Cape York
Termite mounds at Oyala Thumotang National Park, on the Archer River [Image source: http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/projects/outback-to-oceans-australia/where-we-work/cape-york-peninsula . The area was made a National Park in 1988 in order to forestall its sale to Aboriginal people; apparently an act of spite by the premier of Queensland Joh Bjelke-Petersen, after his original block on the sale was dismissed in the High Court of Australia. In 2010 some 75,000 hectares of the park were given over to the Wik-Mungkana people on a freehold basis. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koowarta_v_Bjelke-Petersen .]
|
THE
LAST
FRONTIER
Glenville Pike
WILDERNESS
1983
Cape York Peninsula was the
first place, so far as we know, where white men landed on the Australian
mainland and encountered native Australians. That was in 1606, and the
encounter was naturally bloody. The ship was the Duyfken, Captain Willem
Jansz, and the Aborigines came out shooting (or rather, spearing). As the
author concedes, this courage and hostility may well have preserved their
homeland for at least another couple of centuries. The Cape York peninsula, at
the north-eastern tip of Australia,
is to this day an unpopulous, barely settled country, without proper roads.
Glenville Pike is not a lively writer but he has exciting
material. From Tasman, Cook, Edmund Kennedy, Frank Jardine, the missionaries,
the gold-rushes, the 1899 cyclone; to exploration, drovers and packers – he
maps a melancholy, and of course broadly familiar, epic of pioneer
generations.
One misunderstands the economic nature of exploration by
reducing it to a matter of names, but nevertheless, naming is a crucial
component of the story that Pike has to tell, and so it is of the methodology
that elicits the story. In the earliest days the naming begins with features
seen by sailors: islands, river-mouths, and a few notable peaks. Inland
exploration was much more confusing. The travellers were invariably cutting
across the numerous rivers on their marches up and down the peninsula. But
rivers inland are much more difficult to understand as unities, because they
are seen only at crossing-points, and the grand simplicity of a coastal
debouchment is the mingled water of numerous tributaries. Different explorers
kept naming the same river twice, or misapplying previous names, and a good
many of the oldest names ended up getting attached to the “wrong” rivers, i.e.
different ones from those they originally referred to.
No unified grasp of the landmass could be exploited during
this period (the second half of the nineteenth century). Only the concentrated
local interest of flakes of gold could pay immediately. It’s extraordinary how
gold-rushes always spring up at such times; extraordinary in contrast to the
utter insignificance of the same locations once latter phases of civilisation
have gridded the land. I suppose that’s why prospectors always end up being
called “old-timers”.
At some point the myall, or “wild blackfella”
disappeared. It was about the 1930s, just about when the first motor-car, a
Baby Austin, was driven to Cape York by two
enthusiastic New Zealanders. Tourism, even if at this stage of heroic
dimensions, was a sure indication that the peninsula was becoming safe. Steady
changes had broken down the barrier between wild populations and the new
activities. These included missions, reserves, the repressions of the Native
Mounted Police, the country being checkerboarded into grazing stations, and the
pioneers’ use of cheap aboriginal labour; at first a few individuals from other
locations (“Charlie” and “Jerry” – at last they too are becoming named), later
whole tribes coming round to some local industry, e.g. stockmen or sandalwood cutters. Glenville Pike also says,
of the 1886 Cape Bedford Mission near Cooktown, that it “came rather late on
the scene, however, as the tribes in the Cooktown area had already been
decimated by white man’s grog and tobacco, and Chinaman’s opium.” The
surprising reference to tobacco may be more acute than it sounds – any alien practice,
long continued, must lead to oblivion of what it has displaced.
The pioneer culture, in its turn, would become embattled and
worn down. If (as I suspect) Mr Pike reflects the more enlightened attitudes of
its last days, it came to admire the courage and to sympathise with the culture of
the wild Aboriginals (these having now disappeared, however). Of the modern-day
peninsula he writes: “Here is a country still as the explorers first saw it, a
paradise for the Aborigines of long ago, and a land still unpolluted by white
man’s civilisation.” However often you read that sentence, it seems to end up
suggesting that the land is still a paradise for the Aborigines of long ago.
Perhaps if you are a historian they still seem to inhabit it. (But of the Aborigines
living in new kit-homes in Laura township, he can only say: “Once happily
living on (cattle) stations, they have become urban dwellers attracted by the
fortnightly unemployment cheques, white man’s tucker, and grog. With no work
required, sufficient money, and homes provided, they ‘have it made’.”)
Cattle raising has been the lifeblood of the Peninsula since mining faded, and now it too is on the
downgrade with some of the best properties, like Lakefield and Rokeby which
once turned off thousands of head of cattle, becoming National Parks.
There may be something in what local cynics say – if
most of the cattlemen are forced, by economics, to sell out to the Government,
the best parts of the Peninsula will become a
National Park and the Government will not then be required to build roads or do
any further development work.
No doubt it would suit some politicians’ small
Brisbane-oriented minds to leave the Peninsula
as it is – an unpopulated wilderness that can thus be more easily forgotten.
In this way the conservationists, most of whom have
never seen the Peninsula, can be appeased. The
establishment of some National Parks has to be commended, but they should not
be formed at the risk of further depopulating an already underprivileged area.
Those people who have their homes in the lonely
Peninsula country are too few in number to have any influence at the polling
booths, but their contribution to Australia, past and present, cannot
be so heartlessly overlooked.
The Peninsula
people are friendly – genuine bush folk who are ever ready to help someone they
consider less fortunate. They love their region, where the way of life is slow
and quiet...
But this pleasing quietness might, after all, be inseparable
from the neglect. A more sinister quietness lay on Pine Tree in 1888, when
Louisa Boyd came up after the massacre. (“The sheltered English girl was hardly
prepared for the sight that met her eyes; the bloodsoaked blankets of Eddie
Watson and the grave freshly dug to receive his body. She led the prayers at
the graveside, then set to work to tend Jim Evans’ terrible wounds...” Louisa
was recently married to Jack Boyd and, as the author with gentlemanly
discretion claims, “previously had never seen blood other than a scratched
finger”.)
In their hey-day the pioneers, though pursuing their own
ends, felt totally at one with the development of their nation, epitomized for
instance by the heroic construction of the overland telegraph line to Cape
York. Epic development gave a pattern to their lives. So there is a profound
disappointment in the unexpected loss of impetus. They believed that their
lives manifested a destiny.
If Australia were to act more like one of the rich
Western nations it tries to copy and less like one of the Third World
undeveloped countries, there would be a bitumen two-lane highway connecting
Cairns with Weipa by way of Laura and Coen, and the Mulligan Highway would no
longer be a horror road. Cape York Peninsula
would be able to fulfil the destiny for which its pioneers worked and dreamed a
century ago. The dollars from less than one year’s production of Weipa bauxite
could do it. A levy should be imposed expressly for Peninsula
development, including road construction. The Weipa Aborigines already receive
a substantial royalty.
Organizing 4WD parties that enable urban tourists to sample
the thrills of the “horror road” was obviously not the destiny that was dreamt
of.
In the Peninsula
there is still gold; there is definitely tin, wolfram, bauxite, coal, and
perhaps oil. There is a huge coalfield running inland from Bathurst Bay
to Battle Camp. There is an artesian basin inland from Princess Charlotte
Bay. There are a million
acres of agricultural land, ten million acres of good grazing country; the
balance, as big as all of Tasmania,
can still be left as a wilderness area in National Parks to ensure
preservation. Development and conservation can go hand in hand.
This heartfelt plea is a little confusing, set in apposition
to the remark about “a land still unpolluted by white men’s civilisation”. I
suppose, like many other people, the
descendants of the pioneers wanted self-contradictory things – the dream but
also the dreaming, untamed grandeur transfixed in an eternal moment of being mastered,
admiration but not displacement, to be left alone but not forgotten, and to
bequeath to their children something whose value lay in being uninherited. One
wants one’s life to have had a purpose. Or more realistically, one wants it to
seem to have had a purpose.
[It
would be a shame not to give a sample of Mrs Lennie Wallace’s inspiriting
narrative of a 1958 drove from Merluna to Mareeba:
Our plant was a very small one with two saddle
horses and one packhorse per person. We had to do big stages to meet our
delivery date, and with 100 F degree heat for twenty-three days, with no storms
yet to make either grass or water, our once-fat horses turned to near
skeletons. To cap it all, I developed dengue fever.
Meanwhile, Hardy [nb. her husband’s brother,
organizer of the drove] was in trouble. One night out from Coen there was a
yard available, but they rushed that night and took the yard. Some had bad horn
wounds when we took delivery the next day.
Hardy counted them out. ‘One thousand one hundred’
as he tied the eleventh knot in his whipfall, then: ‘One, two’ – a pause as he
looked back over his shoulder to a stag that was hobbling along well behind the
mob – ‘and three. I think he has Three Day Sickness.’
Hardy was right. The whole mob got it. Some even got
it twice and calves on their mothers suffered, too. It was the first outbreak
for over thirty years, and nothing had immunity.
It didn’t help our task, and we shuddered each
morning as the cattle were counted off camp. We broke all the rules and forced
the sick ones on as there was no grass or water where we could leave them.
Rarely did we do a normal eight-mile stage; most of our camps were dry ones,
with the horsetailer and cook carrying canteens from the closest waterhole.
Calves born on the road had to be killed, but when
near a station we gave them to the station kids to poddy on the milkers. Many a
herd has been started from drovers’ calves.
Christmas Day was spent just north of Musgrave. The
menu was dry salt beef, tea, damper, and syrup. I spent most of the day by a
waterlily pool trying to get a bullock on his feet and rejoin the mob. I rode
back down the telegraph line in pitch darkness except for flashes of lightning.
As a Christmas gesture, Hardy Wallace did my watch for me, he having caught us
up in a jeep.
The sister of John, the cook, lived at Musgrave and
she gave him a home-made fever mixture for my dengue. It worked, but was
horribly horrible in taste. The ingredients included quinine, Epsom salts, and
gin. John had also been given some fresh eggs for me and he carried them in his
saddlebag. The motion of the horse scrambled them in the shell before they were
cooked, but that was only minor...]
[For
a dramatically different sense of Cape York
and its communities, visit the website of the Cape York Youth Network (http://www.cyyn.net).*
This is largely the work of young people from the aboriginal communities (with
some discreet assistance in setting-up from the “Nerds”). Both book and website
are mere pinholes into a large, remote land; yet their underlying preoccupations
are after all complementary. For the outsider there is no possibility of savoir,
but there are elusive beginnings of connaître.
* Unfortunately short-lived: I wrote these words in 2003 but the site had gone when I looked for it again in 2005. ]
[See
also: George Farwell, Cape York to the
Kimberleys (1962).]
Labels: Glenville Pike
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home