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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781741766592 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 977 KB |
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A Terribly Wild Man
By Christine Halse
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2002 Christine HalseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86508-753-5
CHAPTER 1
Mostly of tears
Ernest Richard Bulmer Gribble died on 18 October 1957, a month and five days before his 89th birthday. Wizened, wasted and worn out by life. He had been fond of historical parallels and would have liked the neatness of ending his life's work where it had begun, in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, near Cairns on the Queensland coast. The wife of the mission Superintendent nursed him as he waited for death, and she later wrote to Gribble's wife in Sydney, describing his final weeks:
I think everyone at Yarrabah came to see him and knelt by his bed as if it was an altar. At one time about 50 young boys and youths passed through his room noiselessly bowed to him or kissed him softly and whispered 'Good-night' or 'God bless you Dadda Gribble'. There couldn't have been more reverence if it had been a church. Indeed it reminded me of the passing of the late King George VI in England and his subjects coming to pay homage ... It would take pages to describe the grief and sorrow of Yarrabah and yet all were glad that his sorrows were over and knew of the glory awaiting him on the other side ... It would have taken a Cathedral to hold all the people who came to his funeral mostly coloured people.
The Reverend Ernest Gribble was laid to rest with full Anglican rites in the graveyard buried in the hills behind St Alban's Church, Yarrabah, but in death, as in life, peace eluded him and Gribble continued to inflame passion and controversy. Was he a kindly and conscientious man who tempered zeal with tact; or a reckless, tortured tyrant who ruled his remote kingdom with a Bible in one hand and a whip in another? Loved like a saviour and despised like the Devil, the enigma of Ernie Gribble lived on in the public mind.
The legend of Ernie Gribble began soon after he was born. It was a well-worn fable that his parents plotted the future of their first born while he was still in the cradle: he would follow in his father's footsteps and become an Anglican clergyman and missionary to the Australian Aborigines. The fact that John Brown (JB) Gribble was still a coalminer when Ernie was born in Geelong, Victoria, on 23 November 1868 was irrelevant. It was a family trait to spice up a story when spinning a yarn.
In truth, the Gribble past, unlike its future, was unremarkable. The family sprang from solid, Cornish mining stock and escaped to Australia when JB was nine months old and barely old enough to justify the sacred bond he later imagined for 'mother England'. His father found and quickly lost a fortune after the family settled in the disarray, ruined dreams and revolutionary fervour of the Victorian goldfields. JB, the youngest of the brood, was a voracious reader with a natural talent for turning a phrase. Later in life his writing would menace the soul of colonial society but in his youth the brutal necessity of surviving outweighed book-learning, and he followed generations of Gribbles by going down the coalmines young. JB's spirit found liberation in his evangelical zeal. He was barely a teenager when he started honing his skills as a preacher on the street corners of Ballarat, and bailing up thirsty patrons outside pubs to harangue them to abandon the drink that would lead to perpetual hellfire, brimstone and damnation.
JB grew into a tall, strikingly handsome man with a patrician profile, a thick mane of swarthy dark hair and a luxurious beard that swept down over his chest. He exuded a sensual, magnetic charisma that drew women to him and was almost indecent in a preacher. His weedy son did not inherit his manly, good looks. Even at his best, Ernie never managed to cast off the air of a skinny kid who never got quite enough food. There was a touch of his father's nobililty in Ernie's high forehead and aquiline nose but it was ruined by unnaturally heavy eyelids that gave him a misleading look of indolent self-indulgence. His eyes were what everyone remembered. They were the intense, icy, blue of a flawless Ceylonese sapphire. They penetrated your very core.
There was little of his mother, Mary Ann (née Bulmer), in Ernie's looks nor in his childhood, which was ruled by JB's devotion to the noble Victorian icons of duty, family and work. Ernie's first memory of his father was receiving a sound whipping, for JB's dauntingly rigid puritanism would not tolerate human weakness or neglect of duty. Two foes menaced JB's world and Ernie's destiny. The first was the Church of Rome. According to JB the Pope was the Anti-Christ. At the age of ten, Ernie's father conscripted him into the Orange League and the Protestant fight against Roman Catholicism. The second peril in JB's world was carnal desire. He was only twenty when he married the goodly Mary Ann and they had thirteen children — nine survived to adulthood — during their 25-year marriage, but JB lived his life in constant vigilance against women. He considered them temptresses who plotted to injure the spiritual life by stirring men to lust and sin.
Young Ernie was nearly eight in 1876 when his father abandoned the coalmines to become a Methodist minister. JB's flock was scattered between Melbourne and the New South Wales border, and Ernie's childhood unfolded as a nomadic blur of rural settlements, homesteads and schools. Life was slightly more settled after JB left the Methodists and joined the Congregational Union of Victoria. Mary Ann and her young family set up house at Rutherglen on the Murray River, while JB spent much of his time traversing rural Victoria and New South Wales in a rickety horse and buggy, forming temperance societies and ministering to the souls of squatters and selectors.
In nineteenth-century Australia religion was a pervasive presence that was both revered and disdained. The Anglican Church was the dominant faith and the Roman Catholics and Protestants battled it out for a distant second place. Most people pledged allegiance to one creed but the number of genuine faithful was less certain. Not infrequently, religion was merely the reason for Sunday socialising and a family lunch, the expected routine for commemorating births, deaths and marriages, and there the matter ended.
Ernie got his first taste of the contradictory place of religion in the Australian psyche soon after he started school. A parson's son was easy prey for the scorn and contempt of irreverent youths. The experiences during these formative years burned deeply, and even as an old man, Ernie recalled that his:
little life was made miserable by the bigger boys putting me up on a stump and compelling me to preach a sermon before allowing me to proceed home after school hours. The sermon could hardly have been called 'dry' for it consisted mostly of tears, until I was rescued by the girls and by them escorted home. No wonder I grew up with a distaste for the ministry, a distaste which took a very long time to disappear.
JB worked hard to instil his own religious zeal in his eldest son and insisted on taking Ernie and his brother Arthur, younger by two years, on his trips around the countryside to minister to the faithful. It was their job to leap from the buggy and open the massive gates that guarded the properties of JB's rural congregation. For the boys, these expeditions meant weeks of endless plains, scorching summer heat and rain, mud and boggy roads in winter. The experience battered their spirits and bruised their souls. At night, all Ernie could dream of was 'gates and mud'.
JB's ministry lay amidst the sheep and parched, blond grasses of the Riverina plains of southern New South Wales in the upper reaches of the dominion ruled by Ned Kelly and his gang of bushrangers. In 1879, JB was the minister of Jerilderie when the Kelly gang laid siege to the sleepy, rural township. The exploits of the larrikin band were already legendary and wildly romanticised in popular wisdom and the collective imaginings of 11year-old boys like Ernie: skilled horsemen, reckless rebels and courageous champions of the oppressed rural poor. The gang won the instant veneration of Ernie and his mates by taking their schoolmaster hostage. The children of Jerilderie spent their welcome burst of unexpected freedom ogling the gang as they put on a flamboyant show of talented horsemanship. JB did not share the children's admiration. He considered the gang's flagrant disrespect for authority, property and life inexcusable, and gave Ned Kelly a stern dressing-down for his 'unmanly behaviour'. When the outlaw Steve Hart relieved JB of his pocket watch — on loan from the local watch maker — the spirited bush parson strode up to Kelly and demanded its return. The leader of the gang obliged. After all, Kelly said dismissively, the timepiece was a 'bloody turnip'. For a long time afterwards, bushranging was the favourite game in the Jerilderie schoolyard and the role of Ned Kelly was greatly coveted. Ernie never got to play the part of his cherished hero, and was always relegated to the pitiful role of the protesting parson whose second-rate watch was pinched by the daring renegade.
It was in the same year, 1879, that JB announced he would forsake the comforts of the 'civilised' world and become a missionary to Aboriginals. He liked to attribute his evangelical commitment to a formative childhood experience when he got lost and was befriended by local Aboriginals, but a visit to Maloga mission, run by the renowned missionary Daniel Matthews, had fired his humanitarian zeal. Life as a missionary would mean sacrifices: quitting his job as a Congregational minister, forgoing a steady income and taking on the task with £5 in savings and five young children. JB weighed up the implications, searched his soul and decided to forge ahead, oblivious to the hardships and firm in his faith that the Lord would provide. Thus, Warangesda mission was born. It lay on the wide, muddy Murrumbidgee River, surrounded by sprawling sheep stations, eucalypts, kangaroos and endless skies. The local selectors quickly decided that JB was a bit mad: 'he had blacks on the brain'. They shook their heads and mostly kept their distance.
For Ernie, town life had been a distasteful period of disagreeable regulation and mortifying humiliation by schoolyard bullies. Warangesda could not be more different. He loved the space and the isolation. At last he was free. He and his younger brothers, Arthur and John, ran wild and unfettered in the open spaces and filled their days with endless, boyish adventures — exploring the crevices and she-oaks that lined the Murrumbidgee, fishing for Murray cod and shooting kangaroos so that Mary Ann could make kangaroo-tail soup, the mainstay of the family diet.
The fun could not last forever. Within a month, Ernie's father had organised his offspring into a well-disciplined army of labourers. JB was a stern task-master with an insatiable passion for work and complying with his orders was compulsory. The first task was to build a family home. Trees were felled by hand and the children stripped them of bark before the sap dried so they could be placed upright and saplings nailed alongside to make slots for stacking the logs for the walls. A bark slab sufficed as a roof, held down with timber and tied with strips of untanned bullock skin, known as green-hide.
The children replicated this lengthy process for each building on the mission: the school, huts for the married people and a dormitory for the Aboriginal girls. Ernie was still only a child and it was monotonous, backbreaking but gratifying work. This was the labour of men but he found satisfaction in the rewards of hard work well done, in watching a community materialise from the untamed landscape and in the fellowship of working alongside his father.
Mesac Thomas, the first Anglican Bishop of Goulburn, visited Warangesda twelve months after it was established. He was moved by JB's humanitarianism but horrified by the primitive conditions endured by the family and mission residents. If JB could see his way clear to take Holy Orders, Bishop Thomas proposed, he would take Warangesda into the Anglican fold and fund the mission. Poverty and pragmatism ruled. In 1880 and without relinquishing his evangelical zeal, JB was deaconed. He was ordained a priest three years later.
Ernie later described Warangesda as one of the happiest times of his childhood. There was little space for feminine influences and the stoic Mary Ann, shackled by perpetual pregnancy and her precious brood, occupied a separate, domestic realm. Of Ernie's sisters, Amy was seven years old and Ethel merely a newborn when the family moved to Warangesda. Evangeline arrived three years later, in 1881, but the others — Illa and Muriel (Stella) — were born in 1889 and 1890 and never knew the mission. JB shaped this phase of Ernie's life. His was a world built around physical labour and male companionship, and JB leaned heavily on his first born for support and to lead the younger children. Sharing the toil and vision of Warangesda nurtured a new level of intimacy between father and son. The plight of Australia's Indigenous peoples, missionary methods and the need for reform dominated their conversations as they worked together by day. At night, in the haunting silence of the open plains, Ernie listened while JB read chapters of the Bible by the light of burning pine bark.
As Warangesda developed, Ernie's life settled into a predictable rhythm that became his idealised vision for all Aboriginal settlements. The Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children mixed together freely. In the morning they worked around the mission. In the afternoon they attended lessons in the mission school. On weekends they worshipped and played together: hunting, building canoes and sharing meals of witchetty grubs. Ernie was the leader of the little group. In the sheltered isolation of an Aboriginal mission, he at last found a place where he was master of his domain.
His bliss was shattered when an official inspection of Warangesda by the Aborigines Protection Board concluded that all the children were virtually illiterate. With this discovery, JB's denominational switch proved timely. Supported by a scholarship for the sons of poor clergy, Ernie was promptly dispatched to boarding school. He spent 1882 at a preparatory school in Geelong, followed by two years at The King's School, an Anglican boarding school for the sons of graziers housed on a comfortable rural spread at Parramatta on the outskirts of Sydney.
Ernie did not want to go. The bush and Warangesda were the sanctuary that protected him from the unknown, uncontrollable forces of the outside world, and his inadequate, disrupted schooling had left him with little interest or enthusiasm for study. He knew his chances of winning academic accolades were slim, and he did not relish the prospect of failure. In a childish, petulant act of defiance, he blew up his new school hat with a box of Chinese crackers.
Nevertheless, boarding school unfolded new vistas. For the first time Ernie stepped outside JB's orbit and discovered a hopeful alternative to his father's sterile evangelism. The King's School was Anglo-Catholic in tenor and its spiritual life was a vibrant spectacle of liturgy, processions and angelic, surpliced choirs. Regular ritual and methodical progression through the Anglican rites of passage provided Ernie with a predictable, comforting doctrine that liberated him from the tiresome obligation for individual fervour and biblical inspiration demanded by JB's spiritual zeal. Ernie also discovered excitement in the sacrificial role of the priest. Here was God's direct intermediary — an earthly surrogate for the Heavenly Father. Such omnipotent authority was awe inspiring, if somewhat sacrilegious, for a young lad and the puritanism that was his inheritance by birth and habit.
The King's School mimicked the ethos of Britain's great public schools and tutored the sons of the establishment in the sacred canons of Victorian manliness: the importance of character, the virtue of service, the rewards of self-sacrifice and the worship of work, duty and earnestness. The first Headmaster, George Fairfowl Macarthur, was a former military chaplain and established the School Cadet Corps in Australia. This quasi-military organisation was designed to instil discipline, obedience, patriotism and submission to authority. All students at the King's School were cadets. They vowed faithful service to the school, wore a military-style uniform, were tried by courts-martial for breaches of discipline and enjoyed regular sham battles conducted with the passion of a reallife conflict — except that they started with prayers, stopped for midday service and ended with a celebratory display of fireworks.
Anglicanism and British imperialism were inextricably linked in Australia until well into the twentieth century. The Australian Anglican Church was legally tied in doctrine and worship to the Anglican Church in England until 1962, and the first Australianborn Archbishop was not elected until 1966. Any imperial celebration, like Empire Day or a coronation, was accompanied by a state service in an Anglican cathedral. In national crises, church leaders led the nation in vowing unswerving loyalty to their monarch and the Empire. Young Ernie found the union of imperialism and muscular Christianity both enticing and familiar. He had often heard his father proclaim his pride at being a 'son of Britain, that land which ... is ... the very centre of truth and righteousness' and listened to him praise Britain's soldiers going 'forth ... to death for their country's good'. Ernie devoured the culture of The King's School. The marriage of the sword and cross solidified his belief that battle was righteous, God was his ally, and victory was the reward for steadfastness of faith. The school's military flavour captured his imagination and fired his spirit, and later he would resurrect and recast this element in other contexts. He marched proudly with the cadet band during Queen Victoria's birthday parade and cheered wildly with the other boys when New South Wales announced it would send a contingent to fight the war in the Sudan. No-one knew where the Sudan was or why New South Wales needed to send its sons to die in such a remote, God-forsaken place. It did not matter.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Terribly Wild Man by Christine Halse. Copyright © 2002 Christine Halse. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
| Acknowledgements | ix | |
| Introduction | xiii | |
| A note on language | xv | |
| 1 | Mostly of tears | 1 |
| 2 | Clasping their children tightly | 22 |
| 3 | Porridge for every meal | 48 |
| 4 | Horse-thieves and harlots | 74 |
| 5 | When native fruits are ripe | 93 |
| 6 | Dark deeds in a sunny land | 112 |
| 7 | Ghosts crying in the dark | 127 |
| 8 | A complete outsider | 154 |
| 9 | Punishment place | 170 |
| Endnotes | 193 | |
| Sources and a select guide to reading | 205 | |
| Index | 209 |