Boggy Hole

Boggy Hole Police station was located thirty-five kilometres downstream from Hermannsburg . As Mulvaney writes, stations like Boggy Hole were founded to ease the fears of the European pastoralists through the 'pacification' and 'dispersal', or violence and murder, of Aboriginal people (Mulvaney, 124).

Boggy Hole station was abandoned in approximately 1891 largely due to complaints by the Hermannsburg missionaries over Willshire's war-like rule.

Reference:

D.J Mulvaney, "Encounters In Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606-1985", (University of Queenland Press...)

Anecdotal evidence suggests the term niggers was used throughout the territory. In his letters to Baldwin Spencer, Frank Gillen uses the term ‘nigger’ throughout his correspondence (1894-1903). In some of his letters he calls himself ‘Nigger Protector’ (Gillen was in charge of Aborigines) (see 7 November, 1895, p 86). Occasionally he capitalises the word but it is generally written in lower case. Mounted Constable also uses the term in his letters to Spencer. Interestingly, in his account of his travels through Central Australia, Spencer makes reference to the incorporation of the English and American vernacular in Australian culture. His discussion of the echidna, which he says is often referred to as either a porcupine or a hedgehog, prompts an interesting passage about language: ‘The Echidna, with its short spines, projecting through the hairs all over the back, is really very much more like a large hedgehog, both in build and appearance, than a porcupine, but the latter is now the popular name for it all over Australia, where English names are unfortunately applied in the most curious and often fanciful ways to native animals and plants to which they have no affinity and usually very little, and sometimes no, resemblance whatever. In many part of Victoria and New South Wales it puzzles anyone who is accustomed to European woods and forests to find a gum tree called a ‘mountain ash’, to which it has not the faintest similarity, either in foliage, fruit or manner of growth. So again ‘possum up a gum tree’ refers to an animal and a tree neither of which are really Australian so far as the original application of the names is concerned. The popular name ‘gum tree’ was given first to an American tree, quite unlike any Australian ‘gum tree’, and ‘possum’ to an animal which, though it is a marsupial, belongs to a group of pouched animals very distinct from that to which its Australian namesake belongs. The expression ‘possum up a gum tree’ was really brought over to Australia in early days by miners of the celebrated ‘forty-niner’ period, who left California to try their luck on the gold-fields on Bendigo and Ballarat in Victoria.

‘The poetical effusion:

De Lord he know de nigger well, He know de nigger by de smell, And when de nigger baby cry, De Lord he gib em ‘possum pie,

‘must be reserved exclusively for use in America. There are neither ‘niggers’ nor ‘possums’ nor ‘gum-trees’ in Australia, and its long-headed, chocolate-coloured aboriginals, who are physically much more closely allied to ourselves than to ‘niggers’, are innocent of any such culinary craft as that requisite for the making of ‘pies’.’ (Spencer,1928,152-53)

REFERENCE: From the Frontier, ed. John Mulvaney, Howard Morphy, Alison Petch, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2000 Baldwin Spencer, Wanderings in Wild Australia, vol 1, Macmillan and Co, Ltd, London, 1928 My Dear Spencer: The Letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, ed. John Mulvaney, Howard Morphy, Alison Petch, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1997

Tempe Downs

In his short historical account for the Centralian Advocate, Peter Forrest writes that Tempe Downs has always been at the ‘Frontier of Pastoral Settlement’, and its ‘chequered history illustrates the ups and downs of the pioneers. ‘In 1881 the scientist and explorer Dr Charles Chewings claimed 3000 square miles which became Tempe Downs. Chewings secured backing from partners (principally R.F. Thornton) and stocked the country from 1884. The venture was unprofitable, and in 1893 the partners sold to Thornton for £2500 – a loss of £27000. Thornton died in 1902 and the station was abandoned until 1906 when it was taken over by Bob and Bill Coulthardt. They sold to George Bennett in 1918 and Trot Kunoth took over the management. After a run of disastrous seasons the property passed to the Crawford family (1927-1930) who installed Bryan Bowman as manager.

In the early 1920’s, Tempe Downs was owned by George Bennett, who also held big pastoral interests in South Australia, and was managed by E.H. Trot Kunoth. He bought it in approximately 1918 from the Coulthard brothers (Bob and Bill). Bryan Bowman says Tempe was always an ‘erratic performer’, yet it did reasonably well in Bennett’s time.

S.L. Davis and J.R.V Prescott in Aboriginal Frontiers and Boundaries in Australia claim that the ‘history of Tempe Downs station exemplifies the issues and events which are central to the changes in the demography of the Aboriginal people in Central Australia.’

References:

See S.L. Davis and J.R.V. Prescott, Aboriginal Frontiers and Boundaries in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 1992, 89-90

Strehlow writes about totems and totemic centres most extensively in Songs of Central Australia, however, there is a succinct summary provided in The Art of Circle, Line and Square in Australian Aboriginal Art. He writes:

‘The earth, so the Aranda and other inland tribes used to say, was uncreated an eternal. In the beginning it had been a bare plain, devoid of all physical features and all forms of life. Then came the time when the great multitude of supernatural being known as totemic ancestors emerged from their eternal sleep under the surface of the plain. The sacred sites where they emerged turned into soak, waterholes, claypans, caves, and so forth. Each of these supernatural beings was normally, though not invariably, linked indivisibly with one particular animal or plant. […] Hence any native belonging, say, to the kangaroo totem, would not, except as a last resort, kill or eat kangaroos, since he believed that both he and they were descended from the same supernatural being. This then, was the link between any man and the animal or plant that he regarded as his totem; he shared the same life with this animal or plant…These totemic ancestors were also believed to have created all the prominent physical features of the present day landscape – its ranges, hills, rocks, plains, sandhills, rivers, springs and so on. At the end of their labours and their wanderings these supernatural personages either returned to the earth from whence they had first sprung, or changed into sacred rocks, trees or tjurunga slabs. They slept again in eternal sleep, as they had done at the beginning of time. But they retained their power to send down rain, and to fill the earth with plants and animals of their own totem, whenever they were summoned by magic increase rites…’(Strehlow, 44-45)

REFERENCE: Strehlow, The Art of Circle, Line and Square in Australian Aboriginal Art, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1964

Strehlow writes about totems and totemic centres most extensively in Songs of Central Australia, however, there is a succinct summary provided in The Art of Circle, Line and Square in Australian Aboriginal Art. He writes:

‘The earth, so the Aranda and other inland tribes used to say, was uncreated an eternal. In the beginning it had been a bare plain, devoid of all physical features and all forms of life. Then came the time when the great multitude of supernatural being known as totemic ancestors emerged from their eternal sleep under the surface of the plain. The sacred sites where they emerged turned into soak, waterholes, claypans, caves, and so forth. Each of these supernatural beings was normally, though not invariably, linked indivisibly with one particular animal or plant. […] Hence any native belonging, say, to the kangaroo totem, would not, except as a last resort, kill or eat kangaroos, since he believed that both he and they were descended from the same supernatural being. This then, was the link between any man and the animal or plant that he regarded as his totem; he shared the same life with this animal or plant…These totemic ancestors were also believed to have created all the prominent physical features of the present day landscape – its ranges, hills, rocks, plains, sandhills, rivers, springs and so on. At the end of their labours and their wanderings these supernatural personages either returned to the earth from whence they had first sprung, or changed into sacred rocks, trees or tjurunga slabs. They slept again in eternal sleep, as they had done at the beginning of time. But they retained their power to send down rain, and to fill the earth with plants and animals of their own totem, whenever they were summoned by magic increase rites…’

References

See Strehlow, The Art of Circle, Line and Square in Australian Aboriginal Art, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1964, pp 44-45

As TGH Strehlow maintains, F. J. Gillen was responsible for ensuring the Willshire arrest in 1891, a decision which has since gone on to secure Gillen’s reputation as a man of honour and moral courage. And yet, according to an essay by Dick Kimber, Francis J. Gillen, who was also the Sub-Protector of Aborigines, has been remembered not just as the man of the ‘hour’, but the man of the era. In his essay ‘Gillen Time: The Creation of an Era’, Kimber recalls a conversation with a senior Arrernte man, Stewart Oliver, in 1992 where the latter used the term ‘Gillen time’ to describe a period in the Centre’s history. As Kimber describes it, Oliver was pointing out one of the tracks used to reach the Arltunga gold-fields which he described as being used during ‘Gillen time’. Kimber writes, ‘As I had not mentioned Gillen, or Spencer and Gillen, in conversation, it struck me how significant F. J. Gillen was in the history of Central Australia.’ Hearing about Gillen in these terms, Kimber goes on to recount the way in which the legacy of Gillen has been handed down the generations (Kimber, 49). While he was clearly prejudiced in much of his thinking like the other men of his generation, ‘he was,’ Kimber writes, ‘clearly more interested in the individual character and well-being of the Aborigines whom he met than almost any other person in the Centre’ (Kimber, 54). Maisie McKenzie describes a similar response to Gillen in her book Flynn's Last Camp when she writes that Gillen was known to Arrernte people as 'Oknirrabata' which means 'something like great teacher, wise man or big father' (McKenzie, 51).

REFERNCES

Richard Kimber, ‘Gillen Time: The Creation of an Era’ in Connection and Disconnection: Encounters Between Settlers and Indigenous People in the Northern Territory, (eds) Tony Austin and Suzanne Parry, Northern Territory University, Darwin, NT, 1998, pp 49-76

Maisie McKenzie, Flynn's Last Camp, Boolarong Publications......