Dreamtime Drift: Soul of Australia, #3

By Kev Richardson

The true tale of the fame of a nation's founding.

Australia's city of Brisbane was founded as a convict prison for second offenders. When the hateful Captain Logan was given free rein to exercise his torturous disposition, both convicts and Aborigines found the object of their resistance heartless. While Britain insisted on appointing gutless governors, what could sympathetic white men do to ease the pains? The black man, however, found his own way of taking personal revenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781613093450

Book preview

Glossary of Aboriginal names/terms

Tribes (with today’s Brisbane suburb)

Jabira... Newport

Joondoobari... Bribie Island

Ningy-Ningy, of Humpy-Bong... Redcliffe

Pinkenba... Pinkenba & Nudgee

Turrbal of Mian-jin... Brisbane City

Coorparoo... Bulimba

Jagera of Kurilpa... West End

Moorooka... Yeronga

Aborigines

Banyo...  Turrbal chief

Buranda... Jagera chief

Jumna... son of Buranda

Murruroo... Ningy-Ningy chief

Yampa... son of Murruroo

Nundah... Pinkenba chief

Tarragindi... Moorooka chief

Tingalpa... Coorparoo chief

Aboriginal Terms

Alodim... tribal meeting

alodim-gaeray... tribal summit

billabong... small lake, water-hole

bullumna... adopted brother

humpy... bush shelter

jin... woman, wife

midden... spiritual site of Aboriginal feast

nulla-nulla... club, mallet

Quandamooka... Moreton Bay

Tugulawa... Brisbane River

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;

All Discord, Harmony, not understood;

All partial Evil, universal Good...

—From An Essay on Man – Alexander Pope

1688-1744

Preface

Dear Readers,

Gurrewa told of the impasse created when the first white man arrived to settle Australia. He quickly illustrated what he believed his right...to unsettle the Aborigine.

Son of Gurrewa then told, through white men’s eyes, how White Australia developed during the second ‘white’ generation.

Dreamtime Drift tells of the Aboriginal demise through the eyes of both a white sympathiser and indigenous man of mystical beliefs...a culture misunderstood by the Whiteman; he who day by day saw his heritage eroding like a tree-trunk with termites. Throughout Australia, Aboriginal lore, the people’s very culture, was irreparably abused during Whiteman’s frenetic determination to settle every inch of arable land. Bloody murder fed Whiteman’s greed. Book Two of this work is devoted to the settlement of Brisbane as a hard-labour convict prison, at the expense of the resident Aborigines.

One of the oldest homo sapiens on Earth, the Australian Aborigine was wont, as a tribe, to settle areas ranging from a hundred to several thousand square kilometres. His instinctive understanding of purpose was firstly to succour the tribe’s families and secondly, to care for tribal land; the essential commodity providing everything to achieve the first. Despite he built no fences, borders of each tribe’s land were recognised by others as clearly as territory spoor-marked by animals. Visitors were welcome while observing protocol: not outstaying their welcome...the equivalent of today’s practice of issuing tourist visas. Metals and explosives being of another world, weapons were artefacts crafted for slaying wildlife for food and skins.

Aboriginal culture did not command sophistication. The people were nomads, happy in primitive brush shelters wherever greenery attracted edible wildlife. Tribal territories were large enough to relocate when greenery was exhausted, while growth regenerated. Most were coast-dwellers, their diet including exotic marine foods.

All physical needs of Aborigines were so simple as to leave them, like all the continent’s animals, naked. They were, however, a spiritual people. Images of spiritual beliefs are still being discovered. Spiritual idols were mountains, rivers, fauna and flora, even wind and rain...yet another reason why each tribe’s very territory was sacrosanct to his welfare...why he could never be content with life in other tribal districts. Away from ‘home,’ spirits were strange, even sinister, so the district each man was born to became essentially precious to his very welfare.

They were a peaceful people with no understanding of material possessions, greed, covetousness, lies, subterfuge, aggression, physical force, envy, urgency or power. It indeed made the Australian Aborigine a unique individual.

His every commendable instinct, once the white man came, found him disadvantaged. How could he cope with the expectation of ‘moving over’ as Whiteman took his land?

He could but gape in awe as Whiteman scrambled to build on sacred land, what he called ‘houses’ that developed into ‘clusters of houses’ then into villages and towns.

In his countless thousands of years, the Aborigine had never constructed a house, let alone a settlement. He had never cleared forest that invited game, nor built fences that prevented the stalking of prey. Everything Whiteman did had the native utterly confused.

A general impression in modern society beyond Australian shores is that its Aborigines had ever been desert-dwellers...a false assumption. The only reason they are today is that desert is all Whiteman was prepared to leave them. Coastal plains were the first territories usurped, quickly followed by whatever land was suitable for raising crops and grazing cattle and sheep.

Apart from the loss of natural habitat, a major fear for the native was the several diseases Whiteman brought. Cholera, smallpox, chickenpox, influenza, venereal diseases and measles spread in waves throughout the nineteenth century. Aboriginal people had no genetic resistance to such threats and died by the thousands.

European settlers gradually made their way into the interior, appropriating small but vital parts of the land for their exclusive use, denying Aborigines their billabongs: essential waterholes and soaks. The introduction of sheep, rabbits and cattle quickly denied the black man his essential need of life...bush greenery. In Australia’s outback, sheep and cattle stations, often larger than British counties, robbed him of his very homeland.

Some natives tried working for the white man, yet quickly discovered how poorly, as human beings, they were considered, and nor did the work ethic have a place in their karma. They were but poorly fed with unpalatable foods and denied every familiar custom. They turned for solace to tobacco and alcohol, to both of which their systems lacked immunity. Each proved as destructive, over time, as the most debilitating disease.

From the very day Whiteman landed on the shore at Botany Bay in 1788, the livelihood of the Australian Aborigine, as a race, began its speedy demise.

Dreamtime Drift illustrates examples of how the drift became a surging torrent.

Kev Richardson

Book One

1818

Does anybody care?

THE FOLLOWING LITERATE extracts are from Racism and Resistance in Australia–the White Invasion, by Jerome Small, 3 Sept 2007.

The sentiments may or may not all reflect those of Dreamtime Drift’s author, despite he finds all pertinent to the true history.

In 1788, British capitalism arrived on Australian shores.

The rulers of Britain were clawing ahead of their European rivals. They had traded millions of Africans into slavery plantations from Jamaica to Virginia. Increasingly, they were pushing English villagers off their land and into the cities to work in their new factories. And in 1788, having lost their highly profitable American colonies in a revolutionary war, Britain's rulers were establishing a new empire.

The full force of this social system was turned against the Aboriginal peoples of Australia...up to a million people speaking over 300 languages. These people had never known private property or profit, let alone the laws, jails and wars that serve to keep some people rich and the rest in their place.

PERHAPS THE PEOPLE of the land and the newcomers dumped there could have worked out how to coexist, given time and goodwill. But the needs of Australian capitalism would allow neither. In the 1820s, a lucrative market for wool opened up in Britain. The slow encroachment of the invaders became a wholesale land grab. Aboriginal people living on their land couldn't turn a profit for Australian and British capitalists. Sheep, however, could. The result was conflict on an enormous scale.

THE PASTORAL INDUSTRY was the main engine of Australian capitalism from the 1820s until the 1890s. The cost of this rapid expansion of the capitalist system was unspeakable atrocities against the Aboriginal population.

One

Port Macquarie, NSW, 1818

Gilligil called an alodim .

The tribe’s elders would not have been surprised if yet again, the only subject on the agenda would be the ever-increasing pressures of Whiteman’s advance.

Gilligil was now a bent old man, but a shadow of the upright tribal leader of Karri survivors. Thirty summers had passed since Djarringa had died at redcoat hands, the loss of the son indeed hastening the ageing of the father.

To think that then, we still held hopes of Whiteman taking his ships and people away, was a lament remembered by only the old.

It had been as painfully slowly as Gilligil bore his grief that every man came to realize how the future held only promise of more white men arriving, of being driven forever north along the coast as Whiteman built houses on Dreamtime homelands. Tribes that had taken early umbrage at sharing lands with neighbours now realized that time would not only make them, too, move further north, then west, but that blood would be shed if making a stand.

Life had become, for the proud and bewildered native, one of continuing retreat and resentment.

Whiteman’s musket was a weapon against which they had no defence, being used without hesitation if the black man’s retreat faltered.

Whilst waiting for elders to arrive, Gilligil sat observing his grown grandson Injinga, always the first to take his place under the broad leaves of the banana trees where meetings were held.  Gilligil’s mind in the moment was full of unspoken thoughts.

The boy is yet so young. How many seasons does he have? All my fingers twice over? More? It is hard to tell how long one’s own son has been dead. The pain of time has no measure.

When Djarringa’s jin had come to him with the news, following her man having become yet another victim of Whiteman’s dreaded fire-stick, that she carried Djarringa’s child, he had been delighted that his bloodline would continue. He had ever since cultivated Injinga towards one day becoming Karrigal chief.

Yet Karrigal numbers had thinned. It had been proud blood; seasons of trekking northwards ever seeking a tribe that would let them stay, had weakened it. Karrigal blood was now mixed with Bandalang.

Injinga had, however, achieved elder status even under Bandalang lore, a further tendril of the palm-oil sapling planted by Gilligil and Bandalang chief Awaba, illustrating the spiritual merging of tribes. Only occasionally did Gilligil hold alodims for those with only Karri blood, whose numbers dwindled every day. The present meeting was, in fact, with the old man realising the spirits of his next life were calling, to hand leadership to his grandson. The name ‘Injinga’ was the Bandalang word for Number One, the raised forefinger; it was already decreed that he was destined for great things, as great as any could be in the new culture.

My days left among you must be few, Gilligil told them. "The changes in our culture since Whiteman came are better understood by the young, so to appoint another old man is merely persisting with fading dreams. Karri Dreamtime has drifted down many a strange river and Injinga knows only the Bandalang Dreamtime. Its spirits will influence his people’s future more than can mine. I have learned to see it as the loss of only a physical home. Whilst Karrigal Dreamtime has merged like drifting waters with that of the Bandalang, Injinga’s heart is imbued with both. His will be the inspiration his father was denied. Already he has earned the respect of his peers along these big-river lands."

Every man had tears in his eyes, rolling down cheeks...yet a few more drops of traditional Karri Dreamtime disappearing.

Injinga and his grandfather embraced warmly, heart-warmed by murmurs of approval.

ONLY A FEW DAYS LATER, explorer John Oxley was on the home run of his second excursion west of the Great Dividing Range.

The range began in jungles at the very tip of Australia’s Cape York, the ‘sharp point’ of the continent’s north-east. For never more than sixty miles west of the coast, it extended to the very south-east corner, where the continent’s highest peaks found themselves under snow for two months of most years. The range had proven a barrier to white man’s exploration west. For twenty-five years Whiteman had been confined to the coastal strip. Once a path ‘over the top’ was found, John Oxley, the colony’s surveyor general, led the first exploration into the vast western plains, opening up the world’s largest sheep-grazing lands. Now he had travelled north up those plains to see if inland rivers ended in a vast sea like Europe’s Black Sea or Caspian Sea. He failed to find such. Western-flowing rivers slowly disappeared into fens too swampy to traverse.

Having lost two men to Aboriginal spears on the western slope, Oxley crossed to the east coast to a point some four hundred miles north of Sydney, to discover a vast river emptying into the Pacific Ocean. He set up camp on the beach dunes, lookouts posted as they had done each night since the attack. Whilst they had, on both excursions, come across natives, none had showed aggression, only amazement at finding men with white skins, yet more particularly, the trekkers believed, at the sight of horses; the entire Australian continent had no animal larger than the kangaroo.

Oxley’s team had continued to wonder why those particular savages attacked when all previously had slunk away, intimidated.

Could they have taken umbrage at us killing a kangaroo? Believed the creature their especial right? was a common question.

Who is to know? answered Adam Ashby, Oxley’s second in command. Why they didn’t simply make a show of anger and wave us off their patch is what I’d like to know.

Jack Murdoch, the team’s bushman and marksman, however, had an answer: Maybe they saw me shoot that roo and realised the power of our musket. It could be that they thought any ‘show of force’ might drive us quickly off their patch, a sort of ‘self-protection’ attitude?

That was two weeks ago, lads, John Oxley interceded. We farewelled Alf and Arthur with all the respect we could, so that chapter is closed. Maybe we should learn from the fact that we’ve seen no native since, because the rocky uplands supported no game. Our goal is whatever is ahead, and now on the narrow coastal plain where animals again abound, we will likely encounter many natives. So keep eyes and ears peeled.

He then deliberately changed the subject. I am naming this natural harbour Port Macquarie. Our generous governor deserves the recognition.

His men smiled. He had explained on many occasions how Governor Lachlan Macquarie spared no expense in equipping both his expeditions. Oxley had already named one of the two major western rivers found, Lachlan. And the other, Macquarie.

He had deliberately chosen the spot where they sat, a sand ridge where the river had carved a path around it to make it almost an island, for setting their fire and eating their meal. The discomfort of eating on the soft sand was preferable to again being the victims of a surprise attack. They were amused, however, by the fact that the entire sand-hill surface, tallest dune on the entire beach, was covered in discarded seashells.

Known as a midden, he told them.

They could only, however, remain ignorant of middens being sacred Aboriginal sites used over centuries for religious feasting. Most discarded shells were by then sun-bleached over eons until nowt more than fragments of gritty sand.

Oxley, a lieutenant in the British Navy, had been in the colony twelve years. He was of the modern colony leaders, one with an egalitarian outlook, so much so that he had requested of Governor Macquarie that he include convicts on his treks. On the first, he had taken three, two good-conduct men with only one of their seven year sentences to serve, and a youngster, Andy, with yet three years to serve. These helped in the care of the horses, scrounging firewood and assisting the cook. On the current expedition, he again took two senior convicts and young Andy. The two freemen chosen had been on Oxley’s first trek as had his close personal friend, Adam Ashby, and Jack Murdock, the bushman.

It was to prove significant, for not only was Adam to receive a land grant from the governor in recognition of his contribution to the colony’s future, but Adam had offered Jack Murdoch the office of estate manager on it. Jack had wearied of the hardships of two exhausting excursions of several months, to happily accept.

Adam was yet to play a significant role in not only the further future of the colony, but in the future of its Aborigines.

Two

Injinga sought out Gilligil.

"Whiteman has come, my grandfather. He camp on the midden."

Gilligil was shattered.

Ah. Even here he now comes? With the big canoe?

No, my grandfather. He come from the upland, bring many big, strange animal.

How many men?

Injinga flashed a handful of fingers, three times.

What they do now?

Cook kangaroo! They build fire on our midden!

Gilligil closed his eyes. Is there never to be an end to sacrilege? Does him being here mean our people must again move or be killed? This is a whole new generation under threat. Is it never to end? Oh! Is it never to end?

His mind kept asking the dreadful question.

He sighed again before looking earnestly into Injinga’s eyes.

You are now chief, my boy. What do you suggest we do?

"Having now told you, I will sit with Kildanga. My bullumna and I will consider it. What, Grandfather, what would you advise?"

Gilligil smiled.

That you keep watch. Do not show yourselves. See where they go and follow in silence. Watch from hiding but send a man to tell me where they go.

Injinga nodded. Kildanga will come with me.

Kildanga was not only the son of the Bandalang chief, but adopted brother-in-arms of Injinga. It had been a happy agreement by both fathers to formerly establish the adoption of the other’s son. Together destined to lead the Karrigal/Bandalang tribe into its future, they had already exchanged blood to formalise the joining of inner spirits.

And it was near mid-day when a Bandalang youth came scurrying.

"Injinga say Whiteman go nowhere. They shed their stupid cloaks and play in the surf like children."

Gilligil put his arm around the lad.

I will talk with my brother. You wait.

As he walked, he mused...If they come from the uplands, then they are happy to find the sea. At least that tells me they do not have murder in mind. Not yet anyway.

The two sages considered the number of Whitemen too few to build houses.

They despatched a lad..."Tell your leaders to remain in hiding. If Whiteman want to take fish, or kangaroo, let them. Being so few, they will not leave us hungry."

NEXT DAY, ADAM ASHBY and John Oxley relaxed outside their tent. They’d made camp by a freshwater stream that flowed into the big river. They smoked pipes while detailing plans for trekking down the coast to Newcastle. From there they would take ship with the next coal shipment to Sydney.

In this land, Adam, John was saying, I’m filling my diary with sites that lend themselves to human habitation. This Port Macquarie is simply yet another example...fresh water in abundance, a fine broad and navigable river skirted by land fit for both grazing and growing grain and semi-tropical fruits. Add this fine harbour for shipping, and it is a prime site for the governor’s prison for second offenders.

The hard-labour prison was currently sited at Newcastle where convicts dug coal from the Hunter Valley’s endless seams, yet with shipments of convicts arriving from England and Ireland every month, sometimes two shiploads in a month, additional prisons were an increasing need.

A port here, John, said Adam, with a road built over the route we’ve just traversed, will open up more grazing territory on the western plains. Too far north for wheat, I reckon, yet ideal for sheep. Even cattle. Your experience at Camden illustrates how wool is not only profitable to the grazier, but to Britain’s steam mills.

Adam was the son of a convict bolter. Even before knowing he had left his lover pregnant, Adam Ashby the elder had bolted rather than face a flogging. For more than two years he lived with the Aborigines on Sydney Harbour’s north shore. ‘Gurrewa’ the Aborigines had named him, their word for the white cockatoo. He had even been created bullumna with Djarringa, son of the Karrigal chief Gilligil.

The elder Adam Ashby and Djarringa were shot and killed in a skirmish with redcoats.

Adam’s mother and the colony’s chief surgeon had then begun a relationship and when Surgeon Balmain returned to England, taking his ‘wife’ and his own two children by her, with him, young Adam was left in the care of the small colony’s Governor King.

John Oxley was aware that Adam was keen to marry an English lass who had arrived with her father as free immigrants, yet there was the social problem of she being of ‘free’ caste and Adam being ‘bred of convicts,’ a social slur in the community. As he grew under the governor’s patronage, in order that he might take a place in the emerging ‘free’ element of the colony’s society, the story was invented that he was in fact the son of a naval doctor and wife who died in Sydney’s smallpox plague.

This, Adam explained to his friend, is how Amy sees me, yet her father remains sceptical.

Oxley gritted teeth and shook his head, an expression of exasperation.

Damn this ‘social disgrace!’ The free settlers are, of course, all brushed with Britain’s class-consciousness. Speak to anybody in Britain of someone born in New South Wales and the poor wretch is immediately suspect. At least we now have a governor trying to encourage ‘free’ immigrants to live hand in glove with emancipated convicts. Over time, Adam, that will ease Amy’s father’s concern, yet, dear friend, you remain a victim of the scourge. Have you and Amy discussed it?

No. I cannot but fear she too, is concerned that it might prove so. I don’t think she doubts my story, yet at the same time I don’t want her to question me on it. I must then lie. Yet if I tell her the truth, in confidence, I put her in the situation of having to lie to her father. His attitude is not as egalitarian as yours, my friend.

"Charles Wentworth is in the