Perth brought surcease from the struggles and crudeness of the north-west and refreshing contact with those of my own kin, but it was not to be for long. The call of the task to which my life had been dedicated was insistent. It drew me first to solacing the passing of the last of the Bibbulmun, that once great race which had roamed the fertile coastal plains on which Perth is set and the delectable uplands of the Darling Ranges.
The Bibbulmun race was the largest homogeneous group in all Australia. Their country extended for many hundreds of square miles, and comprised the extreme triangle of the south-west, its base drawn from about Jurien Bay, slightly south of Geraldton on the West Coast, to Esperance on the Great Australian Bight. The Perth groups occupied a wide area, towards Northam, Toodyay, Gin Gin and Southern Cross on the north, and south to Bunbury and The Vasse. The last of the uncircumcised hordes, gradually driven down by a lustier, fiercer people, and finding by chance the wealthiest and most fertile corner of the State, “sat down” in the forests by rivers and water-holes of rich flora and teeming fauna, sharing them with the birds and animals and reptiles that they, believed to be their “elder brothers” or that became, in the passage of the centuries, their ancestor-gods.
The word bibbulmun signifies many breasts, a name derived, perhaps, from the fecundity of that region, or from the unusually great proportion of women and children among them. There were more than seventy groups in the Bibbulmun area linked by one language with local variations. They had neither chiefs or kings nor overlords, and although they were innocent of arts and crafts, they were by no means savage, and accorded their women more of initiative liberty than the circumcised. They were the finest groups in all West Australia. [Probably their prototypes were to be found in the New South Wales and Victorian coastal tribes, which disappeared equally rapidly.] The Manitchmat and Wordungmat, the fair and dark people of the White Cockatoo and Crow, always kept their marriages within the four class subdivisions of these two primary divisions, which I believe to be fundamental and Australia-wide. These tribes were not cannibals. Infanticide was rarely practised except in the case of twins and then only because of the magic of “two heads” coming where one was expected. Such was their simple philosophy that the facts of birth were unknown to them. Their only deity was a woggal or serpent-god, that dominated the earth, the sky, the sea, and punished evil-doers. They believed that the spirits of the dead were taken to Kur’an’nup, a land beyond the western sea.
The only raiment was a fur-skin cloak, made from the skins of seven kangaroos. Their tools were palaeolithic, with a later intrusion of the neolithic scarcely evident-a koja, or stone axe with wooden handle fastened with wattle gum and a rough knife of serrated stone. It is a question whether to any great extent they used the boomerang, which I believe to have been an importation, as it was useless in such thickly timbered country. They had no fighting-shields. The spear, miro, or spear-thrower, and the club, were their weapons, and spear-dodging was a consummate art among them. The women carried a wanna, or digging stick, the usual bark or wooden scoop, and a kangaroo-skin bag. A camp-fire for winter warmth, and a bough shade for shelter from the sun were their only homes, fire being made by the friction of a stick applied drill fashion to the flower-stem of the resinous “black-boy” tree-fern.
These southern people had a sense of hereditary group ownership of their land, upon which no other tribe might trespass, but all were generously invited to share its special products in times of plenty, a hospitality unknown in the poverty-stricken wastes of the great north-west and centre. The sea-coasts, estuaries and rivers were full of fish, and the inlanders and hill-folk were always welcome visitors in the spawning and crabbing seasons. The tall timber country, of which the magnificent jarrah and karri now occupy a pride of place among the world’s hardwoods, was alive with bird and animal life, and rich with numerous fruits of shrub and vine, a meeting-place of tribes within hundreds of miles when the wild potato was in harvest there.
When I came upon the remnants of the Bibbulmun, they had been in contact with civilization for some seventy years, and in that short time it had reduced the native inhabitants of the city of Perth and its environs to one old man, Joobaitch, and an older-looking niece, Balbuk. On this old man’s group area, at the foot of the Darling Ranges, the first reserve had been established by Lord (then Mr.) Forrest in the nineties, and here were gathered all that were left of the tribes.
The desire of the Government was that I should base my investigation upon history and existing data, and build upon the anthropology premises accumulated by cultured and well-informed men such as Sir George Grey, Bishop Salvado, G.F. Moore and others. For two years I studied every note of the bibliography at my disposal regarding the aboriginal tribes of West Australia, with augmented information from South Australia, Victoria and other states. I found that in many essentials these Western Australian authorities contradicted each other, and that it was difficult to come to a conclusion. So I made the suggestion that I should begin at the beginning, and seek the truth at the fountain-head.
My first camp was established on the Maamba Reserve near the present National Park, a few miles from Cannington, today an outer suburban area of great fertility, set with orchards and vineyards, but in the early years of this century a beautiful kingdom of bush still rich in native foods and fruits. The Bibbulmun race was represented by some thirty or forty stragglers, and these would gladly have gone back to their own various grounds; but their health and sight had failed.
It is saddening indeed to wander the vast expanse of hill and dale and cliff and grove, and find not one of its own people remaining. They have vanished from the face of earth as completely as the extinct sthenurus, of which their far-off ancestors were contemporaries.
The first landing of the white man was the beginning of the end. Often have I heard the story, a never-failing marvel to the three generations who survived it, of the landing on the banks of the Swan River in 1829. In his camp by a little spring called Goordandalup, a wilderness of bush that is now the metropolitan subdivision of Crawley on the highway of the Mount’s Bay Road, Yalgunga lay dozing in the heat of mid-afternoon. He did not know that it was 1829, or hear the death-knell of his people. He knew only that the world was blue and smiling, and the rock-holes filling with fish in the incoming tide, and that the sun was good. Suddenly he heard a new sound on the river, a soft continuous sound, and coming closer. He rose to this feet and looked about instinctively for his spears. His women crouched round him, and his children ran to him afraid. Round the bend came an open boat, and the phenomenon of jang-ga, spirits of the dead who had come back as white men, borne upon the waters. Spears were useless. Yalgunga waited. Walking as other men, the strangers stepped ashore and came to him, speaking words that meant nothing. Then one of them put out a hand in greeting. Yalgunga gratefully clasped it in his own, and with his other hand made a gesture to his camp and his spring-they were all he had to offer. That evening he gathered his family, his spears, and all his belongings, and wandered away to the swamp at Goobabbilup, which is now Monger’s Lake, never to return to the leafy home and the curve of bush and beach that had been his alone. So easily had the white man won.
There must have been some tradition handed down from Yalgunga’s forefathers of Vlaming and other earlier arrivals of jang-ga who moved over the waters in their strange ships, and walked about unafraid, and returned to Ku’ran’nup. Yalgunga did not know that these later jang-ga had come to stay. The gazettes of the early thirties made frequent reference to his peaceable and kindly disposition. It was Maiago, whose camp was where the Perth Town Hall now stands, who later travelled with Stokes on his explorations, and who introduced the white man’s flour and rice to the natives, the first instalment of payment for their country. The rice they buried in the earth, but the flour they appreciated, calling it always “barragood”-the nearest they could get to the assurance of “very good” with which it was given to them.
The belief of the Bibbulmun that the first white men were the returned spirits of their own dead relatives, led to friendly feeling towards the “spirits” from their first encounter.
A peculiarity of gait, a slight deformity, a scar, a missing toe, finger, tooth, etc., singled out some white person for special recognition and friendship. When Sir George Grey was Governor, word came to him that the old woman Delyungur had recognized in him her long-lost son, and cried and wept unceasingly in that she could not see him or touch him.
Grey appointed a day for a Native Levee on which all the natives of the district came to the appointed place and approached the spot where he and his staff were standing.
A great wailing was presently heard, and as the natives opened their ranks along the cleared space came old Delyungur, crying and peering to find the face of her long-dead son. She walked slowly up until her eyes could see the Governor clearly. Her step became quicker, stronger. She looked at Sir George, who was looking kindly towards her, and in a moment she had him in her embrace, crying, “Boondoo, boondoo! bala ngan-ya Kooling” (True, true, he is my son), as she fondled the face and form of her long-lost son and wept for joy at their re-union.
Sir George Grey’s gentle sufferance of her embraces strengthened immeasurably the friendly bond between the black and white in those early days. His kindly reception of old Delyungur, who was sister to Yalgunga’s dead mother Windera, became known to every group throughout the metropolitan area.
What a surprise the fences, and the sheep and horses and cattle within their boundaries, and the telegraph line with its magic messages swifter and truer than smoke signals, and the ships sailing into the estuaries, and the jetties and wharves built out to meet them! Who shall say what vague despair and unrest entered these primitive minds as the natives beheld one after another of their cherished homing spots ruthlessly swept away in the resistless march of civilization, and the winding tracks to their various food grounds obliterated by houses and streets?
They could no longer seek for the goonoks in their season, their mungaitch honey-groves were cut down to make way for flocks and herds. Could they hunt for the bai-yoo nuts of the Zamia, the warrain, and the joobok roots on the slopes, when the white men had fenced them in, and driven their old friends beyond the pale? On their own country they were trespassers. There was no more happy wandering in the interchange of hospitality. Sources of food supply slowly but surely disappeared, and they were sent away to unfamiliar places, compelled to change completely their mode of life, to clothe themselves in the attire of the strangers, to eat foods unfitted for them, to live within walls.
Their age-old laws were set aside for laws they could not understand. The younger generations, always wilful, now openly flouted the old, and defied them, and haunted the white man’s homes, protected by his policeman. A little while, and they resorted to thieving-where theft had been unknown-and sycophancy, and sold their young wives to the depraved and foreign element. Half-castes came among them, a being neither black nor white, whom they detested. They died in their numbers of the white man’s diseases, measles, whooping-cough, influenza, and the results of their own wrong-doing.
Change of food, environment, outlook, the burying of the old traditions and customs, inhibitions and the breakdown of the laws all conspired to bring degeneration, first to the individual and then to the race. Can we wonder that they faded so swiftly? Can we blame them for the sudden reactions that found vent in violence in certain instances few and far between, punished sometimes with terrible reprisals on the part of the white man?
The pioneers of Western Australia were noble men and women, and nearly all of them were above reproach and more than kindly in their treatment of the aboriginal. There is evidence that they did everything in their power for the preservation and betterment of the race. Schools were established as early as 1831, and reserve sanctuaries, with interpreters and ration-givers and government inspectors. There were innumerable systematic schemes on the part of religious organizations, and social organizations and private persons, from King George’s Sound north to Geraldton, with no encouraging results. Missions of all kinds were established throughout the Bibbulmun area. The most outstanding of these was undoubtedly the great Benedictine Mission of New Norcia, 80 miles north of Perth, founded by Don Salvado in 1846, among the dingo-totem tribes of the Victoria Plain.
As a young and earnest evangelist, Bishop Salvado journeyed into this then remote country, camped with the natives at a water-hole to gain their confidence, then gathered them to him in the name of Christianity. In a fertile valley he established his church and his colony, later sponsored by the Queen of Spain, and destined to become the great Spanish monastery it is today, a seat of the arts and sciences with its colleges of secular and religious education, a railway-town of considerable importance with its far-flung and prosperous agricultural and pastoral estates, a jewel of the south-west.
Bishop Salvado fed and clothed the natives. He built a tidy little Continental village of stone houses, twenty-eight in all, laid out in streets, and induced them to live in them. He saw that each man had his own allotment of land. For the preliminary work done upon it the Bishop paid him, and put the money in the bank, and purchased implements for further development, and educated his children. He taught them handicrafts and stockwork and telegraphy and accountancy and music and languages, every one of which they could absorb and absorb well. He went further. He selected five promising young aboriginal boys, and took them with him to Rome to study for the priesthood in a Benedictine seminary there. Among them were two who received the names of John and Francis Xavier, and the habit of the Order from the Pope himself All died in Europe, with the exception or one, who returned to New Norcia, promptly flung away his habit made for the bush and died there.
Children of the woodland, dwelling in a squalor that could not be avoided in their stone-walled houses, closed in from the air that was their breath of life, in the heat of summer and the dank cold of winter, they lost all touch with their native earth. They slept on beds-but they could not learn cleanliness. They wore clothing, and developed chest complaints and fevers. They died, and the dead were carried out of the little houses, and others sent to live in them-a superstitious people with a horror of the dead, there they too died. Alas for the poor “little brothers of the dingo”-civilization was a cloak that they donned easily enough, but they could not wear it and live. Bishop Salvado had counted 250 members of the Victoria Plains group in 1846. The last of these, Monnup, died in 1913.
It was the same story everywhere, a kindness that killed as surely and as swiftly as cruelty would have done. The Australian native can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation-but he cannot withstand civilization.
In 1883, a commission was appointed in West Australia to control native conditions of living and employment, and in 1886 all aborigines of the State were brought directly under the guardianship of the Government. In the early nineteen hundreds a special Aborigines’ Department was created, with protectors travelling throughout West Australia, and a Chief Protector in authority in Perth.
There is no hope of protecting the Stone Age from the twentieth century! When the native’s little group area is gone, he loses the will to l............