PHIL JARRATT finds lost threads of history at Cherbourg Aboriginal Community
There are two cemeteries at Cherbourg Aboriginal Community, but our guide would only take us to the newer one, not because there is any ruling about where visitors may go but because the other place frightened him.
“I get the shivers around those old bones,” said Brian Warner, secretary of the Kabi Kabi Peoples Aboriginal Corporation, and spokesperson for the Native Title holders. “It’s not something that is easy to explain.”
But it’s something that’s not so difficult to understand. Warner, like many of the people I would meet at Cherbourg on this bright, early summer morning, is a direct descendent of the families that were torn apart by the Aboriginal Protection Act of 1897, wrenched from their country in and around what would become Noosa Shire over the next decade as the first generation of “inmates” at a settlement that was really a prison. Now working on programs of social and economic benefit for his Kabi Kabi people, Warner not only has family bones in the graveyard, he has skin in the game.
Even for a white stranger, however, the newer ghosts of Cherbourg told a sweeping and multi-generational story of survival against stacked odds in a place where kids have gone hungry, neglected and victimized for more than 100 years. As I walked between the elaborate headstones and humble and untended stick graves, I read stories of hope and hopelessness, from the resting place of the great fast bowler Eddie Gilbert (who once bowled Bradman for a duck) to the more recent grave of a young victim of social paralysis, marked only by a boxwood cross and a Bundy rum bottle.
The place we know today as the Cherbourg Aboriginal Community first came into being as the Barambah Settlement, established on traditional Wakka Wakka land on the Barambah Creek in the South Burnett by Salvation Army missionary William J. Thompson in 1901, with the intention of teaching “God’s way” to a small group of Wakka Wakka people, who set up a rough camp by the creek.
But by 1904 the Queensland government had taken control of the settlement as part of their implementation of the Aboriginal Protection Act, the brainchild of Archibald Meston, who was both the entrepreneur behind the lurid Wild Australia circus shows and also the “Southern Protector of Aborigines” for the government. The full name of the Act was the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, and Meston used the premise of saving the Aborigine from the temptations of white society and from self-destruction to herd them into camps and then pick the most interesting to appear in his vaudeville tent shows.
To many people in Queensland, Meston’s title seemed tragically ironic. The government, in its wisdom, had appointed an opportunist showman and a liar and cheat in business to “protect” its most vulnerable people, and had accepted wholeheartedly his abduction of tribal people for financial benefit as a model for government policy that was subsequently adopted by Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and South Australia.
But this enforced dispossession was Queensland Indigenous policy little more than a century ago, and versions of it lasted for another 60 years. At the start of the 20th century it resulted in Barambah, along with other similar settlements around the state, being flooded with new arrivals from different tribal and language groups from Cooktown to Birdsville. Often these First Nations groups were forced on the long march for weeks and months, with family members dying and disappearing along the way.
The survivors found that their first job at Barambah was to build the settlement they thought they had been sent to. One woman who visited family members at the settlement in its early years recalled: “They had no decent house, they lived in old bark humpy with blanket and rags and everything like that … no dormitories, no hospital, just a wild camp.”
The Queenslander newspaper reported in 1907: “A visit to the camp disclosed some interesting features. One was that the blacks from different localities had their own camps. There were the Cooktown contingent in little bark gunyahs, Birdsville blacks were by themselves in bough miamias, and the Thargomindah tribe had a camp of very large dimensions. As might be expected, the majority of the people in the camp are the Burnett blacks (the Wakka Wakka and Kabi Kabi) and their dwellings are superior … ”
But not by much, and all the camps had one thing in common. They had no toilets or washing facilities. While the men and women worked long hours on the construction of administrative buildings on the other side of the creek, they all performed their daily ablutions in the Barambah Creek, and drew their drinking water from it while carcasses from upstream floated by. As the population of the settlement grew alarmingly, disease was rife and infant deaths were common.
But internment had a spiritual as well as physical toll, as the Reverend John Mathew, author of a landmark book on Kabi and Wakka culture, noted in 1906, when renewing acquaintances at Barambah Settlement with Kabi Kabi families he had known 40 years earlier: “Now there are no camps on the runs, no organised hunts, no corroborees. A feeble old straggler may be occasionally seen alive, clinging to some loved haunt, but the centre of aboriginal life now is at the Government reserve.” By 1910 there were about 300 people, more than half of them Kabi Kabi and Wakka Wakka, still living in rough camps and crowding into the primitive ration shed for flour, beef and tea handouts. If the men weren’t working on a construction project at the settlement, they were sent out by the government superintendent as hired labour on the surrounding stations, but the fees were never seen by those who did the work. It was called protection but its real name was slavery.
By this time the last of the Noosa Kabi Kabi, those proud elders who wore nameplates around their necks and tried to keep up their traditional ways at bush camps along the river, while trading decorative boomerangs for grog, flour or money in the Tewantin markets, were the only traditional owners left. The families of King Tommy, King Brown, Willie Crowe and others had been forcibly removed to Barambah, leaving the elders to eke out their days without the comfort of clan.
Meanwhile, at Barambah the inmates may have been incarcerated and enslaved, but when World War I broke out they were prepared to fight and die for the country that continued to deny their existence. Twenty nine enlisted – although not all served as some were rejected for being “too black” – and three paid the ultimate sacrifice. When the survivors returned they were confronted with one of the worst outbreaks of the Spanish flu epidemic in Queensland, with 87 of the settlement’s 1000 residents dying within a two-week period.
In the 1920s nothing fundamentally changed about the lot or the rights of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders removed from their homelands, but the sheer scope of the segregation policy meant that rough camps had to be turned into permanent settlements. Work stepped up at Barambah, and by the end of the decade more than 40 family cottages, girls’ and boys’ dormitories, a shop, a proper ration shed, a two-roomed school and a hospital had been built. And the settlement had a new name. After complaints from nearby Barambah Station that their mail was being wrongly directed, authorities renamed the community Cherbourg, not for any romantic French connotation but for the parish in which it sat. This is the Cherbourg that the community’s Ration Shed Museum, established in 2004 to mark the settlement’s centenary, commemorates, if not quite celebrates. And yet, despite the dark history of oppression and cruelty that surrounds it, there is much to celebrate in the heroic and uplifting stories of those who survived, and some that thrived.
Uncle Eric Law, 70, our guide through the four exhibits that make up the museum, is himself something of a hero of Cherbourg – a Vietnam veteran who went on to become the community’s first and only Aboriginal superintendent, in the 1980s just before Cherbourg was granted a Deed of Grant in Trust (DOGIT) and a new level of self-determination. A Wakka Wakka born at Cherbourg like his parents before him, Eric has plenty of stories of his own to tell, but instead he focuses on the portraits of Cherbourg high achievers on the walls, like Eddie Gilbert, who played cricket for Queensland, or Harold Blair, the opera singer, or Jeffrey “Mitta” Dynevor, the boxer who became the first Indigenous Australian to win a Commonwealth gold medal, or rugby league star Frank “Bigshot” Fisher, who was also Cathy Freeman’s grandfather.
And a personal favourite: the Little Rockers, who performed at a talent quest in Gympie in front of Princess Alexandra in 1959, and beat the heavily-fancied Gibb Brothers from Brisbane, later known as the Bee Gees.
Cherbourg Aboriginal Shire today has a population of around 1300 people. Unemployment is well over 50 percent and home ownership is non-existent. Everyone rents. The Australian Bureau of Statistics Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) for Cherbourg is the lowest in Australia at 403.5 (compared to Noosa 1,014 and worse than outback communities such as Tennant Creek at 612). The index measures socio-economic advantage/disadvantage, education, occupation, and economic resources to demonstrate the lack of opportunities the community faces.
But no-one is giving up on this plucky township. Says Kabi Kabi Aboriginal Corporation chair Norman Bond, whose family line goes back to the beginning of the settlement: “Having grown up here, when Uncle Eric was superintendent, today it’s quite different from what I knew. It’s not long ago that the government was still running the place, and us. People in Australia need to understand that, and why we’re now working to overcome all the challenges that face our people because of it.”
Kabi Kabi Native Title spokesperson Brian Warner, who can also track family lines back to the beginning, says: “I think when you love a place you gloss over the inequalities and the barriers that still exist. There are big problems here, just look at the suicide rate over the last 10 years. There’s no industry, nothing for the kids to do. It’s our role to create something for them, and to mentor them. They have the talent, they’ve just never had the opportunity to thrive. That must change.”
Next week we trace the family trees of King Brown, Willie Crowe and other elders over more than a century of lost history, and learn what Noosa is doing to help our First Nations.
