Kiangardarup

Daisy Bates in 1908 - Her Year of Living Dangerously

2008-05-09T23:28:00.009+08:00

Daisy Bates in her prime
Recently there have been two forays into the life and work of Daisy Bates – in a review of both for the Sydney Morning Herald, Angela Bennie concluded, “Perhaps the definitive Bates is yet to be written”. Indeed, most recent work has been somewhat sidetracked by her narcissistic problems with truth and her seemingly racist attitudes regarding half castes, cannibalism and the imminent demise of the Aboriginal race. Bob Reece to his credit acknowledges the importance of her work for Native Title cases although, even in Native Title law, remains a resource that has yet to be fully tapped.

In the Battye Library there is a personal file kept while she was working for the Native Welfare Board of W.A. from 1905 to 1910. Her job initially was to record a dictionary but she was adept at turning it into something much bigger. It is clear from the record that she relied on her contacts in the Perth elite, such as her mentor Malcolm Fraser, the Attorney General and her women friends at the exclusive Karrakatta Club. Every year, Fraser lobbied indefatigably for a continuance of her allowance of ₤150. But at some point, everyone who seeks patronage from the elite has to prove or reprove their ‘reliability’. In 1908 Daisy’s reliability came into question.(there's more)

She had almost finished her work by the end of 1907. Her grammar was being reviewed by R.L. Matthews in Victoria she was discussing how the work was to be published with the Government but there was something nagging away about whether she had everything. Most of her informants had come from around Perth or were in the employment of the gentry, and while their information was good, there were some holes. A Mr Jull from Mt Barker had told her that the descent system on the south coast was patrilineal. She hadn’t been to Albany but had heard of Tommy King (Wandinyil) who had been alive since the earliest settlement of the state and was renowned for his willingness to talk and trade.

Arriving in Albany 7 May 1908, she discovered that Wandinyil had died the year previously but Wabbinyet and Jakbum were camped out on the Perth Road and were willing informants. What she learnt from them destroyed her certainties, “I shall be compelled to rewrite six chapters” she wrote to the Acting Chief Protector. “Mrs Hassell has offered to pay for a trip out to Cape Riche.” By the end of the month, she is Esperance asking for more expenses “ I have constantly to supply my native informants with tobacco, tinned meats and sundries”. By the end of July, she had travelled 1900 miles and visited 28 townships through the south coast, the great southern and the southern wheatbelt forwarding invoices for rail tickets and expenses to the Acting Chief Protector.

Her travel diary makes exhausting reading as she literally chases down people from town to town - Collie to Darkan and back Collie and on to Brunswick Junction in 4 days cadging lifts in buggies or on borrowed horses where she could get a side saddle, just to catch up with one group. In this time she records the bulk of her Great Southern “dialects and pedigrees”. She is on a mission now, her eyes have been opened as she has come into contact with other groups in the south west and realized that she has only half the story, if that.

She is in Perth for a week and then she is off again to the Goldfields. Suddenly she has discovered that even within the Noongar (or Bibbulmun as she insisted on calling it) there were different habits and customs, shades of grey and nuance that her white and more colonized informants had elided over. Her trip through the goldfields would be taxing today. She visits 21 towns and travels 1700 miles in five weeks. At Menzies, she wrote “natives afraid of constables and hid, walked some miles next day with some boys and found native camp. Obtained pedigrees … all of them differing from statements of white residents”. She is beginning to risk her reliability.

On her way back to Perth she has a chance to “witness an initiation” at Burracoppin. The Assistant Protector telegrams her to return to Perth forthwith. She writes back, “In view of the proved unreliability of the statements received from white people the Murchison must be traversed…”. The question of reliability is being asked on all sides.

She is back in Perth by the 12th of September, after a trip to Rottnest to follow up with some of the prisoners she is on the train to Nannine and the Gascoyne by the 24th. It’s clear that she is not going to give the protector a chance to stop her. A week later, she is giving a lecture in Meekatharra (proceeds to the hospital) and she drives out to the ‘boolee boolee’ ground. She writes - “ ‘boolee boolee’, a special seed, whose harvesting occurs at this time, gathering of all natives from surrounding districts”. On the train back to Dongara she travels with “2 native murderers from Lawless and Menzies … and obtained p[edigrees]. and some d[ialects]. arrived Dongara midnight.” She is becoming a dangerous woman.

At Mingenew, she “found a Berkshire Valley woman who gave me Jindal and Manara woman’s ped. Had to work with her during her laundry work, walking from washtub to clothesline”. She has discarded virtually all her white informants as reliable sources of knowledge and has recognized the separate importance of women’s knowledge. It would take another 50 odd years for the rest of Australian anthropology to catch up as she blazed a trail for the likes of Olive Pink and Caroline Berndt.

A few days later, at Moora, she finds a ‘native camp’ where all but one of the residents is ‘half caste’. She writes, “Obtained pedigree of native as I consider the half caste information of no ethnographic value”. A viewpoint she was reiterating from Lorimer Fison , the co-author of the landmark book “Kamilaroi and Kurnai” (published in 1880), who had cautioned that “...they had to be ‘continually on the watch’ that ‘every last trace of whitemen's effect on Aboriginal society’ was ‘altogether cast out of calculation’… ”.

Her supposed distaste for half castes originated not from an unthinking prejudice but from her aspiring to follow the dictates of scientific research at the time. It would be later reinterpreted as prejudice on her behalf, because she was so obviously ‘unreliable’. As Elizabeth Povinelli points out, “given time, deeply held moral convictions …[reappear] as simple parochial beliefs, as good intentions gone awry.” Today, in native title cases arguments about the authenticity of “customary beliefs and practices” determine the issue of people’s entitlements due to the perseverance of this belief.

By the time she has finished this third trip she has travelled 5400 miles and recorded 34 dialects from the southern half of western Australia. The protector writes to her at the end of the year that “her employment is to be terminated”. Fraser again intervenes but the knives are out. She spends most of 1909 rewriting her work and trying to negotiate a publishing deal with antagonistic officials who adopt a hard line. No money will be forthcoming. In 1910, the State sees a way out. The noted and reliable anthropologist, Radcliffe Brown is coming to the state and she is to be loaned to him. More importantly, the drafts of her book are to be given to him for him to publish as he sees fit. She writes to the Undersecretary of the Premier’s Department “I regret … my long and arduous labours… have not met with more equitable consideration” and pleads that she could have the material that Brown doesn’t use for a popular book. Eventually she publishes this in her influential book “The Passing of the Aborigines”, but her original work is not published until 1985. The conflict with Radcliffe-Brown is discussed elsewhere and a source of some dissension. Prejudice surrounds Daisy and her works, I hope this article stimulates some discussion of her guts and determination. She is accused of woolly headed thinking more than once by her reviewers but her actions I suspect speak louder than words.

Sources:

Povinelli, Elizabeth, "The Cunning of Recognition - Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism", Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002

State Government Personal File, Daisy Bates C.SO. 1023, State Records Office, Battye Library, Perth.

Angela Bennie, book review, The Sydney Morning Herald; 1/3/08; no internet text; this text quoted from http://www.missionandjustice.org/daisy-queen-of-the-desert-australiaaboriginalhistory/ [last visited 9 May 2008]

Small Town Saints and Sinners

2008-05-07T10:50:00.003+08:00

In a small city, there is an edge between anonymity and identity where those who don’t fit in, live halfway between madness and normality. I know several quite ordinary saints who conduct miracles over the chook pen.

One looks after her Noongar neighbour’s young daughter while her mum oscillates between speed and prison, she makes sure she the kid gets to school, standing up to the aggro when it comes her way with strength and patience. Another borrows other people’s cars so she can visit 'her boys' in prison, they’re no one’s boys, in actuality, but she can write letters for their appeals or to get them home or just listen to their loneliness. Is she a saint or just misguided as some of the guards think. Her life is guided by spirit voices who tell her what she is meant to be doing for the planet. She’s survived more than her share of tragedies. Whenever I talk to her, I’m left breathless by this other world and the power that she grants it. She makes me believe in miracles.

There are sinners here too, on this edge of town. Narcissistic tendencies get full rein in a place where you can pretend to one more mark that you are poor and misbegotten and can you spare me a dime. This belief, that my view of the world is all that matters, compounds itself as the emo queen screams abuse at the cops and her mother. Her demands get more unreasonable by the minute. She’s just like Putin, seeding the clouds so it won't rain on his big parade. Except she hasn’t got a cloud seeder just some stolen drugs. My narcissistic sinners commit no grand auto thefts; their crimes are against emotion. Stealing hearts and twisting desires to ensure their grandiloquence and the hubris of their miraculous birth.

Fortunately, in small cities and amongst the poor at least, saints outnumber sinners and the disabled and destitute find jobs and friendly shop keepers who keep an eye on their money for them. People remember their names and do what they can because the saints inspire them.

Noongar Resistance on the South Coast

2008-05-04T00:29:00.004+08:00

This is a much awaited public copy of an essay I wrote last year. I've just finished rewriting it tonight. I will post a footnoted and referenced version to my website tomorrow.

Introduction

“And you know Kimmy, it seems a bit funny that different times when our people travel and been going down, some of thems’ cars have stopped and they have trouble, just like the spirits are trying to stop them, and telling them not to go past [Cocanarup].” … “in the darkness a voice said, ‘Oh, what happened at Cocanarup means a lot to us’ ” . In rediscovering his Noongar ancestry Kim Scott published the first written account of a massacre that occurred near Ravensthorpe towards the end of 1881. The wadjela record is fragmentary and oblique, “terrible stories abound” but no one doubts that something happened. The Noongar record, on the other hand, is specific as to circumstances, numbers and names. In order to examine how these two opposing narratives arose I want to explore the genealogy of inter racial murder and violence on the south coast leading up to the 1880’s from the initial settlement at King George’s Sound (Albany) in 1826.

The colonial history of the south coast makes much of the apparently peaceful co-existence between Noongar and the British colonizers that marked the colony’s birth. Garden, in Albany’s official history, records that “during the 1830’s Albany became the showplace of race relations” . In 1833, following the death of Yagan, Gallipurt and Manyat were sent to Perth from Albany to explain to the local population the value of co-operation. Tactfully, they pleaded ignorance of the local language. The “superior intelligence of the Albany natives” , the qualities of the “men in charge” , and the “small size of the settlement” are cited as reasons that here, at least in the beginning, peaceful settlement was no myth even if it was exceptional.

Fifty years later race relations in Albany were very ordinary indeed and conflict on the south coast from Albany to Eucla reached a peak as the local authorities turned a blind eye to massacres, mass murderers and the concerns of authorities in Perth.

This account, of necessity, skims the surface of the Noongar resistance. Some subjects such as the impact of disease and traditional payback are omitted completely. It begins in the last decade of colonial rule and works backwards to the beginning. Like Alice reading the Jabberwocky, we must hold the colonists’ accounts up to the looking glass to decipher them, to see the view from the other side

Cocanerup and other massacres of the 1880’s

In 1881, R.C. Loftie, a gentleman of the “old school” , took over as the Government Resident at Albany. It was the sort of place “where above all a gentleman is required” and he was “highly popular” . On 27 February 1882 he was most put out, having to return “to my office after four o’clock” to respond to a telegram from the Colonial Secretary that complained “about three shocking cases of natives in want” . The telegram had been sent in response to one sent by Campbell Taylor visiting Albany from his station at Eucla. Taylor found the three lying next to the road “within a mile of the town” near Mr Gardener, the birdman’s house. One was a young girl of 19, “lying in a perfectly helpless state of partly from a great boil on her knee which for want of urgent treatment has become a putrid sore”, another “frightfully burnt about the belly and privates…some boys had put some red hot ashes on him”, the third, Towlett, was to die of starvation and thirst within the week . Taylor had complained that the police “made light of” the incident and his willingness to bypass Loftie may have been due to his knowledge of recent events at Eucla and at Cocanarup.

Six months earlier the telegraph station master at Eucla, G.P. Stevens had taken a statement from Geordie, a Mirning man, which he was to forward later to Loftie, as Chief Protector of Aborigines in the district, and which was the basis of a report made by Constable Truslove . Truslove accused the Kennedy brothers and William McGill of a “wholesale system of murder of natives” on their sheep run at Mundrabilla . The Superintendent of Police in Perth thought it was of “sufficient importance” to pass it on to the Governor, Sir William Robinson, who expressed the hope that “Captain Smith will not lose sight of this case” . According to Stevens, Truslove was shown the graves of 16 natives .

Geordie, much later told his story to the young child Arthur Dimer who grew up to be a man of Ngadju and Mirning descent who, in his 70’s, told it Peter Gifford in 1993 . Gifford was able to uncover the few documents relating to this mass murder. He cannot “excuse his [Loftie’s] inaction” in response to repeated reports “over what were, in effect, accusations of multiple murder of Aboriginal people” by McGill and the Kennedy’s .

In March 1880, John Dunn, one of three brothers who had been running sheep at Cocanarup since 1872, was killed.

It was Granny Monkey’s [Ngurer] brother, Yandawalla, that killed Dunn, you know, for what he was doing to the women.
The truth was, Esmeralda Dabb was thirteen years old when Dunn raped her, and him and the overseer were busy satisfying themselves with the young girls and they locked all the old people up in the harness room…
They were shepherding sheep …and…having initiation ceremonies…she went and told the men…and… they come back and they speared him, they killed him. Yandawalla speared him, at Cocanarup.

Next day, when John still had not come back, he [Walter] and Robert set out to look for him. They followed tracks, lost them; found them again. It was two days before they came upon John’s body and signs of a scuffle. The body had a spear wound in the neck and bruising on the arms as though they had been held.

After much delay Yangala (Yandawalla) was put on trial in October 1881, based mainly on the evidence of Dartaban who had previously been accused of the murder by Yangala. “The Attorney-General told the jury the case rested solely on Dartaban’s evidence”. Yangalla was acquitted leaving the Dunn’s “stunned at the result” .

There is no evidence of when exactly the massacre that followed these events occurred but it seems likely that directly after the trial there would have been a strong motive. The following year, Walter and Robert, bought the women of the family, to see John’s grave. They stayed six months before returning to Albany . The brothers may have felt confident of their situation by then but it was misplaced as the following year in September the Noongar again attacked, James was ‘beaten and left for dead… Robert was also attacked by them, but he shot 2 of them Dead and wounded 3 more”

Many of the Noongar accounts claim that they were “given permission from the authorities”, they “got a permit to kill the seventeen people that were residents of that place”, they “bought back the wadjela farmers and two cops with guns” and that “the police were sent up from Albany” .

“Old Henry Dongup…reckoned that altogether there was over thirty people that were killed down there.” All the people living at Cocanarup were killed except for a couple of children (the impact can be traced in genealogies recorded by Daisy Bates and Gerhard Laves ).

The popular “old school” Loftie’s brother-in-law was Maitland Brown who, in 1865, was hailed as a hero for leading a punitive expedition that killed at least 15 people in revenge for the murder of three explorers at Moola Boola . In his first year as Resident Magistrate and Protector of Aborigines in Albany, it would appear that he has ignored one report of a massacre at Fraser Range and possibly actively encouraged another at Ravensthorpe. It is little wonder that Campbell Taylor, felt motivated to send telegrams and strongly worded letters of complaint in February 1882.

In 1883, Albany residents dislike of “newcomers” and resentment towards Perth found voice in the new Albany Mail. They dreamt of separating from W.A. and annexing to S.A . A viewpoint shared by McGill and the Dempster brothers who had taken up the first leases at Esperance Bay in 1865 .

The Dempsters in 1880 had demanded an apology from the Colonial Secretary when he issued a circular banning the practice of “imprisoning natives on the islands” . They claimed that, “our conduct towards natives generally has been such as to merit esteem from the natives and praise from the public in general” . By 1870, the Dempsters had already twice reported to the Colonial Secretary Barlee that it had been “necessary in self defence to take an Aboriginal life”. They were forgiven “so long as no complaint is preferred.” The Dempsters claimed throughout that they had “very little trouble with the natives” . In 1883 outraged when Loftie connived with the Dempsters by giving them “an authority in blank” to care for “sick natives afflicted with measles” enabling the Dempster’s to charge the Government ₤291 for care that Constable Truslove reported to be greatly exaggerated. The Albany Mail accused the Government of short changing Albany by “thousands of pounds per

By 1890, after 10 years of Loftie’s protection, the Noongar population of Albany was reduced to six who dutifully attended the celebrations of Colonial independence (see below). In 1881, Loftie reported that there were 9 “exclusive of course of those in employ of householders who … would appear in the census” but Loftie was clearly in the business of under-reporting, in the same report he states “It is known that there are a few wild natives between Esperance and York but impossible to return the number – not exceeding 50.” Much later, in 1992, it was claimed that these were the last of the tribe (LOTT) and that the 800 or so Noongar residents recorded in the 1991 Census were from ‘elsewhere’ , although at least 33 Noongar burials are recorded in the Albany Memorial Park Cemetery between 1900 and 1935 . What is clear from the record is that many Noongar people had retreated from the town and the hostility that had developed towards them from the 1870’s on. Fanny Taylor, Campbell’s mother records in her diary in 1873 “[Candyup] Bobby came out but bought us no letters; he is afraid to go to town as Mr McGill is said to be in Albany" .

Resistance 1830 - 1890

The events of the 1880’s did not occur in a vacuum. Noongar resistance along the south coast to the spread of colonial settlement follows a pattern that is, in retrospect, evident in the record from the earliest days of colonization. Wadjelas were cautiously evaluated as they moved into new country, an initial test was how they responded to an offer of guidance through local territory . The consequences of cattle and sheep on native pasture and their kangaroo herds were clear from the beginning to both sides.

The Noongar would demonstrate both their numbers and authority to the newcomers, a late afternoon or evening visit usually timed to occur when the men (and their guns) were absent and only women or servants were around was made. At the same time raids leading to the destruction of sheep or stores in significant quantities occurred.

The guerrilla war that followed was mediated by Noongar ideas of payback and individual honour as well as organised resistance . The front line troops were wadjela shepherds and Noongar women and the war was as much about women’s bodies as it was about men’s land. It is striking how this frontline, so much in evidence between 1840 and 1890 on the south coast, is the progenitor of the policies and politics of the early 20th Century.

The Dempsters had ‘pioneered’ the Esperance region in 1866 and had initially settled at Menbrunup on Esperance Bay. By 1873 they had reported to the authorities on three separate occasions that it was ‘necessary in self-defence to take an Aboriginal life’ and in that year “runners with a maintch stick … collected about a hundred men, women and children…” to raid Dempster’s and drove off “between 300 and 400 young weaners” .

Biggins suggests that this is a “new tactic” but it was first employed on the south coast in 1839 against Sir Richard Spencer’s farm on the Hay River when he lost "300 fine toothed ewes and all the lambs out of 500” . It was a tactic designed to forestall the newcomer, at the same time these new farms were besieged as the local Noongar made clear their proprietary rights.

At Augusta in January 1834 Fannie Bussell records “We had a visit or rather an invasion from a number of natives… they seemed well aware of our unprotected situation, demanding bread in a tone of great authority…” Later at Vasse in 1837, her sister Bessie wondered “How will all these wars and rumours end!” It was to end in bloodshed with mass murders in 1837 and 1840. After the first massacre, (over the killing of a calf) her sister Bessy wrote ‘9 were killed and two wounded. No one in the house looks or speaks like themselves’ and after the second she wrote ‘ I fear more women were slain than men...Three women, one man, one boy are known to be dead, but more are supposed to be dying’

At the Hay River in 1840, Spencer wrote “they came in great numbers about the house towards the close of evening” and at Kendenup in 1841, Hassell wrote “the natives have assembled to an alarming number” . However, John Hassell was quick to recognize the value of diplomacy alongside force majeure and, whereas others were all too willing to preach the value of communal punishment following the putative success of the Pinjarra massacre , he recognized the virtue of protecting and rationing those in the immediate vicinity whose land he had usurped while hiring shepherds who were capable of ‘gross acts of brutality’ and who became his front line in the ongoing guerrilla war . This enabled Hassell to report that there were a ‘great many well inclined natives towards the white people… [and to request that] several native constables be made in the district’

It established a pattern. Shepherds became the expendable front line troops in the war against the Noongar. They were often charged with crimes for their actions although rarely successfully prosecuted. The loss of hunting grounds forced Noongar families to work for rations on the farms and enabled the colonists to divide and conquer. By 1840, most districts had two or more native constables who became crucial in the pursuit of the Noongar resistance. But these men risked everything, in 1847 “300 natives carrying fire beside their spears” surrounded a soldier’s house at Kojonup, they were after Bimbert and his brother George who usually stayed with them. The brothers escaped and apparently prospered but with their bridges burnt forever.

On the Noongar side, women became the front line and the war was fought over the right to their bodies. John Dunn was murdered because “the [Dunn] men were messing around with the women” . The ownership and abuse of Noongar women is a constant theme in the documented conflicts along the south coast. In 1862, Anne Camfield and others petitioned the Governor to change the law to make it a criminal offence “for either black or white to take or retain a native woman contrary to the consent of her husband ” because “in this district…the greater part of the serious crime committed by the natives has originated in this manner” .

Suspicion undermined many well intentioned people. Bobbinet went from being a trusted employee of the Graham’s at Eticup (south east of Kojonup) in 1865, to being a hunted murderer ten years later . Bobbinet was accused participating in the murder of a Noongar shepherd called Jacky Mullish in 1874. According to Bill Baker in 1953 newspaper article, he was a “red ragger” who “had always resented the intrusion of the white man” , but according to his family he was framed. The family history accords more with the facts in the contemporary record.

According to the trial record, Lance Corporal Armstrong and trooper Michael Fahey visited a shepherd’s camp at Beenup Swamp early on the morning of 13 January 1875 where Bobbinet was rumoured to be staying. He along with 6 other Noongar men were in the company of Donald McKellar, a shepherd. McKellar had entrusted Bobbinet with his rifle the previous Wednsday. Armstrong rode into the camp with his gun loaded and bailed up, at Fahey’s direction, a “native I [Fahey] have since found is called Bob Guarich” . Bobbinet had grabbed one of the three loaded guns in the camp and fatally shot Armstrong. Fahey was vilified by the police force and dishonourably discharged thus preventing any alternative view to Armstrong’s ‘heroic deed’ . Bobbinet was captured after a full scale manhunt which, according to Baker, was to result in “a trial with all the trimmings and an execution” He was caught by Constable John McGlade and was hanged in Perth, before his execution he apologized for the murder of Armstrong and prayed for forgiveness . His two children were sent to Swan Native Home and his wife Lucy remarried .

Whether or not Bobbinet was on the side of the resistance, it was still active. In 1880, when ‘notorious hut robbers’, Youngie and Tommy shot a man named George Smith east of the Williams River, the posse of four police, several farmers and trackers that pursued them returned wounded and dispirited, having caught only one out of the six in the gang ( which included three women) after 9 days and a shoot out in the marlock scrub . The resistance was not easily quelled.

While the displacement of kangaroo by cattle and sheep, exacerbated by the hunting and export of kangaroo skins, forced the Noongar to depend upon the colonists’ largesse, in 1841 and 1842 another threat emerged. American whalers arrived en masse on the south coast and decimated the population of Southern Right Whales . The coastal people had opportunistically exploited strandings and, latterly, the waste of the whalers as a source of food. In April 1844 the Government Resident wrote, “this season this source has failed them” .

The consequences were quickly bought home to the residents of Albany. Norn, Denin, Bobby and Wylie (the latter on a native constable’s rations for his assistance to Edward Eyre) staged a series of raids over a period of six weeks on every available store of food in the town . So effective was this action that there only rice available by August. Local trackers refused to co-operate and the Resident was forced to send to York for Mr Drummond, the feared ‘protector’ of natives. . However the ringleaders had given themselves up before he arrived, cheerfully admitting in court to their part in the various crimes. Denin cheekily told the court that he was ‘asleep during the robbery of sugar from Mr Warburton’s station but another man put some of it in his mouth’ .

Although various terms in Rottnest were meted out, it is clear that the Noongar men involved were aware of the political implications of their action. Indeed Norn was to become one of the most well known figures around Albany, and, in 1890, on the occasion of colonial independence, petitioned the crown reminding his Excellency “that in the year 1829, all of this country belonged to my tribe…Since that time we have been gradually deprived of our hunting grounds and nearly all our kangaroos have been killed by the white man” He may also have been the pseudonymous Kyan Gadac who wrote in 1855 to the Colonial Secretary “There is a tract of land in this colony which time out of mind belonged to me and my ancestors. I can point out its marks and boundaries and no blackfellow ever disputed my right…it is true I have no title deeds but undisputed occupation, when continued for a long series of years, you white men I believe, consider a just title.” Both petitions ask for blankets and flour - rent in other words.

The colonial perception of peaceful settlement at Albany owes much to the early interactions between a young man, Mokare, and various early officials. Mokare was an uninitiated man with a great facility for language and the nephew of the local landowners at the time of colonization. De Sainson, Nind, Barker, Wilson and Collie left descriptions of the Minang based upon their interaction with him . His role as an interpreter was pivotal in the survival of the colony but he paid a heavy price. He was ostracised by the wider community and he and his family were regarded with grave suspicion for their apparent alliance with the newcomers . Just prior to his departure Barker, the most perceptive of Mokare’s interlocutors was to write,
There are a few tribes or families of the Will's still trying to preserve peace, chiefly those who live nearest to this part, but the great majority have been stirred up to hostility by Patyarite(Woolangoli's cousin) who since his recovery, has been constantly going about exciting wrath & revenge & has persuaded the young men of some tribes to come from a great distance.(Feb 13, 1831)
The resistance had already begun.

Postcript

“You know why there are no Aborigines living in Denmark [west of Albany], it’s because it’s taboo – there was a massacre”. It was said in a knowing smug voice in 1986 when I first moved to the south coast conveying a privileged confidence. Later on I discovered that there was at least one Noongar family living there, mistaken for Italians probably because of there surname and I could find no trace of any massacre. “The last Albany Aborigines died out around the turn of the century”, members of the local historical society assured me. There were 800 recorded in the 1987 Census and I’ve identified over 33 Noongar graves in the Albany Cemetery from 1890 to 1930 when many people had abandoned the town because of the persecution of Loftie and his ilk. The persecution only intensified over the next 40 years as Noongar people were corralled into concentration camps of Carrolup and Moore River unless they were able to secure work on farms and stay out of the towns which maintained a curfew against their presence until the 1950’s.

There was a massacre at Cocanarup near Ravensthorpe to the east of Albany. “…and that’s why there are no Aborigines here and most of the locals think that’s just fine”, I was told recently, it was the malice that was the message. The massacre had only become a topic of public discussion in the last few years as local Noongar people have begun to record their history. The Noongar historians wanted it recorded and reconciled but the white descendants resile from this confronting possibility preferring the opiate of forgetfulness to the thorns of haunted memory.

The history wars are personal, my family is chasing DNA tests to prove that they have a touch of Aboriginality – preferring to forget that their pioneering ancestor, Harry Broome, left his DNA in the descendants of the Yorta Yorta women he raped before he died, slowly, from tertiary syphilis. The dementia enabled him to forget.

But this forgetfulness hides the knowledge that an irrevocable bridge has been crossed and as Bessie Bussell put it “no one in the house looks or speaks the same”.

Meme of the week

2008-05-02T23:35:00.001+08:00

"If Chinese foreign asset growth continues at its current pace, China’s government, the Bank of Russia, the Saudi Monetary Agency and a few Gulf sovereign funds will pretty much be the global financial system."

from Brad Setser's Economic blog

Dodgy bullets and Predator

2008-05-01T20:31:00.005+08:00

One reason this blog is going to be a daily thing from now on is because of a bloke who went by the moniker of Predator. The other reason is that the dodgy bullets have caught up with me and I've got metastases(secondaries) from the cancer in my jaw. So far, the count is two one in my spine called 'arthur' and one in my shoulder called 'sinclair'.

It's kind of a privilege to be able to know that your death is imminent. Although how imminent is still 'a piece of string' and I'm still finding out things, had my second cat scanned today since sinclair still is a bit of mystery. Optimistically, 12 months give or take a bit of traditional Injibardi healing perhaps. Pessimistically, it depends on sinclair and his other undetected cousins. But I intend to live life to the full - I don't have a 'take it easy' gene and there's too much that I want to say and do.

Predator and his mate stacy
from cat.org.au
Let me tell you about Predator though. I came across his minimalist website from a link on the old Indymedia sites a few years ago. He was a young bloke, in his twenties when he died from kidney cancer. His passions were anarchy, alternative technology, all kinds of d-i-y science and illegal caving. The last involved exploring the drains and pipes that are found underneath every big city. Sydney his home town has a plethora. I used to catch the underground city loop train from Central station and dream about jumping the fence and looking for those ancient pipes and the Tank Stream. Predator and his mates were way beyond that innocent fantasy, they took major risks to tag and get into places that they were not welcome. A few weeks ago someone was dragged dead out of a sewer pipe near Bondi beach. One the clan.

He was destined to have a short life. The man was a genius with more energy and appetite than any normal human. There is a web site cat.org.au created by Predator and others way back in the late 1990's where they pioneered the use of unix and running their own servers to do web casts from community events. These days we rely upon, unthinkingly, ISP's to provide us with access. These guys grabbed there own DNS space early on so that they could run it themselves from the bottom up. It's become slightly redundant and the site is maintained as an archive rather that an active site. It relied, I think, on Predator's energy and intellect.
He wrote about everything from the information paradigm, 'a light hearted' epistemology, viewing human nature and life as an information system; through to details of his own hair rasing experiments of enhancing his masturbation by applying 20v electric currents at the point of orgasm! But his tour-de-force is his diary written upon his diagnosis up until he could no longer write. Maddeningly masculine in outlook, it is a gripping yarn and tragedy as he regards his disease as a biochemical experiment trying one cure after another, putting up with doctors who can't keep up with his intellect, how the allure of death improved his sex life and finally a few days before his death when he reaches the point of no longer being able to write.

I wont write as personally as him, but I'm inspired by him to use the occasion to record as much of the miscellany of indigenous history and culture and environmental knowledge that I've acquired over the years.

Yorgum - a large red flowering gum

2008-04-30T18:10:00.005+08:00

Yorgum is "a Noongar name for a large red flowering gum tree with healing properties" and also the name adopted by the Yorgum Aboriginal Family Counselling service( an indigenous run service). Their introductory page contains the following words "yorgum a symbol of grandmother for the family tree", "dwott yorgum kwopping very good walbrininy healing".

I'm recording this as an example of what I was talking about in my previous post - of how the writing of Noongar is taking on a life of its own. Let me unpick some of the words here.

dwott is a word used for various eucalyptus trees. George Moore recorded its use in the 1840's, Moore spelt it twotta . Yorgum is probably derived from Yok(woman) and may also be a name for a specific tree. Large red flowering gum trees are not common on the west coast. The most likely candidate is Corymbia ilicifolia which is generally a small tree. It would be nice if someone could ask the service for me about the origin of this word. My intuition is that it may well find its way more generally into the language.

kwopping is a variant on kwop/gwab - here the -ing ending is used as an intensifier(very). Daisy Bates is enlightening on the variations of this common word in Noongar.

walbrininy is interesting. It's not recorded in any of the early word lists as far as I can tell. But is now quite common in the Perth area where it means 'healing'.

A very brief history of written Noongar

2008-04-28T23:14:00.000+08:00

Words tend to congeal, like blood from a wound, out of the flow of possibilities and spellings. The Noongar language is still flowing across the page redolent with potential, like the earth after the rain.

Tonight I counted 13 different word lists that had been written over the last 200 years recording the southern Noongar dialect as it has been spoken around King Georges Sound since 1801. At a guess, there would be another 30 or more word lists for the whole of the south west during this period of colonization. Now Noongar people themselves are beginning to write the language in their own way, scratching the itch making the blood flow again.

Consider by way of contrast the languages of the Western Desert, these languages have been ‘saved’ partly by linguists writing them down and providing a phonetically based script. Well, at least that’s the linguist’s justification, the actual saving was done by the speakers speaking and the learners learning. What the script and consequent dictionaries and grammars have provided has been a way of competing in the classroom with English. But even this argument is flawed - the descriptive tools of linguists have become the prescriptive tools of the classroom. The clotted words have colonized the poetics of recitative.

Collett Barker, in 1830, wrote about Noongar visitors arriving at King Georges Sound “when they have something important to say they say it in a sort of recitative”, Nind referred to “a chant”. The traditional language was sung as much as it was spoken. When I read this sort of thing, I feel that we have missed out on a high culture where everyday conversation was an art form that would leave the salons of Europe for dead.

Something else happened instead. Unlike the precise dictionaries of the Western desert, Noongar was written down by ordinary people trying to communicate what they thought they heard around them. As a result many Noongar words have solidified into spellings that (in much the same way as English) do not map the pronunciation but are purely symbolic. Thus balga, Palgarup, refer to the grass tree and to a place where grass trees grow; quenda, rather than kwenda is used for bandicoot. In linguistics both sets of words Noongar and Western Desert are considered technically symbolic but clearly the former is more arbitrary than the latter.

The form is also political. The academic spelling was for years, Nyungar, but this was challenged by Noongar people themselves in the 1980’s and so by 1992, the first dictionary produced by the speakers themselves was the Noongar Dictionary. Many Noongar people speak bitterly of being unable to speak their language as children and young people. They risked arrest, one lady I know recalled being put off the school bus for saying something in language. Another spoke of the aura of fear and criminality that surrounded the old people who lived on the edge of the Gnowangerup reserve.“We were too scared to talk to them”. An unfortunate legacy of Daisy Bates was her appellation of Bibbulmun to the people of the south west. Writers like Jack Davis derided this mistaken metonymy. During the 1960’s and 70’s there was a slow and painful process of reclaiming their own name in official and educational publications, of fighting the studied ignorance of racism.

Many people objected to the 1992 Dictionary, especially on the south coast. “That’s not our talk”. The complexities of the dialects were not acknowledged, not through any sense of superiority but more from a lack of time and money. So today a new phenomenon is beginning to occur. As people write stories, signs, lists and posters they are making their own spellings, revising those found in other dictionaries. Two books featured here recently spelt kangaroo, yongker and yongka. In Perth I’ve seen other examples of this fluidity (although I’ve been remiss in recording them). It’s as if each family wants it’s own way of doing things and it’s also a form of resistance. As Luce Irigary wrote… “fluid movements that permeate and resist, but are irreducible to the phallocentric[read colonial] structures of representation”.

Eulogy

2008-01-11T22:55:00.001+09:00

It's been a 400km day, a clear-sighted blue sky day. A driving day from the coast still green to the gimlet and salmon gum and yellow straw fields of the hinterland. To Katanning, for a funeral.

He was a good man who touched the hearts of those around him and when two of his innumnerable grannies, 10 year old girls, solemnly dropped flowers in his grave I cried. When I heard the voice of his friend and mentor, the Rev Eric Hayward of the Aboriginal Evangelical Church, break at the end of a long service that he had officiated over, preaching the redemption of Christ and the victory over death, preaching consolation and hope to the family of this young, 61 year old grandfather taken on Xmas day, he too had tears in his eyes.

When I met him, he was working to revive the Noongar language, trying to keep the culture alive. He saw no contradiction with his evangelical faith. I remember he attended a men's meeting over a long weekend and came back so enthusiastic, growling out lingo, capturing the poetry of it's tonalities. The stuff that can't be put in dictionaries or on paper. His eulogy records that he would sing any time of day, and play cards with anyone, and of course, he wrote songs for himself, his family and anyone who would listen. He was a 'Noongar lover', his wife wrote.

Sometimes, wadjela people say that the poet and lover in the Australian character is an inheritance from our Irish ancestry, but AB reminded me that the poet and lover are icons of our Noongar ancestry. Songs and dance, Daisy Bates once observed, were the most tradeable items at manjars(fairs) far more valuable than material things like spears, and flint and special foods.

And tonight, I'm watching on TV Kev Carmody's songs being "re/discovered" and when our hearts are open our eyes do cry...

More Noongar language books

2007-11-21T22:41:00.001+09:00

Four new children's books have been produced in Noongar language by Batchelor Press. These are traditional stories told by Jack Williams and Carol Petterson of Albany that have been told in Noongar and English by the authors. With the assistance of Denise Smith-Ali and a variety of family members the authors have used the current Noongar vocabulary and their own memories and idiosyncrasies to produce a new text. A similar process has been used by the Laves family translators although in the latter case the original story tellers have long since passed away.

This process which is occurring more and more these days is indicative of the way in which Noongar is being re-invigorated within the indigenous community. The language of the stories is discussed within families and a new generation of speakers and writers is evolving. It is only a matter of time before we start to see a new generation of texts in Noongar language.

Carol Petterson recalls that she was "beaten for telling the bobtail story in that 'filthy' Noongar language", an experience that was shared by all members of her generation. The "shame and distress" that she felt as a youngster is these days a strong motivation for her and others to revive the language.

Jack Williams' stories come from the Stirling Ranges and the real treasure in Jack's work is to be found in the accompanying CD where he sings a traditional Noongar song associated with his stories.

There is a renaissance of Noongar culture that is just starting to flower. The next few years will be exciting indeed.

Copies of the books are available from Batchelor Press email them at batchelorpressATbatchelorDOTeduDOTau

Cape Verde Cliffs on Mars

2007-11-10T20:29:00.000+09:00

"Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech."
This picture is from NASA's Opportunity Rover which is beginning to crawl into the interior of Victoria Crater, the cliffs have been christened "Cape Verde" by NASA. The color is from "scattered light from dust on the front sapphire window of the rover's camera" according to NASA's press release. I've cropped NASA's image. If you click on this you'll get a larger version that will fit on your desktop if so inclined.

A new warm current

2007-11-06T23:44:00.000+09:00

Sea surface temperatures off southern africa
Off the east coast of southern Africa the water is quite warm at the moment. In fact there's a warm current carrying warm water far down into the southern ocean.

temperature anomalies
It's been that way for the last month (these pix are from Nov 2 and are cropped from the daily pixs posted at the US Navy's Oceanography & Meteorology Centre ). The anomaly picture shows how unusual it is - the deep red splodge is 4 degrees above normal.
Currently the temperatures off the north west coast of W.A. are slightly below normal which is why the La Nina is not happening as it should. The Leuwin current is sluggish and only just getting into gear. Instead all that warm water is on the other side of the Indian Ocean probably gonna melt a few icebergs but it ain't gonna make it rain.

Four different ways to say "good"

2007-10-23T19:51:00.000+08:00

Waddib (B.coccinea) at Mt Barker Banksia farm source:wikipedia

I've posted at my Noongar language web site a copy of Daisy Bates 1914 article on Noongar dialects. It confirms my opinion that one of her best qualities was her linguistic skill. In analysing her genealogical data I learnt to trust her spellings of individual names, even though she might get a relationship wrong she never misheard a person's name.

She identifies 17 different dialects within Noongar country which is easily the biggest number identified by anybody but which also accords with the accounts of many Noongar people I've spoken to who insist that there are far more local variations than are generally given credit for in the academic linguistic literature.

Here are Daisy's variations on gwab, good.

Gwâba, good (Swan, Bunbury, Vasse)
Gwâba-gwaba, very good (Swan, Bunbury, Vasse)
Gwabalitch or gwâbajil, best.
ŋwiri, good. (Dunan dialect, Capel)
ŋwiri- ŋwiri, very good. (Dunan dialect, Capel)
Gwâb, good. (Katanning.)
Gwâbărt, very good; or Gwâbadăk. (Katanning.)
Kwâb, good. (Esperance, also Kaiali wongi.)
Kwâbadăk, very good. (Esperance, also Kaiali wongi.)

Pia (B. occidentalis) source: wikipedia commons

I've also updated the list of plant names including some banksia's recorded by Baron Hugel recorded in Albany in 1832-3. Waddib, Banksia coccinea and pia, Banksia occidentalis. The latter is (probably mistakenly) recorded as B. Grandis by other 19th Century authors(Moore, Grey, Lyons etc.).

A good day for a story or three

2007-10-17T20:28:00.000+08:00

I’d never seen quite so many crows as I did last Saturday as I walked up past the rubbish tip to the Noongar Centre, more like a mass murder really. But it was a perfect Mondyeunung day, the start of early summer. The winds were deciding to change direction from the winter westerlies to the summer easterlies and they’ll debate this from now until Christmas on the south coast. Something new in the air – there certainly was up at the Noongar Centre. A buzz was in the air and it wasn’t just about the terribly important persons wandering in the door. They were here incognito (“I’m just a Lockyer boy”, said the Premier). It was what they were here for. It had taken 77 years for these stories to mature.

The day was a pre-publication launch of three stories, the first three to see the light of day from the Laves collection. Stories dictated by today’s elder’s parents and uncles back in 1930 at the White Star Hotel. A young linguist, Gerhard Laves pursuing his Ph D., equipped with a knowledge of a modern phonetic alphabet, plenty of enthusiasm, and a supply of sixpences, good money in those days. Besides how else was the language and the stories going to be preserved when it was a crime to talk too loud, and could get you kicked out of school for sure. Mind you it was a close run thing, they sat in an attic, while our linguist became a school teacher in depression era America,until Michael Walsh an Australian linguist discovered traces of his visit in the local literature and decided to track him down. That was in 1975 and as these things go it took another eight years before the material returned to Australia with the old man's blessing and another ten or so years before word of the material seeped through to Albany's Noongar community.So it goes.

It was almost ten years ago when people first started to work on setting up a reference group, getting funding for transcriptions and the long painful process of deciding who was spokesperson for what family and how it was going to function. Mind you, patience is a renowned virtue in Indigenous Australia.

Kim Scott won the Miles Franklin Award for his book Benang. There’s a second Indigenous winner now from the other end of the country, Alexis Wright. But these stories, saw him in the role of midwife rather than procreator. So much discussion -about placenames, should they be included; about which words to use, we don’t say it that way today; should we talk this over with the family first – one story was pulled for that reason, the family weren’t ready, the story wasn’t ready; about illustrations – although it’s clear that the artists provided morale boosting moments away from the words.

So today was about giving out 50 copies of the story to the wider family, to the relatives, and yes, one to that boy from Lockyer, that one makin’ all the big promises and one to that old white fella, Bill Hassell whose father’s father had recorded many words and whose grandmother had recorded uniquely women’s stories from Jerramungup – home country for some of today’s family. ‘An unexpected privilege’ he was touched in the heart.

Finally, Iris, Roma and Kim took turns reading one of the stories to us about a boy finding his uncle, fishing for groper and learning about his inheritance.

Symmon's Noongar Grammar

2007-10-01T15:21:00.000+08:00

Things to do in between doses of radiotherapy could include copying Charles Symmons Vocabulary and Grammar from the 1842 W.A. Almanack on microfilm at the Battye library. And then, pausing for a rest and more water, and very slowly, turning it into some web pages. Why would I do that? You may well ask.
One reason is that apart from an abridged publication as an Appendix in the 1892 edition of Lawrence Threlkeld's Awakabal Dictionary, it hasn't been published since 1842. Another reason is that the only other comprehensive attempt at a Noongar Grammar is by Wilf Douglas in the 1960's. But I suppose the real reason is that it's just so damn interesting!
Charles Symmons was not greatly regarded in the colony at the time because he wasn't a gentleman and he was overlooked for the position of 'Protector of Natives' which went to Francis Armstrong. But Symmons learnt the language quickly and although he acknowledges George Grey as the source of some of his work. I suspect that Grey owed him a debt as well when it came to writing and understanding Noongar language and culture. But then Charles wasn't a gentleman.
He was a teacher though and he had learnt Latin. So he established the first school for Noongar children. His knowledge of Latin is evident in his grammar and Latin wasn't a bad start when it came to Noongar.
Anyhow, you can take a look at Charlie Symmon's work at my Noongar language pages. I'm off to bed.

Crystallnacht - Oz style

2007-08-07T19:44:00.000+08:00

Goebbels was found of accusing Jewish people of abusing their children. In 1938 Hitler authorised the SS to destroy Jewish property and confiscate their businesses. The same thing is happening today to Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory and the Labour opposition is craven in it's acceptance of legislation that goes against nearly every fundamental human right.

Under the new legislation introduced today child abuse and something called 'aboriginal violence'(defined as an offence that carries a penalty of greater than 3 years) are now to be dealt with by the Australian Crimes Commission with the same rules as apply to organized crime and terrorrism. They seem to think that the only child abuse that occurs is 'organised'.
Anyone accused of any of these crimes will lose the right to silence and be subject to the various special rules that apply for these other crimes. Anyone who knows anything about child abuse will recognise the futility of such a draconian approach. A close reading reveals that child abuse includes 'neglect' now considered part of the purview of the ACC! Then we have this new category of crime - 'Aboriginal violence' -the only redeeeming virtue of this is that the High Court will chuck it out. In the mean time anyone who violently resists arrest will go down for a very long time indeed. Anyone who throws a spear will lose the right to silence.

Oh yes, then there's the changes to the land rights act - which has been suspended as has the Racial Discrimination Act and any laws regarding Racial Discrimination enacted by the Northern Territory Government, indeed any laws of the Northern Territoy government are superseded. The purpose of these suspensions? To enable the Commonwsealth to take control of town camps and to offer them as freehold land after five years. To remove any restriction on non- community people from using any 'common space' on an aboriginal reserve. To offer 99 year leases ostensibly to Aboriginal owners but in fact to any whitefella who can persuade a land council, or even the minister that s/he has a legitimate interest - after all there are lots of traditional owners with the wherwithal to buy their own homes.Not!

Meanwhile the same government has scrapped CDEP and killed off the social services that were being provided on the cheap by this organisation. it has killed off ICTV, the indigenous television production company that had come to serve a critical role in health and positive messages in communities. And now we have the new welfare reforms which I haven't thad time to read yet because I've been making futile calls to ALP Senators pleading that they show some moral fiber on this issue. I start chemotherapy tommorrow and I can do no more. God Help Australia!

Australia’s Indigenous Women Explorers

2007-07-22T22:49:00.000+08:00

It’s one of those stories that has been told in bits and pieces but those who’ve had a whiff have followed its trail like a hunter chasin’ a ‘roo.

There’s the official story of colonization on South Australia and Western Australia and then there’s this other story. Rebe Taylor tells the story of Kangaroo Island in her masterful local history “Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island”. Sarah Hay created a fictional version of the sealer gangs on Middle Island near Esperance in W.A. in her award winning book “Skins”.

Julie Gough got in touch with me a few years ago because she was tracing the path of her ancestor, Woertomenyer from Tasmania. Her story and the other stories told and untold is of the diaspora of indigenous Tasmanian women in the early part of the 19th Century.

“It was a fact of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture that the men seldom learnt to swim: when they needed to cross a body of water, they were often ferried on rafts by the women, who were proficient swimmers. The Aboriginal men were therefore of limited use as labourers to the sealers, but the women proved to be invaluable” Terry Crowley, “Tasmanian Aboriginal Culture”, in Language and Culture of Aboriginal Australia, eds. Michael Walsh & Colin Yallop, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1993 p. 58

As Rebe Taylor points out, the idea of sealers as wild men who abducted these women was at least partially a 19th Century invention and only part of the truth.

Indeed, it’s a fact of Australia’s colonial history that Tasmanian indigenous women were present with their sealer men at the first settlements of South Australia and Western Australia, at Kangaroo Island and King George’s Sound respectively. Woertomenyer who was present at King George’s Sound in 1826 eventually travelled on to Mauritius, Sydney and back to Tasmania. Other’s like Towser and Eliza Gamble settled near Albany and have descendants in wadjila and Noongar communities.

Julie Gough will be in Albany on August 24th where she will join others for an informal discussion and conversation, “Sealing days in Southern Seas: Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Stories and History of those waters”. Location: Albany Public Library, time: 10.00 am.

Dodging the bullet - part 2

2007-07-22T14:01:00.000+08:00

I’m a bad patient – being an ex-nurse, that’s regarded as a truism – but I’m also impatient, not a patient that I’d like to nurse. I was reassured by a kindly nurse after 11 hours of surgery that everybody loses it after a few days, simply from the lack of sleep. I still had to apologize to a couple of nurses because I arced up at them – such is the interpersonal cost of anger(as my counsellor and friend would say).

But I think sometimes it’s worth being a bad patient because there’s a lot of bad medicine around out there and as a patient you are on the bottom of the heap. Being hospitalised is the medical equivalent of being certified, you have no rights except those that you can assert for yourself. That assertion inevitably involves you treading the fine line between aggression and tears, between resignation and anger. For me, it involved a lot of praying to get through the pain and discomfort and to manage the emotional turmoil of helplessness – besides which the Bible was the only book available, and you could read it in disconnected passages – why not the Koran, the Dhamma sutra, the tao te ching? Never mind, the Bible is at least as worthy of attention as any other great religious text and there is considerable comfort for the helpless to be drawn from it’s message of love and faith. A prayer or a mantra is something that the mind can cling on to when the seconds seem long.

Then there are finally those moments of grace when you look out the window and realize that you have survived and that the world is shining and beautiful. The sigh of relief and the prayer of thanks when the surgeon comes to you after a week and says that the microscopy has confirmed that, ‘we got all of it’.

There is nothing that can prepare you for the shock of major surgery and the physical cost of recovery. Even 6 weeks later I am still weakened and tired – the process of recovery is a gradual thing clawing back a bit of strength day by day and some days losing out to sleeplessness or complications.

Speaking of complications, one should avoid Friday discharges from big city hospitals especially if you are going to fly off to a country town as I did. It seems that there is an inevitable cost of iatrogenic disorders that accompanies surgery, something that was feared in the 19th Century and earlier times, but which it’s my experience has not changed today. I have learnt the hard way to assume responsibility for my own care because leaving it up to doctors or nurses simply leads to bungles and troubles.

Arriving home on a Friday, I stayed with friends that night and broke out in a massive sweat that night. By Saturday night I had borrowed a thermometer and confirmed that I had a temperature of 38.1. So after speaking to the surgical ward in Perth I took myself to the local Casualty department to try and get admitted. Bad move. I got sent home with a couple of flucloxacillin tablets, ‘come back in the morning’, this despite the fact that I had a discharge summary that was less than 48 hours old. So I come back in the morning, after another sleepless night. Bad move. The doctor on call, is not my GP, but one known to have a terrible reputation. Fortunately the nurse in Causalty is one of these true heroines of nursing. She’d seen me the night before but had been on triage and was ‘pissed off’ that I’d been sent home. Nevertheless, with a combination of guile and skill, she got a cannula in my arm and a dose of IV antibiotics and persuaded me and the (bad) GP that I should wait until Monday to get admitted under my own GP. ‘hospitals full’, she said. There was a remarkable number of empty beds when I finally got admitted on that Monday! But I’m eternally grateful for the white lie, I saw the GP in question deal dreadfully with a young man in the bed next to me during the following week.

So I sat outside my GP’s office on Monday morning – ‘give me the hard core antibiotics or I will kill you’ – I’d had 3 sleepless nights by then. Well he did, and while he was at it he wrote me up for some hard core analgesia (oxycodone) without asking whether I was in any pain. It was an instruction from the surgeon in Perth. Pack drill.

3 days later I partially dislocated(subluxed) my shoulder trying to turn over in bed having been frozen in position as I nursed my precious cannula (that nobody wanted to replace with a proper line) and doped to the eyeballs it was remarkably easy to do. I felt the snap and some discomfort but the next morning my mind was distracted from this by the fact that the cannula had finally tissued. These days they allow nurses 2 goes before calling a doctor to insert an IV line. Of course they don’t have specialized nurses in country hospitals who do this all the time. It’s a skill that only comes with practice and it’s the patient who gets to experience their sporadic practice. This is called improving patient care.

The next day after having dealt with my constipation caused by the combination of iron and oxycodone. ‘Yes I can administer my own suppositories’. I decided to refuse the oxycodone –‘We thought that was brave Bob’ – she said 2 hours later as my back went into spasm. It took me 24 hours to work out that I’d had enough oxycodone for my body to think it was a habit. The GP (not my GP, just one from the group practice) had decided that I could go home on oral antibiotics. I had decided that I was going to ‘cold turkey’ off the oxycodone. So I went to my friends place and threw myself into some intense rounds of Chi Kung – the first that I’d been able to do in 3 weeks – took aspirin and fought the demons through the next couple of nights.

I recalled my time back in 1974 when I had helped establish We Help Ourselves(WHOS) in Canberra. I was never partial to heroin but as a social activist I had witnessed the death from an overdose of a great poet, Michael Dransfield. WHOS was astarted by ex-addicts prior to the widespread use of methadone. It had two rules - cold turkey is the only way to go and if at first you don't succeed you're doing about average. I made the mistake taking some panadeine on my first night and after whipsawing into convulsions I recalled those two rules to my friends and my mum the next morning who were still putting me up and putting up with me . I wanted nothing more than to return to my own house with it's trees, bandicoots, birds and Ebony, my rat-hunting cat.

And God provides. I finally got into my own home, which had been cleaned and renovated by my friends who had come together over the previous weeks to support me. I was overwhelmed. One of my Noongar friend’s had found a black beanie, with yellow and red bands and it was lying next to my computer as I walked in the door. It has hardly left my head since then – the strength of the Land is with me. I settled down to endure a week of painful sleep management with a painful shoulder that I had no diagnosis for.

Ah but “ Can’t do that, computer says no”, we can give you plenty of drugs but anything that involves real people and real help is another matter. The surgery had left me with no teeth and one side of my face paralysed and I was unable to eat properly or speak without spitting. It took 3 weeks of asking before I got to see a speech therapist and I couldn’t get a physio referral at all and ended up paying a private physio to diagnose and treat my shoulder. Hard if you’re living on a pension and have no car.

I’ve had great support from friends and family and from a few heroic nurses who really care and who are better at working the system than me (and I've been sustained by my daily Chi Kung regimen). But I wonder how people who don’t have my knowledge and my network survive.

I’m about to go to Perth for 6 weeks of chemotherapy and radiotherapy and I discovered yesterday that they hadn’t removed all my teeth as I was told. I’d been dealing with a recurrence of candida (thrush) in my mouth which should have stopped once I finished taking antibiotics. So I was having a good look and I find a dead, infected molar in my remaining upper jaw. So when I go back to Perth tomorrow I expect I’ll still be a bad patient demanding it’s removal before they start and screw up their precious timetable and I expect the computer will say no. But I intend to live and survive so I’m damned if I’ll be a good patient and lie down and die. Not just yet, anyway.

Dodging the bullet – part 1

2007-07-16T14:59:00.000+08:00

“Well, is it stage 2 or 3?” I asked, trying to sound knowledgeable. He looked at me gravely, “It’s stage 4, it’s into the bone you can see here.” he said pointing to the Cat Scan of my jaw that we were looking at.

“So what are the odds?”

“60% survival in 5 years” he said. It was not good news, but he didn’t beat around the bush and he offered a means of beating the odds.

“ I’ve seen head and neck surgery back in the late 70’s and it wasn’t a pretty sight” I was pretty dubious. In those days a flap from your shoulder was grafted in place of the missing jaw and you sat in ICU for weeks. Not a pretty sight and survival was not good.

“Things have progressed since then. We take a free flesh graft from your arm or leg and micrograft a vein and artery into the blood supply of your face. Survival rate from surgery is about 95%“

Well, that sounds a bit better I thought and the quiet professionalism and honesty of this ENT surgeon was making an impression. I could work with this man I thought. Up until now, I’d only had a diagnosis that had made me contemplate the most painless way to shuffle off my perch. Here was a lifeline.

“You’ll need radiotherapy afterwards. It’s best if we take out your teeth as they’ll be affected by the radiation” Well my teeth were rotten anyway and it was my persistence at pursuing the lack of healing following the removal of a wisdom tooth that meant that we had got it early.

“Your lucky in that respect.” It had only spread into my lymph glands in the last month or so and since I’d moved across the demarcation line from dentistry to medicine things had been moving fast.

“We’ll get dentures for you in 12 months time” Something to look forward too.

So I went home for two weeks and threw myself into an intensive program of Chi Kung and prayer. For the last 5 years I’d been coming to terms with the manic depression that had ruled my life. Up until I had sought counselling I had ridden the ups and downs through of political activism interspersed with black periods of despair softened by alcohol and marijuana. I’d given up cigarettes 20 years ago and gave up alcohol as part of my personal deal to seek counselling and I had been ‘quitting’ dope, having longer and longer dry periods during my counselling. So that by the beginning of this year I had enrolled in university and I was set upon reinventing myself. I had learnt to control my agitation by self medicating with Valproate after going through the retinue of antidepressants.

But nothings ever easy and postponing my exams to have surgery seemed like the least of my problems and deciding to never touch dope again was the easiest of decisions. There is something about the threat of imminent death that sharpens the mind wonderfully. I threw myself into finishing off my essays and coursework. I managed to get into a recording studio for 2 hours and record 19 original songs before I lost my teeth and worse. I’d had numerous goes over the years and always given up because I couldn’t stay in tune or stumbled over a beat. This time I didn’t care it was just get them down it’s now or never.

In the last few days before I left for Perth, I managed to get up an exhibition of a selection of never seen paintings from 1840. They’re 65 water colours done by Robert Neil of fish and snakes caught with the assistance of half a dozen Noongar men. Each drawing had the Noongar name for the fish, as well as the Latin name, and where he knew it the sealer’s name and the settler’s name. 4 different languages came together. It had taken me several years to track them down and get them photographed in the British Museum. There full publication is a project for a cancer survivor.

I was as ready as anybody could be to dodge the bullet.

40 years on - J'accuse

2007-05-27T20:45:00.000+08:00

Referendum baby (Source:National Museum of Australia)

I can't help but wonder what there is to celebrate about the fact that it was only 40 years ago that we decided to acknowledge that the First Australians were human beings. It was, after all, 22 years after the demise of Nazi Germany and the failure of our own 'final solution' (a phrase in common use in 1930's Australia) was due more to our inefficiency compared to Germany than any moral fibre we possessed. As I recall, the 90% vote was as much a repudiation of the more embarrassing vestiges of the White Australia Policy than out of any real concern for the status the First Australians.

At the time the Gurindji people had just begun their walk-off from Wave Hill to assert that, after 180 odd years, the colonists had not destroyed all resistance. In 1967 Bill Stanner called the Gurindji walkoff 'a little miracle' in his lectures describing the 'great Australian silence' about the absence of the First Australians in our Colonial histories.

The struggle to reclaim this land from the colonists continues to this day with little success. The misnamed Native Title Act has become nothing more than a way of legalising the continuing theft of land by the colonizers. As Marandoo Yanner put it the other day, "For every [square]kilometer we've gained we've lost 100 square kilometres".

Instead of Native Title being something worth valuing and respecting it has been universally seen as a problem by the comprador class led by John Howard, the traitor. I accuse him of high treason.

When this country is invaded by the next colonial empire they will turn around to us all and say your title only exists in the 'crown' of some old empire. How can you demand that we respect your backyards and your farms when you have shown no obligation to settle with your own people. This is the great travesty that has been wrought over the last 12 years by this cowardly little man beholden to no Australian cause. This man has betrayed us all irrespective of our antecedents. Sure he has had allies on both sides of politics but it has been his desire to live in the lotus land of the present, recognizing no past and no future, that has called the tune.

What sort of country are we that celebrates our soldiers acting as mercenaries ('lest we forget' indeed) and despises and forgets those people who have fought and died defending it's own shores over the last 200 years?

The Dentist as Murderer

2007-05-24T11:29:00.000+08:00

Hi my name is Rob, I’m a dentist I can’t show you my face because… well I’m a murderer, but I’m getting paid bucket loads to appear in this ad for a toothbrush. Not that it’s any different from any other toothbrush and not that I care one bit about your teeth really. After all they’re your responsibility and I’m just here to charge you an arm and leg if you can’t look after them. How do I get away with it? Well, while everybody concentrates on critiquing medical practice I can get away with murder and I’m laughing all the way to the bank and, no, I’m not going to show you my face.

You see it’s like Catch 22. I can get heaps of money from the aluminium companies because I’m a steadfast supporter of them making a profit out of their waste fluoride which I claim (with dubious support) to be absolutely necessary to improve dental health but when it comes to any individual set of teeth, I don’t have to take responsibility for my professional practice because I can blame it on the victim (sorry patient) who obviously hasn’t cared for their teeth probably. Good eh?

I can recommend that you have braces on your teeth and I don’t have take responsibility for any damage to the enamel caused by them. You see it’s your responsibility and by crikey can I make money from them.

Of course, if you’re poor and can’t afford my rates you can go to a government clinic where they will solve the problem of the pain caused by a hole in your tooth simply. We’ll just pull it out, like they did in the 19th Century. Not that we care that this is guaranteed to cause further damage down the line to your other teeth and result in you losing all your teeth prematurely with consequent damage to your overall health perhaps reducing your life expectancy by 5 or 10 years. You still can’t see my face, can you?

We dentists could of course make professional submissions to the government about the long term costs of these antiquated practices but we won’t because we make so much money charging those who can afford it for fillings and root canal work and so on. We could make submission to the government about the value of public education programs regarding prevention of gum disease and how to clean your teeth to prevent this as you get older but we don’t because… well you get my drift.

Of course if you have something really serious going on in your mouth such as cancer. We won’t bother to look to closely if you’re poor. There was a bloke in here the other day – he had a hole in the base of his wisdom tooth. We yanked that out and didn’t bother to wonder how a hole could occur that far down. When he came back and complained that there was still pain. We just tapped his gums and said ‘sensitive gums, go away’. Eventually he went to a private dentist to get an xray and that showed that a chip of the wisdom tooth had got left behind. Well whose fault was that! We’ll give him some antibiotics that will shut him up.

Silly bugger came back complaining that the antibiotics hadn’t worked. So we better have a hack around –can’t get it – let’s refer him up to the University clinic and get a student to practice on him that will shut him up. Let’s give him some more antibiotics as well.

Silly bugger complained when the student created a hole between his nose and his mouth and left him with no follow up or analgesia. Doesn’t he realize that it’s summer and we need a 6 week break. Let’s make him travel up from the country a few times at his own expense before we do anything and give him some more antibiotics for his non healing wound.

Silly bugger went to his doctor. But you know there is a demarcation line that the most left wing unionist would be proud of between dentists and doctors. Doctor won’t do anything until the dentist makes a referral back except give the silly bugger some more antibiotics.

Silly bugger’s been complaining now for 15 months about this – so we better have a good look. Hmm, the hole in the bone between his mouth and his nose has gotten bigger and that ulcer looks suspicious let’s get him back under a general anaesthetic and take a sample for histology in two weeks time. Wonder what’s eating that bone away.

OK he’s unconscious and can’t complain now - these public patients are such a waste of time. I can’t be buggered to fill out this pathology report properly and I’ve got to pick the kids up from their private school. Get him back in 2 weeks and we’ll see if our handiwork has made any difference.

“Nurse, ring up the pathology company and find out where that pathology report is” – turns to the silly bugger – “actually it’s healing quite nicely you know, I think we did a good job this time”(best professional smile). Hang on a tick here comes nurse with the path report – oh dear you’ve got a squamous cell cancer - better go back to the country and see your GP. It’s his problem now.

Silly bugger knew he had cancer 4 months ago but nobody could be fucked listening. Now he’s in the hands of a specialist who reckons his got a 60% chance of surviving the next 5 years because it’s stage IV and been eating the bone away for some time. Silly bugger needs to have all his teeth out now because of the radiotherapy – he won’t need a dentist anymore that’s for sure.

My name’s Rob I’m a dentist I can’t show you my face…

Last Bus Zone

2007-05-14T20:52:00.000+08:00

Actually, its not quite the last bus, but I am becoming a frequent traveller between Albany and Perth as my persistent dental problems turn tumorous, that's hardly very humourous, they could after all be numerous. Sigh.

So it's so cold and gloomy today on the south coast and there's one carriage on that interminably long wheat train pulling into the port where the grain has been caught and some of it's even sprouted. The pigeons have seen it and make a great to-do, keeping up with the trundling train.

I traveled on the bus with a bloke just out of the army, last six years overseas, travelling on the bus was a bit of test for him, he explained. He didn't expect civvies to understand that...

He was the best company though...

Its come to my attention that people have internalized Guantanamo Bay. Nobody seems to care any more about whether things actually work or not. Nobody bothers to fill in your form anymore. The Breshnevian paradox. The systems going through the motions but its not really for anyones benefit anymore. It's just to facilitate and secure profits. So we have to stand up and remind people just who they are.

'if you want to live close to the edge like that
if you want to lie near to the fire
you've got to accept there's a risk attached
don't look back if you want to go higher.' Bungarra 1983

Everything fragments...

Mal Brough - ANZAC

2007-04-16T23:30:00.000+08:00

There's something about the ANZAC tradition that resonates in the image of Mal Brough, a doomed Government's Minister for Aboriginal[Indigineous] Affairs, setting forth a new vision for a future. Something enticing and intoxicating, perhaps. The nuance of acknowledging a person's country that creates a frission.
In many ways what the debate is now boiling down to is the question of the creation of sustainable institutions. The official "no more ATSIC" line is going to have to give way to the realpolitik of governance in Indigenous institutions. But this quickly leads to questions about the governance of Australia as a whole. Traditional Australians may want to start by questioning the validity of 'state' boundaries.
But, on the other hand, there are no boundaries in the totalitarian world of the twenty first century. Strength lies in openness and honesty. These are, sine qua none, democratic qualities. Consequently, immigrant Australians will always want to extend the metaphor beyond the shores of rectitude.

Is it so unreasonable to suggest that a rewriting of the constitution should start by recognizing the traditional boundaries and homelands of the first Australians and that we should reconsider our tiers of government on that basis? Surely we, Australia, should be the immovable object in the face of the irresistible force of the 21st Century? Is not then the Indigenous land rights movement the ultimate Conservative project???