Tall Poppies Along the Yarra

INTRODUCTION

There is properly no history, only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

American poet, lecturer and essayist 1803–82

For years we have walked or ridden along the Yarra Trail, stopping at riverside cafes and enjoying the peaceful ambience. We have learned a lot about the ancient river, its valley and its people: some of them exceptionally high achievers—‘Tall Poppies’. Those we have written about impacted significantly on the Yarra or were influenced by it.

It is not widely known that this modest little stream is over 100 million years old and Aboriginal people were the custodians of the valley for perhaps 40,000 years before white settlement. They had little effect on the land. Although the biodiversity of the Yarra Valley has been reduced under the onslaught of European settlement, the diversity of its people has increased as society has become more multicultural. Consequently our heroes have a wide range of national origins. Although they have made a valuable contribution to Australian—and in some instances, international—society, not all the Tall Poppies included are well known.

The growth and development of Melbourne and along the valley have waxed and waned since colonisation, but the changes inflicted on the landscape have been profound. During the early colonial period, timber cutters, graziers and farmers moved relentlessly upstream to earn a living. After the following land boom collapsed in the 1840s, men left to make their fortunes on the goldfields. The gold bonanza resulted in a huge increase in Melbourne’s population and by the 1880s it had become a very rich city.

Another crash in real estate occurred in the 1890s: banks failed, unemployment soared and trade unionism flourished. In a few years Australia was plunged into World War I (WWI) and the subsequent depression. Tumultuous times continued with the advent of World War II (WWII) after which a period of relative stability and affluence enabled ordinary Australians more time for leisure. Tensions over the Cold War with communist countries were temporarily suppressed as Melbourne joyously hosted the 1956 Olympic Games in many venues close to the Yarra. Since then, rapid development, globalisation and information technology have made the world appear smaller yet more complex. Man’s impact on the natural environment is causing increasing concern. Consequently, some of our characters have been active in this conflict between nature and ‘progress’.

The book is divided into four sections: Aboriginal Yarra; Colonists; Late Nineteenth Century—Early Twentieth Century; and Contemporary. The story of William Barak, whose life straddled the period of pre- and post-European settlement, provides a fitting commencement to this collection of profiles, which ends with Ian Penrose—the current Yarra Riverkeeper.

ABORIGINAL YARRA

TRADITIONAL CUSTODIAN OF THE LAND

William Barak (c. 1824–1903) Ngurungaeta of his Wurundjeri people and artist

They ought to leave us alone and not take the land from us as it is not much. We are dying away be degree. There is plenty more land around the country without troubling about Coranderrk.

Aboriginal petition on Coranderrk Aboriginal Settlement, October, 1893

IN THE BEGINNING

Before European settlement, the 100 million-year-old Yarra River was the source of abundant food and shelter for Aboriginal people. William Barak (Beruk—white grub in gum tree) took part in their corroborees and ceremonies along its banks. Their myths and stories about it were passed on to him. He knew that Bunjil, the creator spirit, made the earth and used his knife to cut out the rivers. He was familiar with the names given to different sections of the river such as Birrarung (River of Mists) along the lower reaches and Warringal further upstream near today’s Heidelberg.

When the Europeans began arriving in Victoria there were probably about thirty-eight cultural-language groups of Aborigines throughout the colony. Barak’s father, Bebejern, was a member of the Woi wurrung-speaking Wurundjeri-willam clan who lived within the watershed of the Yarra. Barak’s mother, Tooterrie, was a member of the Daung wurrung people from the Goulburn River region. He was the youngest of their six children when he was born at Brushy Creek, Wonga Park.

Barak and others in his clan belonged to the moiety of waa, the crow. The clan would have split into extended families each of whom would have identified with specific territories. The families were responsible for the particular trees, water, rocks and animals in their territory and knew them intimately. It was their birthright: their land. They intermarried but avoided close relatives and always to a person of the opposite moiety. Theirs was a complex society that the European colonisers found difficult to understand.

Barak’s people moved with the seasons depending on the availability of food and the need to visit sacred sites. One such traditional site was at the Bolin Bolin billabong at Bulleen, a place where several hundred Aboriginal people would congregate to feed on its eels and conduct ceremonies. In winter they would move to higher ground to avoid floods.

There were detailed laws to prevent anti-social behaviour, control marriage and perpetuate their customary spiritual life. Each group had a headman or elder who had authority and demanded respect. In Barak’s Wurundjeri clan the elder was called Ngurungaeta. When they were of marriageable age boys and girls were initiated into the full life of the clan. Young Barak was partly initiated by elders putting possum skins, a necklace, nose peg, waist string and apron on him as well as making cuts on his chest and filling them with ashes and animal fats.

His eventful life covered the period both before and after white men colonised his clan lands along the Yarra. Most of his people and their culture were destroyed in the first fourteen years of contact with Europeans. The damage was done by the uncaring squatters, and aggravated by a period of drought and the Black Thursday bushfires of February 1851. Introduced foxes, rabbits, cats and weeds further exacerbated the problem.

While writing this book we were shocked to learn of the magnitude of those irrevocable changes: this clash of two vastly different cultures, and its influence on William Barak’s life. What follows is our inevitably incomplete understanding of what happened.

ARRIVAL OF THE WHITE MEN

When Barak was about 11 years old, he watched the ceremony while John Batman negotiated his spurious ‘Treaty’ with leaders of Aboriginal clans near Melbourne in 1835. Under the treaty Batman convinced them to exchange 600,000 acres of land for some blankets, tomahawks, knives, scissors, looking-glasses, handkerchiefs, shirts and flour. William Buckley, an escaped convict who had lived with Aboriginal people for 33 years before rejoining white society, acted as interpreter during the negotiations. Later in life Barak recalled the impact that experience had on him:

I never forgot Batman. Buckley told us to look at Batman. He said he was a good man. Batman said you must not kill the white man, nor steal his things. White man is good, and will give you meat and sugar, but if you kill a white man, he will shoot you like this, and Batman fired a gun. We all shivered with fright. Women watching in the scrub screamed and ran away. Batman said don’t be frightened and then gave us meat and rations, and we went back to camp.¹

This frightened young boy was fated to spend much of his long life negotiating for his own people with the invaders from overseas. The leader of the Aboriginal people at that time was Billibellary. When Barak became Ngurangaeta he had the harrowing experience of witnessing the rapid disappearance of his people’s traditional life, damage to their sacred sites and massive alteration of the ecology of the area.

We can only try to imagine what the Aboriginal people thought and how they coped when their land was colonised in such a roughshod manner by Europeans in the name of ‘progress’. Initially they showed respect to the white strangers but when this respect was not returned and they were mistreated or killed and their land taken, many reacted violently. Their resistance took the form of a guerrilla war. They were fated to lose because of their lack of arms and the consequences of sheep and cattle grazing on their land. At the same time they had to try to come to grips with a new language, laws and ideology, as well as coping with introduced diseases such as dysentery, small pox and syphilis.

The clash of Aboriginal and European cultures was commented on by H. W. Wheelwright who lived in Victoria in the 1850s before returning to Europe. In contrasting the driven Christian work ethic with the more relaxed lives of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers, he noted the perceptive saying of one Aborigine: ‘Big one fool, white fellow, all same working bullock.’

Noting that Aboriginal people did not farm the land, the colonisers considered it empty and belonging to no one. Therefore, applying the flawed law of Terra Nullius, they thought they were free to make it their own. They also believed that Aborigines were primitive savages: earlier stages of man’s evolution, which would inevitably die out.

PROTECTING AND CIVILISING?

Under the influence of humanitarian reformers and evangelicals in Britain, and in shocked response to the previous genocide of Aboriginal people in Van Diemen’s Land, the government established an Aboriginal Protectorate in Victoria in 1839. It consisted of Chief Protector George Augustus Robinson and four assistants. They were supposed to ‘provide food, shelter, clothing, medical needs, education and religious instruction’ to those under their care. It was assumed that once the Aboriginal people saw the ‘superior culture’ of the whites they would change their ways. The Protectors and the government were amazed when the Aborigines merely complied with the restrictions imposed on them without changing their traditional beliefs and customs.

One of the last big corroborees that young Barak probably would have seen along the lower Yarra was at the traditional camping site near Baron von Mueller’s Melbourne Botanical Gardens. Several hundred Aboriginal people took part in a welcome to Robinson. The strange new settlement attracted them because they could obtain European goods, including guns, in exchange for such things as firewood, spears and possum skins. There were many such camps along the south bank of the Yarra and others scattered on the other bank. Frequently they were visited by Europeans to trade food, sex and alcohol. Robinson considered them to be places of famine and misery.

Tragically, although the Protectorate was well intentioned it was hamstrung by policies that were made half a world away in London. It was not possible to reconcile the aims of the British Government to use Australia as a means of reducing the population in Britain, a place for its convicts and a source of raw materials, while at the same time taking a benevolent approach to the land’s traditional owners.

The Protectorate was largely ineffective and lasted for only ten years. Robinson had to deal with rapacious European squatters who wanted nothing to do with the Aboriginal people and were contemptuous of their claims. As the number of imported sheep and cattle grazing on lush Aboriginal land increased, the number of Aboriginal people near Melbourne declined from 350 in 1836 to only 33 in 1863.

Barak witnessed all this. As the last elder of the Wurundjeri clan, he became an influential spokesman for them and an advisor on their folklore. He had a friendly, intelligent face, piercing black eyes and a dignified bearing. Quietly spoken but charismatic, he was a gifted storyteller. Caught between Aboriginal and European cultures, he was highly respected by all those who met him. No doubt, apart from his own personal hardships, he must have been shocked and saddened at what was happening to his people and the devastating effects of agriculture and mining on the land and its rivers. They were losing their land, but could he somehow retain their culture?

SCHOOL DAYS

As a boy, Barak attended Rev. George Langhorne’s Yarra Mission School which was located on the south side of the Yarra, now a part of the Botanic Gardens. As the area was near a large wetland rich in plant and animal life, it was a popular site for camping and holding corroborees. The boundaries of the land were laid out by Robert Hoddle, the government surveyor, and its buildings consisted of wattle and daub huts erected by convicts.

Barak was probably at the school for only a few years. According to Richard Broome, ‘In December 1838 the Woi wurrung left Melbourne for the mountains, taking with them nearly all the boys from the mission, leaving only a Murrumbidgee boy’, so it is likely that young William was taken then. Governor Bourke chose Langhorne, previously an Anglican catechist to native prisoners on Goat Island in Sydney Harbour, to operate the government Mission. Like others of his time he had prejudices about Aboriginal people but must also have had a strong compassion for them.

In his instructions to Langhorne on how to set up the Mission School, the Colonial Secretary advised him that he should be friendly with the Aboriginal people, protect them and improve their ‘moral and social condition’. However, he also instructed:

Should the conduct of the natives be violent or dishonest, you will endeavour to restrain them by the gentlest means, informing them that they must consider themselves subject to the laws of England, which being put in force for their protection must equally operate for their restraint or punishment if they offend the whites.²

After a few months Langhorne considered that with respect to the children, the mission was successful because:

Although no restraint was put on their persons as regarding coming and going they seldom left the house even for an hour or two without permission, as I had made it a rule that the child who left without leave of absence should forfeit one of the three meals daily served to them; this regulation I propose to continue… The principal aim first must be gradually to reconcile them to fixed hours of labour and school.³

When Barak was a pupil the Mission housed eighteen resident children. The long-term aim was to ‘civilise’ them: that is to make them become like Christian Europeans. When reporting on how he planned to set up the Mission, Langhorne wrote:

These, on being left by their parents in charge of the missionary, to be washed and clothed in the dress provided, these dresses merely a frock with a band around the waist, trousers being given only to the elder boys. To be obliged strictly to conform to the regulations for their meals, sleeping, washing, and to be kept as far as possible distinct from the other black occasional visitors.⁴

Later in life Barak remembered ‘…we heard our Minister, Mr Lanon. We got a schoolroom in the German garden and the Schoolmaster’s name was Mr Smith. We was singing up Hallalooler.’ When the Quaker James Backhouse visited the Mission he saw fourteen boys, including Barak, there. He noted that they were learning how to count and to speak English. They had bread, tea and sugar for breakfast, meat and bread for lunch, and bread, tea and sugar in the evening.

In recollecting that time, Langhorne pointed out that the native translation of the Lord’s Prayer and the expression of a Supreme Being were unintelligible to them: ‘…their religious belief consisting merely in an unidentified idea of the immortality of the spirit, and a dread of certain supernatural beings whom they endeavour to propitiate by superstitious observances.’

During the first eighteen months of the mission both the adults and children attended irregularly. They preferred to maintain their regular patterns of movement and some of the adult men were also being drawn away to join the Native Mountain Police. The elders thought that their children were wasting their time and should be learning how to live in the bush, so they repeatedly took them away. Because of such problems and the poor funding of the school, Langhorne resigned in March 1839.

THE MOUNTED POLICE

After leaving school, Barak reverted to his previous lifestyle for a while. However, he seemed to be reconciled to colonisation by the European settlers, accepting the changed world and perhaps hoping for a better future for himself and his people. He joined the Native Mounted Police of the Port Philip District in 1844. There he became Trooper No. 19 and was given the European name William Barak. He served with the police for about seven years and during that time married his first wife, Lizzie, a girl from Gippsland. They had three children but sadly all three died in infancy.

The Native Mounted Police Corps, under Captain Henry Dana, was another government initiative with a troubled and relatively short history. One observer noted that the ‘50 wigwams’ of the Merri Creek Native Police Corps were arranged in two or three straight lines, indicating a disciplined approach. The barracks consisted of simple slab huts without chimneys. The initiators of the scheme hoped that the Aboriginal people would develop a work ethic and a pride in themselves by having guns, swords, horses and splendid green and red uniforms. They would help to protect their fellow indigenous people from attacks while increasing the status of Aborigines in the eyes of the settlers.

Forty or fifty Aboriginal people were enlisted each year and put under the control of white officers. They were expected to conform to white rules yet at the same time were given meagre food rations and expected to supplement them with traditional food harvested from the bush. Drunkenness was a problem and according to Wiencke, Barak developed a liking for alcohol which involved him in fights. He modified this later in life when he became a Christian.

Although the Corps had been planned as a civilising force it actually became a means of pitting one group of Aboriginal people against another. Another problem was that although Aboriginal people were supposed to have equal status to British citizens under the law, this was not applied in practice. Finally the Corps was abandoned in 1853 due to the dwindling number of recruits, the resignation of white officers during the gold rush and the death of Captain Dana, the man in charge of the force.

Barak greatly admired Captain Dana and proudly imitated him. Mrs Anne Bon, a friend of Barak, wrote: ‘Barak was a man of remarkable personality, not tall, but erect. He carried himself with regal dignity, partly due to his military training. Barak was a superior member of the force and a splendid tracker, and his services were always requisitioned in case of importance.’

On several occasions he was involved in trying to track the Kelly gang of bushrangers in north-east Victoria. Years later he used to enjoy telling a story of how he once located the gang:

I said, Robbers in there, go and get them, but they said, You go in we follow. I said, I have no gun. I track. You are cowards. Then they say, We go back for help and tell Mr. Hare. [Superintendent Hare].⁵

A RESERVE FOR THE REMNANT

When gold was discovered in the 1850s, Victoria became a very wealthy colony. Under the booming conditions, new buildings were constructed and towns developed rapidly. But in those times, exciting for the colonisers, the plight of the Aboriginal people grew steadily worse.

With Lizzie, Barak led a group of Aboriginal people who settled at Acheron, ten kilometres south of Alexandra, in 1859. However four years later they had to move to the new Coranderrk Aboriginal Settlement at the junction of Badger Creek and the Yarra River at Healesville. Coranderrk is the Woi wurrung name for the Christmas bush that grows prolifically in the area.

By a coincidence, the Aboriginal people had made a deputation to the governor, Sir Henry Barkly, one month before the land at Coranderrk was gazetted, so they always thought that he, personally, was responsible for the area being granted for their use. In the same manner they had presented gifts to the British Queen Victoria on her birthday and when they received a letter of thanks they believed that she and Barkly had provided Coranderrk to them on a permanent basis.

The first manager at Coranderrk was John Green, an evangelist with genuine ‘heart’ for the plight of Aboriginal people. After the new residents at Coranderrk built huts and started to cultivate gardens they suggested that they be given the land and allowed to manage it themselves. Green tried to arrange this. ‘My method of managing the blacks is to allow them to rule themselves as much as possible,’ he wrote. ‘When there is any strife among them this is always settled by a kind of court, at which I preside.’⁶ However this approach was frowned on by the board. Instead it imposed paternalistic rules for the operation of the settlement aimed at encouraging them to adopt European methods of farming. The 2,000-hectare settlement became a large enterprise containing cottages, a sawmill, dairy, barns, butcher’s shop, bakery and a school as well as 400 cattle and horses. In one year horticultural produce from the settlement won first prize at the Melbourne International Exhibition. By 1875 there were six brick buildings and 40 cottages, but despite considerable effort by the inhabitants and their supporters, Coranderrk was never allowed to become fully self-sufficient.

Green encouraged the making of artefacts that could be sold to visitors. Nets, baskets and bags out of rushes; spears, possum and wallaby skin rugs as well as Barak’s drawings, provided a steady source of income.

Soon after the move to Coranderrk, Barak’s wife Lizzie died. In the following year when he was about 41 years old, he married 20-year-old Ann, from Euston on the lower Murray, in the first Christian Aboriginal wedding ceremony. Together they had a son they named David.

Everyone at Coranderrk had to attend a church service each morning and night, but traditional Aboriginal ceremonies, which were so critical to their culture, were banned by the board. The relentless pressure applied to the residents gradually broke down their resistance as they realised they would have to get some education and adopt some of the white man’s ways if they were to survive. Barak was the first person Green converted to Christianity, baptised and confirmed, and although he was sceptical about Green’s views on drinking and keeping the sabbath, he did refrain from drinking alcohol.

Green was popular with the Aborigines but the board forced him to resign after 13 years because he disagreed with its authoritarian approach and the plan to move the residents from Coranderrk. He retired to Healesville where he established a hop plantation and became the shire president. His Aboriginal friends from Coranderrk did not forget him and visited to help on his property. When he died in 1908 they were present at his funeral.

BARAK THE LEADER

After Green’s departure, the settlement fell into the hands of inexperienced administrators. Barak began a long campaign to retain and improve the settlement and to resist moves to reduce its size. Improvement was clearly needed as the buildings were in an appalling state and in 1875 there were 31 deaths in a population of about 150. The key issues were poor management and the Aboriginal people’s wish to remain at Coranderrk. They wanted the land to be reserved for them and their children. One of the main difficulties was that the government was under continual pressure to sell the property to influential pastoral interests and the board used this to justify some of its actions.

Barak could read English but could not write, so he must have dictated to his supporters the letters written under his name to newspapers and other organisations as well as making delegations to ministers. They developed good relationships with some of the leading figures in Melbourne and were also encouraged by The Argus newspaper. Barak led a protest march on Parliament House in 1874 and took part in a delegation to the government seven years later when it was rumoured that Coranderrk was going to be closed. Such delegations involved walking about 37 miles from Coranderrk to Parliament House, but usually their efforts were in vain. When government ministers would not talk to them, they must have been driven to despair.

For a while, Coranderrk was saved from being sold. Over the years the grievances of those at Coranderrk became a public issue leading to a Royal Commission, a Parliamentary Board of Inquiry, and many parliamentary debates. Those with vested interests were prejudiced against what they considered to be a ‘childlike race’ that should be disciplined.

However the generous spirit of the Aboriginal people was rewarded in 1884 when the premier, Sir Graham Berry, made the station permanent while other stations were still classified as temporary. This pleased the Coranderrk residents and when Berry was leaving Australia to become agent general for Victoria, Barak led a delegation to give him presents and an address saying:

You have done a great deal of work for the aborigines…You do all this thing for the station when we were in trouble, when the board would not give us much food and clothes, and wanted to drive us off the land…We had trouble here in this country, but we can all meet up long ‘Our Father’.⁷

The board maintained its hard-line approach, however. When parliament passed the 1886 Aborigines Protection Act (commonly referred to as the Half-Caste Act) all able-bodied half-castes younger than 35 years of age were required to leave the stations and find work in the outside community. This dealt a severe blow to the physical wellbeing and morale of the Coranderrk residents. Families were separated. It was not always easy for mixed-blood Aboriginal people to obtain work and without work they could be prosecuted under the vagrancy laws. Full-blooded Aboriginal children, the infirm and the old, who remained in the station, lost their workforce and family members who cared for them. As Dianne Barwick says, ‘The young were removed and the old despaired.’ The board was able to capitalise on this problem by claiming that the station could not be maintained, thus supporting their contention that Coranderrk should be closed.

Well into his sixties, Barak remained at Coranderrk and petitioned the government:

We heard little our land going to be taken from us…They ought to leave us alone and not take the land from us as it is not much. We are dying away be degree. There is plenty more land around the country without troubling about Coranderrk. We Aboriginals from Coranderrk wish to know if it’s true about the land. Please we want to know. We got plenty of our own cattle and we want the run for them… when we go into any of the White People’s paddocks to hunt or fish they soon clear us out of their private premises very quick and yet they are craving for Coranderrk.⁸

How they must have missed the help and support of their former manager, John Green, in their quest for self-determination. Little by little, they were losing the struggle. Half of the Coranderrk land was sold to pastoralists who had been after it for years.

Writing about what she called the rebellion at Coranderrk, Barwick highlighted the pathos associated with one of the earlier deputations to parliament. Barak had not been able to work since he had broken his leg the previous year and it had healed badly.

The Kulin men walked home, accommodating their pace to the lameness of the old clan-head Barak. He had made this journey so many times, with other men, now dead. He