The Gulf Country: The Story of People and Place in Outback Queensland
208
The Gulf Country: The Story of People and Place in Outback Queensland
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Overview
With its great rivers, grassy plains and mangrove-fringed coastline, Queensland's remote Gulf Country is rich and fertile land. It has long been home to Aboriginal people and, since the 1860s, also to Europeans and to settlers with Chinese, Japanese, and Afghan ancestry.
Richard J. Martin tells the story of a century-and-a-half of exploration and colonization, the growth of cattle and mining industries, and the impact of Christian missionaries and Indigenous activism, through to the present day. He acknowledges the brutal realities of violence and dispossession, as well as the challenges of life on the land in northern Australia.
Drawing on extensive interviews with people across the Gulf Country, this is a lively and colorful account of tight-knit communities, relationships across cultures, and resilience in the face of adversity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781760870997 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE GULF COUNTRY
The Gulf Country is a place where Australia's frontier past still feels alive.
Straddling the border of Queensland and the Northern Territory, on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria, it is one of the most remote parts of the continent, and one of the least well known. Yet the story of the Gulf Country is far from peripheral to Australian history. Indeed, the history of the Gulf Country offers insights that are sometimes missing from accounts of grander settings with a more central role in Australia's national life. In the Gulf Country, we find a local history that speaks to the broader experience of Australian colonisation and postcolonial life, offering a distinct perspective on this central theme of Australian history. It is easy to assume that remote places like the Gulf are essentially 'other': 'simple', 'timeless', 'authentic' and 'traditional'. Phrases like 'the outback' summon their own set of clichés. As the Waanyi Aboriginal author Alexis Wright puts it in her novel Carpentaria (2006), many Australians assume they 'know' the story of places like the Gulf Country 'already'. But as Wright suggests, the story of the Gulf Country is unexpected and surprising for those with the patience to 'wait awhile' and listen.
In Burketown, established in 1865 as the first and only settlement for hundreds of kilometres, you can be standing in the middle of the town's main street and still see more or less everything there is to see in the town. Built for horse teams and camel trains, there is little traffic today, more than 150 years after the town was first declared and its streets laid out around a ramshackle hotel. It is not uncommon to see two drivers travelling in opposite directions pulling up for a lengthy yarn in the middle of the road, leaning out the driver's side windows to pass pieces of gossip along between them as though the Gulf Country's stories were somehow tangible.
For the visitor, Burketown is a quiet old fishing town where nothing much happens apart from the odd fight in the town's sole surviving hotel — much like many other roadside places in Australia. The distinctive features of Australian country fashion are everywhere: Akubra hats and jeans, cotton shirts and cowboy boots, on both men and women, Aboriginal and white, although these old-fashioned clothes are mixed in today with high-visibility jackets worn by the crew that work on the roads, and in the mines. These days it is also common to see polo-shirts made from plastic fibres adorned with pictures of barramundi, and Brahman cattle, or else stamped with the brand of a government department advertising its services.
For visitors, the obvious historical features of Burketown complement the quiet country charm, the laid-back style and long sun-drenched days: the old colonial buildings with their wide verandahs and baking-hot tin roofs; the rust-red remains of old machinery from the early pastoral industry; the monuments to the explorers; the Aboriginal and Australian flags fluttering in the breeze.
It is commonly said by those who visit that 'nothing much has changed' over the years: Burketown is still a quiet place where you can find a private bend in the river to while away the day at the end of a fishing line (although some say the fishing was better in the past).
And when you leave Burketown via one of the snaking roads that cut across the saltpans to head towards the coast, it is easy to imagine that nothing much has changed in millennia. As you move closer to the sea, the grasslands of the Gulf give way to lowland coastal plains fringed by vast saltpans with mangrove forests that trace the lines of fresh water as it runs out across the earth to the sea. Viewed from the air, these sparkling veins of water in the dry saltpans make the earth seem alive, beating like a heart. Even on the ground, the landscape is dynamic and alive, the air vibrating in the heat or filling with dust and sand when the wind kicks up and picks up everything it blows over, until the rains come and inundate the Gulf at the end of every year — rains that turn trickling streams and torpid muddy rivers into wild and raging torrents, bringing floods that creep up around everything until Burketown seems to float in the sea like a ramshackle boat built from weatherboard and corrugated iron. In the rainy season, which drags on for weeks and months sometimes, much of the Gulf Country becomes impassable except by foot or horse — a muddy bog that slowly and irresistibly bakes dry until the ground is again as hard as concrete, and the only water left is found in the few surviving rivers and creeks, or else deep underground, beneath the fish eggs encased in the mud and the turtles that bury themselves in the roots of trees waiting for the whole cycle to start again.
Those who know the country well, though, understand that much of what makes Burketown and the broader Gulf Country so interesting is hidden from the view of tourists and visitors.
This book tells the hidden story the Gulf Country, from 1865 on, presenting local stories about some of the key periods from first contact between Aboriginal people and settlers through to the resolution of many of the native land claims around the region more than 150 years later. It focuses particularly on relationships between Aboriginal people and settlers at Burketown and on the cattle stations around the Gulf Country, describing the violence of early contact as well as the uneasy 'settlement' that arose between Aboriginal people and the newcomers to their lands.
In the history of Burketown and the Gulf Country, many of the key themes of Australian history are evident, particularly the story of colonisation and the relations it established between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, as well as its impact on the making of place.
In Australia, colonisation is often discussed in terms of the impact of colonial violence; this has been so ever since Henry Reynolds' research exposed the extent of the conflict between Aboriginal people and newcomers involved in 'settling' the land for enterprises like pastoralism. Studies by Raymond Evans and Noel Loos, and others, clarified the picture of Queensland's frontier, with Tony Roberts' and Jonathan Richards' more recent research adding further detail.
Like many other parts of Queensland and northern Australia, settlement in the Gulf began with much bloodshed. One story that is widely known and often repeated dates from the height of colonial violence in the region in 1883, when the diarist Emily Caroline Creaghe reported on a set of 40 pairs of human ears nailed round the walls at Lawn Hill Station, 'collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks'. Such accounts, and many others, indicate extraordinary brutality against Aboriginal people on the part of some early settlers in what has come to be known as 'Wild Time' among the Aboriginal people of the Gulf Country.
However, Aboriginal people were far from passive victims of colonial violence, and in emphasising the brutality of early colonial history it is important to simultaneously focus not just on Aboriginal responses on 'the other side of the frontier', but also on everything else that has happened after 'Wild Time' ended and the violence eased. In focusing so strongly and solely on violence, Australian history risks ignoring the richness and complexity of the Indigenous cultural life that survived colonisation and its relations of domination, and came to thrive in regions like the Gulf Country. For some scholars, the whole of Australian history can be understood in terms of 'the logic of elimination', which requires the disappearance of Indigenous people. In presenting the results of my research with the Aboriginal peoples of the Gulf Country — but also the diverse 'non-Indigenous' inhabitants of this region — this book tells a different story.
While the commonplace nationalist myths and counter-myths that dominate understandings of Australia's north feature here, The Gulf Country seeks to create an opening or reopening into the story of Australia from a very different space and time.
Of course, the story of the Gulf Country is partly the story of broader changes taking place across Australia, apart from the violence of colonisation — like labour and development, and relations between women and men. The significance of distance in understanding the unique nature of Australian life is also relevant, as is the impact of World Wars I and II.
The story of Burketown and the Gulf Country is also the story of the contribution of migrants from Asia to Australia's national life. Throughout the nineteenth century, many people of Chinese, Japanese and other ancestries came to the Gulf Country — and other parts of northern Australia — where they mixed with Aboriginal people and other Australians to create a unique social mix. While increasingly discriminatory legislation across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eventually strangled this developing multicultural society, the 'polyethnic' history of the Gulf Country has left its mark on the region today. In the story of some of the more memorable characters from this early period, a different type of Australian history, and possibility, is glimpsed — one that was largely foreclosed by subsequent developments, but came to shape local families' stories in ways that need to be better understood.
In telling the story of the Gulf Country, I draw on my reading and study in anthropology as well as history, utilising anthropology's distinctive methodology of fieldwork and participant observation to complement the results of oral history and archival research. In Australia, anthropology is known particularly for its studies of Aboriginal people, and there is a rich tradition of anthropological research focused on Aboriginal people in the Gulf Country. But anthropology also helps us to understand the lives of other types of people in places like the Gulf Country, including all the non-Aboriginal people who came to make their homes here.
These newcomers were firstly and most significantly pastoralists (or 'ranchers' as they are known in other settings): pastoralism rapidly became the dominant land use across the Gulf Country when the settlers arrived. This book surveys the development of this industry since the explorer Lort John Stokes first described the grasslands around Burketown as the 'Plains of Promise' in 1841 — a description that says as much about colonial ways of seeing the land as it does about the true cattle-raising potential of the region, which settlers soon discovered to their detriment, as most of the early station enterprises failed. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews with contemporary pastoralists, this book recounts the story of the families who came to the Gulf Country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work raising sheep and cattle.
As well as the history of some of the 'white' families who came to the region, this book tells the story of Aboriginal people's contribution to this developing industry. In the published diaries and other historical accounts of the pastoralists, the contribution of Aboriginal people is often understated. While settlers published frequently in colonial newspapers like The Queenslander, few wrote about their relationships with Aboriginal employees, or about the contribution these employees made to their stations — which was considerable. As the historian Dawn May put it, 'many station owners plagued with high production costs and low returns were only able to retain their holdings by using low or unpaid black labour'. This book describes the Aboriginal contribution to the development of pastoralism in the Gulf Country alongside an account of the stations' non-Aboriginal owners, or 'lessees'. This book also considers the changes in the industry over the years since colonial settlement.
As well as pastoralists and Aboriginal people in the Gulf Country, a different kind of 'whitefella' is associated with colonialism: the Christian missionary. In the early 1930s, Christian Brethren missionaries from southern Australia arrived in Burketown and began to preach the gospel. Shunned by local (non-Aboriginal) residents, they concentrated their efforts on the Aboriginal population living in camps around Burketown and on the cattle stations throughout the region. Within a few years, they established Doomadgee Mission on a sandy ridge beside a freshwater swamp on the coast. Over time, they drew many Aboriginal people together to live in this remote mission, which was later re-sited to Bannockburn Station beside the Nicholson River, where the modern town of Doomadgee now lies. Drawing on mission records as well as interviews with senior Aboriginal people at Doomadgee, this book describes the history of the missionaries in the Gulf Country, and their complicated legacy of Aboriginal Christianity.
Alongside pastoralism and Christianity, mining has had a long history in the Gulf Country. Around 100 years after the first small-scale mining occurred at Lawn Hill in the late nineteenth century, the Century Lead and Zinc mine developed as a leading employer of local people and asignificant contributor to the economic development of the region. This book describes the dramatic story of this mine's early history, including the negotiations that eventually secured what was at the time the nation's most progressive agreement between Aboriginal people and developers, which enabled the mine to proceed.
It also describes the history of Aboriginal activism in the Gulf Country, including the inception of the Carpentaria Land Council and other Aboriginal corporations in the 1970s and 1980s. From the early days of Aboriginal advocacy for improved housing and other services, and an end to discriminatory legislation, through to campaigns for land rights and native title, Aboriginal activists from the Gulf Country have led the way for their communities. This book focuses on the Carpentaria Land Council as an example of such activism, tracing its development from a volunteer group of advocates through to its involvement in the successful resolution of the Waanyi, Ganggalida and Garawa native title claims, which have protected Aboriginal rights and interests across much of the Gulf Country (with other claims ongoing at the time of writing). This book also considers the Burketown Indigenous Land Use Agreement and its promise of a new form of coexistence between Aboriginal people and other residents of the Gulf.
Lastly, this book discusses contemporary life, livelihoods and futures in the Gulf Country, detailing environmental management objectives as well as efforts to promote economic development, improve communications and foster positive change for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people across the Gulf Country.
For Ganggalida people living today around Burketown, as well as in other parts of the Gulf Country, the expression ninjinda durlga manifests a powerful statement of continuing attachment and ownership of country, which can be broadly translated into English as 'my place'. In conducting research towards this book, I frequently recorded comments like this from Ganggalida people, as well as from Waanyi and Garawa and other Aboriginal people around the Gulf Country using cognate expressions in their own languages. However, the Gulf Country is not just home to Aboriginal people. For other Australians with non-Aboriginal ancestry, whose 150-year anniversary in the region was reached in 2015, the Gulf Country is also 'home'. As one long-standing resident, the pastoralist Ernie Camp, puts it, 'Here is home ... the Gulf, the deepest root.' While Aboriginal people sometimes contest this position and remain focused on their people's position of lengthier occupation and embodied experiences in the land, this book sets out to deal sensitively with non-Aboriginal connections to place as well as with Aboriginal ones. It seeks to bring the kind of research empathy that is typically focused on Aboriginal lives to the study of the broadest possible sweep of residents across the Gulf Country.
To conclude, the book describes how the mix of contemporary residents living in Burketown and at Gregory and on stations throughout northwest Queensland's Gulf Country came from different cultures to make their homes in this place. Out of the complex and sometimes vexed history of relationships between people of many different backgrounds, a vibrant and interesting community has developed here. As Ganggalida man Terrence Taylor stated in a quote that stands as an epigraph for this book:
We've got to know our history ... and by knowing that to go forward, we can go forward without making the mistakes of yesteryear ... the new generation will benefit from what we're doing here by preserving our history ... the new generation is starting to come together, black and white.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Gulf Country"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Richard J. Martin.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface and acknowledgements vii
A note on the images xiii
Map of the Gulf Country xiv
Chapter 1 The Gulf Country l
Chapter 2 Wild Time 11
The first explorers 12
The establishment of Burketown 15
Drinking and dying on the Australian frontier 17
Settlement and abandonment 22
The arrival of the Native Police and the impact of violence on Aboriginal people in Wild Time 25
Chapter 3 The Plains of Promise 33
The early stations 34
Aboriginal involvement in the pastoral industry in the early days 45
Chapter 4 Gulf stations in the twentieth century 49
Early developments in the pastoral industry 51
Subdivisions and consolidations 52
From sheep to cattle 55
The arrival of motor vehicles 58
Work life on the stations 60
Mustering and branding 61
Droving 63
Gardening and cooking 67
Social life 69
Aboriginal involvement in the pastoral industry in the early twentieth century 72
Chapter 5 Early days in Burketown 79
Burketown in the early twentieth century 80
Aboriginal settlements around Burketown 90
The arrival of the missionaries 94
Burketown in decline 97
Back to Burketown 101
Chapter 6 Chinese history in the Gulf Country 107
The long walk 110
Sam Ah Bow 111
Willie Sou Kee 112
Yuen Kim Hook 115
Indigenous identity and mixed ancestry in the Gulf Country 116
Chapter 7 The end of an era in the pastoral industry 121
From Shorthorn to Brahman 123
From droving teams to road trains 126
From leg roping in mobile mustering camps to helicopters and the cradle 128
From call signs to satellite phones 129
From family-owned properties to financial assets 131
The end of Aboriginal employment on the stations 135
Chapter 8 Equal rights, mining and the campaign for native title 139
Land rights and contests over bush resources 141
Native title and the Century Mine 143
Chapter 9 Nijinda durlga-My Country 159
The resolution of native land claims 161
Managing Country 166
Conflict and coexistence 169
Further reading about the Gulf Country 175
Endnotes 177
Index 191