O'Leary of the Underworld: The Untold Story of the Forrest River Massacre

By Kate Auty

A powerful investigation that reveals the deep injustices inflicted on Aboriginal people in the Kimberley in the 1920s

In June 1926, a posse of police officers and white civilians murdered at least twenty Aboriginal people near the Forrest River Mission in the Kimberley. After the massacre, a conspiracy of silence descended. Witnesses vanished. Charges against two of the officers were dropped for insufficient evidence.

One of the massacre's perpetrators was Bernard O'Leary, a former soldier whose land holding was known as 'the underworld'. At the 1927 royal commission into the killings, O'Leary was portrayed by his lawyer as a simple honest bushman who had been framed. In this powerful account, Kate Auty argues that O'Leary was in fact 'vicious, brazen and a bullshitter', with 'a propensity for brutality'. Although never charged, he played a leading role in the murders, and his duplicitous testimony thwarted the commission's work.

In electric prose, Auty depicts O'Leary as a merciless killer, while the apparatus that concealed his crimes is portrayed with great realism and clarity. Driven by both forensic and moral judgement, the book exposes the injustices embedded in Australian settlement history, and the culture of denial that has prevented truth-telling in this country.

‘A major contribution to the study of frontier massacres in Australia’ —Lyndall Ryan

‘Powerful and passionate ... a timely reminder that our colonial past should not be a foreign country: it's our place, and we all need to know the awfulness of what happened here.’ —Patrick Dodson

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781743822807

Kate Auty

Professor Kate Auty is a Vice Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne and Chair of Victoria's Environment Protection Authority. She has formerly held appointments as a magistrate in Victoria and in the goldfields and western desert of Western Australia, establishing Aboriginal sentencing courts in consultation with Aboriginal people.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR O’LEARY OF THE UNDERWORLD

‘Auty has probed deep into the archives to deliver a chilling profile of a frontier killer who, with fellow World War I cavalrymen, slaughtered an unknown multitude of Aboriginal people in the Kimberley, less than a century ago. Her meticulous research also reveals how the cynical response of the Western Australia government . . . was calculated to bury the truth and deny justice to Aboriginal people.’

—PATRICK DODSON

‘In this riveting account . . . Kate Auty deploys her extensive knowledge of the Kimberley region to brilliantly dissect the evidence of the key perpetrator, Patrick Bernard O’Leary, who vehemently denied his involvement. A major contribution to the study of frontier massacres in Australia.’

—LYNDALL RYAN

‘Auty has chased down the sort of detail that scaffolds the dark side of the pioneering narrative we are only just learning to hear. While his name and his war record were fictions, Patrick O’Leary’s involvement in the murder of Aboriginal people in the east Kimberley was fact. O’Leary of the Underworld tells the story of a time and place in which O’Leary and his ilk were allowed to flourish, and is a forensically researched document of the persistence of frontier violence into the twentieth century.’

—KIM MAHOOD

‘Through research and writing that pulls no punches – and a compelling, often confronting storytelling style – Auty restores respect and humanity to those who deserved it, while tearing apart those who did not. A truly powerful book for all times.’

—SANDY TOUSSAINT

‘For many Australians, the Kimberley region is the stuff of touristic dreams. But this stunning landscape witnessed horrors of violence, death and murder at an unimaginable scale . . . Auty’s [book] delivers us a devastating narrative of events and characters that have until now evaded justice. With the forensic eye of a legal scholar, she dissects the evidence and testimony of O’Leary and the others involved and reveals the lies, deceptions and subterfuge that ensured the guilty went unpunished. This is a book for all Australians, a book we need, a book we must read, in all its uncomfortable detail.’

—LYNETTE RUSSELL

‘Forensically researched and brilliantly and engagingly written, it is likely the authoritative account of the characters in the notorious 1926 Forrest River Massacre.’

—CHRIS OWEN

Published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc.

22–24 Northumberland Street

Collingwood VIC 3066, Australia

[e-mail]

www.blackincbooks.com

www.latrobeuniversitypress.com.au

La Trobe University plays an integral role in Australia’s public intellectual life, and is recognised globally for its research excellence and commitment to ideas and debate. La Trobe University Press publishes books of high intellectual quality, aimed at general readers. Titles range across the humanities and sciences, and are written by distinguished and innovative scholars. La Trobe University Press books are produced in conjunction with Black Inc., an independent Australian publishing house. The members of the LTUP Editorial Board are Vice-Chancellor’s Fellows Emeritus Professor Robert Manne and Dr Elizabeth Finkel, and Morry Schwartz and Chris Feik of Black Inc.

Copyright © Kate Auty 2023

Kate Auty asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

9781760643980 (paperback)

9781743822807 (ebook)

Cover design by Tristan Main

Text design and typesetting by Typography Studio

Cover image by Dr John Boulton AM, 2010

Maps by Alan Laver

La Trobe University Press acknowledges the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia as the first inhabitants of the nation and the traditional custodians of the lands on which we work. We pay respects to their Elders past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this book contains images and names of people who have passed away.

This book is dedicated to Warrawalla Marga, the old blind woman who was walked to her death with a chain around her neck by O’Leary and others in June 1926. She and all the others are not forgotten.

CONTENTS

Names

Introduction – The Scaffold of Lies

PART I – THE PUZZLE

1. O’Leary of the ‘Underworld’

2. The Brute Is Always with Us

3. Tracking the Truth

4. The Royal Commission

5. Inspector Douglas: When Is an Investigation Not an Investigation?

6. O’Leary the Malignancy

7. Backstage and Front of House: Bullshit to Baffle Brains

PART II – PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

8. The Veneer Starts to Crack

9. Bad Is Bred in the Bone

10. The Rot Takes Root

11. The Hidden Secret

12. Mayhem, Murder and More Lies

13. Sweating the War Service System

PART III – PULLING THE PIECES APART

14. Lumbia: Ground-truthing the Struggle That Started It All

15. Front-ending the Backstory

* * *

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Image Credits

Index

NAMES

The dead are many – list we forget

1922: many whose names remain unrecorded

1926: primary victims: Goolay, Yowan, Warrawalla Marga, Delagai, Damada, three men called Boondung, Gumbool, Newringie, Bungomerrie, Juberoo, Old Kangooloo, Wearie, Jumbarie, Mungaro, Mungungoo, Jaymund, Biame, Doomaranga, Ayedemay, Umbilijie, Ninuoo, Jibarie

1926: secondary victims: Tommy Deward and Goolool

1945: tertiary victim: King River/Walmajarri

The survivor

1926, 1945: Lumbia

‘The Ragged Thirteen’¹ – gangs of white men beyond the law – Kimberley cohorts

1922: the thirteen who hunted Harry Annear’s killers included unnamed whites and trackers, led by volunteer Patrick Bernard O’Leary and Constable Cooney

1926: hunting Frederick William Hay’s killers, the thirteen included:

white volunteers – special constables Barney (Patrick Bernard) O’Leary and Richard Jolly; Leo Overheu (Nulla Nulla Station owner), Daniel Murnane (veterinary surgeon for the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR))

constables James St Jack and Denis Regan

co-opted and employed trackers Jim McDonald (Mulga Jim),² Windie Joe, Sulieman (Nimbeeairee)³, Frank Comberoo and Charlie

horse tailer Jacob and female camp follower Lyddie/Goolara

The investigators (form your own view as to their bona fides and whether they warrant that title)

1922: Police Inspector Spedding-Smith, Sergeant (later Inspector) Douglas

1926–27: Detective Manning (originally from the eastern states), Police Inspector (and later Police Commissioner) Douglas, Sergeant Buckland, Constable Donegan

1945: Wyndham police

The other side of the river – beyond ‘the pale’

1926: Aboriginal men who lived at the mission: Herbert, Aldoa, Bargadenda, Lamondilla, Waybram, Wunmurra

Tracker attached to the Department of Native Affairs, Frank Wallace

Mission managers Reverend Ernest Gribble, Jack Gribble (son of Ernest), Aboriginal Deacon James Noble (Queenslander, tracker and witness), Angelina Noble (Queenslander and wife of James Noble, interpreter)

Resident Medical Officer (Wyndham), Dr Arthur Adams

The 1927 royal commission

Commissioner, chief magistrate and lawyer George Wood (originally from New Zealand and Victoria)

Barrister for the punitive party, Walter Nairn (later federal parliamentarian and Speaker of the House of Representatives)

Lawyer who refused the brief for the Forrest River Mission, Sir Walter James

Representative for the WA police, Police Inspector Douglas (also a witness)

Representative for the Aborigines Department, Inspector of Aborigines E.C. Mitchell (former farmer) and also a witness

Representative for the Australian Board of Missions, Reverend Ernest Gribble (also a witness)

INTRODUCTION

THE SCAFFOLD OF LIES

Almost a hundred years have passed since a white man with narrow, buried eyes and sour, ribbon-thin lips stepped into the witness box in Wyndham in north-east Western Australia, to give evidence about the mass murder of Aboriginal people in the Forrest River watershed.

Probably accentuating a ‘war injury’ to his right big toe, he had sauntered to the front of the witness box and swore his name was Patrick Bernard O’Leary. It was just one of many lies he told in his truncated testimony that morning.

This book tells the story of that man and the lies that he and others told about the Forrest River murders in 1926. It is a tortuous tale, but it has intense contemporary relevance as we work on truth-telling and charting the route to Indigenous constitutional recognition.

If we hang O’Leary’s lies off a scaffold, it is this. In June 1926 Constable James St Jack and Leo Overheu, a World War I soldier settler, ‘dispersed’ a large ceremonial meeting of Aboriginal people near Nulla Nulla Station. Returning to the station, their sense of achievement was dashed when they found Overheu’s station-owner partner, Frederick William Hay, dead. And naked. A post-mortem was conducted in the field by Wyndham’s resident doctor. Hay had been speared. His revolver, with one expended chamber, and a broken stockwhip were found near the body. ‘Reinforcements’ gathered in town. The mood was frenzied. Civilian volunteer Daniel Murnane and quasi-police ‘special constables’ Barney O’Leary and Richard Jolly, ‘led’ by Constable Denis Regan, got on the road with the express intention of dealing ‘drastically’ with Hay’s killers. A number of Aboriginal trackers, including a man called Sulieman, were co-opted.

Halfway through the hunt, Murnane left the pack. Returning to Wyndham, he reported to Sergeant Buckland and Police Inspector Douglas. Buckland was instructed by Douglas to disband the volunteers. He took a launch out to the Forrest River Mission and directed O’Leary, Overheu and Jolly to stand down. Perhaps they did as they were told. While the police party was at the mission, the Reverend Ernest Gribble told them the name of the man they were seeking. He also told them where they could find him. St Jack and Regan were instructed to head north and arrest the man, called Lumbia.

Within days, rumours of the mass murder of Aboriginal women and men began circulating in Wyndham, at the mission and along the road.

Investigations over the next few months, based on tracking, turned up mounds of burnt bone, many burnt teeth, a few charred buttons and two wooden pokers spread across a number of the police camps set up to find Hay’s killer. The tracks of some Aboriginal women led to a charred tree stump. Their tracks did not lead away.

Inspector Douglas was guided around all but the last of the police camps by Sulieman. Douglas concluded and reported that four men, three women and nine other people were held at police camps and that they later perished at places called Gotegotemerrie and Mowerie and in a ravine west of Mowerie. Douglas did not visit St Jack and Regan’s last camp at Dala.

However, Royal Commissioner George Wood, appointed in 1927 to investigate the murders, did visit Dala. He rejected police claims that no people were brought into the camp. He found that two women and two men were murdered there and that their bodies were incinerated.

The 1927 royal commission shadowed Douglas’s 1926 investigation. Wood concluded that every member of the police patrol lied to him. Specifically, O’Leary ‘obviously lied’.

Because O’Leary made confusing claims about his critical role at the Wodgil camp, his barrister, William Nairn, purposefully presented him as an ineffectual ‘backwoodsman’. Even among the catalogue of lies about these mass killings, nothing could be further from the truth.

What follows here is a deconstruction of O’Leary, the hero of the herd, revealing the sophisticated and sly liar he was. He was vicious and brazen, and a bullshitter. During the 1926 Forrest River patrol, he was menacingly in charge – the ‘main event’. During the 1927 royal commission, he was arrogantly incognito and contemptuous of the power of the state. Prior to 1926 he was before the courts. In France during World War I, he was before a court martial. After the 1926 mass killings in the Kimberley, he shifted camp to Coniston in the Northern Territory, the site of a massacre in 1928. He was mates with Constable Murray, the perpetrator of those killings. O’Leary’s real history gives us a dishonest brute.

The narrative which was developed to explain his role in 1926 is preposterous. O’Leary is the key to deciphering what really did happen. That is why his lawyer had to sideline him.

Unravelling the events at Forrest River is hard going. A lot of effort went into creating a chaotic narrative that would be incredibly difficult to untangle. Truth-telling in the face of persistent dissembling and concealment will probably always be this complicated.

Ironically, Lumbia – the first man to appear before a court in this chain of events – is also the last man standing as the truth is told. His final appearance in court in 1945 exposes lies that lay dormant for nearly two decades. His culpability in 1926 unravels and Hay’s martyrdom is seen for the fiction it was. That, in turn, delegitimises the fury which drove O’Leary and the ‘little army’ which killed so many blameless people.

Truth-telling is complex and takes time, backcasting and studying up. If focusing on people, rather than the oppressive systems we create, takes us to the truth then that is the course to follow. O’Leary is a vehicle.

The savaged and the fallen warrant all the effort. If not now, when?

PART I

THE PUZZLE

1

O’LEARY OF THE ‘UNDERWORLD’

‘Something wicked this way comes’—Macbeth

O’Leary was a killer and a liar. He and a gang of other whites, including police, murdered at least twenty Aboriginal people in the Kimberley in 1926.¹

Giving evidence at the 1927 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Killing and Burning of Bodies of Aborigines in East Kimberley, O’Leary lied with determination and even imagination. The whole pack lied about everything except the rudimentary facts.

Former 10th Light Horseman and soldier settler Frederick William Hay attacked Lumbia with his stockwhip and revolver. Lumbia speared Hay and Hay died. From there the stories diverged. The power elite in Wyndham claimed that Hay’s assault on Lumbia was justified as he was a cattle killer. Outsiders, such as the missionary Ernest Gribble, counterclaimed that Hay had taken Lumbia’s wife. They even went so far as to intimate that a black man might have been legitimately defending himself against a white pastoralist.

While Leo Overheu, Daniel Murnane, Richard Jolly and constables James St Jack and Denis Regan all played roles in the subsequent mass executions and incineration of Aboriginal women and men, it is the man who called himself O’Leary who was absolutely central, not only to the savagery which exploded but also to the fabrications which resulted in them all escaping the consequences of their actions.

This map, taken from the 1927 royal commission report, illustrates the places of importance in this story. P1, P2 and P3 are police camps.

As O’Leary and his mates knocked back a beer at the Wyndham Hotel a few months after the massacre, they would have been aware that the stakes for multiple murder could be high. On 2 August 1926 Royston Rennie was executed for murdering a young bank clerk, and on 25 October two men – William Coulter and Phillip Treffene – were hanged in Perth for the murder of two gold detectives in Kalgoorlie. Just over a week later, on 3 November 1926, O’Leary made his statement denying the murder and incineration of bodies. With the executions of Coulter and Treffene as a backdrop, truth-telling about the mass murder of Aboriginal people would be brazenly denied by silence, lies and half-truths, resulting in confrontation and inviting argumentative speculation.

In modern times, the Brereton inquiry into the war crimes of the Australian SAS in Afghanistan detailed the difficulties of such investigations:

[We] faced great challenges, including active resistance and deceptive conduct from some current and former Special Forces soldiers. They were up against a closely bonded culture ‘in which loyalty to one’s mates, immediate superiors and the unit are regarded as paramount, in which secrecy is at a premium, and in which those who leak are anathema’. There were those in the Regiment who thought Brereton’s chance of penetrating the wall of silence was zero.²

In 1927 O’Leary’s lawyer, Nairn, acted as anticipated. He vilified the missionary who exposed the killings, Ernest Gribble. He dismissed his clients, the accused, as incompetent. And he invited speculation which would have been objected to by skilled lawyers in an ordinary court.

Mr Gribble [was] obsessed with this idea of the killing of natives. He [was] antagonistic to the police . . . Therefore he proceeds to the question assuming the guilt . . . [making] some point that O’Leary gave the wrong date [about a police camp carving], but if [we] were out in the bush like the members of this party were [and] if we had been asked what day of the month it was I venture to think we would probably have given the wrong date.

O’Leary is a backwoods man living 300 miles . . . from Wyndham. Such a man loses all count of dates and therefore his giving a wrong date [about a police camp where Aboriginal victims were concentrated before being taken away and executed] is not surprising.³ [emphasis added]

Nairn’s approach typifies the ‘defence’ advanced throughout the 1927 royal commission.

Secret voice: Think like O’Leary. ‘I like blood’. Turn and attack. Turn detractors into fools and liars. ‘Turn virtue into pitch’ (Iago).

Deconstructing the events of 1926 is impossible without disentangling the other fictions which have settled around not only O’Leary’s time in the Kimberley but also his previous and subsequent incongruously secret and shouted history.

It should be said up front that O’Leary was not the victim of a conspiracy to frame him for something he had not done. With other station owners around Bedford Downs and Sturt Creek, near the Northern Territory border, his soldier-settlement holding was described as ‘the underworld’.

The map below sets out the places where mass killings took place around the region called the ‘underworld’.⁴ There are several of them.

Those who shared holdings described as the ‘underworld’ included James Anderson (Scotty) Salmond (like Hay, formerly of the 10th Light Horse),⁵ Alex B. (Scotty) Sadler and two brothers by the name of Siddons, all of whom dealt viciously with Aboriginal people. In 1970 Salmond carelessly remarked:

It was no good being noble and dead. The natives had been brought up knowing nothing but killing. In spite of the wailing and singing over dead relations a life meant nothing to them. All they could understand was savagery and strength. Even now strength is the only way to get their respect. We’d just come back from a war in which we were taught to kill. And when it came to a showdown we were the stronger.⁶

Sites across the ‘underworld’ where massacres were reported to have occurred

Salmond’s description of what drove the men of the ‘underworld’ is more fitting than Nairn’s depiction of them as inept.

Unlike Salmond and O’Leary, Sadler had not gone to war in Europe. He preferred to run fewer risks, armed and dangerous in the backblocks. When he was investigated by Constable Manning in 1917 after the disappearance of his station-owner partner, Bowers, other expressions of brutality were serendipitously exposed.

An Aboriginal woman called Coombinyah/Coomie told Manning she had been taken out of camp by Sadler when she was just a ‘little girl’. She had three children with him and he ‘did not want them’. She told Manning he made her kill them all.

First one I have at Bohemia Downs, a boy. Scotty Sadler make me kill him. He won’t let me keep him and he make me get stone and kill my piccanniny. The other two [were] girls. I been have them at this station Springs and Scotty make me kill them too. He won’t let me keep them.⁷

Sadler was never charged with the deaths of these children or involvement in Bowers’ disappearance. O’Leary arrived in the Kimberley after 1917, but Sadler was an ‘underworld’ familiar of O’Leary in the region where they had their land holdings. They were linked by their interest in the punitive action which followed the death of Harry Annear in 1922. Annear was a mate of O’Leary’s, having worked at Bedford Downs together. He was speared by Aboriginal men after raiding a camp, taking two Aboriginal women away in chains and then sexually abusing them.

Some of what the royal commission heard in 1927 works to situate the pain that Coombinyah/Coomie was exposed to. Aboriginal women were given no quarter.

Between the waterhole of Gotegotemerrie and the treed plain at Mowerie, three women walked. Two men rode. O’Leary was at the head, Constable St Jack brought up the rear. From time to time they shifted sideways, speaking to each other.

Old and blind Warrawalla Marga, with Goolay and Yowan guiding her, hard as it was in neck chains, were herded by St Jack. In his sweat-stained uniform, he might have shoved his horse’s shoulder into her back, bunching them up, driving them. The horsemen were likely impatient.

O’Leary kept the chain tight and forced the pace.

Secret voice: What explains this? Trying to think like O’Leary is troubling. An old blind woman – what was that all about?

Warrawalla slowed them down but, chained as the women were, O’Leary knew she was an impediment to the others trying to run. That made her useful. The women also knew this, so they helped her. What else was there to do?

None of the women was present when Hay charged at Lumbia and was fatally speared, but they didn’t expect that would save them. The story was now across the country. They knew the drill. For them, O’Leary was likely cut like Jack Barry of Birrindudu, a man described even by his own as a ‘cunt of thing’ who had a ‘stud’, an Aboriginal woman (or women) who was held in camp and used for sex and general labour. When one woman ‘cleared out and ended up at Turner [Station] . . . Barry went across and flogged her back with the whip … on horseback … she died when she got back’.⁸

Earlier, as the sun threw early morning shadows, Goolay and Yowan had watched as their men, chained together and seated back to back, were shot in the forehead. One after the other they slumped where they sat. Warrawalla Marga, unable to see, heard the cracks and