The Legacy of Douglas Grant: A Notable Aborigine in War and Peace

By John Ramsland

In The Legacy of Douglas Grant, John Ramsland vividly re-creates the famous Aborigine's life - now lost in the mists of history. Douglas was born to Indigenous parents and, as an infant, was the sole survivor of a cruel massacre in northern Queensland. As an adult, he was a charismatic speaker on Aboriginal rights, but spoke with a distinct Scottish burr. Why was this so?
He was rescued by a kindly Scottish immigrant and brought up and well educated in the Scottish way in Sydney’s leafy suburb of Annandale.
Highly successful at school, he became a leading engineering draftsman at Mort's Dock Company in Balmain and, later, a woolclasser at "Belltrees" station near Scone in the Hunter Valley of NSW.
With friends from "Belltrees", he joined the 1st AIF. His dangerous encounters on the Western Front and as a prisoner-of-war in Germany are pieced together by the author from many fragments.
Douglas bravely faced unpleasant racism in post-war Australia, but never lost his keen sense of humour and scholarly interests.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brolga Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780648697022

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Copyright © 2019 John Ramsland

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

John Ramsland, author.

ISBN 9780987639080 (paperback)

ISBN 9780648697022 (eBook)

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Printed in Australia

Cover design by WorkingType Studio

Cover Photo: Douglas Grant wearing British Red Cross uniform, Half Moon Concentration Camp, Museum Europäischer Kulturen, Berlin (photographed by Otto Stiehl 1918, coloured by Benjamin Thomas) Typesetting by Elly Cridland

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John Ramsland OAM is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle NSW. Born in Manly NSW in 1942, he is the author of 24 non-fiction books and about 130 conference papers, articles, book chapters and reviews on a wide variety of historical subjects, including the Aboriginal experience, Australian childhood, World War I and its aftermath, surfing beach culture and colonial and post colonial child-saving institutions.

In recent years he has concentrated on biographical studies of men at war. His wife Dr Marie Ramsland is his supportive editor and research assistant. At present, he is working on another study of WWI entitled Rendezvous with Death, Anzac Tales of the Great War, 1914-1918.

Books by John Ramsland

with Brolga Publishing

Remembering Aboriginal Heroes,

Struggle, Identity and the Media

(with Christopher Mooney), 2006; 2012

Brave and Bold.

Manly Village Public School, 1858-2008, 2008

The Rainbow Beach Man.

The Life and Times of Les Ridgeway, Worimi Elder, 2009

Cook’s Hill Life Saving & Surf Club.

The First Hundred Years, 2011

From Antarctica to the Gold Rushes.

in the wake of the Erebus, 2011

Venturing into No Man’s Land.

The Charmed Life of Joseph Maxwell VC

World War I Hero, 2012

The Other Side of No Man’s Land.

Arthur Wheen World War I Hero, 2015

Flying into Danger.

The story of Paul Brickhill RAAF, 2017

To Marie

with love

Contents

Foreword

1. A Scottish Sojourn

2. Finding Poppin Jerri

3. Nurturer and the Nurtured

4. Estaminet St Georges

5. The Engraved Sovereign

6. Bullecourt 1

7. Prisoner-of-War

8. Recognition behind barbed wire

9. Troubled 1920s

10. Freedom of the Wallaby?

11. Sanctuary! Sanctuary!

12. Alone at Journey’s End

Coda

Appendices

Bibliography & References

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Douglas Grant, creator of the Memorial, Callan Park

Foreword

You quite understand me

Douglas Grant had a Scottish name and yet was totally Aboriginal. Many historical witnesses have confessed in newspapers, magazines and even books to have known him from the Great War and to have found him a charismatic personality and to have liked his gracefulness, humour and generosity of spirit in difficult circumstances. No one had a harsh word to say against him. He was viewed as a brilliant conversationalist, a man who could engage others, entertain and joke with them. He was, in fact, a great storyteller and a witty individual.

From his earliest days he was a notable Aborigine, well-liked by everyone, even as a child in family circles and at school. I have sought to answer how and why he became famous in Australian historiography.

Historical research on the record – for example the fine work of Tony Griffiths (Douglas Grant: that Black Digger from the Scottish Mob, 2014) – reveals in outline important historical events during his life. Griffiths stuck meticulously to the facts in his short biography and soon discovered, during his research and scholarship, anomalies in what remained of the published historical record. This is true, after all, of most celebrities or famous people. Articles on the life of Douglas Grant in newspapers, magazines and academic publications contradicted one another. Primary source documentation was sparse and oblique, sometimes missing, destroyed or misplaced and not extant to the scholar. I am much in debt to Tony Griffiths’ assiduous uncover of mistruths and inaccuracies that seem part-and-parcel of a celebrated figure such as Grant, from infancy with the popular characterisation of ‘the little dark boy’, or ‘dark toddler’, who survived the massacre of his rainforest native people of north-eastern Queensland in the second half of the nineteenth century under the Queensland government’s so-called ‘dispersal’ policy on the frontier.

Especially in the jagged edges of stubborn silence, one can find in the gaps that something more creative and convincing can be done to substitute actuality’s most inconvenient randomness in the lack of reliable sources in putting a narrative together.

My intention in writing a life study of Douglas Grant, given the paucity of the more personal sources, is to fill the historical lacunae with a balanced form of speculation that draws carefully and exclusively from relevant background historical settings or contexts so as to create his inner and outer psychic story and provide more than a mere summary outline. The full story thus needs to be revealed. The creation of the absent inner life of the man requires this form of measured speculation.

As a notable Australian Aborigine of his time, Douglas Grant received a great deal of comment in newspapers and other media across the nation. A good deal of it carried an ambiguous message to readers that reflected Australian society’s attitudes, or even racial views towards its Indigenous population at large, while purporting to make an accurate appraisal of Grant’s life and death.

A number of questions are asked in this study of a more specific nature. Was he among the first Aborigines to become nationally famous during World War I, particularly at the height of the conflict in 1917? Did he have to go through too much as a prisoner-of-war in Germany? Did he suffer from shellshock or some similar terrible trauma because of war? In what ways was he maltreated in the post-World War I period in Australia? How did he cope? Was his will broken on the wheel? What was the cause of his battle with the bottle? Why was he placed in Callan Park Mental Hospital as a repatriation patient in the early 1930s? Had he mentally and metaphorically ridden away from the battlefield after the war? How was his great potential thwarted? Was there a price to be paid for fame?

In a few newspaper reports Douglas Grant was allowed to speak for himself. Such was the case on 22 March 1918 in an article, ‘Pte Douglas Grant. Appreciation of the Red Cross’, that appeared in the Lithgow Mercury at a time when he was still a POW in Germany.

The paper, who generally recognised Grant as a local war hero, referred to the ‘splendid photo’ that appeared in the previous week’s Sydney Mail of ‘the aboriginal soldier Douglas Grant, the adopted son of Mr Robert Grant of Sydney, who is the brother of Mr Richard Grant of Spooner street Lithgow’. So the newspaper gave a reasonably accurate account, glancing at the Aboriginal man’s Scottish immigrant family background and personal links with the Lithgow scene, while pointing out to readers – again accurately – that Douglas ‘is a native of Northern Queensland and is now about 30 years of age’. The report goes on as accurately:

Nearly three years ago [in 1916] he enlisted and spent some days in Lithgow prior to going properly to camp. Eventually Pte Grant went to the front and in April 1917, while doing his bit was taken prisoner of war [during the First Battle of Bullecourt] by the Germans at Riencourt [near Bullecourt], and is still in a prisoner of war camp at Wittenberg [doing slave labour in the coal mines]. With the photo sent to his foster [adoptive] father, the soldier enclosed a note, in which he says [in his own voice]: ‘I am well, and as comfortable as circumstances will permit. I am working every day [in the coal mines], which helps to pass the time away. I often long for home, and hope to be back soon. Do not worry. I am quite fit. The Australian Red Cross sends me three packets of groceries a fortnight. These contain oatmeal, rice, bacon, cheese, butter, cocoa, coffee, tea, cigarettes, tobacco, and other articles. I also get two loaves of bread and a tin of biscuits a week from the Red Cross in Switzerland. I have good boots, shoes, slippers, socks, singlets, shirts, and a prison uniform. I had this photo taken and am sending you one: by it you will see I am looking well. The man alongside me is a Russian interpreter, he is very kind to me. I get letters and they do cheer me up so. You really cannot understand what happiness the receipt of letters affords me’.

Here Douglas was able to speak about himself in his own handwriting as it was in its letter form originally before it was published in the Sydney Mail.

What does it reveal? It demonstrates his generosity of spirit for others, particularly his anxious family back on the home front, his need for close friendship as well as his capacity for friendship with a variety of people. All this is shown in a subtle and mature writing style of a particularly fine quality, revealing he was an exquisite calligrapher.

I first came across Douglas Grant while researching and preparing my co-authored book with Christopher Mooney Remembering Aboriginal Heroes. Struggle, Identity and the Media (2006). Douglas fitted the bill on all three counts as his life had elements of struggle to achieve his goals and his true identity and he received regular attention in the media. From 1917, and even earlier, he had become a public figure in the press because of the war and remained so until his death in late 1951 – and even afterwards for a time. Celebrity is very fickle at times and sometimes the once-famous are eventually forgotten shadowy ghosts of what they actually were. Such was the case of Douglas Grant.

The first source about him that I discovered was an extended essay in the Sydney Mail by PSA, ‘A Plea for the Australian Aborigine’ (11 July 1917). I have never uncovered who PSA was. The essay dealt to a good extent with the lives of David Unaipon and Douglas. It is clear to me now that the accompanying photograph of Grant since he is in his sergeant’s uniform could have only been provided by his father Robert to the Sydney Mail.

This photo would have been taken while he was on his leave in Lithgow. Soon after, he was demoted to private – no reason was given – and transferred from the 34th Battalion to the 13th Battalion. In this fleshed-out biography I have regarded Grant’s transfer in the AIF to be an important turning point in this Aboriginal icon’s life and a great disappointment to him.

What I wrote about his being a precursor for other Aboriginal public figures in the media of the 1950s still stands in my thinking today. He was a war hero who had been adopted at an early age by a white Scottish Presbyterian migrant family. By 1917 this thirty-one-year-old, who was a fully trained draftsman, taxidermist and calligrapher, was a widely regarded man of many talents and accomplishments, all achieved within the context of a white man’s society. He even played the bagpipes ‘with skill and precision’ and knew Scottish Gaelic. He was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment who had lost his native culture.

In early childhood he had lost his parents and his tribal culture through no fault of his own. I wrote of his formal adoption in Sydney by Robert and Elizabeth Grant and of his schooling in Lithgow and Annandale. What I did not refer to, however, was the intention of PSA’s essay : the core argument being that Aboriginal children would be better off if they were removed entirely from their traditional culture and educated, Christianised and socialised instead in white European culture and civilisation.

Smith’s Weekly was more interested in satirising Grant for humorous purposes that had racist undertones. As a postscript, Crow of Townsville submitted on 7 December 1940: ‘He was the hardest case and the whitest man that ever lived under a black skin’. The heading given by the newspaper was Sunburnt that sought to depict Grant’s particular brand of impish humour. But there is some mockery to the man’s race through it all:

Douglas Grant as an aboriginal member of the AIF had a keen sense of humour. He has been reared by a Scottish couple and could speak broad Scotch as well as any porridge addict.

When on leave in Scotland he visited the village from which his foster parents hailed. One of the lasses asked him where he learnt to speak Scottish. He replied that he learned it before he left Scotland.

‘But’, said she, ‘you were not born in Scotland’. He assured her he was.

In reply to her query as to how he came to be black, he replied: ‘When I was a small boy I fell asleep in the hot Queensland sun for a couple of hours and when I woke up I was as black as a nigger and I never became white again’.

I wonder where Douglas is now.

The issue of colour is emphasised in humorous terms and Douglas is considered an object – of humour. Black ‘as a nigger’ expressed a racist attitude that was widespread in Australia. It is a typical example that prevailed in Australian newspapers for three or more decades. While it has to be admitted that Douglas told humorous stories about himself of a similar nature, it was to protect himself in an unpleasant arena in conversation and gossip.

Back in 1916 the Lithgow Mercury (28 April) was much more sympathetic even though it produced an unfortunate title, again emphasising colour, to its lengthy article on Grant’s life story: ‘Sergt. Douglas Grant. Dark Skin and White Heart’.

This article emphasises the local Scottish Grant families of Lithgow and particularly honours Robert as Douglas’ adoptive father. It also provides useful historical information about the family who hailed from Scotland: Robert arrived forty-one years ago (in about 1878) and worked for Brown’s colliery near Eskbank railway station which was long since shut down. Later he worked in the Lithgow colliery.

While there he saw an advertisement in a Sydney paper calling for volunteers to go to the north of Queensland to help gather rare species for the Australian Museum authorities. His then childless wife chose to travel with him. And the rest was history – as they say.

Robert Grant worked his way up in the public service to become chief taxidermist in the Australian Museum’s workshop. The article then proceeds to tell in some detail Douglas’ life story from his rescue by Robert in the Bellenden Ker range about a hundred miles north-west of Cairns. When this occurred the Australian Museum’s expedition had been working there for about six months. The Mercury called the massacre merely a ‘tribal dispute’ in the commonplace euphemistic manner of the day. Local massacres of Aboriginal clans were commonly swept under the carpet in the mass media, even in twentieth-century Australia.

Douglas was at first placed with his grandparents in Lithgow where ‘he manifested a taste for drawing and often delineated subjects on the ground or in the sand’. He was then brought up in Annandale with his adoptive parents. Annandale is occasionally referred to as a Scottish diaspora suburb because it was settled at the time by a fairly large number of Scottish migrants as free settlers. They created a Scottish cultural environment in the place.

When Douglas reached adolescence and ‘early manhood’, ‘a gentleman connected with Mort’s Dock Co took a fancy to him and secured him employment in the draftsmen’s department at the work’. Here he remained for ten years and ‘was a general favourite’.

The narrative continues: to broaden his experience he ‘accepted an appointment at Belltrees, the homestead property of Mr HL White, Scone where he had been for two years prior to enlisting’, learning ‘the art of wool-classing’ and ‘the higher practical branches of station management’.

When he volunteered for active service, the Mercury told its readers, he showed ‘he had as much British pluck and loyalty as the others [the white men] who volunteered’. The Empire was calling and he had answered – he was declared ‘white and British’.

Later, the press Douglas received was at times much less glowing, as in ‘A Hielan Abo’ (Western Champion, Barcaldine, Queensland, 13 April 1929). According to this piece of journalism he was adopted by the Grant family ‘when a piccaninny, [they] educated him and brought him up as a Presbyterian’. He was depicted as ‘Highly intellectual’ (as though this was the worst thing you could be in ordinary Australian society) and had written many articles on the Aborigines (an exaggeration) and also, almost as an afterthought, had ‘fought through the Great War’.

In a visit to Scotland after the war, the readers are told, ‘he surprised the natives with a pure Doric language’. As to how he achieved ‘such a grip on the Scottish dialect, he replied:

… that he had had it from birth.

‘But you’re not Scotch’, the questioner declared. ‘Of course, I am’, facetiously remarked Douglas. ‘I’m not really black: the sun’s so dashed hot in Australia it would burn anybody’.

‘Doug’, the article claimed accurately enough, was brought up in a ‘Scottish atmosphere’ within his family and when excited about anything, lapses into the language of the folk ‘across the border’.

When Douglas was marched through Germany as a prisoner-of-war, it was claimed: ‘the frauleins wet their fingers and rubbed them down his face thinking he was camouflaged’. Thus ended the article after depicting Douglas as a mere curio to readers.

Even worse was to come in June 1931 with a vicious racist page of eugenics in Smith’s Weekly: ‘The End of a Human Experiment. Bitter Tragedy of Douglas Grant. Most Human Episode in Our History’ (6 June). Had Douglas read it, and it is probable he had, he would surely have been shattered by its anti-Aboriginal sentiments.

The article takes a Social Darwinian doctrine and applies it:

For Douglas Grant represents Australia’s greatest contributor to the science of anthropology. He is the focus of the most human Scientific Episode in Australian history – the living embodiment of an attempt to blend humanity as it was in the beginning – and moreover a man whose career, including his adventures as a Digger is remarkable in its novelty.

The racist cartoon by the well-known cartoonist Stan Cross carries the caption ‘Out of the darkness into the Hall of the White Man’. Eight faces with monkey-like features appear in the darkness haunting the figure of a slim young Aboriginal man in an appropriate loin cloth in the forefront of the cartoon with outstretched arms, pleading, while his dark shadow falls behind him symbolically on the white ground. ‘Equal to Any White Man’ is a slogan boxed in the centre of the article. ‘On the Pig’s back’ is another slogan boxed in in the same manner. Elsewhere is the highlighted statement ‘Black of Body But White of Head. He Added an Amazing Chapter to Science’. The gist of it all is blatantly obvious. And yet, towards Grant himself the article is reasonably sympathetic.

Another article entitled ‘A Dark Australian Reared A White’ in the Scone Advocate allowed Grant to speak for himself (18 April 1941). Ironically, his health by this time was rapidly deteriorating.

His hope and aim:

is that Australian Aborigines be given the full rights of citizenship. Surely after 150 years the Government can see its way clear to uplift and emancipate the Australian Aborigines… They [the politicians] need someone to make them more aborigine-conscious, to remind them of their obligations.

He was able to point out that his boyhood was a happy one in Lithgow and Annandale Superior Public School, ‘where the children of his generation were ‘more congenial and homely than the children of today’ and accepted him ‘without any qualms’. They never left him out of anything. If there was a party ‘I was always taken along’. And he finally said a phrase he frequently used: ‘You quite understand me’. Earlier in the interview Grant could not resist telling a humorous story from his past when he was with the 1st AIF on leave:

Once in London a portly visitor to a soldiers’ reading room went up to the ‘dark chap’ and asked: ‘You readee paper? Very goodee eh?’

Doug Grant nonplussed for a moment answered: ‘If you wish to speak to me, would you please use proper English so that I can understand you?’

The Scone reporter patronisingly opined that Grant was a ‘living example of what can be done with the reasonably intelligent aborigine …’. Such an opinion was frequently echoed across the Australian continent in many other biographical articles in newspapers and magazines about the notable and famed Aborigine, Douglas Grant, formerly Poppin Jerri.

At his release from the Half-Moon Concentration Camp in Germany at the end of World War I, as an intelligent man now in his mid-thirties, he would have appreciated the printed ‘A Parting Word’ from his German Commandant with whom he was on friendly terms. It had a mark of authenticity. He kept the written statement and much later provided it for Reveille magazine.

Gentlemen – The war is over. A little while and you will see your native land again, your home, your friends. You will once more take up your accustomed work.

The fortunes of war brought you as prisoners into our hands. You were freed, even against your will, from fighting, from danger, from death, but the joys of peace could not be yours, for there was no peace. Now peace is coming, and peace means liberty. When you are already re-united to your families, thousands of our countrymen will still be pining in far-off prison camps, with hearts as hungry as yours for home.

You have suffered in confinement – as who would not. It is the fate of every prisoner in every prison camp in the world to eat his heart out … There are many discomforts, irritations, misunderstandings.

Douglas was to feel these words deeply over many tribulations throughout his subsequent life.

Under the heading ‘A Notable Aboriginal’, the Australian Museum Magazine (Vol. X, No 9, 1952) celebrated Douglas Grant’s life and passing as ‘an inmate’ of the War Veterans’ Home on Bare Island, La Perouse south of the city of Sydney, who they pointed out had died on 4 December 1951, his age uncertain. They claimed that he was an ‘interesting example of the effect of environment and assimilation into the white community’. The Museum considered itself directly interested in him because of their valued employee his father Robert Grant. They then recounted the rescue of the infant Douglas by the Grant couple who came upon the ‘tribal clash’ by accident and found him ‘abandoned’ as ‘in all probability his parents had joined their forebears – for Robert Grant’s account indicated that the engagement had been fierce’. We are told that the ‘Grants took him up, he was little more than a toddler, and reared him as carefully as if he had been their own child’. Later they had a son and ‘the boys were as brothers’.

They claimed that Douglas was particularly intelligent and educated at Annandale Superior Public School ‘where he easily held his own with other scholars frequently heading his class’. Then the article rehearses his training at Mort’s Dock as ‘an engineering draftsman’ – a profession, they wrongly claimed, he also followed at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory.

They also told of his war experiences in the 1914-1918 war in the 13th Battalion; his capture and placement in a camp for Ghurkha prisoners. Here Douglas re-met Professor Hermann Klaatsch, an eminent anthropologist he had met in Sydney in the Museum in 1905. According to the magazine, this proved ‘fortunate’ for his representations with German authorities, it is believed. Grant was transferred to another camp with Australians ‘with whom he had a common interest’. We are told that when he returned to Australia, ‘he resumed his calling’, but at times followed other pursuits. They then mentioned that ‘he conducted the returned soldiers’ session on radio station 2LT Lithgow’.

The Australian Museum’s eulogy of Douglas Grant ended simply:

He was not only a skilled draftsman. He was an excellent penman, a conversationalist with a keen sense of humour. Well informed and well read, and friends of a lighter hue appreciated his company.

This is a modest, but true elegy for Douglas Grant, accepting it to be akin to the funeral oration that Douglas did not receive at his burial, in other words, a sincere song of praise, it is judiciously based on the legend of the man. But this author is interested in explaining as much as possible of what is beyond the legend that remains to be uncovered, especially the inner being lying somewhere in the shadows of a very public persona.

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Annandale Scottish Pipe Band

A Scottish sojourn

In late December 1918, Douglas Grant found himself sitting on a seat of an isolated, wind-swept branch-line railway station five miles from Edinburgh.

A solitary Australian soldier in the bleak landscape – to all appearances in ill-fitting, dust-covered khaki. His