Threatened Species Day

Yesterday was Threatened Species Day in Australia. The date was chosen because it was on this day in 1936 that the last Thylacine died. (I do notice that goggle spellcheck tells me I'm writing about hyacinths here. Even the Tasmanian Tiger's name has become extinct in the etherwebs. Thanks blogger.)

The day is beset with a complicated stew of feelings about colonisation, the Anthropocene and resurrection. Apparently some Australian-born movie stars, among others, are helping fund an initiative to clone the tiger using numbat, tiger and dunnart genes. More practical ecologists are asking how this funding could be diverted to managing future extinctions. But no, the tiger clone/sighting bling always wins. 

The video of the last surviving tiger does me in. Yes it is a species made iconic for its extinction, but there are many other species that have suffered and become extinct over the last two centuries. Birds, marsupials and insects. Personally, I see the attempted resurrection of the tiger as the ultimate human arrogance. It's using Euro/settler 'science' to justify the elimination of a species ... and then bring it back from the dead. Wow. It's Frankenstein stuff for sure, with an added dose of Theseus' boat. But ultimately, 'building' another tiger is not absolving us of our past. 

Big Skies, Islands and Shipwrecks

Now here are some meanderings about shipwrecks and books and adventures on islands ...

Last week I flew up to Geraldton as a guest of the Big Sky Writers and Readers Festival, which is one of the choicer small festivals in Australia. I mean, despite missing my plane, I came home completely buzzed. I'd hung out with a Doug Anthony Allstar, kissed a knight in shining armour, ate copious amounts of beautiful food, bought way too many books, extracted a 'I was a wild female deckie' confession from a rather dignified old lady, sold every copy of Salt Story in Geraldton, bought an antique fox stole, stayed in a luxurious hotel and generally had a ball.

An authority of writers: Dawn Barker 'Fractured', Annamaria Weldon 'The Lake's Apprentice', Tim Ferguson 'Cheeky Monkey', Craig Sherbourne 'Hoi Polloi', Liz Byrski 'Family Secrets, Agatha and Christine from WritingWA.

A Doug Anthony Allstars' self portrait, just for me!

The most amazing thing the Big Sky organisers do for their writerly guests is to fly them to the Abrolhos Islands for a night before the festival kicks off. These islands are soaked in a history of 17th Century shipwrecks, castaways and mutinies - plus a massacre led by a drug-addicted psychopath. There's more info on the Batavia mutiny over here at Antipodean Nemo. On Rat Island part of the Wallaby Group of the Abrolhos, festival guests were able to swap yarns and get to know each other. It was a special time, I heard a splendid saga of a love affair spanning decades and continents, and we even had fresh dhufish for dinner.

Okay, though it is hard, I'll stop rolling about in how wonderful it all was. The other shipwrecks that I want to mention here are those of the long-lost ships from Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to find the North West Passage in 1846. As I was travelling north to Geraldton, news came through that the Canadians have found one of the ships. They released this amazing sonar image of the wreck resting on the sea floor.

The Erebus and Terror were the two ships that became trapped in ice. Apparently the sailors were stranded for eighteen months and all of then died eventually, with rumours that some men had resorted to cannibalism to survive. Until the other day, the Erebus and Terror have remained missing for more than a century - one of the enduring mysteries of colonial exploration.

Whether or not the find of the Erebus or the Terror (they are not yet sure which one it is yet) is connected to Canadian nationalism and claims to extra territories, was an aside to me as I read this news. It is a thrilling story but what got me really excited was the ships' connection to my book Salt Story.

On the cover and throughout the book are illustrations of fish and other marine critters. They were drawn during Sir James Clarke Ross's zoological expedition to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.
The images can be found online via Google books as The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Erebus & Terror: under the command of Captain Sir James Ross, during the years 1839 to 1843. After this journey the ships, already fitted with plated hulls for Arctic conditions, went off to find the Northwest Passage.

Sarah's Sandwich Seminar

This map, taken from Lynette Russell's book Roving Mariners, is commonly called The Great Circle.  The map has been the best way for me to get my head around the movements of nineteenth century Southern Ocean sealers and whalers and is one of the images I'll be using as presenter at Thursday's Friends of UWA Sandwich Seminar:
'Reimagining the Breaksea Islanders. History and Fiction on the Eve of Colonisation'.

Before West Australia was colonised, a small community of seal hunters lived on the islands around Albany, where I live now. Their origins were diverse - African American, English, Maori and several men and women indigenous to Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales and South Australia.
Pigeon or Warroba, pictured below, was one such sealer.
(John Glover, 1833, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart)

 

When Major Lockyer arrived on the Amity to found the settlement of King George Sound, he wrote that there had been 'some bad work done here' and within a fortnight he'd arrested several of the sealers with charges of murder and abduction.

Part of my PhD thesis is a fictional account of this snippet of history.  On Thursday, I'll talk history first, of the characters and events that I've found by delving into explorers' journals and reports. Then I'll go into the process of writing historical fiction based on these stories.

Here are the deets:
12.30 - 1.30 pm, August 28th
in the function room at UWA Albany.
Entry by donation.
You can ring 98 420850 to rsvp
You can bring yer lunch! And eat it too!

I hope to see any interested folk there.
Please be nice.
I'll be nervous.

Good men and bad men in small boats

Recently I've been consolidating all of my word doc files to see what the exegesis segment of my thesis will look like. The exegesis is basically a dissertation; a theoretical exploration of the creative section - in my case a work of historical fiction about the sealers and Aboriginal women who travelled from Bass Strait to Breaksea Island on the eve of the colonisation of the west of the continent. Because this is a creative PhD and the thesis must 'contribute to knowledge', I was becoming quite uncertain and freaked out that what I'd written was contributing to anything at all, let alone knowledge.

Any readers of A WineDark Sea over the past few years would have heard my moaning:

"It's nothing new. Someone else has already done this."

"I don't want these pedo/rapist/feral bastards camping inside my head for another week."

"I can't do this thing."
"This shit is fucked up. I wanna go back to selling gemstone necklaces at the markets."

What I've learned over the last week is that a) part of my exegesis actually is contributing to knowledge and that no one else has achieved this yet. b) after four years of the worst of the worst kind of folk camping inside my head, I exorcised them with the essay Predator Dreams (here), took control of the narrative and gave them all the raised middle finger. And c) I can use these essays in my exegesis as a bridging chapter between the theory and the fiction without the whole thing being negatively critted as too 'solipsistic'. (Thanks for that word Michelle.)

The beautiful thing about these realisations is that the exegesis is mere months away from finishing. Most of the chapters are done and only need cleaning. The fiction is not completed but I'm shaping up the story for the conclusion. The end is in sight.

This is so exciting for me.

Sorry if this bit next is boring ... but I'm going to post a section on working with men in small boats which is still rough and may or may not contribute to the bridging chapter between the exegesis and the fiction.

1. People

1.1 Good men and bad men in small boats

On the south coast of West Australia I have worked with (mainly) men in small commercial fishing camps, netting the estuaries and inshore waters for fish and crabs. The irony that I was also writing about men of much the same ilk, albeit a century dead, did not escape me. These modern day commercial fishers are certainly no duplication in sentiment or actions of the 19^th century sealers: they are usually happily married, own land and pay large amounts of money to maintain their fishing licences. However they tend to be clannish outsiders with slightly anarchic tendencies towards the government arms of law and order, only complying for utilitarian reasons. They are comfortable living in bush camps and shacks for weeks or months at a time. They understand the cycles of nature – the winds, swell, the natural predators and the seasons - intimately through their work. Their income derives from a trade plied from small boats, another primary industry of the sea. In these ways contemporary commercial fishermen are similar to yesteryear sealers.

One of the fishermen I worked with was proud to relate that he was a fourth generation fisherman and that one of his ancestors, a sealer, was accidently shot through the neck and killed while working the beaches east of Albany. Working for this fisherman was an ‘embedded’ process of research for me while I spent long hours on the coast, learning how to handle boats, nets and prey such as stingrays and small sharks. He had a keen sense of family and natural history and this information constantly inspired my writing about the sealers.

Obviously the modern day fishers differ from 19^th century sealers in that they don’t tend to kidnap women and imprison them on islands or shoot Aboriginal men and each other (though there are a few historic yarns of guns being brandished over access to fishing spots). However I do wonder what kind of men the fishermen would have been if they were placed in the same situation as the Hunter and Governor Brisbane crews: abandoned thousands of nautical miles from the nearest point of white population and law for two years. Phrases like ‘the thin veneer of civilisation’ and ‘men of their time and circumstance’ go through my mind. They are also common responses given to my wonderings out loud. There is really no way to answer this question, other than to judge each individual by evidence of their actions, either today or 160 years ago.

I would like to think that there is no such excuse as the ‘man of his time’ one. I would like to think that there are good people and bad people, that there are good men and bad men in any era. That the ‘men of their time’ argument is a simplistic furphy, a way out of explaining the history of good and ill deeds, of opportunities taken at the expense of a less powerful people.

Some of the historical characters whom I depict in Exiles do appear from the journals to be people who were compelled by justice and the wellbeing of others. Certainly the white men who wrote the journals represented themselves as virtuous and astute, (which is not to say that these representations were mistruths) intent on preserving their legacy upon the page. In a land without access to European law I believe Lockyer and d’Urville both knew the imperative of quickly assessing the characters of the sealers who rowed to their ships’ sides and asked for assistance, and that they were not naive or generous in their first impressions.

There is also the language and actions of the potential coloniser. Within days of the Amity weighing anchor in King George Sound, Lockyer knew that he must assuage the turbulence created within the Menang population by the sealers. He ‘managed’ the situation by staging the rescue of the four men from Michaelmas Island, the rescue of Samuel Bailey’s captives and the arrest and handcuffing of Samuel Bailey in front of the Menang population, consulting with them throughout the process. Major Lockyer was probably motivated not by humanitarian concerns but utilitarian – his was a career colonisers’ post and he understood that for the settlement to succeed among a people who, though extraordinarily generous in their hospitality, heavily outnumbered the occupants of the Amity. He had to establish a relationship of trust and distinguish his own white charges from the sealers.

Still Lockyer and d’Urville granted men such as Hamilton (d’Urville) and William Hook (Lockyer and d’Urville) some humanity in their journals. D’Urville also expressed a grudging admiration for the abandoned Breaksea Island community of sealers who survived for so long in isolation with only whaleboats, guns and the women to aid them.

Generally though, their depictions of the sealers and the women were disparaging, distrustful, full of loathing or exasperation at the mob of ‘ferals, sea wolves and pirates’ cruising the Southern and Indian Ocean islands. Then of course, came the evidence: the dead man on Green Island and the state of the woman rescued from Eclipse Island.

The sealers who lived in King George Sound did not record their own thoughts for posterity but their attitude towards authority comes through in the journals and despatches. D’Urville notes their recalcitrance and their aloof manner when he asked if any of the men wanted a working berth to Port Jackson. Despite them having been marooned, he was amazed that they rebuffed his offer and, no doubt chagrined by their cool manner, he withdrew the offer. Whether this snub was a result of the sealers and the Frenchmen distrusting one another as left over sentiments from the Napoleonic war, a breakdown in communication or simply that the sealers preferred to stay in West Australia to await the arrival of an Englishman, is uncertain.

In observing the interactions between contemporary commercial fishers and the law, I noticed that the relationships were often the same as the ones depicted in the 1820s journals. It seems to be a point of masculine pride, both parties being distinguished by their positions, that they never ‘cross over’ to the other side. Commercial fishers do not defer to authorities such as fisheries officers. Information is gleaned in a roundabout, conversational manner where both parties go away thinking they’ve gained more than the other.

Breaksea Island and the Venus de Milo

Eight weeks before King George Sound (now Albany) was colonised by Lockyer and his mates via the British Crown, the French weighed anchor here. They'd had a nasty 108 days' crossing from Tenerife through several storms, had lost a man, several chickens and some spars. 

Despite the lack of mobile phones or internet, just about every Brit in the Antipodes knew that the French were camped in the Sound, painting pictures, collecting plant and animal samples, and spending their nights swapping songs and stories from their country with the locals. It was the one part of the continent not yet annexed by the Crown, so Lockyer's missive was to get from Botany Bay to here as fast as possible to head off any French flag-planting ideas. I think it took the Amity two weeks, easterly winds, bad water and all.

Anyway, lets go back a bit ... the French ship Astrolabe was captained by a man named Jules Dumont d'Urville, a title with an interesting resonance with Hardy's Tess and her dastardly lover/rapist Alec d'Urberville, but here again, I digress. When d'Urville anchored the Astrolabe just off the channel in the same spot where Old Salt now has weekly fights with Grievous for flathead, he was already a famous man in his homeland for discovering the Venus de Milo in a paddock in Greece.

"The Venus de Milo is a statue of a naked woman with an apple in her raised left hand, the right hand holding a draped sash falling from hips to feet, both hands damaged and separated from the body. Even with a broken nose, the face was beautiful.

D'Urville the classicist recognized the Venus of the Judgement of Paris. (My note: know your Greek myths folks. It weren't the city but the man that Venus was playing here) It was, of course, the Venus de Milo. He was eager to acquire it, but his practical captain, apparently uninterested in antiquities, said there was nowhere to store it on the ship, so the transaction lapsed.
(My note again: Can you imagine how cranky d'Urville was, when his boss refused her berth? "Oh shipmate, the Venus de Milo? She'd be a useless freeloader. We're no people smugglers. We've got like bricks and wheat and shit to cart. C'mon!")

The tenacious d'Urville on arrival at Constantinople showed the sketches he had made to the French ambassador, the Marquis de Rivière, who sent his secretary in a French Navy vessel to buy it for France. Before he could take delivery, French sailors had to fight Greek brigands for possession. In the mêlée the statue was roughly dragged across rocks to the ship, breaking off both arms, and the sailors refused to go back to search for them<sup>."

So there you go. Six years later, d'Urville was in Albany. His officers met Mokare' and the other Menang Noongar folk of Kinjarling. They traded their songs, bits of language, curiousities and axes, all the while fixing up the Astrolabe's sails, masts and spars. d'Urville also described the men and women, those Vandemonian sealers who rowed that day from Breaksea Island to alongside his ship moored in the channel, to trade him a bag of black lizards for gunpowder and flour.</sup>

It was the first time the Frenchmen had seen the three sealer women and girl child. The little whaleboat was crowded with the exiled of Breaksea Island. Mary, plump in her sealskin frock, black face, red beanie with tufts of wiry hair escaping it and rows of gleaming marineer shells strung tightly around her neck: Weedchild, a tiny, waif-like creature in boy’s trousers, her wild halo of hair buffeted by wind and salt resembling a sea urchin: Wiremu Heke standing at the tiller, his tattoos spiralling over the belt of his canvas trousers, no shirt or shoes, beardless, wearing a slender length of green stone from his left ear and a necklace of stark white killer whale teeth: Smidmore, his ruined face - turned eye and stoved in cheek, his long black hair not quite concealing the gold earring beaten out of a sovereign: Dancer, naked but for her scars and shells, her ring of furry hair framing her round glossy face: And Sal, with the skull of a child strung about her throat, her long straight hair held back with a scrap of bright woven cloth, standing with one brown foot on the thwart and the toes of her other foot gripping the gunwale.
Sal held up a heavy sack, dripping with blood and circled by flies, to show the bemused sailors leaning over the side of the Astrolabe. From the sack, she produced a fat black skink the size of her forearm, its triangular head bashed in and its tail dangling by her elbow. 

“It’s good!” she said.

And this is why History is such a blast.


Quote from S.-C. Dumont D'Urville Two Voyages to the South Seas, Memoirs of Captain Jules. Introduction by Helen Rosenmann.

Roving the Southern Ocean

This is a great interview. Russell talks about Aboriginal whalers and sealers on the south coast of Australia.

"Aboriginal men and women were an active part of the sealing and whaling industries in the southern oceans in the nineteenth century. Even though the historical record is incomplete, Professor Lynette Russell has mined ships' records and sailor's journals to find individual stories of roving mariners."

Go here to download the post:  http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/awaye/roving-mariners/5009868

Flinders, Mr Thistle and Cape Catastrophe

In the Recherche Archipelago, they try fishing from the Investigator but their work is impeded by three monstrous sharks, in whose presence no fish dared to appear. They manage to catch one of the sharks but getting it aboard is an operation akin to hoisting one of the wooden launches. The circumference of the shark is eight feet and it is twelve and a half feet long. Amongst the vast quantity of substances contained in the stomach was a tolerably large seal, bitten in two, and swallowed with half of the spear sticking in it with which it had probably been killed by natives.

On to South Australia and Flinders and his right hand man Mr Thistle spend the night pondering the fierce currents that flow past the island, in an ocean devoid of king tides. Does the current mean there is a massive water course that travels through the centre of the continent from the Gulf of Carpentaria ... large rivers, deep inlets, inland seas ... and the prospect of making an interesting discovery seemed to have infused new life and vigour into every man on the ship.

The next morning Flinders and Mr Thistle launch a boat from the Investigator and visit the island. They climb a hill and at the peak they find a snake sleeping on a warm rock. The snake is speckled and yellow. They decide to take it back to the ship for the naturalists to examine. While Flinders presses the butt of his musket against the snake's neck to keep it down, Thistle sews shut its mouth with a sail needle and twine.

As they continue exploring the island, Thistle holding the writing snake in his hands, two huge white eagles rush at them from the sky and then retreat to the nearest tree, watching them. These birds sit watching in the trees, and should a kangaroo come out to feed in the daytime, it is seized and torn to pieces by these voracious creatures. Flinders thinks that the two men are mistaken for kangaroos and about to be attacked. Perhaps the eagles are really after that speckled yellow snake.

In the evening Mr Thistle sails from ship to shore in the cutter, to gather water and verify Flinders' longitude observations. The watchman sees his returning sail in the gloom of dusk and then there is no more sight of Mr Thistle. Shots are fired. A light is shown. Lieutenant Fowler leaves in a boat with a lanthorn to see what might have happened. Two hours passed without any tidings ... no answer to be heard to the hallooing and the firing of muskets ... Fowler reports that he was nearly upended himself by that fierce, rippling tide.

Another boat leaves in the morning and returns towing the wreck, bottom upward, stove in from being dashed against the rocks. On shore they find an oar and Mr Thistle's keg. They never find Mr Thistle or his seven crew. On board that night, Fowler tells Flinders strange story of the fortune teller Mr Pine, whose palm Mr Thistle had crossed on a whim one day whilst the ship was lying idle at Spithead. The cunning man informed Mr Thistle that he was going out on a long voyage, and that the ship, on arriving at her destination, would be joined by another vessel. That such was intended, he might have learned privately; but he added, that Mr Thistle would be lost before the other vessel joined.

Lieutenant Fowler then relates to Flinders the rest of the prophesy; that the remaining crew would be shipwrecked, but not in the ship they went out in. The whole of the Investigator's crew knows this story, he reminds Flinders.

I remarked with some pain in a future part of the voyage, that every time my boat's crew went to embark with me in the Lady Nelson, there was some degree of apprehension among them that the time of the predicted shipwreck had arrived. I make no comment upon this story, but recommend a commander, if possible, to prevent any of his crew from consulting fortune tellers.

(Turns out Flinders' crew should have been more worried about getting aboard the Porpoise than the Lady Nelson.)

A Voyage to Terra Australis, Matthew Flinders, Text Publishing, Melbourne, (1814) 2000.

Yesterday: Cape Riche to Albany

 At dawn, dolphins followed K as he came ashore to pick us up.

 Cheyne Island at Cape Riche. That tiny knob on the left side of the island is a stone lookout from the bay whaling days.

 Haul Off Rock 

Bald Island

 Bald Rocky Islands. Actually I'm not sure what they are called - just west of Bald Island. They are very bald and very rocky.

 Autopilot makes time for conversations and fishing.

Waychinicup.
"Just imagine if you came across that channel into the inlet after days and days of rough seas. Imagine if you discovered Waychinicup."
K's son laughed. "Yeah it would be a beautiful thing. But you'd never want to get close enough in rough seas."

 Cape Vancouver

Cape Vancouver and Mt Gardner.

 The most impressive Rock Dundar

 Breaksea and Michaelmas Island, left and right.

K was a happy man to sail into town, two years after he sailed away.

                                                Green Island, Oyster Harbour. Nearly home.

Apologies for the standard of photography here - and some excuses. The light was beautiful and misty from dawn to dusk, the hills and island shrouded in salt spray. I have a feeling my phone camera was shrouded in mist too.

Doubtful Island

Ocean Sojourn

"It is a fact universally acknowledged that a fisherwoman in receipt of a slightly battered heart will be in need of a red sail against an uncluttered horizon."
Mmmm. Yes? No? Okay, how about this one:
"Last night I dreamed I returned to The Tearaway again."

I spent last evening with friends who played ukeleles and sang The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, The Ship Song and Fisherman's Blues around a fire. Funny, later I dreamed about what my book would look like. Perhaps that is because I've been editing the manuscript for weeks, months, and last night the blokes were running over a songlist for the book launch.
But when I woke up this morning, I knew I was actually one sleep closer to the uncluttered horizon.

"An easterly is the most agreeable wind in Esperence Bay ..."
Charlotte Bronte, Daphne Du Maurier and John Fowles really knew what they were on about. Sometimes there is just nothing for it but to go to sea. It's only TWO MORE SLEEPS before I set sail from Esperence to Albany on my friend's catamaran. This is the same sea highway that my sealer men and women trod so long ago so hopefully I'll get some writing done. Hang out on the islands. Sing to some seals. Stuff like that.

A WineDark Sea's waters will be still for a week but they've been glassed off for a while anyway, seeing as I haven't been to sea for six months. (Aaagh!) I promise photographs and ripping yarns of old on my return.
And ... Happy Easter.

Dogs of the Sea

From Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Erebus & Terror
under the command of Captain Sir James Clark Ross, R.N., F.R.S.,
during the years 1839 - 1843.

Exiles and Island Wives

 

“ This half caste breed, reared under circumstances which must eventually render them the most lawless and worthless characters, stand a fair chance of inheriting in right of birth thereon, the various Archipelagos on the coast.”

Government Resident, 1839.

Finding the above quote was the beautiful makings for a paper that I wrote for a Tasmanian history conference last year. Seeing as it's probably not going to be published anywhere, I thought I'd put it up here and anyone who is interested in this kind of stuff can use it as a resource. A golden treasure hunt hint: the crux is straight after the pointing hand. There are references and notes at the end. The pictures are from my original powerpoints.

 Exiles and Island Wives: Southern Ocean Islands and their People

In this paper I describe the sealers and Aboriginal women who lived on south coast islands of Western Australia in the nineteenth century. I am interested in the colonial administration’s response to these islanders and their fears that the offspring of sealers and Aboriginal women could inherit the islands. The state’s desire to control visitations to great southern islands has continued, albeit in changed form, into the twenty-first century.

For at least twenty years before West Australian colonisation, sealers worked the southern waters. The Eastern states sealing industry was fattened upon an unrestrained slaughter, severely depleting the very source of the industry. Some crews moved west, seeking new grounds. The crews that I describe here are those of the Hunter and the Governor Brisbane who had previously worked Bass Strait and Kangaroo Island. These two sealing gangs were abandoned by their owners and living on islands between the Recherche Archipelago near Esperance and King George Sound, for nearly two years before colonisation there. They hailed from America, Ireland, Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand and included Indigenous Van Diemonian and South Australian men, women and children. In the latter half of 1825, they lived on Breaksea Island, one of two large islands that guard the entrance to King George Sound.  

De Sainson: The Astrolabe's skiff heading for Green Island, 1825.

In October of that year, according to the testimony of Maori sealer William Hook, the sealers took five Menang men to tiny Green Island in Oyster Harbour adjacent to King George Sound under the guise of a muttonbirding expedition.

The sealers and Menang Noongar had worked together before, muttonbirding on the islands and fishing. It is likely that they trusted one another. However all trust was destroyed when the sealers pushed off and rowed away, leaving the Menang men on the island without a boat.

Green Island, Oyster Harbour

With the majority of the local Menang band’s young men effectively imprisoned on Green Island, the sealers raided a local camp and kidnapped four women. Two of the women escaped overnight, their arms still roped together. The sealers took the other two women out to Breaksea Island. The marooned men on Green Island began to construct a raft but this was unfinished when the sealers returned the next day. The Aboriginal men rushed the boat and in the fracas, one of the sealers shot a Menang man dead. The next day, the sealers returned and took the remaining four men out to Michaelmas Island, which lies next to Breaksea. Sealer Samuel Bailey took one woman and a little girl of uncertain origin to Eclipse Island, a wild outcrop of granite beyond the protection of Bald Head and the Sound. The rest of the sealers returned to Breaksea Island.

Eight weeks later, the Amity arrived, laden with convicts, seeds, livestock and soldiers. Major Edmund Lockyer soon discovered the desiccated body of the man on Green Island. Having seen smoke on Michaelmas, he rightly judged that someone on the island required assistance. He sent a boat out to Michaelmas to pick up the marooned Aboriginal men. On their landing back at the settlement, the four men mounted a swift if misguided payback, putting three spears into the fledgling colony’s only blacksmith. Lockyer had been entrusted with establishing the settlement and instead had walked straight into a blood feud between sealers and Aborigines. He wrote in his report to the Colonial Secretary that there had been “some bad work done here.”

In 1839, the Government Resident Grey at King George Sound wrote to the Colonial Secretary ... listing his concerns about foreign whaling vessels working the coast ... and the sealing crews who lived on islands between King George Sound and the Recherche Archipelago. The colony was twelve years old by this time. Grey’s main concern was that the whalers and sealers were not yet obligated to pay the bond that domestic port visitors had to pay, that bound them to behave in accordance with the colonial port’s regulations.  The French and American whalers, he wrote, were enticing deserters away from the colony and creating opportunities for the resident sealers to smuggle in Yankee tobacco. He also complained that the sealers brought their Aboriginal wives and workers into the settlement where they mixed with the local Menang population and exercised a “most contaminating influence over their characters.”

Captain Grey backed up his bureaucratic grievances with allegations that some of the sealers were engaging in piracy and wrecking ... that old and bloody practice of misleading ships to crash into reefs and headlands in darkness so they could be plundered ... He warned the Colonial Secretary that the sealers were living with Aboriginal women who had been carried off from their families in the east of the continent. As a result, many of the children living on south coast islands had European fathers.

Grey wrote, “this half caste breed, reared under circumstances which must eventually render them the most lawless and worthless characters, stand a fair chance of inheriting in right of birth thereon, the various Archipelagos on this Coast.”

In the comforts of my living room and hindsight, Captain Grey’s fears of Aboriginal and sealer’s children claiming a birthright over islands read as a veiled but unsubstantiated threat to British sovereignty and colonial power. His sentiments also reflect the era’s deep discomfort with miscegenous relationships. The sealers had declined to participate in the settlement of land, instead choosing a furtive existence roaming between islands, subsisting from their vegetable gardens, muttonbird, kangaroo and summertime seal revenue. Captain Grey, Major Lockyer and other colonial players described them as escaped convicts and pirates. Sea wolves, the sealers were called. In modern language sealers would be described as feral, anarchic and godless. Surely though, stories of sealers deliberately wrecking ships or claiming a birth right over the islands, was a bit farfetched?

In 1842 a Perth Gazette journalist wrote: “Rather than be at the expense of living at the settlement and going to work, some of these men prefer leading an idle life on one of the islands with their black women and children, entirely excluded from human society and sleeping away their existence. They require only a little flour, all the rest ... supplied to them by the bounty of nature.”

De Sainson: Sealers at Westernport, 1825.

This account depicts the life of a sealer as almost Elysian, as opposed to Grey’s vision of wreckers, rapists and smugglers. The difference is in the vocation and viewpoint of the writer; one a journalist depicting a new romance of the Southern Ocean, the other a colonial administrator intent on controlling his jurisdiction and the people who lived on islands.

Boxer Island in the Recherche Archipelago near Esperance was named after an Aboriginal man who was imprisoned there. Using Recherche Archipelago islands as a gaol for “incorrigible sheep stealers and other native outlaws” was common practice in Esperance prior to 1876. However before the Recherche islands were used as prisons, they were home to sealers. Archaeologists and local historians recently examined a cave on Boxer Island and ‘rediscovered’ a nineteenth century abode of sealers. Unique for its preserved diorama of a single man’s domesticity, the cave was complete with what appeared to be a wooden bed, neatly rolled seal skins, tarpaulins or sails and a sailor’s chest. There is also a wooden shelf set into the limestone above the bed. 

Bob Gimble lived on Bald Island, forty kilometres to the east of Albany in the 1840s. Gimble had three Aboriginal wives and some children. The women were his companions and his crew. During the summer months, when the sea was swollen and chopped by the easterly winds, Gimble and the women killed seals, salted their skins and extracted the oil. I am unsure whether any of the three wives were Palawah but, given the regularity of Tasmanian women moving from east to west during that period, it is possible. Families like Bob Gimble’s were most likely the target of Grey’s concerns about resident islanders.

What Grey originally sought in his letter to the Colonial Secretary was to:
extract customs from all visitors to the port of King George Sound,
to curtail the nefarious activities of foreign whalers,
to control who entered the port
and licence and restrain those inhabitants of the islands. 

The colony, situated on the remotest edge of the Southern Ocean highway, lived a precarious existence and he knew it. 

In 1846 an ordinance by the colony of West Australia was extended to regulate the temporary occupation of crown lands and offshore islands. By the 1880s police regularly visited the Recherche Archipelago islands as part of their beat that covered hundreds of kilometres. It was a difficult job you can imagine to police all of the islands. Legislation compensated for that. Some islands around Albany were closed to unauthorised landings, and still are to this day. The act, which made it illegal for people to live without government authorisation on crown land, effectively circumvented the laws of proscription, or adverse possession. The regulating and removal of human inhabitants from south coast islands was (and still is) a state ownership issue.

One hundred and sixty years after Captain Grey wrote that letter to the Colonial Secretary, his fears of Aboriginal children inheriting the islands were realised in another state, Queensland, when Eddie Mabo demonstrated his family’s continuous working and living on the Mer Islands. My point here is not to compare the Mabo decision and its Native Title ramifications, with the (non-forthcoming) claims of nineteenth century south coast island communities, but to assert that Grey’s anxieties proved to be historically and legally justified. His letter shows that in the 1830s, individuals within the colonial administration of West Australia were already considering continued Aboriginal occupation as a legitimate legal obstacle to state ownership of the islands.

My impetus to write about the colonial anxieties regarding birthrights of south coast islander children developed from the day I asked the regional manager of the State’s environment department if I could camp on Breaksea Island to continue my research on the sealing gangs. He told me that I would have to write a letter requesting permission and that the department may or may not decide to let me camp there. Most offshore islands in Western Australia are registered nature reserves. He explained that some are set aside for the rehabilitation of endangered species and most islands have fragile eco systems, so camping on islands is prohibited without permission from the government.

It did not take me long on Breaksea Island to realise that the species really thriving there were rabbits and noxious weeds, with piles of asbestos and rubbish lying around in the bush. There were vague plans for an eco resort reported in the local newspapers. The state of this spoiled nature, and the fraught bureaucratic journey that it took me to see it, began my wondering about the limited access to West Australian offshore islands. Most islands around Albany have signs posted on the shore advising visitors that, as a registered nature reserve, human visitations are not advised or legal.

Breaksea is five nautical miles from the mainland and skirted by massive, barnacled granite rocks. The jetty is the only safe place to disembark. Due to the tides and rough swells, the jetty is about eight metres above sea level. As we edged the dinghy into the jetty, I grabbed the ladder and climbed, swinging, up to the landing. As I got level to the jetty timbers, I saw a sign tacked into the wood. Despite the age of the sign, the message was clear. “This jetty is hazardous. Do not climb on or around this jetty ......” 

The very nature of islands means that they are microcosms of worlds. The element of water constrains island inhabitants to a strongly delineated space. Cut off from the mainland by water, islands are only accessible or escapable to those who possess a mode of access. An island can offer safety from predators and an intensified state of environmental sensitivity, of social interaction and finite resources: ... or punishment, captivity and isolation.

South coast islands such as Breaksea and Michaelmas were such places of refuge and captivity for sealing gangs and Indigenous men and women. As Captain Grey’s letter reveals, south coast islands were also highly contested spaces, reflecting the state’s anxieties about sovereignty -  and they remain so to this day.

Notes.

1. The date of the abductions is exact, according to the statement given by William Hook to Major Lockyer. The indigenous men were marooned the day after the French expedition ship Astrolabe departed King George Sound after a stay of several weeks. Rosenman Ed. D’urville, p. 51

2. Menang is the name for the Noongar people of Kinjarling, King George Sound, Albany.

3. Matthew Flinders reported that Green Island, which had been planted with vine cuttings, watercress and other seeds by Vancouver ten years previous, to his disappointment that “the vegetation now consisted of tufts of wiry grass, and a few stunted shrubs, supported by a thin layer of sandy soil, which was everywhere was perforated with rat holes” These ‘rat holes’ were most likely muttonbird burrows. Stephens, Robert, Green Island, Oyster Harbour, Albany History Collection, 59 M, Notes and Letters.

4. Amendment to the Occupation of Crown Land, State Law Publisher.

5. Rintoul, J :the Esperence police also visited the edge of the Nullabour to break up ‘large gatherings’.

References

Historical Records of Australia, Vol. 3, pp464 -

Colonial Secretary’s Records, Acc 36, Vol 73, Folio 75, Albany, Nov. 17^th, 1839.

Helen Rosenman, Ed. Voyage to the South Seas, Astrolabe,  1826 – 1829.

Robert Stephens, Green Island, Oyster Harbour.

Tiffany Shellam, Making Sense of Law and Disorder. and

Shaking Hands on the Fringe.

State Law Publisher, Amendment to the Occupation of Crown Land.

John Rintoul,  Esperance Yesterday and Today

Plomley, BJB Ed. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of GA Robinson.

Rebe Taylor, Unearthed, the Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island.

W.N. Clarke, Perth Gazette, October 7^th, 1842.

Images: Louis de Sainson, Dan Cerchi, Me.