journeyed to Belgium. They carried part of their country with them – sand from the dunes of Ninety Miles Beach, earth from the banks of the Coorong, soil gathered from the shores of Lake Alexandrina and the edges of the Murray. All these places were shaped by the ancestral hero Ngrunderri during the Dreaming; these sites were sacred to Cyril and Rufus and will always be a part of them.

The parcel of soil was scattered on the moist turf of Harlebeke New British Cemetery where one of the two boys was buried; the distinctive notes of a didgeridoo cried out across Flanders to the other. Clad in red paint and loincloth, Victor performed the dance of the Kangaroo and the Emu. It was a freezing winter’s morning but the great-great nephew of Rufus Gordon Rigney leapt high into the frosty air and landed close by his grave. And as Verna Koolmatrie spoke, reading a tribute to her ancestor, that cold place seemed a little warmer.

Ngarrindjeri people will always remember Rufus and Cyril Rigney, just as they will always care for the country that they came from. The grieving began in the church where the two boys were taught the Bible, and where today a memorial window shines in their honour. Nine from that mission went away to war, fighting, the stained glass tells us, not for ‘King and Empire’ but for ‘Justice and Freedom’. The loss of those two boys was dearly felt by the community.

A loss dearly felt: The memorial window to the Rigney brothers raised by the community. Note the appeal to ‘Justice and Freedom’. Aboriginal service in World War One and subsequent conflicts helped to secure citizenship – but not until the 1960s. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

‘I think about all that crying . . . when I was a little girl,’ Doreen Kartinyeri, niece of Cyril and Rufus, remembered. ‘My mum, my dad, and the other old ladies used to come to sit with my grandmother and they’d howl for days, a couple of days before and a couple of days after every Anzac Day.’2 And every other day of the year, Cyril and Rufus’s names gleam in gold from Raukkan’s war memorial.

We do not know the exact number of Aboriginal people who lost their lives in the Great War, nor the number who fought for the country that long denied them citizenship. We do know that ‘Justice and Freedom’ has been a long time coming for Indigenous Australians – and that the service of Rufus and Cyril Rigney was one of many sacrifices.

Heroes of the Great War: A studio portrait of Rufus Gordon Rigney (fifth from the left, top row). The service dossier notes his ‘dark complexion’ and includes a letter consenting to his enlistment from the Chief Protector of Aborigines. The Chronicle, 9 February 1918 courtesy National Library of Australia.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: The authors respectfully acknowledge the Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia and their elders, past and present. This story draws on the service dossiers for Rufus and Cyril NAA: B2455, RIGNEY RUFUS GORDON and NAA: B2455, RIGNEY CYRIL SPURGEON; and Rufus's Red Cross Missing and Wounded file AWM IDRL/0428. See also Mike Sexton, ‘One service charged with extra emotion’, The 7:30 Report, ABC, 25 April 2005, transcript available: abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1353096.htm. Further details of the transfer of Raukkan land can be found in Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service Bulletin, February 2005, number 1/2005.

We gratefully acknowledge our debt to Clyde Rigney, who facilitated our visit to Raukkan, and Verna Koolmatrie, who welcomed us to the community and generously shared her memories. Thanks are also due to the Indigenous playwright Wesley Enoch who alerted us to the existence of the memorial window and who wove their story into his remarkable play, Black Diggers. Finally, we acknowledge the work of Julie Reece, whose ‘Connecting Spirits’ commemorative tour honours Indigenous service. Studies of Ngarrindjeri Anzacs were pioneered by Doreen Kartinyeri, see Ngarrindjeri Anzacs (Adelaide: Aboriginal Family History Project, South Australian Museum and Raukkan Council, 1996) and more generally Doreen Kartinyeri and Sue Anderson, My Ngarrindjeri Calling (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008). This account also benefits from the scholarship of Diane Bell, Listen to Ngarrindjeri Women Speaking = Kungun Ngarrindjeri Miminar Yunnan (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2008); Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World that Is, Was and Will Be (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1998). For general studies of Aboriginal people in the First AIF see Philippa Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers for the AIF: The Indigenous Response to World War One (Canberra: Indigenous Histories, 2013); David Huggonson, Too Dark for the Light Horse: An Exhibition of Photographs & Documents Depicting Aboriginal Involvement in the Australian Army at the Albury Regional Museum, August 11th–September 27th (Albury, 1988); Alick Jackomos and Derek Fowell, Forgotten Heroes: Aborigines at War from the Somme to Vietnam (Melbourne: Victoria Press, 1993). The authors eagerly await the important work of Mick Dodson, John Maynard and Jack Pearson into Indigenous service.

1 Red Cross Wounded and Missing file AWM 1DRL/0428 Private Rufus Rigney.

2 Mike Sexton, ‘One service charged with extra emotion’, The 7:30 Report, ABC, 25 April 2005, transcript available: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1353096.htm.