Uniting Churches in Noosa will hold Day of Mourning services on Sunday 22 January to lament the way land was taken from Aboriginal communities and their culture, law and spirituality despised and suppressed.
A focus for services in Noosa will be a painting that depicts the story of a massacre believed to have occurred at Murdering Creek.
No doubt many people will have seen the Murdering Creek Road sign as they’ve travelled the Sunshine Motorway.
The real story of the massacre at the creek, that was thought to have occurred in 1862, is unknown, with the only details of it in historical record to be found in a letter written in 1944 by William Low, who was not alive at the time of the massacre, and published in a book by Dave Bull, titled Short Cut to Gympie Gold.
According to Low’s account of the story, which occurred 160 years ago on the Yandina Station, which then extended to the southern shores of Lake Weyba, local Aborigines believed they were entitled to help themselves to cattle on what had always been their Traditional Lands.
A number of elements resulted in armed station managers or ’agents of the state’ luring a group of Kabi Kabi people to the creek and killing them.
Retired Uniting Church minister Neil Sims said local Indigenous artist, Sam Jones, shared with him the significance of the oral tradition within the Aboriginal community and how he takes seriously the stories passed down.
Sam has created an interpretation of the massacre in a large painting that will be a central part of the Day of Mourning services at Sunrise Beach and Tewantin on Sunday 22 January.
Sam will also be playing his didgeridoo and singing The Ballad of Murdering Creek.
The Uniting Church Assembly has asked all its congregations to observe an annual Day of Mourning on the Sunday before Australia Day.
Included in the service is an act of lament, which includes this section:
“We lament the way in which their land was taken from them and their language, culture, law and spirituality despised and suppressed. We acknowledge and lament the way in which the Christian church was so often not only complicit in this process but actively involved in it.
We lament that in our own time the injustice and abuse has continued. We have been indifferent. Gracious God, hear our confession —“
In his artistic interpretation of the Murdering Creek massacre Sammy Ray Jones has created a painting across six panels.
The panels tell the story of the killing of cattle by Aborigines on Yandina Station, men from Yandina Station planning to put an end to the killing of cattle, the use of a decoy to attact Aboriginals to Murdering Creek in their canoes and station men opening fire on the Aboriginals, killing most of them.
In his painting a high-rise building, palm tree and pineapples represent local white society.
But Indigenous and non-Indigenous living together reconciled is the dream of the artist and this is depicted in the surrounds of the painting which are full of the rich animal and birdlife of the Noosa area.
The first Day of Mourning of Aboriginal people in Australia was in Sydney in 1938. About 100 Aborigines gathered in Australia Hall and passed the following resolution:
“We, representing The Aborigines of Australia, assembled in conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January, 1938, this being the 150th Anniversary of the White man’s seizure of our country, hereby make protest against the callous treatment of our people by the white men during the past 150 years, and we appeal to the Australian nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, we ask for a new policy which will raise our people to full citizen status.“
After this, from about 1940 to 1955, a number of churches observed an annual Day of Mourning for the Indigenous people of Australia, the retired minister said.
He said as a sign of their desire for reconciliation between the First and Second Peoples of Australia, the Sunrise Beach congregation has entered into a memorandum of understanding with a local Indigenous group which is using the church grounds as a gathering place.
Day of Mourning services will be held at Uniting Churches at Grasstree Court, Sunrise Beach at 8am and Poinciana Avenue, Tewantin at 10am on Sunday 22 January.
