A Terribly Wild Man

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Author: Christine Halse

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A Terribly Wild Man-TEXT PAGES 22/12/01 7:01 AM Page i

A TERRIBLY WILD MAN

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Christine Halse has a life-long fascination with the social, cultural and psychological forces that shape identity, and has been immersed in the life and work of Ernest Gribble for more than ten years. An Associate Professor at the University of Western Sydney, Christine is married, revelling in life with her teenage daughter and currently working on a biography of a young woman with anorexia nervosa.

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A TERRIBLY WILD MAN

Christine Halse

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First published in 2002 Copyright © Christine Halse 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Halse, Christine. A terribly wild man. ISBN 1 86508 753 X. 1. Gribble, E. R. B. (Ernest Richard Bulmer), 1869–1957. 2. Church of England—Clergy—Biography. 3. Clergy—Australia—Biography. 4. Aborigines, Australia—Missions. I. Title. 283.42092 Index compiled by Russell Brooks Maps by Ian Faulkner Typeset in 11.5/15 pt Caslon by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough Printed by South Wind Productions, Singapore 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For Martin and Sarah

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C ONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction A note on language

ix xiii xv

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

1 22 48 74 93 112 127 154 170

Mostly of tears Clasping their children tightly Porridge for every meal Horse-thieves and harlots When native fruits are ripe Dark deeds in a sunny land Ghosts crying in the dark A complete outsider Punishment place

Endnotes Sources and a select guide to reading Index

VII

193 205 209

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A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

M

any Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people encouraged the writing of this book. They generously shared memories and stories about Ernest Gribble and mission life, and gave me permission to use papers and photographs in their possession. Many have since passed on. They are not identified in A Terribly Wild Man, in accordance with the custom of many Aboriginal communities, but the insights they provided into Ernest Gribble’s private world continue to help illuminate his public life. The account of Gribble’s life and work presented here may not correspond with the views of everyone or with the image of Gribble they would like to see portrayed for the public. It is hoped, however, that this account sheds light on the life of a man who had a profound impact on the lives of Aboriginal Australians and on Australian race relations. Special thanks are due to the people of Yarrabah, Oombulgurri (formerly Forrest River Mission) and Palm Island for their hospitality and kindness during my visits, and to the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) for granting permission to use material from its archives. A particular debt is owed to Joan Hunter, former ABM librarian, who first urged me to write Gribble’s biography. I would also like to thank the staff of the Mitchell Library and Sydney IX

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X

A T E R R I B LY W I L D M A N

University Archives in Sydney; the Oxley Library and State Archives in Brisbane; the diocesan offices of the Anglican Church in Brisbane and Townsville; the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra; the Battye Library and Departments of Aboriginal Affairs and Community Services in Western Australia; and Columbia University, New York, home of a valuable collection of early Australian anthropological publications. Noel Loos always believed that Gribble’s story was an important one that needed to be told and encouraged me from the start. Psychiatrist Sarah Mares provided invaluable help in understanding Gribble’s psychosocial profile. Doctors Michael Skinner and Judy Kirk shared their medical expertise to help diagnose Gribble’s ailments. Bishop Arthur Malcolm and his wife, Colleen, kindly arranged accommodation on Palm Island, and Bishop John Lewis’ generosity in allowing me access to the Townsville Diocesan Archives is greatly appreciated. Linda Lawson, from Koombal Park near Yarrabah, was both a guide and a mentor through Gribble’s years at Yarrabah. Susan Hunt and Dr Bill Louden provided friendship and moral support in Perth and when serendipity had us all living in North America at the same time. Duncan Waterson and George Parsons introduced me to Australian History at Macquarie University. The scholarship of Raymond Evans from the University of Queensland provided invaluable guidance during the PhD research on which this book is based. Henry Reynolds read an early version and urged Allen & Unwin to publish Gribble’s life, but the book would not have been written without the sustaining encouragement of publisher John Iremonger and the gentle but meticulous efforts of editor Emma Cotter. Permission to reproduce photographs from their collections was generously provided by Gwyn Gribble, Linda Lawson, the ABM, the Battye Library and the North Queensland Diocesan Archives. For their advice at different stages, I am grateful to Neil Baumgart, Geoffrey Bolton, the late Brian Dalton, Rob Dixon, Neville Green, Annette Hamilton, John Hay, Rob Hinxman for

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

XI

his knowledge of James Noble, Christopher Kelen, John Lewis, Dawn May, the late Stephen Shortus, Mary-Louise Slattery, Tom Stannage and Peter Yeend. Vicki Fox painstakingly formatted the book and relieved me of many administrative burdens during the final stages of production. Martin Debelle’s unfaltering forbearance and faith in the project was a precious, sustaining force, and my daughter Sarah’s patient acceptance of a life filled with ghosts from long ago has been both motivating and inspiring. As is custom and obligation, my deepest apologies to anyone who deserves acknowledgement but has inadvertently been omitted. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of Ernest Gribble’s story—any errors of fact or interpretation are mine alone.

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I NTRODUCTION

T

he stale, pungent odour of musty paper eclipses my earliest memories of Ernest Gribble. Buried deep in the basement under the offices of the Australian Board of Missions (ABM), adjacent to the elegant forecourt of St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney, were fragile journals, aged letters, sepia photographs and stacks of records bundled together with tightly knotted red cord. Cemented by decades of dust, the personal papers of Ernest Gribble had been deposited and deserted. The gracious librarian with a canny eye for history asked hopefully: ‘Can you do something with this?’ Sifting through the disarray brought more questions than answers: Why would someone write six autobiographies? How could a solitary priest inflame such intense national and international controversy? Whose lives did he wound and heal? What happened in the years when the records abruptly ceased? Why were there so many contradictions and inconsistencies in the vast, chaotic collection? As the riddles unravelled so did the poignant, passionate themes of Australian history, and the consequences of combining noble intentions with human frailty in forging an identity in the blurred boundaries between culture and race. XIII

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Humanitarians are often naively portrayed as saints or sinners. The life and work of Ernest Gribble exposes the private traumas and secrets that haunted the public persona of a prominent humanitarian who challenged the moral conscience of white society. Gribble embodies both the virtues and sins of the past. In doing so, his life presents an opportunity to salvage perspective in the current historical debates about Aboriginal and nonAboriginal relations, and to mould a future framed by the hope of reconciliation, rather than the ruin of repression and retaliation.

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A

NOTE ON LANGUAGE

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he word ‘Aboriginal’, rather than local terms like Murri or Koori, has been used because it best reflects the terminology used by the elderly Aboriginal people interviewed for the book to describe themselves and their ancestors. For the sake of brevity, ‘Anglican Church’ is used rather than the more correct but cumbersome ‘Church of England in Australia’. The spelling of Aboriginal names and words varies widely. For simplicity and consistency, the spelling that appears most frequently in the written sources has been adopted. In accordance with the practice of the day, and to make Gribble’s story easier to follow, several other naming conventions have been adopted. Gribble’s missions are described by their geographical location rather than their religious title, for example, ‘The Mission of St Michael and All Angels at Forrest River’ appears as ‘Forrest River Mission’. Ernest Gribble’s father, John Brown Gribble, is described by his nickname, ‘JB’ Gribble. Amelia, the name preferred by Gribble’s wife, is used rather than her birth name of Emilie, which she loathed.

XV

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1

M OSTLY

OF TEARS

E

rnest Richard Bulmer Gribble died on 18 October 1957, a month and five days before his 89th birthday. Wizened, wasted and worn out by life. He had been fond of historical parallels and would have liked the neatness of ending his life’s work where it had begun, in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, near Cairns on the Queensland coast. The wife of the mission Superintendent nursed him as he waited for death, and she later wrote to Gribble’s wife in Sydney, describing his final weeks: I think everyone at Yarrabah came to see him and knelt by his bed as if it was an altar. At one time about 50 young boys and youths passed through his room noiselessly bowed to him or kissed him softly and whispered ‘Good-night’ or ‘God bless you Dadda Gribble’. There couldn’t have been more reverence if it had been a church. Indeed it reminded me of the passing of the late King George VI in England and his subjects coming to pay homage . . . It would take pages to describe the grief and sorrow of Yarrabah and yet all were glad that his sorrows were over and knew of the glory awaiting him on the other side . . . It would have taken a Cathedral to hold all the people who came to his funeral mostly coloured people.1

The Reverend Ernest Gribble was laid to rest with full Anglican rites in the graveyard buried in the hills behind St Alban’s Church, Yarrabah, but in death, as in life, peace eluded him and 1


2


Gribble continued to inflame passion and controversy. Was he a kindly and conscientious man who tempered zeal with tact; or a reckless, tortured tyrant who ruled his remote kingdom with a Bible in one hand and a whip in another?2 Loved like a saviour and despised like the Devil, the enigma of Ernie Gribble lived on in the public mind. The legend of Ernie Gribble began soon after he was born. It was a well-worn fable that his parents plotted the future of their first born while he was still in the cradle: he would follow in his father’s footsteps and become an Anglican clergyman and missionary to the Australian Aborigines. The fact that John Brown (JB) Gribble was still a coalminer when Ernie was born in Geelong, Victoria, on 23 November 1868 was irrelevant. It was a family trait to spice up a story when spinning a yarn. In truth, the Gribble past, unlike its future, was unremarkable. The family sprang from solid, Cornish mining stock and escaped to Australia when JB was nine months old and barely old enough to justify the sacred bond he later imagined for ‘mother England’. His father found and quickly lost a fortune after the family settled in the disarray, ruined dreams and revolutionary fervour of the Victorian goldfields. JB, the youngest of the brood, was a voracious reader with a natural talent for turning a phrase. Later in life his writing would menace the soul of colonial society but in his youth the brutal necessity of surviving outweighed book-learning, and he followed generations of Gribbles by going down the coalmines young. JB’s spirit found liberation in his evangelical zeal. He was barely a teenager when he started honing his skills as a preacher on the street corners of Ballarat, and bailing up thirsty patrons outside pubs to harangue them to abandon the drink that would lead to perpetual hellfire, brimstone and damnation. JB grew into a tall, strikingly handsome man with a patrician profile, a thick mane of swarthy dark hair and a luxurious beard that swept down over his chest. He exuded a sensual, magnetic charisma that drew women to him and was almost indecent in a


M O S T LY

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3

Bathurst Island

TIMOR

SEA

DARWIN

Weipa

ARNHEM LAND

C A R P E N TA R I A

FORREST RIVER MISSION Vic

Marndoc Reserve

Broome

Fi

tzr

oy R

Fitzroy Crossing

Ord R

Moola Bulla Government Cattle Station

e

Victoria River Downs

Cairns Mareeba YARRABAH MISSION

R

Ord River Halls Creek

CORAL

MITCHELL RIVER Cooktown MISSION M Port Douglas it ll

Wyndham Turkey Creek

KIMBERLEY Derby

Great

Peninsula

ch

to

ria River

INDIAN

Cape York

GULF OF

Atherton

Innisfail

Palm Island Group

NORTHERN

Charters Towers

Bowen

Whitsunday Islands

Hughendon

G

E

Rockhampton

A T

QUEENSLAND

Nulla Nulla Station

AUSTRALIA

NEW

BRISBANE

Armidale

E

SYDNEY

N Jerilderie

VIC

Newcastle Gosford

G

WALES ADELAIDE

Goulburn

A

G R E AT A U S T R A L I A N BIGHT

Esperance

R

PERTH Freemantle

Fraser Island

SOUTH

Ceduna

OCEAN

V I D I N G D I

WESTERN

Geraldton

PA C I F I C

Hervey Bay Bundaberg

Carnarvon

SOUTH

Reef

Maryborough

R

Alice Springs

AUSTRALIA

SEA

Townsville

TERRITORY

Port Hedland

Barrier

Normanton

OCEAN

CANBERRA

Maryborough

Albany

SOUTHERN

OCEAN

Ballarat

Geelong

MELBOURNE

TA S M A N

AUSTRALIA 0

1000 km

BASS STRAIT

SEA

TA S HOBART

preacher. His weedy son did not inherit his manly, good looks. Even at his best, Ernie never managed to cast off the air of a skinny kid who never got quite enough food. There was a touch of his father’s nobililty in Ernie’s high forehead and aquiline nose but it was ruined by unnaturally heavy eyelids that gave him a misleading look of indolent self-indulgence. His eyes were what everyone remembered. They were the intense, icy, blue of a flawless Ceylonese sapphire. They penetrated your very core. There was little of his mother, Mary Ann (née Bulmer), in Ernie’s looks nor in his childhood, which was ruled by JB’s devotion to the noble Victorian icons of duty, family and work. Ernie’s first memory of his father was receiving a sound whipping, for JB’s dauntingly rigid puritanism would not tolerate human weakness or neglect of duty. Two foes menaced JB’s world and Ernie’s destiny. The first was the Church of Rome. According to JB the Pope was the Anti-Christ. At the age of ten, Ernie’s father


4


conscripted him into the Orange League and the Protestant fight against Roman Catholicism. The second peril in JB’s world was carnal desire. He was only twenty when he married the goodly Mary Ann and they had thirteen children—nine survived to adulthood—during their 25-year marriage, but JB lived his life in constant vigilance against women. He considered them temptresses who plotted to injure the spiritual life by stirring men to lust and sin. Young Ernie was nearly eight in 1876 when his father abandoned the coalmines to become a Methodist minister. JB’s flock was scattered between Melbourne and the New South Wales border, and Ernie’s childhood unfolded as a nomadic blur of rural settlements, homesteads and schools. Life was slightly more settled after JB left the Methodists and joined the Congregational Union of Victoria. Mary Ann and her young family set up house at Rutherglen on the Murray River, while JB spent much of his time traversing rural Victoria and New South Wales in a rickety horse and buggy, forming temperance societies and ministering to the souls of squatters and selectors. In nineteenth-century Australia religion was a pervasive presence that was both revered and disdained. The Anglican Church was the dominant faith and the Roman Catholics and Protestants battled it out for a distant second place. Most people pledged allegiance to one creed but the number of genuine faithful was less certain. Not infrequently, religion was merely the reason for Sunday socialising and a family lunch, the expected routine for commemorating births, deaths and marriages, and there the matter ended. Ernie got his first taste of the contradictory place of religion in the Australian psyche soon after he started school. A parson’s son was easy prey for the scorn and contempt of irreverent youths. The experiences during these formative years burned deeply, and even as an old man, Ernie recalled that his: little life was made miserable by the bigger boys putting me up on a stump and compelling me to preach a sermon before allowing me to proceed home after school hours. The sermon could hardly have


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been called ‘dry’ for it consisted mostly of tears, until I was rescued by the girls and by them escorted home. No wonder I grew up with a distaste for the ministry, a distaste which took a very long time to disappear.3

JB worked hard to instil his own religious zeal in his eldest son and insisted on taking Ernie and his brother Arthur, younger by two years, on his trips around the countryside to minister to the faithful. It was their job to leap from the buggy and open the massive gates that guarded the properties of JB’s rural congregation. For the boys, these expeditions meant weeks of endless plains, scorching summer heat and rain, mud and boggy roads in winter. The experience battered their spirits and bruised their souls. At night, all Ernie could dream of was ‘gates and mud’.4 JB’s ministry lay amidst the sheep and parched, blond grasses of the Riverina plains of southern New South Wales in the upper reaches of the dominion ruled by Ned Kelly and his gang of bushrangers. In 1879, JB was the minister of Jerilderie when the Kelly gang laid siege to the sleepy, rural township. The exploits of the larrikin band were already legendary and wildly romanticised in popular wisdom and the collective imaginings of 11-year-old boys like Ernie: skilled horsemen, reckless rebels and courageous champions of the oppressed rural poor. The gang won the instant veneration of Ernie and his mates by taking their schoolmaster hostage. The children of Jerilderie spent their welcome burst of unexpected freedom ogling the gang as they put on a flamboyant show of talented horsemanship. JB did not share the children’s admiration. He considered the gang’s flagrant disrespect for authority, property and life inexcusable, and gave Ned Kelly a stern dressing-down for his ‘unmanly behaviour’. When the outlaw Steve Hart relieved JB of his pocket watch—on loan from the local watch maker—the spirited bush parson strode up to Kelly and demanded its return. The leader of the gang obliged. After all, Kelly said dismissively, the timepiece was a ‘bloody turnip’.5 For a long time afterwards, bushranging was the favourite game in the Jerilderie schoolyard and the role of Ned Kelly


6


was greatly coveted. Ernie never got to play the part of his cherished hero, and was always relegated to the pitiful role of the protesting parson whose second-rate watch was pinched by the daring renegade. It was in the same year, 1879, that JB announced he would forsake the comforts of the ‘civilised’ world and become a missionary to Aboriginals. He liked to attribute his evangelical commitment to a formative childhood experience when he got lost and was befriended by local Aboriginals, but a visit to Maloga mission, run by the renowned missionary Daniel Matthews, had fired his humanitarian zeal. Life as a missionary would mean sacrifices: quitting his job as a Congregational minister, forgoing a steady income and taking on the task with £5 in savings and five young children. JB weighed up the implications, searched his soul and decided to forge ahead, oblivious to the hardships and firm in his faith that the Lord would provide. Thus, Warangesda mission was born. It lay on the wide, muddy Murrumbidgee River, surrounded by sprawling sheep stations, eucalypts, kangaroos and endless skies. The local selectors quickly decided that JB was a bit mad: ‘he had blacks on the brain’.6 They shook their heads and mostly kept their distance. For Ernie, town life had been a distasteful period of disagreeable regulation and mortifying humiliation by schoolyard bullies. Warangesda could not be more different. He loved the space and the isolation. At last he was free. He and his younger brothers, Arthur and John, ran wild and unfettered in the open spaces and filled their days with endless, boyish adventures—exploring the crevices and she-oaks that lined the Murrumbidgee, fishing for Murray cod and shooting kangaroos so that Mary Ann could make kangaroo-tail soup, the mainstay of the family diet. The fun could not last forever. Within a month, Ernie’s father had organised his offspring into a well-disciplined army of labourers. JB was a stern task-master with an insatiable passion for work and complying with his orders was compulsory. The first task was to build a family home. Trees were felled by hand and the


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children stripped them of bark before the sap dried so they could be placed upright and saplings nailed alongside to make slots for stacking the logs for the walls. A bark slab sufficed as a roof, held down with timber and tied with strips of untanned bullock skin, known as green-hide. The children replicated this lengthy process for each building on the mission: the school, huts for the married people and a dormitory for the Aboriginal girls. Ernie was still only a child and it was monotonous, back-breaking but gratifying work. This was the labour of men but he found satisfaction in the rewards of hard work well done, in watching a community materialise from the untamed landscape and in the fellowship of working alongside his father. Mesac Thomas, the first Anglican Bishop of Goulburn, visited Warangesda twelve months after it was established. He was moved by JB’s humanitarianism but horrified by the primitive conditions endured by the family and mission residents. If JB could see his way clear to take Holy Orders, Bishop Thomas proposed, he would take Warangesda into the Anglican fold and fund the mission. Poverty and pragmatism ruled. In 1880 and without relinquishing his evangelical zeal, JB was deaconed. He was ordained a priest three years later. Ernie later described Warangesda as one of the happiest times of his childhood. There was little space for feminine influences and the stoic Mary Ann, shackled by perpetual pregnancy and her precious brood, occupied a separate, domestic realm. Of Ernie’s sisters, Amy was seven years old and Ethel merely a newborn when the family moved to Warangesda. Evangeline arrived three years later, in 1881, but the others—Illa and Muriel (Stella)—were born in 1889 and 1890 and never knew the mission. JB shaped this phase of Ernie’s life. His was a world built around physical labour and male companionship, and JB leaned heavily on his first born for support and to lead the younger children. Sharing the toil and vision of Warangesda nurtured a new level of intimacy between father and son. The plight of Australia’s Indigenous peoples,


8


missionary methods and the need for reform dominated their conversations as they worked together by day. At night, in the haunting silence of the open plains, Ernie listened while JB read chapters of the Bible by the light of burning pine bark. As Warangesda developed, Ernie’s life settled into a predictable rhythm that became his idealised vision for all Aboriginal settlements. The Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children mixed together freely. In the morning they worked around the mission. In the afternoon they attended lessons in the mission school. On weekends they worshipped and played together: hunting, building canoes and sharing meals of witchetty grubs. Ernie was the leader of the little group. In the sheltered isolation of an Aboriginal mission, he at last found a place where he was master of his domain. His bliss was shattered when an official inspection of Warangesda by the Aborigines Protection Board concluded that all the children were virtually illiterate. With this discovery, JB’s denominational switch proved timely. Supported by a scholarship for the sons of poor clergy, Ernie was promptly dispatched to boarding school. He spent 1882 at a preparatory school in Geelong, followed by two years at The King’s School, an Anglican boarding school for the sons of graziers housed on a comfortable rural spread at Parramatta on the outskirts of Sydney. Ernie did not want to go. The bush and Warangesda were the sanctuary that protected him from the unknown, uncontrollable forces of the outside world, and his inadequate, disrupted schooling had left him with little interest or enthusiasm for study. He knew his chances of winning academic accolades were slim, and he did not relish the prospect of failure. In a childish, petulant act of defiance, he blew up his new school hat with a box of Chinese crackers. Nevertheless, boarding school unfolded new vistas. For the first time Ernie stepped outside JB’s orbit and discovered a hopeful alternative to his father’s sterile evangelism. The King’s School was Anglo-Catholic in tenor and its spiritual life was a


M O S T LY

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vibrant spectacle of liturgy, processions and angelic, surpliced choirs. Regular ritual and methodical progression through the Anglican rites of passage provided Ernie with a predictable, comforting doctrine that liberated him from the tiresome obligation for individual fervour and biblical inspiration demanded by JB’s spiritual zeal. Ernie also discovered excitement in the sacrificial role of the priest. Here was God’s direct intermediary—an earthly surrogate for the Heavenly Father. Such omnipotent authority was awe inspiring, if somewhat sacrilegious, for a young lad and the puritanism that was his inheritance by birth and habit. The King’s School mimicked the ethos of Britain’s great public schools and tutored the sons of the establishment in the sacred canons of Victorian manliness: the importance of character, the virtue of service, the rewards of self-sacrifice and the worship of work, duty and earnestness. The first Headmaster, George Fairfowl Macarthur, was a former military chaplain and established the School Cadet Corps in Australia. This quasi-military organisation was designed to instil discipline, obedience, patriotism and submission to authority. All students at the King’s School were cadets. They vowed faithful service to the school, wore a military-style uniform, were tried by courts-martial for breaches of discipline and enjoyed regular sham battles conducted with the passion of a reallife conflict—except that they started with prayers, stopped for midday service and ended with a celebratory display of fireworks. Anglicanism and British imperialism were inextricably linked in Australia until well into the twentieth century. The Australian Anglican Church was legally tied in doctrine and worship to the Anglican Church in England until 1962, and the first Australianborn Archbishop was not elected until 1966. Any imperial celebration, like Empire Day or a coronation, was accompanied by a state service in an Anglican cathedral. In national crises, church leaders led the nation in vowing unswerving loyalty to their monarch and the Empire. Young Ernie found the union of imperialism and muscular Christianity both enticing and familiar. He had often heard his father proclaim his pride at being a ‘son of Britain,


10


that land which . . . is . . . the very centre of truth and righteousness’ and listened to him praise Britain’s soldiers going ‘forth . . . to death for their country’s good’.7 Ernie devoured the culture of The King’s School. The marriage of the sword and cross solidified his belief that battle was righteous, God was his ally, and victory was the reward for steadfastness of faith. The school’s military flavour captured his imagination and fired his spirit, and later he would resurrect and recast this element in other contexts. He marched proudly with the cadet band during Queen Victoria’s birthday parade and cheered wildly with the other boys when New South Wales announced it would send a contingent to fight the war in the Sudan. No-one knew where the Sudan was or why New South Wales needed to send its sons to die in such a remote, God-forsaken place. It did not matter. Scholastically, Ernie floundered. By his own admission he was a ‘gawky, countrified and backward’ student.8 His home was on the sportsfield. Ernie represented King’s in rugby and cricket and his athletic prowess saved him from being banished to the depths of the school hierarchy. Sport was the great social leveller. Ernie maintained an affectionate, distant association with his alma mater for the rest of his life. He was sixteen when he left The King’s School in 1885 and he knew what he wanted in life. His heart was set on joining the New South Wales Artillery, recently returned from its uneventful tour of duty in the Sudan. His parents had other ideas. JB and Mary Ann had carefully planned their son’s future, and part of their reason for sending him to boarding school had been to equip him to study for the priesthood. Ernie’s military dreams did not fit this scheme, so they enlisted the services of a close family friend and the then Premier of New South Wales, Sir Alexander Stuart, to end Ernie’s unfortunate streak of adolescent rebelliousness. Stuart’s brother was Bishop of Waiapu in New Zealand and the New South Wales Premier was also a devout Anglican committed to improving conditions for Aboriginals who had established the Aborigines Protection Board within a month of his election as Premier. Stuart


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was assigned the task of persuading the recalcitrant son to change his mind. It was unfair to pit a formidable politician against the hopes of a vulnerable youth. Ernie reluctantly relinquished his yearning for a military career. Now he had no plans, no prospects and was bored. He spent the next six months in a ‘miserable’ limbo: moping about Sydney, and grumbling at the fates which had ordered that I should be the son of a Missionary to the blacks of Australia. I often wished that father had been a Missionary to some other race, for then one would have had some variety in life in a strange country.9

Meanwhile, a cloud had descended over Warangesda. A routine investigation by the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board reported that the mission’s affairs were unsatisfactory and there were vague rumblings about financial muddles. JB decided it was time to make a fresh start and look for alternative work. In 1884, he left Mary Ann and the children at Warangesda and embarked on a tour of England to raise money to establish a new mission on the Gascoyne River in Western Australia. While he was away JB published Black but Comely, a little book that described Aboriginal life in Australia. Both the book and its author were highly acclaimed. JB was fêted by the powerful humanitarians of Exeter Hall, dined with nobility and received standing ovations when he preached. He returned home six months later, invigorated, zealous and impatient to open his new mission near the town of Carnarvon in north west Australia. Ernie dithered and procrastinated about going to Western Australia with the family, but JB won him over with a long, pleading letter and a promise of work as a jackeroo. On a blisteringly hot Christmas Day in 1885, Ernie arrived in Perth with Mary Ann and the rest of the family in tow to discover that, in just a few weeks, JB had alienated almost the entire white population by attacking the treatment of Aboriginals by squatters and police. Despite opposition from all quarters, JB refused to temper his campaign for justice:


12

A T E R R I B LY W I L D M A N The craft of evil men, the emissaries of Satan, is in danger hence their stir and their rage. I like a healthy opposition. It gives one a greater intensity of zeal and greater determination to do and dare for God and oppressed human beings . . . God has called me to expose the injustice and wrong doing to the poor black-man in the North-west of this great colony. I must in His Name, go forward . . . We are in the way the Martyrs trod and are therefore perfectly safe . . . clearly we are on the track of the Lord Jesus Christ.10

To rally support for his campaign, JB documented the treatment of many Western Australian Aboriginals in a book called Deeds in a Sunny Land or Blacks and Whites in North-West Australia. It was a horror story of kidnapping, slave labour, sexual abuse and murder. JB claimed that Aboriginals were abducted by pearlers and pastoralists, cowered by fear and flogging and forced to live on starvation rations and work without pay, housing or clothing. Aboriginal women were treated like property—defiled, ravished, shared and discarded. Even British law—the supposed hallmark of civilisation throughout the British Empire—conspired to violate Aboriginal rights. Workers were bound by employment contracts they could not understand and Aboriginal prisoners and witnesses were chained by the neck and imprisoned, sometimes for weeks, awaiting trial. JB’s push for reform ignited so much animosity that Ernie’s jackarooing job had evaporated and the Gascoyne mission faced a doubtful future. By the time Ernie and Mary Ann stepped off the boat in Carnarvon they found the town peppered with placards: ‘Down with Gribble and his supporters and confusion to all sneaks’. Bishop Parry of Perth had appointed JB and was soon swept up in the torrent of loathing for his missionary: Old Parry sent a parson here, His name is JB Gribble, Poor silly wretch he damned himself, To save the Lord the trouble.11

In early 1886, JB left his family in a rough, three-room iron house to face the venom of Carnarvon alone while he spent nine


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months soliciting support in Perth and the eastern colonies. Mary Ann was heavily pregnant again and suddenly Ernie found himself responsible for the entire family. He struggled to maintain his father’s missionary work among the local Aboriginals, battled a town boycott on the sale of supplies to the mission and begged kindly locals for food to feed the hungry brood in Mary Ann’s care. It was an agonising, demoralising time. Abused, scorned and ostracised, even trips to the post office became treacherous journeys through enemy territory. In the end it was a futile battle. Bishop Parry had never been able raise the £10 000 endowment needed to sustain his diocese and a £14 000 diocesan Cathedral had bled his coffers dry. By 1884, the salaries of all Parry’s clergy were in arrears, his administration was nearly bankrupt and JB was ruining any chance of recovery. John Winthrop Hackett, a leading Anglican layman, exerted his sway as proprietor of The West Australian. The briefless Anglo-Irish lawyer had arrived in Western Australia in 1882 after six years as sub-warden of Trinity College, Melbourne and managed Wooramel sheep station, not far from Carnarvon. He absorbed the values of the Gascoyne squatters before returning to Perth and joining The West Australian, where he soon became editor and sole proprietor. Through Hackett’s influence, the tentacle-like reach of the squattocracy seized the collective mind of the Church. The West Australian warned Bishop Parry not to expect support if the Gribbles stayed in the colony. The Inquirer reinforced the message by announcing that JB’s presence would ‘only frustrate the efforts to further the mission cause in Western Australia’.12 Parry capitulated and withdrew JB’s licence to minister in the colony. The difficult priest had been sacked. Bereft of Church support, penniless and homeless, the family took possession of a vacant block of land near Perth and struggled to survive. Meanwhile JB threw himself into politicking, proselytising and personal vindication. He launched a £10 000 libel suit against The West Australian—the largest in the country’s history at


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the time—after its editors accused him of being ‘a lying, canting humbug’. Responsibility for supporting the family landed squarely on the shoulders of the 18-year-old Ernie and his younger brother Arthur. They scrounged for material to build a makeshift shack and Ernie took any type of work he could find: hawking homegrown vegetables, laying bricks, teaching school, selling insurance and guiding prospectors. At every turn he was haunted by the curse of the Gribble name. One employer believed business would suffer if it got out that he employed a Gribble and ordered Ernie to use a pseudonym. Throughout the ordeal, Ernie loyally stood by his father. He testified on JB’s behalf during the libel case and never once doubted his father’s righteousness, but the months of bitterness and responsibility wore him down. Time and time again Ernie ‘deplored the fact that he was the son of a Missionary to the Blacks’.13 After twenty days in court, JB lost his libel suit. He was destitute, abandoned and publicly humiliated. To escape the colony and avoid his persecutors, he secretly boarded the SS Franklin under the cover of night and buried himself in the hold until the ship was safely underway. The family followed and resettled in southern New South Wales. Soon afterwards, Ernie announced that he would never become a missionary or help JB with one of his missionary ventures again. For years Ernie had been haunted by a desire to carve out his own destiny. He craved a simple, uncomplicated life, far away from JB’s acrimonious battles against white racism and his admirable but stifling righteousness. The family’s recent experiences had cemented his feelings and he finally summoned the courage to make the break. There were no loud brawls when he announced his decision. His parents were too dazed and disappointed after Western Australia to resist. There was little they could do. It was 1889 when Ernie made his escape and immersed himself in a world of cattle, sheep, horses and sweat. The dry, grey


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Australian bush was in his bones and the wiry youth, reared in the belief that sin and idleness were bedfellows, found release and independence in the arduous, rugged life of working on the land. Here sensual gratification lay in physical exhaustion. Work was his solace, isolation was his companion and, best of all, he was accountable to no-one. It was a short-lived emancipation. Before he delivered his first consignment of stock as an independent drover, the 1890s depression hit, the bank foreclosed on his buyer and Ernie found himself unpaid and in debt. His dream of a stockman’s life died. He put his hope for the future in a young lady in Victoria. History has obliterated her name but Ernie had nursed his love patiently from afar and carefully saved £50—a sum sufficient to start a comfortable married life. Optimistic and eager, he made the long journey south to proclaim his love but arrived in Victoria to discover that another had captured the young lady’s affections. A second dream dissolved. Like a lost soul, Ernie sought security and comfort by returning to the bosom of his family. Mary Ann and the children were living in Temora under the auspices of their Warangesda benefactor, Bishop Thomas of Goulburn. Mary Ann Gribble was a short, tenacious woman with a round face, generous breasts and broad hips built for child-bearing. Her soft, milky-white, English complexion defied the ravages of the Australian sun to bestow seemingly perpetual youth. She was very near sighted and her spectacles gave her a mousy, docile look that disguised a formidable streak of quiet determination and a remarkable capacity for resilience in the face of any hardship. Mary Ann was the type of sober, uncomplaining woman you could depend on in any crisis: indomitable, selfless, silent and there. The twin pillars of her life were her faith and her family. Like her husband, she still harboured a glimmer of hope that her first born would follow in his father’s footsteps and devote his life to God. Knowing his mother, Ernie should have expected that the matter of his destiny would not be left up to him.


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The overture came through Bishop Thomas, who offered Ernie work as curate in Tumbarumba in regional New South Wales. For Ernie, the job meant surrendering all hope of forging out an independent path, but the work was in the parish of Adelong, near his mother, and required extensive horseback travel, which appealed to the bushman in his soul. The job also came with a salary of £60 a year. For Mary Ann and the family, money was short. JB had embarked on his latest missionary venture—a new Aboriginal mission in Queensland, near Cairns—leaving the family without an income. Nevertheless, Ernie procrastinated. Later, he liked to fancy that he took the job because he could not afford formal training for the priesthood. In fact, Mary Ann had to invoke all her subtle but potent powers of persuasion to win her son over. In the end, Ernie was conquered by parental pressure, a lifetime of indoctrination and a dearth of cash. He fatalistically rationalised that his destiny lay with the Church. While Ernie wrestled with his future, JB and his crew struggled to set up a new Aboriginal mission adjacent to the burgeoning township of Cairns, in north Queensland. It was 17 June 1892 when they landed at Cape Grafton on the eastern peninsula of the wide, sandy shores of Trinity Bay. Captain Cook named the bay in 1770 as he travelled north mapping the east coast of Australia for King George. Cook thought he sailed into the tranquil haven on Trinity Sunday, hence the name. He miscalculated. It was Saturday but the name stuck anyway. The three men with JB were: the stocky Willie Ambrym, a South Sea Islander who worked in Brisbane with Canon StoneWigg, the future Bishop of New Guinea; an Aboriginal youth called Pompo Katchewan; and the prosaic James Tyson, former manager of Bribie Island mission, off the coast of Brisbane. JB begged Ernie to come as his assistant but Ernie’s reply was emphatic: he ‘would never go as a missionary among the Blacks’.14 JB was 44 years old when he arrived in north Queensland. His reputation as a troublemaker in Western Australia had preceded him. From the start, local selectors united in opposition to


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Green Island

YARRABAH MISSION

PA C I F I C Cape Grafton

Mission e

on

Bay

False Cape

r

Ri v

Barr

Rocky Island

Tr i n i t y

Kings Point

Mothers Point

Bay

King Beach

YARRABAH to Cairns

Fitzroy Island

Cairns M ur r a y

CAIRNS AND HINTERLAND l

G R E AT

er

o r P r i

Riv

Mount Malloy

Barron Falls

Cape Grafton

Cairns

rro

OCEAN

k

ad o

Buddabadoo

YARRABAH

Beach

a n

Gordonvale

g

r

ATHERTON

BARRIER

e s

CORAL Cape York

dab

R

n Rive

Mareeba

Bud

Redlych

Ba

Chillagoe 60 miles

C r ee

Mitc hel

TABLELAND

SEA

Atherton

Bellendon Ker Mountain

Cooktown

17°E

Herberton

Cairns

Road

Cardwell

NORTH

Track

REEF

QUEENSLAND

Boundary of Reserve (38,155 acres)

Innesfail

145°S

Ravenshoe

0

5 Miles

Mount Garnet

0

12

Miles

the Trinity Bay mission. It was futile to educate the Aboriginal, the Cairns Post argued, because he was ‘by instinct a thieving, treacherous, murderous, irreclaimable savage’ who was innately inferior, incapable of ‘learning anything useful’ and destined to ‘quick and certain annihilation’.15 Selectors worried that the mission would ruin the region’s economy. The Cairns Divisional Board fretted about losing potential mineral and timber resources, and tried to stop the gazetting of the Cape Grafton Aboriginal Reserve on 2 January 1892. The Cairns Argus had warned that selectors did not ‘want to see their cheap labour busily engaged in singing hymns and learning collects’ and, only eight days after JB landed at Trinity Bay, the Cairns Post printed the wildly improbable allegation that the mission had already destroyed the local beche-de-mer industry.16 Aboriginal missions were an unpopular cause in nineteenthcentury Australia, and Anglican congregations preferred to support


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the conversion of heathens in more romantic, exotic and faraway lands. The recently enthroned Bishop of North Queensland, Christopher Barlow, squashed JB’s hopes of diocesan support for the mission, and issued a stern warning that he was not to comment on white ill-treatment of Aboriginals. JB was barred from visiting the Cairns rectory with Pompo, his young Aboriginal assistant: ‘parishioners were not in favour of the Aborigines being about the Church’.17 Horace Tozer, Colonial Secretary of Queensland, promised financial aid for the mission but changed his mind after learning of JB’s history in Western Australia. The mission seemed doomed and Mary Ann was worried. Her husband’s hopes were disintegrating, she was in debt and the family was totally dependent on Ernie’s earnings from his curacy. Nor had JB told her that he had surrendered his life assurance policy to fund his trip to Cairns. The financial future for Mary Ann and her large family seemed bleak. After six months of negotiations, the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) agreed to assume responsibility for JB’s mission. As the official missionary arm of the Anglican Church in Australia, the ABM was responsible for the Church’s missionary outreach in Australia and overseas. It agreed to pay JB a salary of £200 a year, providing he personally covered the cost of establishing the mission. The arrangement might have been tolerable but JB’s salary was delayed, money pledged in England failed to materialise and funds that JB raised during a 1891 lecture tour vanished when the Depression forced the Bank of North Queensland to close its doors in 1893. As a final blow, the mission cutter sank two days after the missionary party landed at Trinity Bay, cutting them off from all contact with Cairns. These setbacks did not diminish JB’s resolve but the emotional strain and physical demands took a severe toll on his health. He fell victim to malaria and dengue fever—the two tropical diseases that struck fear in the hearts of all settlers. Malaria brought high fevers, painful headaches and vomiting. Each of JB’s attacks was accompanied by uncontrollable shivering followed by a drenching


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sweat that saturated his clothes and bedding, drained him of energy and left him fatigued and weak. Dengue fever intensified the erratic temperatures and brought excruciating pain in his joints and muscles. Moving was impossible. JB was exhausted and drained by the never-ending cycle of illness. Eventually, pneumonia set in and he was smitten by more fevers, aches, pains and a gut-wrenching cough. More serious, however, was his undiagnosed tuberculosis. The first symptoms had appeared in the spring of 1884 but JB had dismissed his bouts of bloody coughing as the consequence of an ‘overstrained chest’.18 As his condition worsened, the infection put pressure on his heart and he was incapacitated by pain in his left side. No-one, not even JB, realised he was so sick. Illness frustrated JB and the mission’s progress but it was his assistant, James Tyson, who suffered most. JB invited Tyson to join the mission party believing he could not secure a better man but he soon changed his mind and complained that Tyson was lazy and sloth-like, lacking in judgement and commonsense. In short, a complete failure. Six weeks after landing at Cape Grafton, JB demanded—and received—Tyson’s resignation. Back in Tumbarumba, Ernie had settled comfortably into his new life as curate. The idiosyncrasies of his mountain congregation with their unrefined ways, family feuds and blunt honesty provided him with constant entertainment, but JB’s illness and Tyson’s sudden departure re-ignited the pressure on him to help his father at the mission. JB sent begging letters to Mary Ann threatening to collapse immediately if Ernie did not come: ‘Do all in your power to hurry it along’.19 Ernie felt bitter and resentful. He was convinced that JB’s pleas were merely a ruse to get him into missionary work. He was nearly 24 years old and beyond being given marching orders by his father, yet the possibility that his instincts might be wrong niggled, and Mary Ann’s entreaties were difficult to resist. His deeply ingrained sense of duty and respect for the first commandment to ‘honour thy father and mother’ disturbed Ernie’s peace


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and made him fidgety. Finally, he submitted. He took leave from his curacy and agreed to spend six weeks at Cape Grafton, but insisted that staying was out of the question. JB met him when the boat berthed in Cairns and Ernie was shocked by his father’s appearance. JB was thin, wasted and grey. His skin hung loosely on his gaunt, emaciated frame and his sunken cheeks accentuated the fatalistic resignation in his eyes. His retching cough and stooped, weary body exuded that hollow, vacuous aura that envelops the ill when they are being sucked empty of life. Father and son quickly agreed that JB should consult a specialist in Townsville. As he left, JB made a final, desperate plea for Ernie to stay permanently at the mission. Ernie refused. He would wait until JB returned but then he would return to his work in Tumburumba. Ernie was tormented by his decision. It consumed him with guilt and uncertainty: Father left today for Cairns thence to Townsville. He does look bad. I do not know what to do. He wants me so badly to stay and yet my heart is in my work at Tumbarumba. O God what shall I do . . . stay here or return[?] My God I only desire to do what is right.20

Was he wrong to deny his father? Was it such a betrayal to want a life of his own? He prayed for the answer but it did not come. Two weeks later, Ernie was still agonising. Feeling forlorn and alone, he asked God to make him ‘a willing soldier in this service’.21 He busied himself clearing a space in the tropical jungle alongside Trinity Bay, but he worked without energy or enthusiasm. Later, Ernie would reconstruct those weeks in his mind and create different accounts of his struggle to resolve his future, but each version would understate the lengthy procrastination and profound anguish he felt at denying his father and that he documented in his journal at night. As the weeks drifted by, it slowly dawned on him that the mission might become his sole responsibility. The thought troubled him deeply. It was during this time that Ernie first slipped


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unwittingly and unawares into the black, tormenting, destructive malaise that would revisit him periodically throughout the rest of his life. The world no longer interested him. He was restless, disconsolate and lonely. He regretted abandoning his work in Tumbarumba and was despondent about the ‘half-heartedness’ of his commitment to his new life. Yet, he felt powerless to change his circumstances. A dark mantle of hopeless melancholy descended and smothered him, and he was harassed by vague, indefinable but incapacitating afflictions—the telling symptoms of psychological illness. JB Gribble died in Sydney on 3 June 1893 at the age of 45 and was buried with full rites in the Anglican section of Waverley cemetery in Sydney. The inscription on his tombstone read the ‘Blackfellow’s Friend’. His friends described him as a martyr to the Aboriginal cause. Ernie was in Cairns when the telegram arrived announcing JB’s death. He should have been prepared but the news rattled him. They had not spoken since JB left Cape Grafton and time had stolen all chance of retracting his renunciation of his father and his work. Ernie mourned in private and in silence but, in the end, JB was the victor in the struggle over his son’s destiny. JB’s dying wish was that Ernie commit his life to missionary work among Aboriginals and ‘carry on . . . the noble work which has had its baptism of death’. In Ernie’s mind, the path was now clear. It was plainly his ‘duty’ to embrace missionary work as a ‘sacred trust’ from his father. He drew on the Gribble determination and resourcefulness buried deep in his soul. Shaking off the depressive, black gloom that menaced his being, Ernie vowed to sublimate his own desires and dreams and ‘to live that my life may be like his’.22


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rnie was unaware that the Kongkandji, the traditional custodians of Cape Grafton, were silently monitoring his every move. Their dominion extended east across Trinity Bay to Green and Fitzroy Islands and inland as far as the Murray Prior Ranges to the west. It was a fertile world scattered with grassy gullies and broad coastal flats, safeguarded by a crescent of rugged hills overgrown with lush, impenetrable tropical rainforests of cedar, silky oak and bean trees. The bountiful, tranquil waters of the bay were shielded from the ocean’s vagaries by the Great Barrier Reef that snaked down the Queensland coast. Until now, settlers had been deterred by the Kongkandji’s reputation as inveterate cannibals. They killed a selector’s bailiff who strayed onto Cape Grafton in 1886 and an eccentric recluse who camped on the beach in 1890. Whether or not the victims were eaten did not matter in Cairns. Fact and fiction fused on the frontier and the local press fuelled hearsay and fear into irrefutable fact. Experts claimed Aboriginals preferred Asiatic to European flesh—thighs were reputed to be the best eating. Local tradition has it that this was cold comfort to the pioneers of Cairns, who were captives of a ghoulish fear that they might end their days as the epicurean highlight of a tribal feast and subscribed to 22


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the popular wisdom that Aboriginals: had no compunction against taking human life simply for its edible quality, in fact they were downright irresponsible about it. Human flesh was especially craved among the rainforest Aboriginals whose diet was sadly lacking in protein . . . they sometimes ate enemy dead but . . . they also ate those with whom they were on the friendliest terms. Enemy dead were in fact an unanticipated windfall for the camp oven of heated stones. Fellow tribal members, plump and tender, and not aged, and presumably dispensable stringy grannie, featured more frequently on the menu.1

Their reputation and the serendipity of geography was the Kongkandji’s armour. The sea discouraged invasion from the east, the Murray Prior Ranges thwarted overland incursions from the west while the Mulgrave River deterred advances from the south— at least until the missionaries arrived—and protected the ancient society and the rich cosmology that cemented its culture. The exploits of ancestor heroes decreed the Kongkandji’s custodianship of the land. These forebears moulded the landscape, laid down the Law (way of life) and set the behavioural precepts required for every occasion: rites of passage, social relations, kinship, marriage and the rituals needed to maintain and renew the grand design of the cosmos. The ancestor heroes lived on in the landscape and the legacies they bestowed, and the powerful, regenerative spirit of the Rainbow Serpent still thrived in the waterfall at Bukki behind Trinity Bay and in the sacred, healing Yilamagay (medicine water) that trickled down to King Beach in the south. Every Kongkandji identified with a particular ancestral figure and its totem, and these totemic affiliations linked kinship groups and directed the rules for inter-marriage. Ernie knew nothing of this. Unlike the Moravian, Lutheran and Roman Catholic missionaries, he had no formal missionary training but he dismissed this deficiency. Talent and experience, he maintained, were all that mattered, and he had a goodly quota of both. He had been groomed for this work for nearly a quarter of a century on a staple diet of imperial ideology and liberal


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rations of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ milked from the Boy’s Own Journal, his favourite boyhood reading, fortified by copious doses of evangelical example. Missionary work was in his blood. As he contemplated his future, Ernie imagined a bustling, arcadian village. There would be a school, a hospital, dormitories for the boys and girls, huts of thatched palm leaves for married couples and, of course, a church—perhaps even with stained glass windows. The soul of the place would be fruitful industry. Teams would labour in flourishing farms, fishermen would plunder the seas, busy kitchens would bake bread to feed the multitudes, skilled artisans would populate the site with buildings and roads, the women would cook and sew, and washing lines would sparkle with clean drying clothes while shiny-faced children played happily under the watchful protection of the dormitory matron. He would build a community where ‘everything necessary’ for a permanent home was provided and where all north Queensland’s Indigenous people could be gathered and safely segregated from the evils and corruption of white society. Here he would ‘break through the wall of senseless customs and traditions . . . of the dark skinned and dark minded’ by teaching them the Gospel and ‘industry—that ‘‘duty of life’’’ so that they could ‘conduct themselves better and attain to a higher state of life’. Not only would he ‘soothe the pillow of a dying race’ but perhaps he would even save the Australian Aboriginal ‘from utter extinction’.2 When he eventually snapped out of his daydreaming, Ernie realised just how fanciful and remote his ambitions seemed. JB had made so little progress. No Aboriginals had been sighted, although their presence was evident all around. Some flimsy tents and a rickety, two-room hut for stores were the only shelter, and threatening clouds pregnant with monsoon rains were already filling the skies. There was land to be cleared and ploughed, crops to be planted, timber to be felled, cleaned and hauled, and buildings to be erected. The list of chores was endless. Ernie toiled from dawn until dusk, day after day. Progress was slow. He had few tools and no mule to haul the timber or to


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plough the soil, but he was in his element and revelled in the work. His wiry body grew muscular and strong and his skin became deeply tanned. He was like the master sculptor who slowly, painstakingly but adeptly manipulates form, purpose and life from an amorphous, inert nothingness. As the weeks passed, Ernie began to feel himself taking root at Cape Grafton and decided it was time to stamp his sovereignty formally on the place. The mission was known by a variety of names: Cape Grafton, Trinity Bay and Bellenden Ker, after the mountain to the west. Several retained a degree of currency until well into the twentieth century. JB called the site Yarraburra, meaning ‘meeting place’, but Ernie fancied that E-Yerra-Bah was closer to the Aboriginal name so he decided to split the difference, merge the two and christen the mission Yarrabah. The name was a memorial to his father and a declaration that he had adopted it as his own—just as relinquishing the affectionate and childish ‘Ernie’ for the more formal ‘Mr Gribble’ signified his passage into manhood and his formal declaration that he had accepted his new role as head of the mission. At best reckoning, there were 200 to 300 Kongkandji living in scattered extended families of 40–50 when Gribble arrived at Yarrabah. They sailed their single outrigger canoes up and down the coast to net fish and harpoon dugong and turtle, and in Cairns they were valued sailors on the pearl-luggers and beche-de-mer schooners. The fishing industry was notorious for debauchery, cruelty and exploitation. It was claimed that boat owners: enticed blacks on board, worked them like slaves, treated them like dogs, and finished by leaving them marooned on a reef, or shot them, or landed them far from their own home on some strange part of the coast, where they would be certain to be killed by the first tribe they met.3

The Kongkandji’s reputation as expert sailors helped them escape these abuses. They dictated their employment contracts and worked the beche-de-mer schooners until close to the turn of the century, but it was a different story for Aboriginals elsewhere.


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In the 1890s, as the fathers of Federation met to loosen white Australia’s bondage to Britain, the indigenous peoples of Queensland were being decimated by the bloody violence of colonisation, epidemics of smallpox and influenza, and the rampant spread of venereal disease that left entire communities fetid and decaying. The ravaged remnants clustered in poverty-stricken camps on the edges of towns where they relied on begging, prostitution and infrequent charity. In these conditions, they quickly surrendered to malnutrition, disease, alcohol and opium addiction, and an early death. On the frontier beyond the towns, lawlessness prevailed. Aboriginal groups were ‘dispersed’—the euphemism for organised, quasi-martial sorties and the nineteenth-century synonym for ‘ethnic cleansing’ a century later—by settlers avaricious for land and dominance. Some fell victim to a slow and agonising death after being fed damper laced with strychnine or arsenic. A greater number were abducted to work as forced labour on pastoral properties, boats and as servants. The women were the most vulnerable. For colonists reared in repression and restraint, the luminous, black nakedness of Aboriginal women was tantalisingly bewitching, and their flagrant ignorance of British prudery was a potent aphrodisiac. They were known as ‘black velvet’ and ‘stud-gins’. In a world where the physical gratification and restraining influence of white women was in short supply, Aboriginal women were coveted sexual spoils of conquest. Not all colonists were hostile in their dealings with Aboriginals and not all Aboriginals passively accepted white aggression, but the march of colonisation was unrelenting. This fact meant Gribble’s presence at Cape Grafton caused heated discussion and dissension among the Kongkandji. Oral tradition has it that their first instinct was to expel the latest intruder: When Father Gribble came here he was looking . . . up this way and down that way to see if any coloured people would come out [and] one evening he heard [them] all talking amongst themselves like they wanted to fight . . . because there was a white man here on their land.4


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Gribble found a protector in a man called Menmuny. Like other young Kongkandji men, Menmuny had spent part of his early life in Cairns. He knew the changing realities of the world beyond the sheltered confines of the Cape Grafton Reserve, and oral tradition has it that he quelled the opposition to Gribble’s presence on Kongkandji land. The first Kongkandji ventured into Gribble’s camp on 29 November 1892, a month after JB left. They were wary and cautious, and the women and children remained hidden. As their confidence in Gribble grew, the number of visitors increased, the children accompanied the men and the first women visited on 12 December 1892. Gribble’s problem was how to inveigle them to forsake their traditional existence in favour of Yarrabah and his ways. Food, tobacco and children, he decided, were the answer. He fed all visitors and promised them regular rations if they settled. Even when supplies were short, there was always a gooey bowl of rice or maize-meal porridge for the children. In return, the Kongkandji let him care for the children while they hunted, socialised and fulfilled spiritual responsibilities. This act reflected the concept of reciprocity and mutual benefit that was central to Aboriginal social relations. Between clans, reciprocity was horizontal, levelling and designed to establish a brotherly, sharing relationship. Between individuals, it was vertical and worked in two ways. The first was based on age and/or ritual pre-eminence, that is, between the older and younger community members, and between the ritually senior and the less knowledgeable. Pre-eminence involved nurturing (looking after and helping) and authority (being boss). It was expected that a community would respect and obey those who were ritually senior because they looked after others by controlling and influencing the cosmic forces. The second form of vertical reciprocity was between patronal leaders who acted as brokers or intermediaries and the individuals or communities who were their clients, and offered an alternative pathway to the pre-eminence usually gained through age and ritual seniority. Generosity was a


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key element in reciprocity. It recognised the relationship between the giver and the receiver, and acknowledged the receiver’s significance. If the wealthy were stingy, it was considered hostile behaviour designed to diminish the status and acknowledgement due to the potential gift recipients. Menmuny was the first Kongkandji to settle permanently at Yarrabah. The young warrior was indebted to Gribble when his daughter was saved by Gribble’s medicine after traditional remedies failed. An early photograph of Menmuny shows him standing centre-frame flanked by his friend, George Christian, his fatherin-law Billy Woopah and his eldest son Albert Maywe. In the foreground, his baby daughter squirms on the lap of a child. For the sake of modesty, the photographer has induced him to wear a loin-cloth. It obscures his virility but not his power and authority. Menmuny had the mighty thighs and heavy-set shoulders of a warrior and a stomach lined with numerous swollen, horizontal cicatrices. These scars were the legacy of the initiation rites undergone by all Kongkandji boys when Elders inducted them into the secrets of the Dreaming and carved deep wounds into their abdomens to mark their transition to manhood. Menmuny brought his three wives and children to live with him at Yarrabah. Gribble was delighted. He made Menmuny captain of the boat and cared for his family. In return, Menmuny acted as a broker with the local people: translating language, persuading others to settle and pursuing promised brides stolen from the mission. Menmuny reportedly explained: ‘new way now. I help Missionary’.5 Menmuny was married to three sisters, Maggie I, Maggie II and Nora, but he discarded the latter two at Gribble’s insistence. The next settlers included Menmuny’s brother, Dick Yimbungi, and his father-in-law, Billy Church, with his wife Goondoon and their three sons. Menmuny’s example and kinship ties were crucial to the creation of Yarrabah mission. Of the other Kongkandji, only a handful chose to live at Yarrabah. The mission’s primary attraction was as a ready source of food and tobacco. Few were seduced by Gribble’s culture and,


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no matter how hard he tried, Gribble could not come to terms with Kongkandji social customs. He was disgusted by their practice of polygamy, infant betrothal, wife exchange and young marriage—girls as young as nine or ten married older men, although the union was not consummated until after puberty. In his eyes, their conduct swept the depths of licentiousness and debauchery and buried the Kongkandji in a quagmire of obscene, heathen darkness that barred them from the enlightenment and joy of civilisation and Christianity. Their customs violated his view of the natural order of things and confirmed his belief that Aboriginals were a ‘degraded and depraved race’.6 The intensity of his abhorrence outweighed the fragility of his relationship with the Kongkandji and he lectured them repeatedly against sorcery and witchcraft, banned infant betrothals, polygamy and young marriages on the mission, and insisted on Christian burials. He took a stockwhip to a man who hit his wife and hunted down men who stole promised brides from the mission compound. In 1894 a man called Gomerie tried to claim his promised wife, Jinny, and Gribble: plainly told him that I would not allow any of the girls on the mission to go to any man having already a wife, nor would I allow any girl to get married unless she had reached a proper age.7

Gribble’s behaviour annoyed the old men who resented him interfering with marriage obligations and did not want him to have anything to do with the dead. Many Kongkandji avoided the mission and did all they could to prevent the missionaries gaining influence over the people. Gribble complained that the old people were: very conservative and look with a suspicious eye upon anything that threatens their old customs and traditions; they object strongly to the boys and girls sleeping at the Mission in the dormitories . . . Three or four old fellows cause considerable trouble . . . One old man . . . objects strongly to the young men giving up in any way old native practices.8


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The Elders used their potent powers to preserve the traditional ways. The chichal-barra (clever men) could fly over great stretches of country, cause death by extracting a person’s life-blood or save lives with their powerful knowledge of herbal remedies but it was the old women who were the bane of Gribble’s life. They used their spiritual and political sway to undermine his influence. Gribble breathed a sigh of relief when Menmuny’s aged mother died. She was: a very conservative dame . . . It was a difficult matter to get her to wear clothing, and she had a great objection to the Mission, holding that we would make the young folk ‘too much like white fella’. This poor old soul was frequently seeing visions and dreaming dreams, and frequently conversed with the dead, from whom she from time to time received new songs for the use of the tribe. [Menmuny] held her in dread, having great belief in her powers . . . her death was a blessing for the Mission. Wailing was kept up for her every night for many months so that for some time after her death we still felt her presence among us.9

The Elders were Gribble’s competitors in the contest for the hearts and minds of the Kongkandji, and he needed to discredit them to establish his pre-eminence and control. He deliberately ignored the protocol of feeding Elders before the others and ridiculed the rain-doctor’s powers and the medicine of the chichalbarra. As a result, two communities emerged on the Cape Grafton Reserve: the tiny compound of Yarrabah mission where Gribble ruled; and the nearby camp where the Elders and traditional ways held sway. Camp residents participated in mission life when it suited them and converts defied Gribble’s directives and slipped away from the compound for ceremonies and corroborees in the camp. Nevertheless, tension and conflict troubled relations between the two spheres. Clashes and ritual reprisals continued well into the twentieth century. Every now and again, Gribble wondered if he had made a mistake by deciding to stay in this God-forsaken place. With the exception of Menmuny and his extended family, it seemed so difficult to make inroads with the Kongkandji. With failure staring


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him in the face, he turned to the Cairns police. For different reasons, Gribble and the police agreed on one essential point: all Aboriginals should be forcibly removed from proximity to any white settlement. Gribble offered to take any Aboriginal collected by the police and the first transportees arrived at Yarrabah in 1893—a blind boy called Willie and a nameless woman convicted of stealing a loaf of bread. With this event began an unofficial but long-lived marriage of convenience between Church and constabulary that was the beginning of a community of Stolen Children at Yarrabah. Meanwhile, worry, exhaustion and ill health drained Gribble’s energy and spirits. He suffered from rheumatism and sciatica. The humid, tropical weather aggravated his pains, and he was regularly put out of action by distressing bouts of malaria and dengue fever. Pompo Katchewan and Willie Ambrym remained valiant, loyal aides but JB’s only white assistant, Mr Pearson, left the mission under scandalous circumstances around the end of 1893, and Gribble’s repeated pleas for white reinforcements fell on deaf ears. Part of the problem was that Yarrabah depended on the munificence of Anglican congregations and this was in short supply. JB’s salary went to Mary Ann until he died, but there was nothing for Gribble or the mission, and they were forced to rely on the generosity and credit of storekeepers in Cairns. Supplies were sometimes so low that Gribble lived on boiled sweet potato tops, cabbage and the occasional fish. He had no money for socks, boots or even stamps for his letters, and he avoided going to town because he had no respectable clothes. He kept such a low profile in Cairns that the Argus dubbed Yarrabah ‘terra incognita’.10 The crisis came to a head in March 1893. Yarrabah was £300 in debt, the diocesan management committee was bankrupt, and Gribble was told the mission had to close. It was a scenario that would be repeated time and again during his career. Each time, Gribble’s response would be the same: he was not extravagant, he only bought essentials, his sole concern was the welfare of the people in his care. The problem, he insisted, was the Church’s


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failure to adequately fund his important and necessary work. In 1893, it seemed to Gribble that there was only one way forward. He appealed to the Primate and the head of the ABM, Archbishop Saumerez Smith. This strategic step was more than a petition to a higher authority. The Primate had a soft spot for Ernie and had always taken a kindly interest in his progress, providing money and lodgings when he visited Sydney and persuading his sister to sponsor the two oldest Gribble girls at her school. Gribble looked on the Archbishop as a father he could rely on for sympathy and advice. With characteristic compassion, the Primate acceded to Gribble’s petition and agreed to save Yarrabah. It was decided that the ABM in Sydney would pay out the debt and take over the mission from the north Queensland diocese. This meant Gribble would receive a small salary of £50 a year. The catch was that he had to limit all other mission expenditure to £10 per month. Under these conditions, Gribble had a problem. How could he keep the wolf from the door? Over the years, he jumped at any scheme to raise funds. He had inmates use their traditional knowledge to make weapons to hawk around Cairns; he agisted cows in exchange for the milk; he contracted-out inmates to pick coffee on local plantations, and all hands were enlisted to gather wild orchids for sale in Brisbane—a labour intensive venture that grossed £2.10s. Gribble set his heart on tapping into the profitable trade in harpooned greenback turtles, dugong and beche-de-mer but the mission’s boats seemed jinxed. The first vessel, the Hazelhurst—nicknamed Lazy House—went ashore in a cyclone. Its replacement, the JB Gribble, sprang a leak, was refloated, leaked again and sank within a week. A succession of failures followed: a punt, two whaleboats, a motor launch with a sick engine, the ketch Matabu and the cutter Hepzibah. According to reports, Gribble’s seamanship was part of the problem. He could get a boat going but was not quite sure how to stop it. There were frequent collisions with the Cairns wharf. It was 1893 when Mary Ann surprised everyone by announcing that she and her three youngest children would move to Yarrabah—


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although anyone who knew her financial circumstances and earnest commitment to JB’s work might have expected the news. She and the children arrived in Cairns just in time for a steamy, tropical Christmas and Gribble met them at the wharf. It was more than twelve months since he had seen Mary Ann and there was so much he wanted to share and confide. He was still periodically haunted by a nagging doubt that he was not cut out to be a missionary and he needed her fortitude and faith when he lapsed into one of these occasional episodes of self-doubt and troubling, impenetrable uncertainty. Stuart, Illa and Stella came too. They were aged seven, four and three and needed a father. In name and in practice, Ernie was now the patriarch of the Gribble family. Around this time came the first disturbing signs of Gribble’s tendency for colourful exaggeration and self-aggrandisement. Hindsight suggests that his vanity may have been symptomatic of a lack of confidence or a deep-seated fear of failing to meet the obligations and challenges set by his father, but the cause did not temper the expression. Notwithstanding the disinterest of the local people in his mission, Gribble told readers of Missionary Notes, the official journal of the ABM, that the Kongkandji were devoted to him and listened with ‘rapt attention’ to his sermons. His popularity among other people beyond the Cape Grafton Reserve was firmly established, he told the faithful, and he was called ‘Dadda’ as a sign of their affection. In fact, disappointment weighed him down. After four years of work, he had hoped to achieve more. There were only 42 inmates in the mission compound. He had lured a dozen or so from a marginal existence in Cairns with promises of a better life on his mission, but 29 of the residents were children and the rest were disabled, elderly or refugees from traditional marriage obligations. The Kongkandji made up less than one third, and Gribble’s hold on this group was especially tenuous as long as there were viable alternatives on their own land. Disillusioned and desperate, Gribble bundled up his swag and trundled to all the Aboriginal camps in Mareeba, Port Douglas,


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Redlynch and along the Barron and Mulgrave Rivers. Like the Pied Piper, at each camp he urged the people to follow him and settle at Yarrabah. Some feigned interest. Gribble gave one man trousers, a shirt and dinner on the condition that he conduct him to the local Aboriginal camp but his guide abandoned him to the bush after a five-mile hike. As a rule, the incomprehensible notion of abandoning their own country for Kongkandji territory was matched only by the people’s dread of Gribble. The women gave him a ‘look full of fear, then clasping their children tightly, vanished’.11 Aboriginals told Gribble: ‘Mickinry no good; he catch ’em woman; catch ’em piccaninny; tie ’em up, cook ’em, eat ’em’.12 During these difficult times, Gribble’s solace and sustenance was a tiny, makeshift desk. He lived on his nerves and managed on minimal sleep for his thoughts were full of schemes and new ideas that kept him restless and awake at night. During these silent hours when the draining heat and humidity of the day had eased, he dutifully scrawled entries in the mission’s journal and curtly documented the minutia of Yarrabah’s development. His handwriting was large, impatient and illegible. This necessary task was always hurried and quickly dispatched, as was any administrative chore. He had little patience for trivial, pedestrian responsibilities like accounts, financial statements and reports. Then, oblivious to the lateness of the hour, he immersed himself in his own writing. He intuitively followed the pattern set by his father and was a prodigious scribbler, churning out endless letters and anecdotes and snippets of news for Missionary Notes, the Church Chronicle and any regional newspaper with a penchant for missionary stories. It was during this time that he began to think about the first of his six autobiographies and of recording the experiences that sustained his spirit and that he wanted the world to share. They would be tales of the exotic and sublime: wild, naked cannibals, terrifying corroborees, valiant feats of conquest, courageous battles against the elements and comic incidents of cultural misunderstanding. His spelling was weak and his grammar worse. Later, a typewriter improved on his penmanship


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but not his literary errors. His manuscripts were an editor’s nightmare but it was engaging, colourful writing that brushed up well enough with some careful, incisive polishing. The temperate cool of the tropical winter was still lingering in the mornings when George Fairfowl Macarthur, Gribble’s headmaster from The King’s School, visited Yarrabah in the spring of 1894. He found his former student exhausted and worn out. The retired military chaplain fired off an angry complaint to the ABM and within a month, Christopher Herbst (a carpenter) and William Reeves (a stone mason) arrived to help. Gribble took a shine to the mild-mannered Reeves. He was an anaemic, docile sort with seven years’ experience as the Superintendent of Wagga Wagga Sunday School in southern New South Wales. Reeves settled in and eventually married Gribble’s sister, Ethel. He was loyal, reliable and a passionate, self-taught musician who formed the Yarrabah band, which gave irregular but well-received performances in nearby towns to raise funds for the mission. The carpenter and Gribble did not get on. Herbst had a rebellious streak and foolishly questioned Gribble’s authority. After a minor disagreement, Gribble ‘seized him by the neck and the seat of his pants and dropped him over the verandah on to the ground’.13 Herbst did not last. Around the same time, Deaconess Maspero arrived to care for the women and girls. She was a mousy, inoffensive spinster—a devout Christian who worked without pay. Andrew Obah from the Solomon Islands followed and took charge of the mission’s parade of boats. While this support helped Yarrabah’s physical development to blossom, the mission’s spiritual life was stunted by Gribble’s lack of clerical qualifications and his inability to administer the sacraments. In December 1893, he asked Bishop Barlow of north Queensland to ordain him but his request was refused. Barlow’s election as bishop had been challenged because he lacked a university degree but he would not have untrained clergy in his diocese. Barlow insisted Gribble complete the requisite course of study and examinations. Gribble made a half-hearted effort to


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comply but he was not a scholar and the study was ‘too much on top of a hard day’s manual labour’.14 His desires thwarted by Barlow’s strictures, Gribble devised a cunning scheme to by-pass his bishop by asking his mentor, Archbishop Samaurez Smith, to approve his ordination. After all, Gribble rationalised, Yarrabah was an ABM mission, the Archbishop was head of the ABM and the subtleties of episcopal authority were not his problem. The soft-hearted Archbishop was inveigled to agree and Gribble was ordained a deacon in Sydney, on 21 December 1894. He was twenty-six years old. Four months later, he took the next step in the proper ordering of his life. On 18 April 1895, a small gathering at St John’s Anglican Church, Cairns celebrated the marriage of Ernest Richard Bulmer Gribble to Emilie Julia Wreide. Bishop Barlow officiated, having graciously pardoned his maverick missionary for his disloyalty. The local newspapers reported that there were three bridesmaids, the church was prettily decorated, the choir sang and the couple honeymooned in Port Douglas. The bride’s dress was not mentioned. Emilie loathed her name—it was too ordinary. She preferred Amelia—it was more cultured and sophisticated. Her new husband dismissed this as affectation and called her Millie. Notwithstanding the quibbles about her name, Amelia was a strikingly handsome young lady with that vaguely horsey look acquired by tall women with long noses and lean limbs. She had a remarkably straight back that was allegedly the legacy of some distant Prussian ancestry and a genteel upbringing, as befitted the daughter of the Cairns Harbour Pilot. The comfortable circumstances in which she was raised were a far cry from conditions at Yarrabah but her family were devout, active Anglicans and Amelia believed that her faith could sustain her through any hardship and privation. She could hold a tune well enough to sing in the church choir and had an exceptional talent for needlework. She was a genius at tatting. Her long, nimble fingers could coax any intricate, exquisite pattern from the very finest thread and there was always a delicate piece of lacework on hand to keep her occupied.


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Regrettably, Amelia had two unfortunate flaws: she was impossible to sway once she had made up her mind and she had absolutely no sense of humour. Those who knew her later in life describe her as severe, forbidding and rigid. She was softer and gentler in her mid-twenties when she was newly married. The hardening came later. The couple had had a measured courtship. Every weekend for six or so months, Gribble went to Cairns and visited and returned to Yarrabah after Sunday Evensong. There is no record of passion or fire in their attachment. It was proper, correct and timely. In his old age, Gribble would nostalgically reflect on his unrequited love for his nameless sweetheart in Victoria and wonder whether he might have been a better man with some romance in his life. Still, his marriage to Amelia was not a fruitless union and three sons were duly born: John (Jack) Bulmer (17 January 1896), Eric Livingstone (17 March 1898) and Ernest Yarrabah (24 July 1901). As the century neared its close, Gribble’s life seemed more settled. The death of influential Elders like Menmuny’s mother slowly eroded the resistance of the old people in the camp who were the repositories of traditional knowledge, while those forcibly relocated to Yarrabah by the Cairns police were isolated from their cultural roots. Gribble could feel his ways beginning to take hold. He pinned his hopes for the mission’s future on the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, the model for subsequent legislation in Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory. Archibald Meston was one of the Act’s strongest advocates. After the Act was passed, Meston was appointed Southern Protector of Aborigines with responsibility for all Aboriginal affairs below the Tropic of Capricorn after the Act was passed. Meston argued that the Indigenous peoples needed greater protection because Queenslanders: still regard the aboriginal as of no more value in the scale of being than a horse or a bullock, an inheritance from those who shot him like a kangaroo, abducted his women and sent his children away to


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A T E R R I B LY W I L D M A N distant friends with as much indifference as if they were pet squirrels and tame galahs . . . they were either not credited with any human instincts or those instincts were entirely disregarded.15

As the Act was debated in the Queensland parliament, speakers applauded it as an exemplar of Christian compassion and humanitarianism: ‘a determined effort to ameliorate conditions of the Aborigines’ and to save a ‘dying race’ from extinction.16 The Act established a hierarchy of Aboriginal Protectors and controls over virtually every aspect of the lives of the State’s Aboriginals: where they lived, how they worked, their money, family and movements. At the heart of this labyrinth of regulators and regulations was the provision for the forced removal and confinement of Indigenous Australians and ‘half-castes’ to missions and reserves. The Act promised an answer to some of the most devastating effects of colonisation: the suffering, dispossessed and diseased on the margins of colonial society, and the swelling numbers of ‘half-castes’ threatening the chimera of a racially pure ‘White Australia’. For Gribble, the Act sanctioned his unofficial, five-year alliance with the Cairns police and was a legislative avenue for satisfying his dream of making Yarrabah a home for all north Queensland’s Aboriginal people. Dr Walter Edmund Roth agreed. The newly appointed Northern Protector of Aborigines was convinced that the only protection for the Aboriginal race was complete isolation from the evil, corrupting influence of white society. The seclusion and fertility of the Cape Grafton Reserve offered the perfect sanctuary. In his more sensible moments, Roth conceded that it was physically and financially impossible to segregate all indigenous people on reserves. Nevertheless, he was ‘firmly of the opinion that . . . the time will arrive when the remnant of the State’s autochthonous population will be ultimately gathered together and located’ at Yarrabah.17 It was an empty hope. Gribble’s records reveal that only eight Aboriginals were sent to Yarrabah under the provisions of the Act during its first two years of operation. Despite this fact, Yarrabah’s


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population exploded between May 1897 and June 1900. It was the development of the surrounding region that changed the mission’s future. Settlers poured into the north Queensland region, determined to make their fortunes. The population of Cairns increased more than four-fold soon after it was declared a town in 1876. By 1893 the hinterland was densely populated with new settlements and a railroad linked the towns of Redlynch, Kuranda and Mareeba. Timbergetters plundered cedar from the hills behind Cairns and along the Johnstone and Daintree Rivers. In their place, settlers planted orchards, rice fields, dairy farms and plantations of coffee, bananas and sugar. In the west, cattle stations were established, tin and gold strikes drew hundreds of speculators to the south, and land development accelerated. The impact on the local Aboriginal communities was devastating. As early as the mid-1880s, the Kongkandji’s nearest southern neighbours, the Indindji, were having trouble finding food, while Aboriginals between Mossman and the Mulgrave River and around Townsville were literally starving. By the 1890s, it was reckoned the Aboriginal population of Townsville had been reduced by at least 75 per cent. Aboriginal groups responded to the invasion by attacking settlers and their property, and colonists were so afraid of being speared that a Native Police Force was established on the Mulgrave River for the explicit purpose of exterminating Aboriginal opposition. The Kongkandji had a close relationship with their southern neighbours, the Indindji. Their territories overlapped, they shared a similar material culture and participated in each other’s ritual cycles. In the winter, the Kongkandji visited the Indindji for ceremonies and seasonal trading. In the warm weather, the Indindji moved to the coast to feast on digil (Mulgrave walnut) and murgan (quandong). The Kongkandji’s connections were hospitable but less intimate with the more distant Irukandji, to the north along the Barron River and between Cairns and Port Douglas, and the Maday or Wanur to the south. Nevertheless, Cape Grafton and Kongkandji territory was the regular gathering point for regional corroborees


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and the nexus of vigorous trade routes that radiated to all points of the compass. By 1894, however, the sea trade between the groups had ended. Dislocated from their lands, the Kongkandji’s neighbours were losing the battle for survival. When timbergetters moved into their territory a few kilometres south of Yarrabah, the Indindji sought refuge with the Kongkandji, but their presence strained food supplies, restricted territorial movement, disrupted Kongkandji spiritual life and incited conflict over sacred sites, rituals and territory. Jinny Katchewan was among the first girls to settle at Yarrabah and oral tradition has it that she sought sanctuary at the mission after the Kongkandji were attacked by Aboriginal invaders and her mother killed and decapitated. These circumstances left the Kongkandji and the Aboriginal groups around Cairns with few choices. The Elders disapproved, but Yarrabah seemed a viable alternative to tribal conflict or exploitation and poverty on the fringes of white settlement. Gribble’s mission became a refuge for people in crisis. As the mission’s population expanded, Gribble’s superiors in Sydney worried. Their missionary had accumulated a mass of unauthorised bills in Cairns and creditors were threatening to sue. The problem, Gribble insisted, was the ABM’s inadequate financial support, but the ABM Executive claimed that Gribble was personally responsible and threatened to advertise in the Cairns newspaper disassociating itself from Gribble and his mission if any more debts were incurred. Despite this uncomfortable difficulty, there were portents that Gribble’s dream might be realised. Yarrabah was starting to take on the appearance of a family fiefdom. His siblings, Stuart, Illa and Stella were sent to Brisbane in 1895 to attend school and escape reoccurring bouts of malaria, but Mary Ann stayed on as Hospital Matron and Amelia worked with the women and girls. Gribble’s brother, Bert, was unemployed during the depression and lived at the mission from May 1896 to July 1897. Ethel Gribble taught in the school, and when Illa returned from boarding school she helped her sister and worked in the girls’ dormitory.


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In 1898, the Queensland government made Yarrabah a food distribution centre for Aboriginals. The annual funding of £120 meant that there was finally enough money to feed the mission’s increasing numbers. Meanwhile, the impressive development of the mission meant Gribble’s pleas for staff no longer fell on deaf ears. The ABM sent a string of new assistants—although their influence paled alongside the dominance of the Gribble family. Relieved of the urgency to augment mission numbers and feed the populace, Gribble focused on building an orderly, wellregulated community. He had it fixed in his mind that people would be encouraged to settle if he put ‘married Christian blacks in a home of their own in which they can take pride’.18 The men spent their days building, steam-milling, wire-fencing, ploughing, carting wood, felling scrub and cotton-picking, while the women were kept busy caring for the small children, sewing, washing, baking and doing housework. Amelia’s role in the daily life of the mission was limited but she taught the women embroidery and needlework, and the Yarrabah Rule Book instructed these diligent homemakers to have fresh flowers on the meal table every day. Any man wanting to marry had to build a hut first and part of any income earned outside the mission—picking coffee or working the beche-de-mer boats—had to go towards a verandah or domestic utensils for their home. Gribble religiously enforced the Protestant ethic ‘that work is noble, and that all should contribute to the general good’.19 The resulting air of settled domesticity took visitors by surprise. Gilbert White, soon-to-be Bishop of Carpentaria, was greatly impressed by the married couples’ small slab houses and carefully weeded gardens when he visited in 1896, while another visitor commended the fact that Willie Ambrym, Gribble’s assistant, had married and settled comfortably in a snug, clean and neat home. Throughout the day, the strident tones of the mission bell split the air, reverberated through the settlement and echoed off the hills to dictate the rhythm of life in defiance of the weather, day or season. The bell was ignored in the camp where the older


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Kongkandji and Indindji lived close enough to access the mission’s tobacco but distant enough to follow the cadences of life ordained by nature and tradition, and where visiting missionaries bemoaned the ‘evidence that Satan was reigning in their midst; the dirt, the squalor and sin being indescribable’.20 On the mission, supervised teams worked industriously in accordance with the apostolic rule that if ‘you do not work you do not eat’. Discipline seemed to prevail. The list of punishable offences was clearly defined: disobedience, bad language, insubordination, refusing to work, laziness, incorrigibility and the theft of food. Each week the men and boys did military drill, the girls exercised with Indian clubs and the missionaries inspected the married couples’ homes to award points and prizes for tidiness and cleanliness. Even the inmates’ appearance suggested order. The uniform for the men was a sulu of red turkey twill, the women wore voluminous, shapeless shifts and the crew of the mission boat W.M. Cowper looked tidy and sharp in smart sailor jackets and caps with the name of their boat on the rim. Life was not all discipline and regulation. Gribble considered it the ruin of missions to ignore the importance of games in building character and a good home life. Cricket and football were regular highlights at Yarrabah, along with frequent outings, entertainment and concerts. Gribble’s capacity to laugh easily and his personal involvement in the life of every inmate won him the affection and respect of the people. On 26 December 1899, Gribble crowned Menmuny ‘King of Yarrabah’. Outside the mission compound Menmuny deferred to the Kongkandji Elders, but inside the mission he was King John Barlow and wore the red garb of the Moreton Bay Regiment. He officiated at meetings, sat on a throne in the Church and his son, Albert Maywe, was declared his successor. These facts did not stop Gribble from correcting Menmuny’s behaviour and making it clear that any serious offence would mean losing the dignities of office. Explorer Richard Dyott visited Yarrabah and summed up Menmuny’s role: ‘no real power in the management of the


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mission, Mr G [sic] merely keeping him nominally at the head of affairs so as to use his influence for the good disciplining of the local tribe’.21 At his investiture, claimed Gribble, Menmuny confirmed this distribution of power: I am your king . . . I have got a lot of people to look after. And when you have any trouble with anybody, leave it to me, for I am king. When your wife growl, do not hit her, but leave it to me. When anything go wrong, leave it to me, and I will leave it to Mr Gribble.22

The year 1899 also saw Gribble institute the Yarrabah Government and Yarrabah Court. The former met monthly to devise rules and routines. The Court met weekly to settle disputes, rule on offences and to impose punishments. Some of Gribble’s contemporaries liked to fancy that there were parallels between a traditional meeting of elders and the Court and Government of Yarrabah, and commended Gribble for using native customs to preserve law and order so wisely. The Government originally consisted of twelve male Aboriginal communicants but Gribble later reduced this number to three and maintained the right of veto over all nominations. The Government’s term of office hinged on the behaviour of its members: ‘A Government will go out of office on the misbePhaviour of any of its members, lack of interest, non-attendance at meeting, disrespect to the Murra-gnarra [King], failure in regular attendance at Church Services’.23 In later years, a mission visitor reported that ‘Mr Gribble reports, King John admonishes, and suggestions are received from the floor’ but that the community does not participate in decision-making or formulating policy.24 Punishments, however, were executed by the King or the Governor of the Court, some of whom were reputed to be very cruel: they tied up and flogged offenders. Gribble’s greatest joy was the Cadet Corps, which was established in 1899. There was weekly drill with lances decorated with the mission colours, ritualised sham battles and each month the cadets donned their uniforms and the Union Jack was hoisted while the mission residents sang ‘God Save the Queen’. Gribble was


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sergeant and he relished inspecting the ranks in full military dress. At the instigation of the Northern Protector of Aborigines, Dr Roth, the Queensland government provided the Cadets with obsolete snider rifles—the same rifles used by Native Police to silence black opposition to white settlement. Nevertheless, Dr Roth and Home Secretary Foxton were impressed: the Cadet Corps ‘teaches these lads to rely on their own self defence, and . . . encourage[s] them in a sense of esprit de corps’.25 Only one ingredient was missing. Yarrabah still had no priest. In lieu of an alternative, Gribble replicated the evangelical, nonconformist tradition in which he was reared. He held informal prayer meetings, homilies and Bible readings, taught Sankey’s hymns, welcomed Methodist ministers and temperance preachers, and insisted that wrong-doers publicly express sorrow for their sins during services. Yet, because he could not administer the sacraments, the spiritual life of Yarrabah as an Anglican community suffered and the mission’s first group of confirmees had to wait twelve months to make their first communion. Gribble’s future looked bleak for he had not even started the rigorous program of theological study and examinations needed for ordination. His chance of moving up the ranks from deacon to priest seemed slim until a small window of opportunity appeared: Bishop Barlow went away. In his absence, the kindly Archbishop Saumerez Smith agreed to give Gribble ‘directions’ about the contents of the ordination exam and an ‘abbreviate[d] . . . range of questions’ for the sections on Holy Scriptures and Doctrinal Theology.26 Gribble passed his examination and was hastily priested by the Archbishop on 1 January 1899, before Bishop Barlow returned and blocked his ordination by invoking the thorny question of episcopal jurisdiction. After his ordination, Gribble replaced the daily prayer meetings with Matins and Evensong and instituted the High Church custom of having the congregation turn to the east when singing the Gloria. A surpliced choir preceded his entry into the church and processions led by the mission ensign—the red and white


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cross of St George—were routine for Holy Days and celebrations. Although the comfortable predicability of High Church ritual avoided the need for passionate demonstrations of spiritual conviction, Gribble held tight to the ‘hell-fire and brimstone’ style of preaching inherited from his father: Oh! Father Gribble good preacher. He had a big pulpit in church. He used to stand there and preach to the people. He’d lay the law down for the people to understand . . . and talk plain so they can know what he’s preaching about. [He was] the biggest shouter. Yeah! He hit the pulpit [thump] . . . like that when he’s preaching to drive that word in. Yeah that’s right! [thump] when he’s preaching [thump] . . . [He was a] loud speaker . . . he talk very loud sometimes [and] . . . he talk long. We all go to sleep. [When] Father preach . . . not one girl sitting up. We all laying down asleep.27

Faith and common sense cautioned Gribble not to lapse into the venial sin of vanity but after eight years at Yarrabah he could not help but feel a surge of pride as he surveyed the land alongside Trinity Bay. The change was remarkable and satisfying. A tidy, ordered settlement had emerged. He had subdued the unruly rainforest, and an impenetrable tangle of tree ferns, vines and lichen-smothered rainforest on the hills behind the mission was the only reminder of how the place had once looked. In pride of place was a church resplendent with his coveted stained-glass windows. Gribble named it after St Alban. This English saint’s feast day was 17 June—the anniversary of JB’s landing at Trinity Bay. St Alban died a martyr to his faith after being beheaded by the Romans. The parallels with JB’s life struck Gribble as appropriate. Above the altar was inscribed the phrase that had guided his father and that Gribble would give pride of place in all his churches: ‘Lift up thy heart for the remnant that is left’. Through the settlement there were regimented lines of single-roomed huts of woven palm leaves for the married inmates and a melange of dormitories, stables, kitchens and sheds. Plantations of sweet potato, bananas and corn struggled in sheltered out-stations beyond the main settlement, cattle, goats and chickens promised a supply


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of meat, milk and eggs, and a jetty cut the mouth of Trinity Bay. The baptismal register at the rear of St Alban’s Church documented a swelling number of converts. On Sundays the small church filled to overflowing for services led by a scrubbed and surpliced choir, carefully coaxed into tune by Amelia. In 1895, Gribble began a class for selected converts with the explicit purpose of making them teachers to their countrymen. Within a few years inmates read and preached at services and proselytised amidst the people in the surrounding districts. By the turn of the century, 85 inmates had been baptised and seventeen had been confirmed. Christianity seemed to have taken hold and a steady stream of missionaries flowed to Yarrabah to study Gribble’s methods and diffuse them throughout north Queensland to Mapoon, Weipa, Cape Bedford and Bloomfield River missions. To any outsider, Yarrabah had all the hallmarks of success. Missionary News reported that Police Sub-Inspector Cooper of Cairns visited Yarrabah in his capacity as Aboriginal Protector and was: most agreeably surprised . . . Rev. E.R. Gribble deserves the greatest credit for the system and management obtaining on the place . . . the Mission is doing excellent work all round.28

The Cairns Morning Post was usually quick to criticise Gribble on almost every matter but it deviated from this predictable path in 1897: He has been by turn builder, doctor, blacksmith, planter, schoolmaster, governor and many other things. He has planned and carried on one of the most successful fruit plantations in Northern Queensland . . . He has made the blacks under his care into surprisingly good Christians, and has, in short, working almost single handed, made an improvement which has been regarded as impossible.29

The Bishop of Carpentaria, Gilbert White, was lavish in his praise: Before Mr Gribble started his work the blacks were living as savages; now there [sic] were leading sober, respectable lives in houses erected by themselves and kept scrupulously clean. They worked year in and year out to support their families, and there [sic]


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appearance showed no tendency to break back to savagedom . . . They were engaged in agriculture, and grew fruit trees and rice and the mission in a few years would be entirely self-supporting. It was one of the most remarkable instances of successful mission work in modern times.30

Such affirmation encouraged Gribble’s bent for self-promotion and he informed the faithful that Yarrabah was ‘the best Aboriginal Enterprise in the State’.31 His world was now in order. His dominion seemed complete. There were few portents of the trials that lay ahead.


3

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ribble’s perpetual worry was that his secluded sanctuary on Cape Grafton would be invaded. When the Land Commission approved the logging of Buddabadoo to the south, Gribble expected vice, opium and alcohol to flood into the mission. He acted quickly by settling five married couples at Buddabadoo and informing the Home Secretary that a ‘native village’ occupied the area. The intrusion was thwarted. Rocky Island was the focus of a second territorial tussle. This bare, stony outcrop in the centre of Mission Bay was home for Yarrabah’s rapidly increasing herd of goats. The Inspector of Nuisances in Cairns donated the animals to the mission after they wantonly devoured the towns’ gardens but the goats demolished Yarrabah’s plantations, so Gribble dispatched them to the indestructible confines of Rocky Island. The island lay outside the Cape Grafton Aboriginal Reserve but Gribble considered it mission territory by right of occupation. When local fishermen were licensed to work Mission Bay and use Rocky Island as their base, Gribble viewed it as an open declaration of war. These developments made him panicky, nervous and defensive. He bombarded a bevy of officials—the Inspector of Police, the Northern Protector of Aborigines, the Commissioner of Police 48


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and the officers of the Department of Lands—with protests and complaints about the white invasion. In the light of these developments, he decided it was urgent to occupy the entire reserve to ‘prevent interference on the part of outsiders’ and to protect the Kongkandji.1 At a cost the mission could ill-afford, he bought out the fishermen, stationed his boatman, Andrew Obah, on Rocky Island and built a string of out-stations radiating from the main settlement across the Cape Grafton Reserve. Occupancy was nine-tenths of the law. The townsfolk of Cairns looked on and damned him. In their eyes his territorial ambitions smacked of hypocrisy and betrayal. The local press launched a stinging denunciation decrying his actions as obsessive, compulsive and vindictive. The attack took Gribble by surprise but he responded swiftly and astutely by snaring the support of Queensland’s two most influential men in Aboriginal Affairs: the Home Secretary, Justin Fox Greenlaw Foxton and the Northern Protector of Aborigines, Dr Walter Edmund Roth. Gribble liked Foxton. At first glance the two men seemed to have little in common. The Home Secretary was 21 years older than Gribble—a dapper-dressing lawyer with a solid bourgeois background who was educated at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School and renowned for his quick and caustic tongue. Yet their affinity ran deep. Foxton was a staunch Anglican, a firm advocate of military training—he was a Colonel in the militia—an ardent Imperialist, passionate cricketer and one-time jackeroo. Gribble was attracted to him instantly. When Foxton visited Yarrabah the two men would stroll through the settlement with their heads bowed, buried in deep discussion. The young missionary deferred to the older statesman but they were likeminded on all the key issues that were precious to Gribble: the moral obligation of white society to protect Aboriginals; the need for tighter legislative controls to segregate Aboriginals for their own protection; and the powerful ‘civilising’ influence of religious instruction.


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His relationship with the scholarly Dr Roth was more relaxed, familiar and open. Gribble was only eight years younger than Roth and bewitched by the Northern Protector’s incisive intellect. Roth was a scientist: a careful, accurate observer who methodically and painstakingly detailed the customs of Aboriginal groups throughout north Queensland. He practised medicine briefly in the north of the State after migrating from London in 1887, but was rescued from this pale existence by the same passion for ethnography that captured his older brother, Henry Ling, author of The Tasmanian Aborigines (1890). Roth’s ethnographic writings were among the first systematic documentation of Aboriginal life in Australia and he won international recognition and awards for his work. Gribble tried to imitate the talent he admired so greatly in Roth. He subscribed to the Australasian Anthropological Journal and Science of Man, and even published a handful of letters and articles on Kongkandji social customs, initiation rites and language. It was mere tinkering. He had no talent for languages, never saw an initiation ceremony and his knowledge of social customs was limited to what Menmuny told him. In the end, it was a fleeting flirtation with scholarship. Gribble lacked the flair, interest and time for a serious commitment to scientific research, especially when the higher duty to ‘convert and civilise’ the Aboriginal people occupied his mind and consumed his energies. Roth and Gribble shared secrets as they smoked their pipes under the spreading mango trees that lined the open ground adjacent to St Alban’s Church. It was during one such exchange that Gribble related the story of his experiences in Western Australia: the violent abuse of Aboriginals, his family’s suffering and his father’s ignoble defeat. Roth empathised. His work was in the heartland of the beche-de-mer industry where he tried to stop the exploitation of black labour. The tragedy that Gribble related was a too familiar tale. The missionary, politician and scientist made a curious trio. They shared a deeply passionate humanitarian concern for Aboriginals and an unwavering belief that they alone could save the


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Australian Aboriginal. In their eyes the 1897 Act did not protect Aboriginals from abuse by unscrupulous, wily settlers. The three men were frustrated by the limitations of an Act which defined Aboriginals as those who lived or associated with other Aboriginals. Although government officials were empowered to take ‘children from their Aboriginal environments’, Roth found it hard to ‘claim little waifs and strays’ living with Europeans and was inundated with applications from settlers trying to claim exceptions from the Act for Aboriginal girls ‘brought up as one of the family’.2 Roth knew these girls worked without pay and were often sexually abused, but in an era when Indigenous births were not registered, it was impossible to prove that the girls were under age and procure a conviction of sexual assault. It was easy, alleged some Queensland parliamentarians, to mistake the maturity of ‘native’ girls because they ‘ripened’ earlier in the tropics.3 In August 1899, Foxton and Gribble met at Yarrabah and schemed. Soon afterwards, licensed fishing was banned in Mission Bay and Gribble was gazetted Superintendent of Yarrabah with the power to prohibit and remove trespassers from the Cape Grafton Aboriginal Reserve. This step was necessary, Roth explained, ‘on account of the abuses consequent upon the stubborn determination of many undesirable characters to enter and remain on these reserves’.4 According to explorer Richard Dyott, Gribble put a different spin on his appointment: The Superintendent holds the Government position of protector to the Aborigines . . . he is sole judge of what should or should not be done with the reserve, having full discretionary power to accept an aboriginal or turn him away if incorrigible.5

Gribble moved quickly to assert his new authority. He limited interaction between mission inmates and the outside world; vetted in-going and out-going mail; confiscated all money and gifts; and his written authority was needed to move about the Reserve. Popular wisdom of the time held that the future of the Aboriginal race lay with the children: ‘if any real reform is to be affected


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in the character and habits of the blacks it must be done when they are children’.6 Under The Industrial and Reformatories Schools Act 1865, any child under fifteen years and ‘born of a half-caste or aboriginal mother’ could be classified as ‘neglected’, arrested and committed to an Industrial School for up to seven years. Gribble, Foxton and Roth saw the Reformatories Act as a vehicle for meeting their mutual desire to ameliorate and protect Aboriginals. Reflecting the views of the era, Foxton argued: ‘if anybody was entitled to the ownership of the aboriginal children it was the Crown’.7 For Gribble, the Reformatories Act was a chance to redress the wrongs inflicted by white society. He had seen dozens of sad cases where a female child brought up by whites had become the victim of her master and died in childbirth, or been abandoned and thrown onto the streets. His heart ached for the tragic plight of these girls and the Reformatories Act was a chance to intervene. He asked Foxton to register Yarrabah as an Industrial and Reformatory School: ‘There are scores of children whom we wish to gather in . . . this being an industrial school for aboriginal children we can get them without any interference on the part of persons interested’.8 This move troubled the Executive of the ABM in Sydney and it worried that Yarrabah might lose its distinctive character as an Anglican mission and become a repository for criminal children. Gribble dismissed these concerns: how could a bevy of bishops and bureaucrats in faraway Sydney know better than their missionary on the ground? On 7 April 1900, the Queensland government gazetted Gribble as Superintendent of the Yarrabah Industrial School. The ABM Executive was stunned at being ignored and Gribble was reprimanded sternly. The censure was too late. Yarrabah’s registration as a reformatory was a fait accompli. According to the government’s official register, sixteen children were banished to Yarrabah during its first year as an Industrial School. In reality Gribble, Roth and the Cairns police quickly abandoned the legal rituals required by the Act. With Roth’s imprimatur, Gribble picked ‘many a little waif and stray’ and took them


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to Yarrabah. By 1903, Roth had instructed the police ‘to get all the half-caste boys and girls wandering amongst the black’s camps and charge them as neglected children’. The police willingly handed over children ‘in an informal way without any of them having been before any police court but at the request of Dr. Roth’.9 In 1901, Foxton drove through parliament the long awaited amendments to the 1897 Act, increasing the powers of police and protectors to forcibly remove and confine Aboriginals on missions and government settlements. The collections split families, shattered communities and irreparably scarred the psyche of Aboriginal Australia. Gribble’s involvement in the forcible collection of children provoked loud and embarrassing opposition from the local white community. Some settlers objected on humanitarian grounds. A larger number complained about losing free labour. Regardless of the reason, Gribble’s intervention in local race relations was unwelcome. The Cairns Morning Post summed up the prevailing feeling: Powers have been transferred to this gentlemen which should never have been extended to anyone on this earth, much less to a clergyman . . . Mr Gribble has torn children of tender years away from their parents and virtually held them in slavery while the grief stricken parents have gone on their unconsoled way . . . yet it is left in the hands of the Rev. Gribble to travel through out this district and separate child and parent, brother and sister, for ever . . . what excuse is to be put for the tyranny that is exercised? . . . In the name of humanity, of religion, and of common sense, we denounce a law under which children may be torn from their parents at the option of any one man . . . the Aborigines Protection Act has resulted in a far worse state of slavery than was ever experienced in the Southern States of America [and] is not only a serious menace to human liberty but an unwarrantable interference with commerce . . .10

The opposition cut Gribble to the core. In his heart he knew he acted with virtue and integrity and that his sole concern was to serve the best interests of the Aboriginals. Seething with anger, he ranted and raved to anyone who would listen about the bitter and


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inexplicable opposition of Cairns to his humane and Christianlike work. His contempt for white society deepened. The union of the missionary, politician and scientist was tested by two particularly public controversies. In 1901, the Cairns Bench of Magistrates defied a directive from Roth by refusing to apply the Reformatory Act to a young girl called Jeannie Forbes and sentence her to confinement at Yarrabah. Jeannie was not neglected, the magistrates claimed, and she did not want to go to Yarrabah. Foxton stepped in and overturned the magistrates’ ruling but his intervention provoked angry questions in Queensland’s Legislative Assembly: why was Jeannie forcibly removed from a ‘comfortable and . . . happy’ home to a life of privation and isolation on a mission? The response to Foxton’s assurances that Jeannie was ‘in Mr Gribble’s own house, and is as well cared for as she was formerly’ was a thinly veiled hint that Gribble was a moral threat to the Aboriginal women of Yarrabah: Although white people were excluded from the mission station, halfcaste children were still born there. Of course, Mr Gribble could not be blamed for all that went on there as he was often away.11

In the end, the trio won. Foxton decreed that an honest and unbiased report from Gribble would decide Jeannie’s future. Not surprisingly, Gribble counselled that Jeannie stay at Yarrabah and Dr Roth endorsed his recommendation. The Jeannie Forbes case sparked a spiteful spat between the two local newspapers. The Cairns Argus attacked its competitor, the Morning Post, for publicly criticising Gribble and Yarrabah. The Post retaliated by accusing the editor of the Argus of having ‘a big claim on the nursery department at Yarrabah [and being] entitled to be called ‘‘Dad’’ by a black Mareeba piccaninny’. The Post threatened to publish all the lurid details if the criticisms of its editorial position continued, and the ensuing silence of the Argus stimulated interesting conjecture in Cairns for some time thereafter. The second controversy involved Lizzie Johnstone. An attractive girl of Aboriginal and Spanish parentage, Lizzie was barely in


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her teens in August 1900 when Roth had her forcibly removed from the Bloomfield River home of Phillip Johnstone and committed to Yarrabah as a neglected child under the Reformatory Act. Her benefactor, the Portuguese-born Johnstone, had a long and notorious reputation as a local ‘combo’: a white man who shared his bed with black women. Johnstone was reputed to like rough sex and young girls, but the nubile Lizzie had snared the ruffian’s heart and Johnstone was distraught when she was taken away. Roth wired Gribble that Johnstone had offered to marry his young love if they were reunited, and Gribble responded by announcing that Lizzie was happy at Yarrabah and wanted to marry Billie Brown, another mission resident. John Hamilton, government whip and Member of the Legislative Assembly for Cooktown, took up Johnstone’s cause, accusing Gribble of coercing Lizzie into marriage to keep her at Yarrabah. The slur was splashed across the pages of the north Queensland newspapers and the Truth. Parliament ordered a magisterial inquiry to get to the bottom of the question. Foxton refused to let Lizzie be interviewed without Gribble, and fed his missionary ally steady reports on the inquiry’s progress. Hamilton threatened to resign if Lizzie stayed at Yarrabah but Foxton refused to retract his support of Gribble. By the end of 1902, the matter was at an impasse. Hamilton stayed in parliament and Lizzie stayed at Yarrabah, but she did not marry Billie Brown. This was the last time the Home Secretary and Gribble joined forces. Foxton retired from the Queensland Legislative Assembly in 1904. Although he returned to politics two years later as the Federal member for Brisbane he never again exercised the same sway over the destiny of Queensland’s Indigenous peoples. In January 1901, the Australian colonies became a federated Commonwealth and the white invasion around Cairns was so comprehensive that Gribble could insist that the Kongkandji leave their children ‘entirely in the missionaries [sic] charge’ or be excluded from the mission’s benefits.12 He wanted to ‘have the children more under control, and by having them under lock and


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key at night will prevent the camp natives taking them off at all hours for corroborees, etc’.13 His threat was so effective that the glut of children could not be housed. There were 29 boys under ten years of age and an army of older lads who slept in the kitchen because there was no room elsewhere. The children entered a new, unfamiliar realm when they joined the mission. They were separated from their parents, baptised, assigned Christian names and inducted into a new set of alien beliefs and behaviours. The influx of new inmates was Gribble’s justification for abandoning his struggle to learn the local languages. He decreed English would be Yarrabah’s lingua franca and the speaking of ‘language’ became a punishable offence. The children attended school for two hours each day and every morning they stood in line after Matins: Father [Gribble] said ‘Now all say this prayer: ‘‘We must not steal, we must not tell lies, we must not say bad words this day’’’. That the words we got to say every morning.14

The roll was called each night and life was strictly supervised: . . . if you want to go out for a walk. The Matron take the girls on the beach and they got to stay in one place without wandering . . . We used to go down every Saturday . . . for a bath in the sea or the creek but not to move away in the bush or anywhere. There’s a prefect . . . got to watch the girls if they wander about.15

Close surveillance, Gribble explained, was necessary to ensure that ‘these Mission children, growing up under Christian teaching lose all touch with native laws and regulations’.16 As life at Yarrabah settled into a steadier, more predictable rhythm, Gribble grew restless and edgy. He was keen to spread his wings further afield, and the Bogimbah Creek settlement on Fraser Island Aboriginal Reserve had caught his eye. The island lies about 800 miles south of Yarrabah opposite the mining town of Maryborough and just a short train ride north of the sedate State capital of Brisbane. Standing on the Queensland mainland and gazing east across Hervey Bay, it looks like a huge, sleeping whale.


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The centuries have held it captive between the tranquil waters of Hervey Bay and the Pacific Ocean that pounds Seventy Mile Beach on its eastern coast, moulding it into an elongated key of high sand dunes topped with sparkling, freshwater lakes and a smothering jungle of blackbutt, tallow wood, satinay and vines. The mastermind behind the Bogimbah Creek Aboriginal settlement was Archibald Meston, Southern Protector of Aborigines. Meston was a man of many faces: sugarcane grower, journalist, parliamentarian, explorer, showman, sportsman and bankrupt. A flamboyant, loquacious, byronic character, Meston claimed to be a tribal initiate fluent in several Aboriginal languages. He had an arrogant predilection for public displays of physical prowess and speeches scattered with obscure references to Greek legends that sent journalists scurrying for Bulfinch’s Age of Fable. His was a persona that begged for caricature, and the Bulletin generously obliged by sketching him resplendent in a flowing cape and skintight breeches with bulging muscles and an Aboriginal spear. A dedicated eugenicist and Social Darwinist, Meston put his theories into practice by fathering seven children by his patient wife, and denouncing interracial intercourse as an ‘abomination’ that led to the ‘undesirable’ breeding of ‘half-castes’. The ‘law of the strongest’, the paternalistic Meston argued, should be used to collect and confine Aboriginals on reserves where the race’s tragic decay would be reversed and Rousseau’s ‘Noble Savage’ would be resurrected to hunt, fish and flourish in splendid isolation from all corrupting influences. Any suggestion that Australia’s Indigenous peoples were attached to their own country was dismissed as capricious sentimentality and irrelevant to the new order of the day. Meston had high hopes for the Bogimbah Creek settlement. It was his personal experiment in social engineering and he predicted it would set a permanent precedent for the future management of Aboriginal affairs. By March 1900, Indigenous Australians from more than 30 centres had been rounded up and exiled to Fraser Island. Only someone Meston trusted implicitly could have responsibility for overseeing this precious undertaking:


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his son Harold was his logical choice—assisted by a group of former Native Police to maintain discipline. Gribble monitored Bogimbah’s development from the start. A scrapbook of newspaper cuttings testifies to his interest. He was sure it was doomed: ‘no government can uplift or develop a primitive race such as this . . . It is the Church alone that can instil into the race, incentives to existence and also to higher existence’.17 When Home Secretary Foxton visited Yarrabah in August 1899, Gribble voiced his concerns. A month later Foxton stopped at Fraser Island. After a cursory inspection he decided the residents were discontented, fearful, superstitious, and Harold Meston’s methods were violent and oppressive. Foxton asked the ABM in Brisbane to take control and recommended Gribble’s appointment as temporary Warden arguing there was ‘no man in Australia so well fitted to assist in starting the mission on a proper basis’.18 A delighted Gribble immediately trekked south. He did not consult the ABM Executive even though two months earlier he had refused to go to Sydney because important matters prevented him leaving Yarrabah. The maverick missionary was duly chastised but to no avail. Gribble spent the next three months at Bogimbah introducing his system of operation. Not long after Gribble arrived at Fraser Island, details about Harold Meston’s brutal regime started to leak to the public: beatings, intimidation, terrified inmates tied-up and abandoned overnight in the graveyard, women and girls coerced into sex, violent summary punishments. Using Yarrabah as his model, Gribble quickly put his imprimatur on the settlement at Bogimbah. The children were separated from their parents and assigned to dormitories, a school was established, a surpliced choir and services were instituted, bells and an hourly timetable decreed the day. Male residents worked clearing and building while the women were kept busy with domestic chores. Gambling and ‘loafing’ were outlawed. Ignoring the tribal diversity among the inmates, an Aboriginal King was appointed. Even Yarrabah’s staple fare of maize-meal porridge was duplicated.


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Fraser Island became another marshalling point for the Gribble family. A month after he arrived at Bogimbah, Gribble again incurred the Church’s wrath by appointing his mother, Mary Ann, Matron at Fraser Island without consulting the Bishop of Brisbane or the ABM in Sydney. He later appointed his sister Ethel as schoolteacher and his loyal friend and colleague from Yarrabah, William Reeves, took charge for six months. Gribble kept an eye on things from Yarrabah and visited annually, but other members of his family were on hand to see that his methods were followed loyally. Gribble circulated eloquent, glowing accounts of Bogimbah’s progress under Church control. It was in ‘marked contrast’ to its formerly ‘pitiable condition’, discipline and order had been restored, material development was advancing, and disease had been eliminated.19 In contrast, the Aboriginal inmates described the mission as a prison. Food was chronically short, officials complained that the children were half-starving and that the place was riddled with tribal tension and conflict: ‘There are representatives of many tribes . . . they are very jealous of one another, and if one member is offended will bring up all their side to take their part, and if not prevented will have a fight’.20 Tuberculosis, chest complaints and opium addiction raged and slowly decimated the population. Ankylostomiasis was rampant. This potentially fatal infestation of intestinal hookworm was the result of poor diet and inadequate sanitation. Victims experienced insatiable cravings to eat clay, ashes and charcoal. The only known cure was a generous diet of milk and vegetables but neither was abundant on Fraser Island and sufferers inevitably succumbed to anaemia and died. The mission developed such an appalling reputation that Aboriginals were terrified to be sent there. More than 70 of the inmates absconded and those who were re-captured begged not to be sent back. Archibald Meston smouldered. Fraser Island was his baby and his resentment of Gribble’s intrusion gnawed and festered, making him sour, jealous and vindictive. He dismissed Gribble’s flattering accounts of the settlement’s progress under Church


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control and the two men became embroiled in an ugly public brawl in the press over who was responsible for the greatest number of deaths among the ill-fated inmates. Meston claimed that as many as 78 Aboriginals died during Gribble’s four years as Warden, while Gribble countered that there were more than 70 graves in Bogimbah’s two cemeteries when the Church took over and many more beyond that he did not bother to count. Meston’s feelings of betrayal deepened in 1903 with the creation of the new post of Chief Protector of Aborigines. The man put in charge of Queensland’s Aboriginals was his long-standing rival, Dr Roth, and Meston was made redundant: ‘I am a year senior to Roth. All practical work has been done by me. He does nothing but write reports and advertise himself to make the Minister believe he is a marvellous man’.21 At some point during those years, Gribble realised that all was not going as planned on Fraser Island. The formula that won him accolades at Yarrabah went strangely awry on the sandy, southern island. This inexplicable fact did not reduce his faith in his methods and he ignored advice to grow vegetables to improve the diet, health and death rate of inmates. Nevertheless, Gribble was unsettled enough to seek the counsel of his friend and ally, Dr Roth. They agreed that Bogimbah was in a sorry state when the Church took over: a nearby swamp exacerbated illness; a succession of Superintendents made for ineffective administration; and Gribble, as absentee Warden, was unable to provide the personal supervision the place needed to succeed. The sensible solution, they decided, was to close the mission and transfer it to Yarrabah. In August 1904, the buildings on Fraser Island were dismantled and transported north to Yarrabah along with 117 inmates. The remaining residents were sent to the government’s Durundur Reserve, near Caboolture. With this act, Gribble and Roth’s vision of making Yarrabah the centre for Queensland’s Indigenous peoples came one step closer to being realised. Gribble’s Fraser Island years were interrupted by three exhilarating adventures. In 1902, Gilbert White, first Bishop of the


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recently created Diocese of Carpentaria, decided a mission was needed at Mitchell River on the Gulf of Carpentaria. Surveying the pool of potential candidates, White declared that Gribble’s experience as a pioneering missionary and successes at Yarrabah made him the perfect choice to lead the expeditions to establish the mission. The trek through unexplored territory to the Gulf was exactly the type of project Gribble relished: physically exhausting, potentially dangerous, liberating and thrilling. He was always happiest leading the spartan life of a bushman when he could relive his romanticised memories of a carefree boyhood at Warangesda and an unfettered existence as a drover. In the silence and isolation of the bush it was easy to centre his energies on the elemental engagement with nature and to avoid the more difficult and complex task of interacting with others that life in the wider world demanded. His first trek north was in 1902. Anticipating a hostile reception from the local people, he took two white policemen and five Native Police for protection. On later trips, in 1904 and 1905, his companions included Aboriginal co-workers and the future staff of the mission. The Mitchell River expeditions reawakened his desire to record his life’s story. He had temporarily set this task aside but a real-life adventure with all the elements of a dramatic, gripping yarn re-ignited his enthusiasm. Even before he set out, vivid images were forming: defiant victories over a primordial world, courageous subjugation of uncivilised savages, benevolent bestowal of civilisation and Christianity, mixed with a generous dose of nationalistic fervour. He reported the Mitchell River expeditions in Church journals and they take pride of place in several of his memoirs, especially his first autobiography, tellingly entitled Life and Experiences of an Australian and serialised in the Gosford Times some years later. The first expedition, he wrote, was through country ‘teeming with blacks’ who spoke ‘no English’. According to Gribble’s journal, however, the party did not encounter any Aboriginals on its trek north, although he later claimed they were attacked twice and constantly threatened by


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the ‘stealthy approach of . . . savages [and] numerous foes’.22 When they arrived at Mitchell River, Gribble reported, he immediately established control over the people and more than 130 sat in a circle and listened attentively while he preached. On the second expedition in 1904, he took two Mitchell River Aboriginals who had been living at Yarrabah and baptised them among their own people: The wild blacks, over two hundred in number, stood on the bank of the lagoon . . . We Christians, seven in number, four whites and three blacks stood near the water. I entered the stream and the two candidates came from their tribe to me in the middle of the water, where I baptised them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Bendigo took the name of Peter and Grady the name of John, the first two baptised on the new mission.23

In his more modest moments, Gribble admitted that his success at Mitchell River hinged on the Aboriginal members of the expeditions whose presence disarmed the local people. Nevertheless, he reported that by his final visit, the people were openly affectionate. They had prepared the mission site in expectation of his return, willingly carted the missionaries’ supplies and had carefully guarded a gold cross that Gribble lost during an earlier trip. Bishop White was a member of the 1905 expedition and was less certain of the people’s affection. He found them afraid and suspicious. For Gribble, the Fraser Island and Mitchell River interludes were a welcome respite from less easily resolved troubles closer to home. His spats with Cairns continued and rankled, and the first disquieting rifts with Amelia were becoming all too apparent. At best, they interacted with courteous civility. At worst, they argued. The clashes came more frequently—generally over minor domestic irritations of little consequence and no lasting importance—but the rows were more acrimonious, wounding and less easily repaired. They were both ferociously stubborn, neither would admit fault, and they were both sulkers. It was a deadly formula for discord. The growing acrimony between the couple so worried


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Amelia’s brother that he wrote to the ABM Executive complaining of Gribble’s conduct towards his wife. The couple never openly discussed this withering of their tenderness and intimacy. To do so would mean acknowledging the growing distance between them and that their dream of a life of affectionate companionship was crumbling, but their respective orbits now intersected so irregularly that each was barely a shadow in the life of the other. It was simple for Gribble to fill the swelling emotional void and to retreat from the brutal reality that his marriage endured on a flimsy, brittle footing of shared history and marital duty. Fresh adventures, new schemes and the increasing number of people in his care kept him busy, absorbed and distracted. It was harder for Amelia. She had felt like something of an interloper when she was newly married and arrived at the family fiefdom. Keen to forge the kind of supportive partnership his parents shared, Gribble latched on to the idea that Amelia would have a freer rein if he relocated his mother and sister to Fraser Island. It did not help. Missionary life did not live up to Amelia’s hopes and no matter how much Yarrabah inched towards Gribble’s notion of an ideal, civilised world, the mean austerity of the mission was a far cry from the generous and comfortable refinement she had left behind in Cairns. Her three young boys were also a handful. Their capacity for childish mischief was boundless, their energy was exhausting and she found it almost impossible to imbue them with any comprehension of the proprieties and obligations of wider society in a world of dark skins and foreign manners. As a father, Gribble was playful, benevolent and stern if necessary but he relegated the task of rearing his sons to Amelia. Besides, he was often lured away and other distractions consumed his time and attention when he was at home. He had taken it upon himself to oversee the minutiae of all that happened at Yarrabah and he was forever occupied mediating domestic disputes, resolving grievances, chastising recalcitrant residents and struggling to put Yarrabah on a viable economic footing. The work sapped his physical and emotional resources. He did not


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have enough energy or will left to give Amelia the devotion and attention she craved or to compensate for the loneliness and isolation that she felt. At regular intervals Amelia retreated to the sanctuary and cultural familiarity of the Wriede family home in Cairns. Any excuse was enough to justify a trip: some minor illness, Gribble’s absence on another adventure, an inconsequential family celebration. These sojourns became increasingly more frequent and longer lasting. In the end, staying at Yarrabah seemed a pointless façade. What Gribble found unnerving about this unsettled state of affairs was its untidiness, and he sought comfort by burying himself in the job of creating order, predictability and structure at Yarrabah. He divided the mission into neat administrative units: work teams, boat crews, Ambulance Brigade, Boy Scouts, Girls Sewing Guild, and so on. Each group had a smart, distinctive uniform and a Monitor, appointed by Gribble as a reward for good behaviour, who completed a detailed, weekly questionnaire on the performance of each of the charges in their group. The 27 closely typed pages of the Yarrabah Rule Book provided detailed regulations for every contingency: work, leisure, schooling, church attendance, marriage, dress, baking bread, writing on walls and even bathing. No detail was too petty to be ignored. The ‘Rules for Married People’, for instance, specified that: 11. Tables be clean for every meal. 12. Basins, mugs, spoons, dishes to be cleaned at once after every meal. 13. Mugs are to be kept in the proper place. 14. Copper oven and fire places to be kept clean. 15. Tub for bread [to be kept] well clean. 16. Bread to be set each evening. 17. Flowers to be kept on meal table. 18. Table to be properly laid for meals. 19. Bread to be got from the store before bell rings. 10. No boys allowed in kitchen unless at work.


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Wharf Flag Staff Boat Shed

MISSION

Wet Shed

St Alban's Church

BAY

B e a c h Rain Gauge

School Hall Infant School Shed

Steps

Gas Works

Mission House

Kitchen

Boys' Dormitory Water Hole

M Tap

Hospital Steps

Bath Room

W.C.

Fire Station

Cottage Girls' Dormitory

M Creek 0

40

Gas line Yards Water main Telephone line Married People's Houses

Engine Shed PA

CRE

EK

Store

Kitchen

Store

W.C.

Fowl House

Washing Shed

ROAD

Pigsty

Horse Paddock

M

Road

M

KAR

Store

M

Fence

King's House

M

M

M

M

M

M

M

M

To Plantation & Reeves Creek

M

M

M

M

Yarrabah Mission

The secular and spiritual merged in the close confines of Trinity Bay. Gribble’s soul was Australian to the core but he was a child reared in the evangelism of British imperialism and his devotion to the Empire was passionate and unwavering. This cultural farrago bred a special brand of muscular Christianity: his favourite text was ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and one of the first hymns he taught mission residents was ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Saluting missionaries and mission officers was mandatory for mission residents and non-compliance meant pack-drill or sentry duty. Any imperial event was celebrated with pomp, ceremony and a service. When Queen Victoria died: The bell tolled, the rifle corps of twenty-five men and lads fell in and marched with reversed rifles to the Church . . . stacked their arms outside [then] . . . the choir and missionaries entered. Part of the burial service was read, the hymn ‘O God our help in ages past’ was sung. [Gribble] gave a short address taking for the text ‘A Good


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A T E R R I B LY W I L D M A N Name’ (Proverbs xxii, I). The people all listened attentively while [Gribble] spoke of the late, good Queen, her determination ‘I will be good’, her long and good life.24

Gribble jumped at any chance to strengthen imperial connections and regarded the institution of a branch of the Church Lads Brigade (CLB) in 1904 as one of his special achievements. The CLB was a kind of Boy Scouts with an Anglican twist that married religion and militarism with the middleclass values of discipline, sobriety, thrift, self-help, punctuality and obedience. To confirm the imperial connection, and by pulling a few strings, Gribble got the Yarrabah CLB affiliated with its counterpart in London. Gribble actively campaigned to increase Yarrabah’s population but this was a double-edged sword because the incessant arrival of new inmates constantly thwarted his dream of a well-regulated, predictable world. Nevertheless, Yarrabah’s numbers almost tripled between 1900 and 1905, from 122 to 312. They came from more than 57 districts and spoke more than 100 dialects. The new arrivals created new problems. May Smith was about seven when she stepped off the Rio Logue, with the rest of its human cargo from Fraser Island, onto a strange, unfamiliar and frightening shore. She remembered that the old Kongkandji, with their traditional dress, corroborees and tribal fights, terrified the acculturated new arrivals from the south. Virtually no preparation had been made for the arrival of the Fraser Islanders. They lived in tents and their staple fare was ‘porridge for every meal. In the morning, sometimes, they cooked it very careless, you know. They don’t cover the thing properly and the rats get all into that porridge’.25 Hunger inspired one desperate group of inmates to flee to Cairns where they formally registered their complaints about the mission’s food with the Police Magistrate and the editor of the Cairns Morning Post. Gribble’s defence that he could not ‘perform miracles and feed the black multitude on three loaves and three small fishes’ did not fill stomachs or quieten discontent.26 At Gribble’s behest Dr Roth interceded and dismissed the inmates’


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protest but the mission’s inadequate diet caused an outbreak of the tragic clay-eating disease, ankylostomiasis, that claimed the lives of at least four inmates. Gribble struggled to preserve the illusion of an idyllic community but discontent and wilful defiance festered among the Fraser Islanders and spread to the other inmates. The undercurrents of discord tormented Gribble. He was baffled by the inmates’ disinterest and ingratitude in the world he had created. Church services became an excuse for lecturing the congregation against running away, reading the mission rules and ‘long talks about disrespect. Some of the chief men of the mission having been rather cheeky and rude in their manner towards their missionaries’.27 Almost every day the Matron of the girls’ dormitory complained of rudeness, insubordination and defiance by the Aboriginal women. On occasions, albeit rarely, Gribble and his staff were physically attacked. Despite his efforts, the number of runaways increased. Some fled as soon they arrived. Many refused to return when captured. Gribble’s dark moods visited more often in the difficult months after the Fraser Islanders arrived and the disconcertingly familiar and menacing depression returned again in intermittent doses of varying intensity. During these drawn-out episodes of melancholy, Gribble could feel his dream of utopia slipping away and he was overcome by a profoundly painful sense of impotence that he could not shake off. The slow disintegration of his relationship with Amelia merely compounded the feeling that he was isolated, abandoned and misunderstood by a hostile world. On the wall of his study hung two leather straps. The Aboriginal inmates called them ‘Yellow Belly’ and ‘Black Tom’. As the frustration, disillusionment and loneliness got the better of him, he used the straps more often on adults and children alike. He suffered deeply during these sorry bouts of self-loathing and unforgiving contempt for mankind, but the mission staff bore the brunt of his moods. His outbursts were ruthless and he viciously accused his staff of being ‘numbskulls’ who did not treat him with


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‘proper respect’ or were only interested in using Yarrabah as a ‘stepping-stone’ towards Holy Orders.28 Meanwhile, ill-health and the tropics had taken its toll on Bishop Christopher Barlow. In 1902 he resigned the bishopric of north Queensland to accept the more climatically agreeable See of Goulburn. His replacement, the English-born George Frodsham, was enthroned as Bishop in September 1902 and soon earned a reputation as an energetic supporter of missionary work and evangelism among Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islanders, Polynesians, Japanese and Chinese of north Queensland. His earliest dealings with Yarrabah, the largest mission in his diocese, were less auspicious. Frodsham had not even celebrated his second anniversary as bishop when the staff at Yarrabah made a formal complaint about their Superintendent’s autocratic and violent behaviour. Gribble blamed the Fraser Islanders, alleging that they were rebellious, incorrigible and disruptive. Tribal differences divided them down south but resentment of their transportation united them in the north. In 1905, more than fifteen disgruntled transportees fled and managed to evade recapture. In desperation, Gribble asked the police and Bishop Frodsham to threaten runaways with gaol and begged Roth to approve the use of greater force to punish recalcitrant inmates. As he felt his authority fade and his control languish, Gribble converted Fitzroy Island into a penal colony. The island was a short boat trip across Trinity Bay from Cape Grafton. In years past it was a haven for explorers, traders and beche de mer fishermen because of its sheltered inlets, deep anchorage and ready supply of fresh water, but between 1905 and 1907, Gribble banished about 30 inmates to Fitzroy Island. The ringleaders from Fraser Island were the first to be incarcerated but there were also drunkards, opium addicts, criminals, prostitutes, the diseased, idle and mutinous. Apparently some sins were beyond redemption. The increased population and undercurrents of sedition made Gribble vigilant and anxious that unchecked, petty misdemeanours might foment a climate of mutinous rebellion. To cover any


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contingency, he put in place a collection of punishments: imprisonment, expulsion from positions of responsibility, public humiliation, standing barefoot on the tin roof of the bakery all day. Thieves who pilfered food had half their head shaved and runaways from the girls’ dormitory had ‘their head cut baldy’ or were forced to dress in hessian bags. The monthly mission newspaper, the Yarrabah Times (later the Aboriginal News), published the names and crimes of delinquents: ‘Porridge spoilt twice, once by Annie and once by Rosie Nothadge . . . once Jessie used bad language’.29 The brew of discipline and dogma blurred the divide between the secular and the spiritual. Services began and ended each day, attendance was compulsory, recalcitrant residents were chained during services, late arrivals were punished and absentees were deprived of rations until their non-appearance was explained satisfactorily. Only the baptised could vote for members of the Mission Court and Government and these elected officials had to be confirmed male communicants and ‘true xtians [sic] who really believe that the mission is the only place where they can be truly happy’.30 Meanwhile, Yarrabah’s debts mounted and donations dwindled. At the behest of the ABM, Gribble wrote a series of articles to prod the generosity of the faithful. His chronicles were in the tradition of tales from the missionary field: full of prepubescent brides; mysterious customs; and humorous anecdotes about rain-doctors and medicine men. The response was indifferent. The faithful found missions in China, India and Africa more alluring. Meanwhile, Yarrabah’s physical development continued at a frenetic pace. A hospital, school, extensions to the girls’ dormitory appeared; gas lighting and telephones were connected to the main buildings; more out-stations were established; and a new cutter, the Hepzibah, was purchased for beche de mer fishing. The AMB nagged Gribble to be judicious with funds but he ignored the cautions. The mission’s debt skyrocketed. Ever since he arrived, Gribble had raved about Yarrabah’s


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potential to be self-supporting and financially independent. He struggled desperately to live up to his promises and planted coffee, Indian rubber and cocoa but these crops took years to return a profit, and cash-crops of rice, bananas and pawpaws did not break even. New ventures were soon neglected in favour of more enticing schemes. When Gribble concocted a plan to transform Yarrabah’s plantations into grasslands for cattle, the Archbishop curtly reminded him that considerable money had already been spent converting the original grasslands into plantations. By 1904, the ABM decided it could not afford to keep Yarrabah and asked the Queensland government to take over all secular aspects of the mission. No other mission, the government responded, was better able to be self-supporting if managed effectively. It was not interested. In October 1905, while Yarrabah’s financial difficulties smouldered, Gribble signed a deal with the Queensland government to use nearby Green Island as a fishing base for the mission. The addition of this jewel to Yarrabah’s crown triggered an orgy of opposition in Cairns. The townsfolk convened a noisy protest meeting and bombarded the Queensland Premier with telegrams accusing Gribble of land grabbing. Gribble was so unnerved by the protest that he withdrew from the agreement. The government pulled out the next day. Green Island was lost but Gribble snared the lease over nearby Fitzroy Island and, in August 1907, Fitzroy and Rocky islands were formally added to the Cape Grafton Reserve. The Cairns Council, Ratepayers Association, and Chamber of Commerce protested but to no avail. They had been outmanoeuvred. After each tussle for territory, Gribble declared a truce with the townsfolk of Cairns. Mission produce was exhibited at the annual Agricultural and Industrial Society Show, the Yarrabah band gave public performances, groups were invited to inspect the mission and Gribble fed the Morning Post anecdotes about Yarrabah and copies of Aboriginal News. Goodwill blossomed, but it only lasted until the next battle.


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Dr Roth lent his support to Gribble’s push to win control of Fitzroy Island but the Chief Protector had his own problems. Roth’s efforts to control the exploitation of Queensland’s Indigenous workers brought him into constant conflict with local vested interests and a concerted campaign was launched to remove him from his position as Chief Protector of Aborigines. The charge was led by the pompous, vexatious John Hamilton, Member of the Legislative Assembly for Cooktown. In 1902, Hamilton used parliamentary privilege to accuse Roth of neglecting his duties and jeopardising government revenue by tightening controls on the employment of Indigenous workers. When the allegation was dismissed, Hamilton changed tack and accused Roth of taking grossly indecent photographs of Aboriginals for immoral purposes. The pictures were old and scientific in purpose—they first appeared in Roth’s 1897 Ethnological Studies—and the accusation got short-shift, but the groundswell of malicious defamation did not abate. In 1905, the townsfolk of Cooktown held a protest meeting that resulted in a petition accusing Roth of obstructing officials and neglecting to provide medical treatment for Aboriginals. A formal inquiry exonerated Roth but the following year Joe Lesina, Member of the Legislative Assembly for Clermont, led a vicious campaign claiming the Chief Protector sold native specimens and curios belonging to the Queensland government to a Sydney museum. The Opposition used its numbers in the Queensland Legislative Council to instigate an investigation and Roth was summoned before the Bar of the Council to explain. In the end it was all too much. Ground down and worn out, the Chief Protector resigned, packed his bags and left Australia in July 1906. He spent his remaining years as a magistrate and district commissioner in British Guiana (Guyana) and was the curator and government archivist of Georgetown after he retired in 1928. He died on 5 April 1933. Roth performed one final service for his friend Gribble before he left the country. In 1904, at the request of the Western Australian government, Roth led a Royal Commission into the


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treatment of Western Australia’s Aborigines. Gribble had briefed him well during those long conferences under the mango trees at Yarrabah and his findings confirmed JB’s allegations twenty years earlier. Roth did not wait to submit his report before he cabled Gribble: ‘If I do nothing, will vindicate your father. Things as bad if not worse than in his time’.31 Roth’s replacement as Chief Protector of Aborigines was Richard Howard. Known as ‘Long Dick’ on account of his height, Howard was a vocal critic of Gribble’s style of management at Yarrabah and of Roth’s policies for the segregation and protection of Aboriginals. The Aboriginal News of April 1905 summed up Gribble’s opinion of the new Chief Protector: ‘We do not think the change will be in the best interests of the blacks’. By 1905, the pressure on Gribble and Yarrabah was mounting. He accelerated the mission’s building program to accommodate the Fraser Islanders but he did so in defiance of directives to exercise economy and quickly accumulated unauthorised debts of nearly £700 to shopkeepers in Cairns. There were already rumblings in the ABM’s Sydney offices that Gribble had to go when a violent cyclone hit Yarrabah on Australia Day 1906. In a few hours the work, sacrifices, struggles and achievements of thirteen years were destroyed. The schools, church, hospital, dormitories and storerooms were completely wrecked. Only one building remained intact. The plantations and farms were transformed into a wasteland of debris. Everything was lost. The devastation was Gribble’s salvation. There were 360 people without housing, food, sanitation or fresh water; the makeshift hospital was overflowing; and an epidemic of ankylostomiasis had broken out. As he immersed himself in caring for others, Gribble’s preoccupation with his own problems eased. Each night he collapsed into bed exhausted, drained and more comfortable with his lot. Sweat was his curative. There was no time for self-absorption. Anglicans responded generously to the tragedy and, in just five months, they donated the £2000 needed to rebuild. The ABM


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dispatched its Secretary, the Reverend John Dixon, to keep a check on Gribble’s spending but Gribble had nearly completed the frenetic task of rebuilding by the time Dixon arrived at Yarrabah in July 1906. The Secretary could not help but be impressed with Gribble’s abilities and with the order, discipline and obedience of the mission’s inmates. It seemed that stability had returned to Gribble’s world.


4

H ORSE - THIEVES AND HARLOTS

T

he young Aboriginal girls, with their long legs and luminous, ebony skin, were a disconcerting distraction for the missionaries at Yarrabah. Their frank pleasure in the sensual firmness of their budding womanhood and their flirtatious giggling and coy whispering were magnetically provocative. As previous generations had always done, they affectionately caressed and fondled each other as they played. To the missionaries, such simple, casual violations of sacrosanct western taboos were erotic and arousing. Tempting promises of sinful gratification seemed to be buried in the girls’ dark, eager eyes and their relaxed, uninhibited ways. On the missionary frontier, white desire and slippery notions of black lust saturated and confounded the colonial psyche. It was alleged that Aboriginals had no idea of virtue, morality or chastity. The women were considered whores: ‘the tempters not the tempted’. The men were alleged to be indolent, insatiable lechers who mistreated their women and threatened the safety and virtue of white wives and mothers.1 The Australasian Anthropological Journal of 1897 told its readers that sexual exploitation was rife among Aboriginals and from birth to burial Aboriginal women were: treated as inferiors, and as merely the convenient drudges, the slaves of passion, the beasts of burden, and the bearers of children, and 74


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they have no personal rights nor any voice in their own disposal, but are simply chattels and property of the father, brothers, husbands or any other of the males.

The fragmentary ethnographic evidence tells a different story. The Aboriginal people around Cairns had a strict code of morality and virtue. Licentiousness was contained by the threat of being labelled chiabai or tarpar (prostitute or slut). Although sexual freedom before marriage was sanctioned, it was subject to strict controls defined by kinship, betrothal obligations and inter-tribal law. Wife-lending was only permitted within clearly defined constraints and infidelity was not tolerated. Violations of these basic tribal precepts could be punished by public ridicule, maiming and, in exceptional cases, death. Despite these facts, the sensual nature of man prevailed on the frontier. Here temptation and race intertwined, and religious repression and social convention held no sway. Rape and brutality was rife, food and sexual favours were shared, ‘combos’ and concubines found mutual solace, and the burgeoning number of part-Aboriginal children in the camps around the towns was undeniable proof of the gulf between moral rhetoric and sexual practice in north Queensland at the beginning of the twentieth century. There was little compassion among white Australians for the offspring of interracial unions. In mid-1910, the Townsville Daily Bulletin was blunt. Sexual intercourse between black and white produced nothing but ‘horse-thieves and harlots’. The Cairns Police Magistrate, P.G. Grant, voiced an opinion that cut across all strata of white society when he wrote that the: co-mingling of the races tends to lower the white, without elevating the black, while their offspring would possess the physical vitality of neither and would inherit the vices of both, but not the virtues of either.2

Gribble’s unconditional support for the official moral canons of Christianity and colonial society was a legacy of his puritan


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upbringing. He subscribed unquestioningly to the belief that mankind was innately licentious and sinful, and that moral virtue was the prerequisite for spiritual salvation and a place in God’s eternal heavenly kingdom. For Gribble, Aboriginal cultural practices like infant betrothal, pre-pubescent marriage and wife exchange were irrefutable evidence of moral and social depravity. As a humanitarian and priest, Gribble reasoned, it was his duty to transform his dark-skinned heathen charges into models of Christian virtue and moral propriety by example and decree. Religion and repression proved inadequate antidotes for desire. Yarrabah’s first casualty was Gribble’s enigmatic assistant, Mr Pearson. The particulars of Pearson’s origins have been lost in time but the known facts are that this tall, young man with the opulent moustache had only been at Yarrabah a few months before Gribble learned he had ‘fallen into sin’. He insisted on Pearson’s immediate resignation: ‘it is a most serious affair’.3 The ABM Executive accepted Pearson’s withdrawal without question or discussion, promptly and permanently severing all connection with its weak-willed worker. The second transgression savaged Gribble’s moral sensibilities more cruelly. Work was scarce as Australia recovered from the effects of the 1890s depression and Gribble’s younger brother was out of work. JB and Mary Ann had duly christened their third son John Benjamin Herbert when he was born in Shepparton in September 1874, but everyone blithely ignored this fact and he was known simply as Bert. The unemployed Bert joined the Gribble clan at Yarrabah in mid-1896 but only stayed for eleven months before quitting the mission in July 1897. His abrupt departure was caused by the discovery that Jinny Katchewan, the 15-year-old Kongkandji wife of Gribble’s Aboriginal assistant, Pompo, was four months pregnant with his child. Their daughter, Susie, was born on 3 January 1898. Jinny could barely speak English—even as an old lady after almost a lifetime on the mission—and it is doubtful that Bert knew more than a smattering of ‘language’ since Gribble insisted on English in the mission. The story handed down through


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the generations at Yarrabah was that lust filled the conversational void: Jinny was raped by the priest’s brother. Rather than heightening Gribble’s sensitivity to the frailties of human nature, these two episodes confirmed his opinion that man was inherently lascivious and steeled his resolve to see Christian morality and virtue reign supreme in his domain. The result was a long catalogue of rules to cleanse Yarrabah of lust and licentiousness. Boys and girls were segregated in separate playgrounds and attended school at different times; adults were separated during work, holiday outings and Church services; and the dispensary distributed medicine to men and women at different times. Married women were barred from moving around the mission by themselves, talking to male visitors or being outside their homes after dark. When their husbands were away, wives had to move into the girls’ dormitory to ‘prevent scandal’.4 The dormitory was surrounded with wire fencing and the doors were locked from 6 pm to 6 am, but the bravest girls risked a caning by breaking the netting between the ceiling and wall and escaping for clandestine midnight trysts with beaus. The more timid eagerly awaited church services as a chance to exchange love letters and make hopeful eyes at a potential suitor. Gribble kept a register of betrothed couples on the desk in his study. Every liaison required his personal consent and the names of each couple were carefully checked off when they met on Sunday afternoons under the watchful eye of the dormitory Matron who made sure there was no kissing or touching. Marriage was Gribble’s cure for carnal desire. It was, inmates reputedly told Dr Roth, ‘the guaranteed way of salvation’.5 Weddings meant a feast and public holiday, group marriages were commonplace and serial monogamy was de rigeur. After four new arrivals fled Yarrabah to rejoin their wives, Gribble complained to Roth: ‘if their women were sent . . . such people . . . would far more readily settle down’.6 Marriage meant emancipation from the dormitory but hopeful couples had to be baptised, promise to settle permanently at Yarrabah and prove that they were committed community citizens:


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A T E R R I B LY W I L D M A N Persons wishing to Marry and having obtained the consent of the Head of the Mission must . . . produce a written report as to conduct and character from the persons under whom they have lived and worked for the past three months. The court will also decide whether the persons have been doing a fair share in the daily work of the Mission.7

In his eagerness to encourage matrimony, Gribble let other principles slide. It was an unspoken rule that Aboriginal men had to marry a part-Aboriginal woman, and widows and widowers were remarried with almost indecent haste. Gribble knew any union was supposed to accord with tribal kinship rules: Among the first bush natives who came to Yarrabah in December, 1892, were a young man and woman who kept quite apart from the others, in fact it was very evident that they were ostracised by all others. I enquired about them and received the reply that they were ‘no good’ because the woman had married her brother. I at once understood that it was a case of marriage within prohibited degrees. They were really not blood relations. The man whom the woman should have married was away on a beche-de-mer lugger . . . [Two years later the woman was waylaid, her throat cut and thereby] paid for breaking tribal law.8

He assured readers of Missionary Notes that all mission marriages followed tribal Law but he confessed, as he scribbled in his journal during the solitude and silence of the night, that he often broke this fundamental rule. He married Henry Cheemo and Tooey in defiance of kinship laws and the local men attacked Henry for violating tribal precepts. Gribble refused to let Gomerie marry his promised bride, Jinny, because she was barely twelve and Gomerie already had a wife. Yet, within the year, Gribble married Jinny to his assistant, Pompo Katchewan. On the eve of the wedding of George Christian, who appeared in the early photograph with Menmuny, Gribble mused that the marriage would: be an interesting one, for, according to native custom, the girl has been promised from infancy to a native in another tribe, whom she has never seen and with whom she does not wish to go.9


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In spite of his rules and regulations, passion proved irrepressible. Gribble was constantly tormented by the problem of how to control the weak-willed and defiant who surrendered to carnal desire and thwarted his moral vision. As his frustration grew he concocted stricter rules and harsher punishments to stop illicit intercourse. Any unmarried girl who fell pregnant was told to marry quickly, but the wedding was a dismal, sombre affair: Any girl falling into disgrace necessitating marriage hurriedly [sic], no bridesmaids, best man, wedding dress, decorations or cake allowed at the wedding. The ceremony to be performed privately in the church in the presence of the Mission Staff only.10

If the hapless girl could not snare a spouse, she was banished to Rocky Island to await the birth of her child where her crime could not contaminate the rest of the community. The craggy outcrop on the mainland adjacent to Rocky Island became known as Mothers’ Point, for this was the spot where family and friends gathered to wave to the island’s young, expectant mothers. In 1904, Gribble submitted his annual report to the Chief Protector of Aborigines and bluntly informed Dr Roth that 38 marriages had been performed at Yarrabah since the mission was established. Of this group, Gribble reported, half the women ‘had borne illegitimate children or . . . led immoral lives previous to their advent to the mission [and] have, with one exception, not been blessed with a single infant since’. In contrast, those ‘who had been on the settlement for years, and who had led decent lives, have borne forty-nine children between them’.11 His message was clear, but Gribble’s repressive taboos sat uncomfortably alongside the relaxed pleasure that the Aboriginal inmates took in sensual desire and carnal gratification. Christianity’s notion of assigning shame to out-of-wedlock births was a peculiar concept for the people at Yarrabah where the birth of any child was a cause for celebration and a conduit between the physical present and the spiritual world of the Dreaming. According to tradition, conception occurred when a child was brought to


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a woman by a Kope (a species of pigeon) during a dream, and fatherhood was a state bestowed on a man when marriage made him the father of the mother’s children. Biology did not confer parenthood. It was a continuation of the Dreaming and an expression of established kinship obligations and responsibilities. It was difficult for the people of Yarrabah to adjust to Gribble’s view of the world. As the spring of 1904 approached, Gribble was busy preparing for his second expedition to the Mitchell River. Amelia chose this time to announce that she wanted to take a house in Cairns. Leaving aside her deepening distaste for mission life, Amelia insisted that Cairns would be more comfortable and companionable while Gribble was away at the Mitchell River. Her logic was uncontestable. When Gribble returned from the Mitchell River two months later, however, he found Amelia contentedly settled in town and armed with a bevy of reasons for staying put: the social and educational welfare of her three boys; nearness to her family; and access to doctors and medical advice. Amelia was as strong as a horse but she had a pathological fear of illness and was constantly running to doctors with some imagined affliction. The heart of the problem was that she did not like mission life. She found it primitive, isolated and lonely. The crumbling relationship with her husband merely intensified the desire to extricate herself from this unpleasant world, and she could not be persuaded to change her mind. In mid-1905, Amelia and the boys went to Sydney. By the time they returned in October 1906, Amelia had resolved her future and presented Gribble with an ultimatum: mission or marriage. Gribble was shocked and distressed but, in his mind, there was no choice: his work was a divine Christian duty and a sacred legacy bestowed by his father. Besides, he felt as much an outsider and misfit in white society as Amelia felt on the mission. The racial divide had split their respective worlds into two physically and spiritually unconnected spheres. There was no meeting point. Over the next year any lingering intimacy between them slowly


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withered and died. For more than three months Gribble did not even bother to visit Cairns to see his wife or sons. The winter of 1907 began with Amelia packing her belongings and her boys and moving to Brisbane. This step marked the couple’s formal estrangement (notwithstanding two unsuccessful attempts at reconciliation in 1910–13 and 1928–29). As was customary and appropriate for the times, there was no unseemly divorce or public announcement. They sealed an unspoken pact to persist with the pretence of a harmonious marriage and the Church issued the customary explanation that Mrs Gribble’s health necessitated her residence elsewhere. Gribble kept a few shillings of his salary for himself and the modest but comfortable remainder was directed to Amelia and the boys. Despite all the portents, the end hit Gribble hard when it came. He had modelled his life on the image of the committed patriarch courageously protecting Aboriginals with a loyal wife and helper by his side. Amelia sabotaged this dream. Gribble was too shattered to reflect on his role in the disintegration of their union and Amelia’s departure. Even twenty years later he lamented being ‘denied . . . the joy . . . of a good wife [who] will . . . stick [by me] in the work’.12 Amelia’s exit showed that his rigid commitment to the official moral code could not satisfy his dreams or bring him contentment, and his sham marriage made a mockery of the demigods of matrimony and home he had thrust upon Yarrabah’s inmates. Feeling cheated and abandoned, Gribble was overtaken by depression. Plummeting into a barren abyss of morose, black hopelessness, he withdrew into a sullen, pensive haze. His faith faltered and moral questions exhausted his thoughts. He became silent, sulky and withdrawn. As his mental state deteriorated, his physical health declined. Yet again he fell prey to vague, mysterious illnesses that grew in severity and frequency as his moral crisis intensified and his depression deepened. In August 1907, three months after Amelia left, Missionary Notes remarked that Gribble had cut virtually all communication with the outside world and the Morning Post reported that he was so ill that he was in ‘great


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danger of . . . permanently breaking down unless he [left] for a long rest’.13 Gribble turned to his mother and sisters at Yarrabah for support. Of all his family, his sister Ethel seemed the least likely to menace his soul. Ethel was in her mid-twenties and nudging spinsterhood but she still had a neat figure and slim waist. She was lucky enough to have Mary Ann’s fine, milky complexion but to have escaped her mother’s plump proportions. Some might have described her as pretty, but she inherited her mother’s weak eyes and had to wear thick, wire-rimmed spectacles. Even then, her eyes refused to focus properly and she could not shake off the disarming habit of seeming to look at you from two directions at once. In the full-length, high-necked dresses of the day with her dark hair in a tight knot above her neck, Ethel was the picture of a sedate, homely missionary lady. Despite her appropriate looks, Ethel was afflicted with the same headstrong streak of independence that cursed and blessed all the Gribbles. Ethel joined the family assembly at Yarrabah after a brief stint as a governess at Mount Gympie before her brother transferred her to Fraser Island to keep their mother company and to teach in the mission school. It was here that she met and fell in love with an Aboriginal man called Fred Wondunna. Fred was eight years younger than Ethel, dark, taciturn and handsome. Ethel’s family was horrified. As soon as Gribble heard about the liaison, he organised his sister’s prompt return to Yarrabah. Ten days later he announced that she would marry his close friend and co-worker—the quiet, unassuming and compliant William Reeves. Ethel protested and delayed the wedding for sixteen months until, drained and acquiescent, she and William Reeves married on 12 June 1903. Their daughter Faith—a pretty little thing with a mass of tight fair curls—was born six days before their first wedding anniversary. Ethel’s new husband, the musical stone mason, was a thin, sickly soul with a kind heart, a weak constitution and a consumptive nature. His lengthy list of ailments made him especially susceptible to any inconsequential change in the weather, and


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even the slightest cold would strike him down quickly. When the devastating cyclone hit Yarrabah in January 1906, Reeves was so ill that he could not move. A team of good samaritans braved the tempest and tied ropes over his house to protect him from the storm, but their efforts could not save him for long. Reeves quietly passed away three weeks later, on 29 January 1906. It was only two months after Faith’s birth that Fred Wondunna and the other inmates from the abandoned Fraser Island mission had sailed into Trinity Bay aboard the Rio Logue. The couple kept their distance but when Reeves died Ethel sought out Fred for solace and support. Their clandestine meetings over the next eighteen months rekindled the feelings they had shared on Fraser Island and, by August 1907, Ethel was pregnant. They were deeply and passionately in love and oblivious to the heartache their attachment would bring. The couple’s only desire was to declare their devotion publicly by marrying. They asked Gribble to sanction their union and perform the wedding ceremony, but Gribble could see the hopelessness of their love. At the beginning of the twentieth century, marriage to an Aboriginal man meant Ethel would be denounced as a whore and a disgrace to her sex and race. She would become a pariah, ostracised forever from polite society. Ethel dismissed these objections. For two months, brother and sister argued. Gribble was so bewildered by Ethel’s eagerness to embrace such a miserable destiny that he decided she must have suffered some sort of mental breakdown after Reeves’ death. His worry and distress for Ethel made him physically sick. He urged her, for her own sake, to hide her pregnancy, have the child adopted, and forget her foolish infatuation. To this end, he fabricated a shallow excuse and wrote to the ABM asking that Ethel be granted twelve months’ leave. The ABM offered three months. There was no reason, came the response, to justify a lengthy absence from her work. This did not help Gribble’s cause. In three months his widowed sister would be giving birth to a part-Aboriginal child. The matter of her furlough aside, it was clear to Gribble that Ethel could not stay at Yarrabah. The scandal would be uncontainable.


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Just four days before Christmas Day 1907, Gribble waved goodbye from the Cairns wharf as his sister set sail on the steamer heading to Sydney. Her pretty little daughter Faith stayed behind at Yarrabah in the care of her grandmother, Mary Ann. What Gribble did not know was that Ethel and Fred had a scheme to ensure they stayed together. Soon after Ethel left, Fred fled through the hills behind Yarrabah and made his way overland to New South Wales. The couple met in Sydney where they searched in vain for an Anglican priest willing to marry them. Exasperated and disheartened, they eventually abandoned the quest and appealed to a kindly Congregational minister who took pity on their plight and quietly married them on 30 December 1907. Fred’s country of Fraser Island seemed the perfect sanctuary for the newlyweds. It was a place where they could avoid the contemptuous glares and venomous whispers that would follow them in any town. Life would be rough but timbergetters had occupied the island and Fred could get work. The pair slowly made their way north and reached Brisbane in time to find refuge in the Salvation Army Home where the first of their four children entered the world on 21 April 1908. A palpitating wave of disbelief shook the sedate Sydney offices of the ABM when it heard about Ethel’s marriage. The ABM Executive was so stunned that it called for a copy of the marriage certificate to verify the facts. This done, Australia’s Anglicans were informed that Ethel had retired as a result of poor health since the death of her husband, William Reeves. Two years later, when Cairns was alive with allegations of mismanagement and misconduct at Yarrabah, the Bishop of north Queensland worried that ‘Mrs Reeves’ fall [might be] brought up in Parliament and that there might be a lot of nasty scandal about Yarrabah’.14 Even 22 years later, editors at the ABM censored all references to Ethel after the death of William Reeves from Gribble’s book A Despised Race, and the Church remained categorical that a marriage between a ‘white girl’ and ‘a coloured man’ was:


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eccentric and utterly unsuitable . . . and we can safely say that such a marriage would be regarded with entire disapproval and regret by the vast majority of missionaries . . . while there is undoubtedly a risk that the children may fall short of the special virtues of either race, while they are hampered by special difficulties of their own.15

Gribble was shaken by Ethel’s actions. In his eyes her love flaunted all accepted social mores and her marriage was a stubborn act of reckless naivety. But during those difficult months when he was advising and negotiating with his sister, Gribble was wrestling with his own emotional and moral demons. Scarred by the failure of his own marriage, his moral certainty faltered in the face of Ethel’s refusal to accept the racial divide and his own turbulent, private struggle with sexual desire and temptation. Everyone agreed that Janie Brown was startlingly attractive. A photograph of her in her twenties shows a tall, elegant woman with finely chiselled features and soft, wavy, shoulder-length hair. Her name was originally Jeannie Forbes—the child whose controversial removal to Yarrabah under the Reformatory Act sparked insinuations in the press that Gribble made immoral use of mission women. After arriving at Yarrabah Janie worked in the Mission House for the Gribble family and became Amelia’s salvation. She cared for the Gribble boys, ensured that domestic order reigned and went to Sydney with Amelia in 1905–06 to look after the children. Janie helped Amelia survive the trials of mission life. She was like family. Nevertheless, Amelia left Janie behind when she and the boys moved to Brisbane in mid-1907. In the difficult months that followed, Gribble turned to Janie for support and comfort. Her patient gentleness and mellow pragmatism were soothing counterpoints to his tortured emotions, dark moods and incapacitating bouts of depression. Loneliness and propinquity thrust them together. Gribble knew his attraction to Janie was improper. He made a half-hearted effort to resist temptation. On 4 December 1907, Gribble hastily convened a small gathering in St Alban’s Church to witness the nuptials of Janie Brown and Willie Clarke, another


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Yarrabah inmate. Blithely ignoring the fact that Willie was already involved with a woman called Ada Pickles, Gribble reasoned that Janie’s marriage would provide a psychological and institutional barrier that would stop him from falling into sin. It was a forlorn hope. At the same time as he was trying to persuade Ethel to acquiesce to white society’s prejudices by abandoning her soonto-be-born child, her Aboriginal fiancé and her hope of happiness, he had fallen head-over-heels in love with the young, pretty, innocent Janie. The events of those five months during 1907—Amelia’s departure, Ethel’s affair and his love of Janie— conflated to torment Gribble with doubts about the racial and sexual assumptions that underpinned his world. Isolated at Yarrabah without the usual social strictures and religious props, it was difficult to withstand a moral lapse. His resolve was destroyed by the discovery that Ethel and Fred had acted on their convictions and eloped. Janie was Matron of the boys’ dormitory. Gribble moved into the dormitory within a month of Ethel’s wedding. He always had a special interest in the boys and, bereft of family obligations, was free to devote more time to them. Yet, this simple act nurtured his relationship with Janie. The affair was a public secret in the closed confines of the mission. Whispers flew. Gossip raged. Some thought Gribble was in love: ‘it was obvious when you looked at him how he felt’ but their age difference caused comment: ‘it was like having sex with his daughter’. By January 1908, Janie was pregnant with Gribble’s child. Their daughter, Nola, was born on 15 September 1908. Inmates knowingly agreed that the child had Mary Ann’s round face and figure. She was clearly ‘a Gribble. She had these bright blue eyes. Father Gribble had bright blue eyes’. Nola was reputedly never told the truth of her parentage. One outsider could categorically confirm the affair: Janie’s confidante and best friend, Myra Pitt. Janie confided to Myra that Gribble was the father of her daughter but swore her friend to secrecy. The loyal Myra kept her charge until she was an old lady waiting for death and anxious to pass on the stories of the past.16


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Gribble did not plan to fall in love. Perhaps he even imagined that the affair was something special, sacred and pure—an enriching communion of mutual needs and compatible souls? This aside, the intensity of his feelings took him by surprise. It immobilised him and made him helpless. The affair transgressed the very foundation of the faith and moral code on which he had built his life. He knew it had to end but he could not bring himself to take the first step. Guilt, remorse and indecision ate away at his soul, and the worry and strain made him sick. His journals documented the illnesses that accompanied all his encounters with emotional trauma and his physical decline during the affair is clearly detailed. There was no obvious physiological cause for his illness, but his symptoms were devastatingly debilitating. In the autumn of 1908, when Janie announced she was pregnant, Gribble broke down completely. He was so gravely ill that he had to be hospitalised in Cairns for two months. At least his hospital stay allowed him a chance to reflect on the past and make decisions about the future. It was not an easy task and the process left him so physically and emotionally overwrought that his doctors recommended a therapeutic sea journey. Nevertheless, he had made up his mind. He left the hospital in May 1908, returned to Yarrabah and abruptly terminated the affair with Janie. Soon after he made an unexpected trip to Brisbane— perhaps in the hope of reconciling with Amelia? As a final act of restitution, he appointed himself the Church’s unofficial opponent of interracial unions and, until his death, he preached that sexual intercourse between black and white was ‘based on immorality’.17 During the tumultuous events of 1907–08, Gribble neglected mission affairs and Yarrabah drifted into chaos. Debts mounted and bankruptcy loomed. Despite his resolution to lead a virtuous life, Gribble lived in constant fear that his sin would become the subject of open ridicule. Meanwhile, Janie was pregnant and alone. She tried to establish her claim over her erstwhile husband but Willie’s liaison with Ada Pickles had continued and by early


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1908 Ada was expecting his baby. The result was a nasty, public showdown between: two women what in family way fighting. Janie Clarke fighting Ada over Willie Clarke and Ada said ‘Well you got Father Gribble’s [baby]. You carrying Father Gribble’s baby’. That was the quarrel . . . there was a quarrel between her and Jane and that’s how they point their finger at each other [about] what they got: Father Gribble and Willie Clarke. That’s how it is . . . Willie never make a fuss about that. It’s only Janie, having a row with Ada.18

These vicious open quarrels resurrected Gribble’s sin and haunted his future. In January 1909, Ada attacked Janie for a second time. Gribble banished her to Fitzroy Island. When he later calmed down he regretted passing such a severe sentence and allowed her to return to the mission, but his unsettling fear of repercussions and reprisals clouded his days and disturbed his sleep. The summer of 1909 was difficult. Gribble was mistrustful, apprehensive and saw suspicion and betrayal in everyone. As he struggled to silence conjecture and assert control over Yarrabah’s population, his behaviour degenerated into a terrifying, defensive despotism. Gribble listed those who defied him in his journal. His inventory grew each day and included a parade of loyal converts. Issues that Gribble thought he had resolved years ago unexpectedly became causes of contention and discord. Parents refused to put their children in his care in the dormitories and inmates were disobedient and disrespectful. He had a blazing row with Menmuny and temporarily withdrew his title as King of Yarrabah. He also revoked the licence of one of his longest serving Catechists after he was ‘caught in the act’ of adultery with a victim who ‘appear(ed) to have been forced to a certain extent’.19 The complaints about Gribble’s authoritarianism were so vehement that Bishop Frodsham was convinced the entire staff would resign unless Gribble’s mental health improved radically. Outsiders saw a different Yarrabah. The spiritual life of the mission seemed solid. A mission resident won the Bishop’s Prize


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in the 1907 Sunday School Exams and in 1908, three mission residents trained by Gribble—James Noble, his wife Angelina and Horace Reid—went as missionaries to the Church Missionary Society Mission at Roper River in the Northern Territory. Although Bishop Frodsham categorically rejected Gribble’s appeals to ordain James Noble, or any other Aboriginal, the first Aboriginal Synod representatives and licensed lay readers in the north Queensland diocese were residents of Yarrabah mentored by Gribble. Yet, closer scrutiny showed that the Christian message sometimes got lost in the temporal realities of mission life. When inmates sang the hymn ‘Shall we gather at the River?’ they changed the words ‘We will walk and worship forever’ to ‘We will work and wash-up for ever’. After several children were sternly punished for pilfering food from the mission plantation, inmates translated the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Lead us not into temptation’ to ‘Lead us not into the plantation’. In later years Gribble would declare ‘with all humility and with a reverent recognition of the power of Almighty God . . . there is no such thing as superstition amongst our Yarrabah folk’.20 In the first decade of the century, traditional values and practices lingered. Despite their declining numbers, the elderly Kongkandji and Indindji in the camp outside the mission compound passed on Dreaming stories, the names of trees and flowers and secrets about plant medicines and the healing powers and ceremonies of Yilamagay—the sacred medicine water near King Beach. As late as 1908, Gribble complained that he was still having trouble with ‘silly old blackfella things’.21 The Kongkandji believed so strongly in the spiritual powers of the dead that Gribble had to move the mission graveyard into the hills behind the church and, despite his efforts, traditional mourning rites persisted. When Menmuny’s sister died in 1909, King John abandoned his Christian faith to perform customary burial rites and songs of lamentation. As a counter to the lure of corroborees, Gribble introduced South Sea Island dancing during church festivals and


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celebrations. Unbeknown to him inmates incorporated Indigenous significance into the dances by blending the symbolism and language of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The trials of 1907–09 ate away at Gribble’s physical and mental wellbeing. By mid-1909, three doctors confirmed that he was suffering from ‘dilation of the heart and neurasthenia’. This now outdated term literally meant ‘nervous exhaustion’. It was used to describe an assortment of symptoms: loss of energy; insomnia; nebulous and imprecise pains; depression; irritability; and reduced concentration. In short, Gribble had suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown. His doctors insisted on at least a year’s rest. Bishop Frodsham visited Yarrabah in May 1909 and confirmed that Gribble’s condition had worsened and was now precarious. He advised the doctors’ directions be implemented ‘without delay’.22 Gribble refused. He wanted to ‘be at hand to direct’ the mission or: to stay at Yarrabah and die here amongst my own people [and] for the sake of my people . . . be buried amongst them, [that it] may help my children in the years to come when they see my face no more.23

Swayed by Frodsham’s advice, the ABM ordered Gribble to take a year’s holiday. On 12 June 1909, feeling angry and resentful, Gribble left Yarrabah to undergo the Weir-Mitchell cure—a wellrespected treatment of rest and a milk-rich diet—at St Helen’s Private Hospital in Brisbane. In his absence Bishop Frodsham visited Yarrabah during July and November 1909. He was shocked. The mission was badly neglected, food production was almost non-existent and food was so scarce that Frodsham expected a mass exodus of starving inmates to flee the place any day. The Bishop did not blame Gribble entirely. The ABM Secretary had been ill and funds had not been forwarded to the mission but Frodsham was frank: there were ‘difficulties of administration’ and ‘reform’ was urgently needed. Frodsham’s greater concern was for the spiritual welfare of the staff and residents. At time when the grace of the sacraments was needed more than


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ever, Frodsham was dismayed that Gribble did not provide weekday communion: At no place more than Yarrabah is it needful that the Staff avail themselves most assiduously of the means of grace. To be too busy to take advantage of his ‘converted meeting place with God’ must result in falling ideals, and in a lower standard of life and work . . . It is not only the Aboriginal Christians who need the prayers of the faithful. The Staff need the support of the Spirit even more, if they are to be faithful to their trust.24

Meanwhile, Frodsham reported that Cairns was awash with ‘filthy gossip’ about Gribble, and disgruntled staff and inmates were only too ready to point a finger and confide details about his misdoings.25 They were so relieved by Gribble’s absence that they threatened to resign en masse if he returned prematurely. By February 1910, Gribble had recovered and was released from hospital. The respite had done him good. He was determined to make a fresh start and filled in the remainder of his leave by preaching and doing deputation work for the ABM in the Sydney and Goulburn dioceses. While Gribble busied himself, his dismissal was the subject of the March meeting of the ABM Executive in Sydney. Frodsham led the charge but the outcome had already been decided behind closed doors. In accordance with his episcopal obligations, Frodsham told the new Primate and Archbishop of Sydney, John Charles Wright, about Gribble’s affair and the scandalous conditions at Yarrabah. The evidence convinced the Primate. He not only endorsed Gribble’s removal but he banned Gribble from ever working in his diocese of Sydney. Frodsham even refused to allow Gribble to return to Yarrabah to collect his personal belongings. The ABM issued the usual explanation, that Gribble had resigned because of ill health. Even as an old man, the indignity of his dismissal rankled and Gribble would relate his tale of anger and pain to any unguarded listener. He had one minor victory. Exposing an impeccable, caustic sense of historical irony, Gribble insisted on delaying his official resignation until 17 June 1910, the eighteenth anniversary


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of JB’s arrival at Cape Grafton and the foundation of Yarrabah. It was an ignoble exit for the priest who just a year earlier was publicly acclaimed for making Yarrabah the Church’s ‘most successful effort . . . to civilise the aboriginal’.26 In a loyal show of solidarity, Mary Ann and her daughter, Illa, resigned from the mission staff. By the winter of 1910, the only Gribbles at Yarrabah were the family’s unacknowledged part-Aboriginal offspring.


5

W HEN

NATIVE FRUITS ARE RIPE

G

osford was a sleepy estuary town on Brisbane Water north of Sydney with pretensions of being a regional centre. The pubs and public buildings gave the place an air of possible permanence but the houses that hugged the surrounding hills were sad boxes of fibro, weatherboard, tin and peeling paint. The smell of salt water and dead fish saturated everything. This was the last place Gribble wanted to be. He had been filling in time with occasional deputation work and praying for a new mission when the ABM broke the news, in 1911, that it would not support him any longer. Christ Church, Gosford needed a priest and Gribble needed work. The only saving grace in this shotgun marriage was that Gribble managed to convince Amelia to bury the hatchet for a while and try to revive their marriage. The notion of playing rector’s wife dispensing sedate afternoon teas in the rectory caught Amelia’s fancy but the experiment failed on all fronts. The reunion was strained and disagreeable, and Gribble loathed parish work. He escaped the depressing pallor of his new existence by pouring his energies into writing. It was a cathartic distraction. His first autobiography, The Life and Experiences of an Australian, was completed during this phase and serialised by the Gosford Times in 93


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1915. It drew on a collage of vignettes that had lain buried since childhood: the idyllic years at Warangesda; the invigorating spell at the Kings School; and snapshots of religious ambivalence among the selectors of Tumbarumba. These fragments of memory resurrected a happier life than his present existence. In between scribbling, Gribble ferreted out any chance to return to the bush and missionary life. Word filtered through that Bishop Gerard Trower, the new, reluctantly-appointed head of the North West diocese, was establishing a mission in the remote north of Western Australia. Gribble instantly offered his services. He was an experienced bush missionary, he told the Bishop, who could rescue the venture if the staff failed to perform. Trower summoned him six months later. Gribble left Gosford within the fortnight. He stepped off the government steamer onto the wharf of the remote township of Wyndham, in the east Kimberley, on 30 December 1913. Two days later he welcomed in the New Year by resigning his parish in Gosford. He had not seen his new mission but the work was a ‘path of duty’ and his vision was clear.1 Forrest River would be Yarrabah without the poisonous blemishes of those final years where he would realise the hopes and dreams of JB’s struggle in Western Australia 30 years earlier. Wyndham lies on the western side of the Cambridge Gulf, half a continent and a whole world away from the State capital of Perth. The town was named after the second son of the first marriage of Lady Mary Ann Broome (1831–1911), wife of the irascible Governor Sir Frederick Napier Broome, whose wild feuds with public officials nearly eclipsed his administration’s triumph at securing responsible government for the colony. The town’s namesake, Walter George Wyndham, fought with Lord Chelmsford in the Zulu wars in Africa. The Australian township that inherited his name lay in an equally alien, frontier region on the periphery of British civilisation. Wyndham had developed capriciously by sprawling laterally along the waterline to hug the slim strip of ground between the


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tidal mud flats of the Gulf and the rocky slopes of Mt Albany and the Bastion Ranges. In the 1920s, the town was a barren clutch of square, white houses clustered around a labyrinth of dirt tracks pounded hard by the hooves of horses and cattle that transformed into a brown quagmire during the summer wet season. Sterile, gnarled mountains guarded the hazardous, crocodile-infested Cambridge Gulf and its rushing 30-foot tides and the heat was so blistering that locals were said to ‘feed their fowls on chipped ice to keep them from laying fried eggs’.2 This was an unforgiving place that God had forgotten—a lair for the fearless, the foolhardy and the misfit. Forty years after its first exploration by Lieutenant George Grey, Alexander Forrest traversed the region naming it the Kimberley district and praising its grazing potential. Within three years, cattle dynasties like the Buchanans, Duracks and Macdonalds from Queensland and New South Wales had invaded and taken up most of the best land. Gold attracted thousands of hopefuls to Halls Creek in the south east and, by 1887, Wyndham was a flourishing centre boasting six hotels. Champagne flowed freely and business was done with gold nuggets. The boom was over by 1890. Most of the diggers had left for more promising strikes in the south and the fledgling cattle industry was floundering. Only the most serious pastoralists stayed. Cattle tick stopped livestock exports between 1896 and 1899 and again in 1911 when buffalo fly and pleuro-pneumonia forced cattle owners into costly immunisation programs. A government meatworks was built in 1919 but high operating costs caused its closure in 1921. It reopened twelve months later but hardly ever broke even. The town struggled. Cash was so scarce that shopkeepers and publicans issued promissory notes redeemable at the bank that were notorious for their convenient tendency to disintegrate when handled. On the eve of World War I, there were fewer than 200 Europeans in the East Kimberley and the population of Wyndham had stagnated at around 50. It hovered there for the next decade.


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The Forrest River Mission lay on the western side of the Cambridge Gulf about 50 miles up the Forrest River from Wyndham, in the middle of the vast Marndoc Aboriginal Reserve. It occupied the stretch of flat land between Dadaway Lagoon and a line of rugged, stony hills that led to a gallery of sacred Aboriginal burial caves and the fresh waters of Camera Pool on the edge of the Oombulgurri Plain. The Western Australian Government proclaimed the 3 000 000-acre reserve in 1911. It stretched across the majestic Kimberley ranges as far as the Cambridge Gulf to the east and the coast to the north, and spread south through the Milligan Ranges and across the Durack River to Bindcola Creek. In 1898, the Church swapped the site of JB’s failed Gascoyne River mission for the 100 000-acre lease in the Marndoc Reserve. The historical symmetry appealed to Gribble. The mission lease spread across both sides of the mighty Forrest River and the red sandstone cliffs that guarded the river as it wove through the rugged hills and sterile, stony flats of the Kimberley ranges. Downstream the river was bracken with the cloying salt of the Cambridge Gulf. Upstream it melted into ponds ringed by pandanus palms and filled with sweet, fresh water and lilies. A menagerie of catfish, barramundi, cockatoos, ducks, brolgas and hungry crocodiles flourished around the river, but the surrounding country was occupied by scrub, spinifex, kangaroos and termite nests that transformed the stony plains into an eerie landscape of gnarled, red mountains. It was a heartless, unwelcoming land. The first European visitor described Siberia as more hospitable. This was Yeidji territory. Their custodianship of the land stretched north from the Forrest River to the sea coast of the Cambridge Gulf as far as the Milligan Ranges, south to the Steere Hills and north to Mount Carty and the Lyne River. The Yeidji had close ties with the Wembra to the west and the Arnga whose territory lay to the south along the King and Pentecost Rivers. They also had links with other Kimberley groups including the Bemba, to the north west beyond the Forrest River, the Yura, to


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the east of the mission along the coast of the Cambridge Gulf between the Patrick and lower Lyne Rivers, as well as the Baragala, an Arnga group, to the south east of the mission. People from further afield like the Kwini from the Drysdale River and the Wunumbul from the west of King Edward River had regular contact with the people of the district. The Aboriginal communities of the Kimberley shared similar language and a rich mythological tradition dominated by three powerful Dreaming figures: Wandjina, a regenerative, reproductive power linked with rain and water; Brimurer, the Rainbow Serpent who created the rivers and sent forth spirit-children; and Wolara, who instituted initiation, increase ceremonies and other features of social life. Wunan (trade routes) crisscrossed the Kimberley and linked the material life of the communities through the exchange of red ochre, iron axes, boomerangs, shovel and wire spears, wooden water carriers, karl (spinifex resin) and the powder from burnt gypsum used to make ceremonial body paint. Almost every food in the region was linked with a talu (increase) site and an associated ceremony. At key times during the year, the different communities converged to harvest seasonal fruits like gelay (plum) or to conduct initiation rites and mourning ceremonies, renew kinship and political allegiances, and exchange corroborees, mythology, rituals and Law. In this harsh dry land, gatherings usually converged on a waterhole. These gra (sacred sites) were the homes of the spirit-children that took the animal forms hunted by man. Every person was the embodiment of a spirit-child linked with a specific water source where they were ‘found’ by their father and generally named after their spirit centre. The Kimberley peoples exploited imported European technology by making spear heads from glass and metal instead of stone. The results were deadly and devastating. In 1895, the Ord River Station claimed Aboriginals killed stock valued at £20 000. Two years later, the district reported stock losses of £134 000. The Aboriginals used their superior knowledge of the country to evade capture and launch attacks during the wet season when flooded


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plains made pursuit impossible. Cattle and sheep polluted and desecrated sacred sites and waterholes, and Aboriginals often slaughtered more than they could eat. Some pastoralists believed they killed cattle for sport. Police stations sprang up at Wyndham, Halls Creek and Turkey Creek to protect settlers and property. From 1892, cattle killing became an offence punishable with three years’ imprisonment and a beating with a cat-o-nine-tails. The police got two shillings for the capture and conviction of a cattle killer but these drastic measures had minimal effect. In 1909, the government established Moola Bulla cattle station in the hope that distributing meat to Aboriginals would reduce attacks on private herds. This was a world where settlers felt isolated and outnumbered. The exploits of Aboriginal warriors like Pigeon and Major fuelled fears of a wholesale black uprising and settlers were united by a siege mentality and the belief that ruthless action was needed to secure the region and their protection. A catalogue of Europeans died in the battle to possess the Kimberley. The inventory for 1886 included Fred Marriot, who lost his life during an Aboriginal attack on the Halls Creek goldfields; John Durack, who was ambushed and speared; and another digger killed near Mt Barrett. In 1888, William Miller died after being attacked near Mt Dockrell and a teamster was killed near Wyndham. In 1896, Frank Hann and Ah Sing, a market gardener on the King River south of Wyndham, were killed. In 1901, Aboriginals shot Jerry Durack through the head while he was sleeping. His son Patsy was wounded. Settlers formed vigilante groups and the police used armed Aboriginal trackers and deputised civilians to hunt suspected murderers but punitive action was often the underlying aim, as one letter writer explained after diggers were killed at Mt Barrett: A number of diggers went out to take revenge. Having bailed up a large number of blacks in a gully who showed fight, they proceeded to slaughter them with repeating rifles. It is certain that a great many were killed, some say at least a hundred.3


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It was widely accepted that ‘a war of extermination, in effect, is being waged against these unfortunate blacks in the Kimberley district’.4 Francis Connor, Member of the Legislative Assembly and partner in the Durack cattle dynasty, led an unsuccessful campaign to establish a Native Police Force to suppress black resistance: ‘It is simply a question of whether we or they are to have this country’.5 It is impossible to estimate the number of Aboriginals killed in the struggle for the Kimberley. Settlers and police united in a code of silence. It took two years for Police Constable Ritchie to learn of a massacre near Jerry Durack’s station on the Denham River. Richie found the incinerated bones of the bodies on the property but his efforts to prosecute Durack were blocked. In 1884, Harry Stockdale led the first European foray onto the western side of the Cambridge Gulf near the future site of Gribble’s mission. One of the party, J.H. Ricketson, was attacked when he rode into an Aboriginal camp and had to be rescued by Stockdale who shot one of the ringleaders. A few weeks later an old Aboriginal man blocked the party’s path as it skirted around a billabong. Ricketson killed him with a single shot at point blank range. Ricketson declared the area inhabited by hostile Aboriginals but Stockdale returned a year later to manage a 100 000-acre lease taken up by the Victoria Pastoral Company. Two thousand sheep were herded to Gundah Creek on the Patrick River near Mar-ri-da, a sacred talu site for fish and lily-root for the Yeidji and Wembra. Several talu sites and at least five significant sacred sites were within a five-mile radius of Dadaway Lagoon, including a stone Djalmula that was said to have been put there in the Dreaming after the crane and policeman bird fought and the crane threw the fire sticks that gave the policeman bird red legs. The Aboriginals defended their sacred sites forcing Stockdale and his party to withdraw to Dadaway Lagoon. Among the group was Mrs Wilkes who gave birth to the Kimberley’s first European child in 1887. In 1889, the vigorous Aboriginal resistance forced the Victoria Pastoral Company to withdraw but in 1898, Harold Hale, son of


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the first Bishop of Perth, led a five-man party to establish an Anglican mission on the Forrest River. The Government Resident in Wyndham warned Hale that the Aboriginals were dangerous, but his caution was ignored and the group set up at the abandoned Stockdale homestead at Dadaway Lagoon. Aboriginals stole their food and supplies and a large, threatening assembly eventually congregated around the mission. Hale was injured by a glasstipped spearhead that caught him in the arm and ripped the muscles so badly that he needed urgent medical attention. Another member of the party, Sidney Hadley, was speared in the shoulder and the mission lugger was untied to drift down river. A visiting police patrol helped Hale capture the culprits by enticing them into the cottage where they were overpowered before being taken to Wyndham for trial. All five offenders received fifteen lashes. Hale’s attackers were imprisoned for two to three years and the boat thieves received prison terms of three to six months. The incident was ‘unpropitious’, warned the Western Australian Record in February 1899, and ‘may . . . adversely affect the disposition of the local blacks’. Thereafter, the attacks intensified. One of Hale’s party was clubbed unconscious and lay in a coma for three days, the mission boat was disabled and the party resorted to firing shots into the air to disperse their attackers. It was suicidal to stay, warned the Resident Magistrate in Wyndham. The Police Commissioner urged the Church to withdraw before lives were sacrificed. The mission was abandoned at the end of 1898. In April 1913, Bishop Gerald Trower led a six-man party in a second attempt to establish a mission in the Kimberley near the site abandoned by the Victoria Pastoral Company and Harold Hale. Trower christened the mission ‘St Michael and All Angels’ but the early omens were ominous. A young naturalist with the group called Burns got tangled in lily-roots while duck shooting and drowned. Trower returned to Broome and the missionaries erected a small prefabricated tin hut to serve as a church, sleeping quarters and storeroom. They reinforced the walls with stones and surrounded the compound with looped, barbed wire, but it did not


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protect them. One of the lay missionaries was clubbed unconscious and Aboriginals looted the mission boat and raided the compound at night. The missionaries resorted to firing shots into the dark to stop a full-blown assault and, by September 1913, the frayed and terrified staff had all resigned. Reverend Stubbs was summoned from Port Hedland to hold the fort until Gribble arrived. Knowing he would need help, Gribble’s first act was to wire James and Angelina Noble. They already had four years as lay missionaries at the Roper River Mission in the Northern Territory, and Church officials nodded approvingly when the Nobles arrived in April 1914: The fact that these fellow country-men of the same color [sic], have come from afar to lead them to the same calling and teach them the same Creed as they themselves have long embraced, must appeal strongly to the native mind.6

Angelina Noble’s delicate features and dainty figure hid her tough disposition. She was a crack shot, talented linguist, expert rider and absolutely fearless. A horse dealer had abducted her when she was a young girl, dressed her in boy’s clothing and passed her off as ‘Tommy’, but her disguise was eventually detected and she was sent to Yarrabah where she married James Noble when she was sixteen. For five years Angelina was the only woman at Forrest River Mission. Her husband, James Noble, was one of those men with that enviable but intangible quality known as ‘presence’. At 6 feet tall, he towered over his petite wife. His dark, gentle eyes were set above uncommonly high cheekbones and a clean, square jaw. It was the open face of an honest man. Although originally from the Normanton district of Queensland, Noble was reared by the Doyle family of Scone in rural New South Wales from the time he was about ten and tutored at Scone Grammar School. Later, he lived with Canon Edwards in Hughenden, north Queensland, where his talent as a sprinter made him a minor celebrity. When the Canon died James fell in with a bad crowd and the Bishop of north Queensland stepped in and sent the 16-year-old to Yarrabah,


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where he became one of Gribble’s proteges. His calm resourcefulness made James a capable, congenial manager and he freed Gribble of the burden of supervising Yarrabah’s out-stations. He was just shy of 40 and his wiry, dark hair was already grey when he joined Gribble at Forrest River in 1914. Gribble drew on Angelina’s talents as a translator and James was barber, dentist, doctor and general hand. James’ abilities earned him respect. He was treated like an Elder and the people listened when he spoke. In Church circles, the Nobles were credited with thwarting the attacks that had sent other missionaries scurrying from Dadaway. Their daughter, Lovie Kianna, grew up on stories of how her parents pacified the hostile people around Forrest River: The river [was] just black with Aboriginals [who were] just watching them. Wild people . . . They didn’t want to see those white people cause they never saw white people in all their lives. Then [James] got up and stood at the fore of that boat. When they saw him they all put their spears down. That was that and they were all calm when they saw this . . . black man and he told them ‘my wife is black too but she’s half-caste’ . . . They were satisfied with the wife too . . . and they all put down their spears.7

James’ particular contribution was acknowledged in 1925 with his ordination as the Anglican Church’s first Aboriginal deacon. Lured by medicine and tobacco, Gribble’s mission soon became a marshalling point for Aboriginal groups from across the Kimberley. By 1914, about 200 people camped around the lagoon and on the rocky ridge behind the mission. Hundreds of others visited as they travelled the wunan and, during these early years, Gribble carefully recorded the names of those that came and went. His medicine treated a cavalcade of sick—2067 in 1923— and his tobacco was the currency that purchased labour to clear the land, build and plant crops. The availability of tobacco and the precious glass and metal debris needed for spearheads made Dadaway Lagoon a terminus for the Kimberley wunan trade. Gribble divided the people into three classes. The brengen lived


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in semi-permanent camps near the mission and occasionally worked for food and tobacco but came and went as they pleased. The narlies visited off and on to trade in tobacco and join festivities as they travelled to tribal rituals and seasonal supplies of native food. As far as Gribble was concerned, the ‘inmates’ in the mission compound were the mission, but the children were his primary focus. Gribble started a school with a small clutch of boys using red ink and boot polish to write lessons on galvanised iron. By September 1914, dormitories were built and surrounded by a 3-foot-high fence topped by two strands of barbed wire. Only his mission, Gribble believed, could provide temporal and spiritual salvation. He refused work, and therefore food and tobacco, to parents who would not hand over their children, and collected waifs from Wyndham and the bush. Anxious to build numbers, mission inmates remember Gribble bribing Aboriginals to abduct ‘kids from the bush for the school and dormitory’.8 Many parents avoided the mission because they knew: once [a] child is in the Mission, he or she will not be allowed out again except for a few hours on a holiday under the supervision of a missionary, that later the child will be married contrary to the tribal laws and to promises made by the parents and that finally, the child becomes a complete outsider to all tribal culture.9

Gribble reported in the Church press that the mission had a wonderful hold on the local people. In reality, life was hard. Aboriginals stole petrol and food; floods regularly washed away the mission jetty; crocodiles ate the dogs that were Gribble’s companions; and supplies from Perth were erratic especially during World War I when strikes and the withdrawal of steamers caused serious shortages. Gribble planted vegetables, maize and millet for the mission, watermelons for sale in Wyndham and peanuts for the Adelaide market, but the results were unreliable in a fickle world of floods, droughts and plagues of ticks, locusts and grasshoppers. Sometimes there was no food for weeks and potential converts were turned away and inmates sent out to collect ‘native tucker’. Meanwhile, Wyndham’s shopkeepers grew


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fat selling goods at inflated prices to the anxious missionary desperate to keep a hold on his ambivalent flock. Just as at Yarrabah, reciprocity defined local social relations. Without food or tobacco, the people refused to work and disappeared into the bush or went to Wyndham for sugar, tea and flour. The people called Gribble Judja, meaning ‘boss’, but when native fruits were ripe and plentiful, only a few children and old folk remained in the mission and Gribble repeatedly reminded the faithful that the ‘primary object of getting their souls is lost, if we have not got their bodies’.10 The problem, Gribble complained, was that he was shorthanded. He put on a boatman-cum-cook called Rackarock who seemed capable enough but he was known to police across north Australia and his addiction to ‘black velvet’ caused trouble at Dadaway. Eighteen months after being sacked from the mission, Rackarock was imprisoned for raping a young Aboriginal girl in Wyndham. His replacement turned out to be a drunkard who polished off the mission’s supply of altar wine. Others came and went just as quickly for it was hard to survive Gribble’s tantrums and hurtful tongue. Part of the problem was that he played favourites, but his fancies were unpredictable and changed without warning. He made life miserable for those who fell from grace. One staff member—a devout spinster Gribble branded ‘a nag’—was so distressed by his attacks that she packed her bags and returned to Perth. Gribble was always contrite and full of selfloathing later, but then it was generally too late. By September 1915, all his staff had left or were leaving. According to the mission register, by 1916 there were 40 inmates living in the mission compound, but most were children, elderly, sick or maimed. Gribble was frustrated by the slow progress. His dream of replicating Yarrabah at Forrest River seemed to be elusive, and an unsettling sense of doom descended. He remembered the other times he had experienced the same disquieting feeling: when JB abandoned him in Carnarvon; during his ill-fated involvement with Fraser Island; and throughout those stressful, final years at Yarrabah.


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His distraction was to declare war. The continued exploitation and abuse of Aboriginals in the north west deeply offended his keen sense of justice. He could see little evidence that conditions had improved since his father’s campaign against police and pastoralists in the 1880s. As his moral outrage conflated with his disappointment in the mission’s progress, he threw himself into a new role as the moral champion of Aboriginals in their dealings with whites. In 1915, he bailed up a stockman travelling with two Aboriginals and demanded to see the Chief Protector’s authority to take them from their district. When the documents were not forthcoming, Gribble asserted his authority as Protector of Aborigines and took the pair to his mission. Local settlers were outraged and protested that their livelihood hinged on unfettered access to cheap, black labour, but their opposition did not intimidate Gribble. He went further and banned mission inmates from working on the roads in Wyndham. Settlers accused him of keeping ‘young bucks’ idle and poaching workers to increase the numbers at his mission. The Chief Protector of Aborigines, Auber Octavius Neville, sided with the settlers. Neville, an impeccably groomed bureaucrat with a round face and close-set eyes, inhabited the government offices in Murray Street Perth and was called ‘Mister Neville’ by the State’s Aboriginal population. Gribble did not care that the Chief Protector believed in the gainful employment of able-bodied Aboriginals. His position was firm. The only hope for Aboriginals, Gribble argued, was total segregation under missionary influence and he was: determined to fight against any of our Aborigines going into Wyndham [because] it . . . means prostitution for the females and a lazy life for the husbands and apart from that we must urge & work for segregation if we are to do any good.11

He harassed the Chief Protector and Sergeant Archie Buckland, Wyndham’s senior police officer, to invoke Section 39 of the 1905 Aborigines Act. Introduced in the wake of the Roth Royal Commission, the Act gave the government sweeping controls


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over Aboriginals, including the power for the police to exclude Aboriginals from prohibited areas and to remove unemployed Aboriginals to reserves. Gribble hoped that the declaration of Wyndham as a prohibited area would stop Aboriginals being ‘drawn off the Reserve and away from [mission] influence’.12 Sergeant Buckland took a different view. He had been subduing Aboriginals in the Kimberley since the 1890s and he knew the desires of settlers and pastoralists. A zealous missionary would not rouse him to act against their interests. Gribble responded by


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launching an eighteen-month campaign in Church journals and The West Australian, accusing Buckland and the police of being lax and ignoring his complaints. Gribble’s campaign alienated him from the sympathies of settlers and police in the north west, but the prohibited area was declared in 1916. Word that Gribble was making trouble began filtering south and the Perth Board of Missions started to get anxious. It handled the daily administration of Forrest River for the ABM in Sydney and Gribble’s crusade against the police revived its collective memory of JB’s clash with the establishment and the upheaval that resulted. Just as troubling for the Secretary of the Perth Board of Missions, Archdeacon Hudleston, was the high turnover in staff and the mission’s mounting debts to shopkeepers in Wyndham. Hudleston decided to make the long trip north to personally inspect the mission. On his return to Perth he floated the idea of replacing Gribble but Bishop Trower rejected the idea outright. This path blocked, Hudleston urged Gribble to take an early furlough rather than wait the usual five years. Gribble’s past flashed before him. His confidence was rattled. He insisted that he was indispensable and doing the work of three men: ‘to force matters as regards my furlough will not do’.13 Gribble exhausted his anxiety by forging a tidy village between Dadaway lagoon and the stony hills that edged Oombulgurri Plain. Streets were laid out in grid formation and named after Anglican missions. A hospital, dormitories and married people’s home appeared. The Church of St Michael and All Angels—a thatched pavilion partially open on all four sides—was the only church in the East Kimberley when it was completed in 1921. The thatch buildings were picturesque, but alive with nesting insects and fires were frequent. To keep the dust at bay, the dirt floors were soaked with bullock blood and polished to a shine when dry. The furniture was ‘Kimberley Chippendale’—rough constructions made from onion and oil boxes. Later the place was rebuilt in sun-dried bricks. Michael Durack, patriarch of the Durack cattle dynasty and Member of the Legislative Assembly for the Kimberley from 1917


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to 1924, visited the mission and declared it a collection of ‘tumbledown sorts of thatched houses’.14 Gribble put his hopes for a Christian community in the young married couples in the mission compound. Women were persuaded to abandon their tribal husbands and married on the mission in defiance of betrothal commitments, kinship laws and tribal obligations. The brengen and narlies retaliated by showering the compound with spears when Gribble refused to hand over married women or girls promised as brides. The women at the mission had to be guarded in case they were abducted or absconded, and the men were attacked for ‘marrying wrong’. Gribble threatened the attackers with twenty strokes of his strap and promised to ‘drive back with a stockwhip any mission man who went outside the compound to the old men’s camps’.15 Outside the mission compound, the birth rate fell. Gribble declared this a victory for God and proof that the mission was saving the local people from extinction, but the women told anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry that they aborted pregnancies because they did not want to bear children to be taken by the mission. Others avoided the place. Inside the compound, Gribble worked to impose order. Inmates mastered daily drill, the children marched to and from church in straight lines singing the ‘Gloria Patra’ and the school day ended with a chorus of ‘God Save the Queen’. Gribble fell back on the familiar formulae he had used at Yarrabah: bells summoned everyone to daily parade for the allocation of jobs; the mission population gathered to salute the Union Jack on ‘Flag Day’ each month; and Sunday mass was proceeded by a procession through the village to strains of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. Services were intoned with sung canticles, scarlet-clad choristers sang Holy Communion and Compline, and the return of the mission boat was greeted with a chorus of ‘Te Deum’. Gribble reported that the local people were curious about God and listened attentively during services. His favourite text was ‘Mission boy no tell lie; no steal, no lazy fellow, no dirty fellow’.16 In mid-1915, he began a class with seven Catechumens. Twelve months later, four


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inmates were baptised, although the first confirmation was not held until six years later, in August 1922. By the end of 1928, the tally of converts was 134 baptisms and 34 confirmations, but Gribble admitted that most baptised men left after a few months to find wives. Four confirmed men (11 per cent of the total) absconded to fulfil traditional marriage obligations and Gribble deposed his five most trusted converts from their posts as church servers after they participated in circumcision rites. Reverend Haining arrived at the mission and summed up the situation succinctly: most converts eventually ‘lapse and go bush’; Christianity is ‘not as real as one could wish [and] does not seem to have sunk in very deeply’ and is ‘based upon a superstitious fear & [sic] a large percentage of hysteria’.17 Meanwhile, Church publications spread the news that girls from the dormitory pulled the punkah while the staff ate their meals and the inmates were always: quick to show their gratitude, never forward in their behaviour towards the missionaries, and a black always humbly walks behind a white person . . . the poor blacks . . . understand that the Mission is here . . . solely for their good and happiness . . . three or four years ago, vice, in some of its vilest forms, reigned supreme [now] the Mission boys and girls . . . have a repugnance for the same evils that in the early days they looked upon as quite a matter of course . . . cleanliness is gripping them . . . the Mission is their home . . . when spoken to, the Mission blacks reply ‘Yes, Sir’ or ‘No, Sir’ and salute.18

Yet the mission population stagnated. Inside the compound Christianity supplanted tribal and totemic identities and English replaced ‘language’. It was impossible to keep the precepts laid down by the ancestor heroes to sustain the cosmos and the continuity of the Dreaming. Gribble banned infant betrothals, polygamy and traditional mortuary rites, and threatened to horsewhip anyone participating in initiation rites or revenging violations of marriage laws. Increase ceremonies could not take place or sacred sites be maintained and deferred mourning ceremonies could not be performed to enable the zuari (spirit) of the


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dead to rest in peace. Boys were not initiated into the Law or dara:gu (sacred ceremonies), and it was difficult to preserve ramba (marriage avoidance) or for the women to keep pregnancy taboos or be isolated during their menses when it was believed they could make a man ill by touching his belongings. Gribble and James Noble spent fruitless days pursuing those who fled the mission to return to a more culturally familiar world. Gribble begged the Wyndham police for help but Sergeant Buckland claimed Aboriginals said they would rather go to Roebourne gaol than return to the mission. Desperate and worried, Gribble intensified repression in the compound. Recalcitrant inmates were tried in a public court but there was little resemblance to a local djaruk (people’s court) for Gribble decided the verdicts: ‘he was a very, very strict man’.19 Children who fled or were cheeky had a sign of the cross shaved through their hair. Others had to repent in public and Gribble’s leather strap—‘Black Tom’—got frequent use. Young boys tried to dodge the pain by stuffing sheepskin down their pants. Adults were imprisoned in the stone gaol or publicly handcuffed to a post, and when Ronald stole meat from the store: all the mission had to line up and watch as a lesson . . . he was tied around a boab tree, facing the tree and standing and given four cuts with Black Tom like a slave.20

The answer, Gribble decided, was to use the 1905 Act and make Forrest River a depository for children, the ill and the elderly. From 1921, the mission was ‘home’ for about 37 pensioners each year and a generation of Stolen Children transported from Broome, Derby, Port Hedland, the Oscar and Leopold Ranges. By 1928, there were 111 Aboriginal inmates at Forrest River but over 70 were children under seventeen years of age, and more than half were from outside the Marndoc Reserve. As the mission struggled, cattle provided another distraction for Gribble. He argued that the country was right, the cattle kings were rich, the government cattle station of Moola Bulla was thriv-


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ing and, above all, he had ‘excellent qualifications for the work’.21 He put his superlative talents as a nag into action as soon as he arrived in the north west, but poor, harassed Archdeacon Hudleston was sceptical and uncooperative. By 1919, Gribble had decided he could not wait and bought the cattle without permission. The herd was expanded in 1924 after a benefactor left the mission a legacy. Cattle consignments were delivered to the Wyndham meatworks in 1926 and 1928 but the profits Gribble promised never eventuated. Two consecutive ABM Chairmen observed that Gribble was ‘not a businessman’.22 Gribble knew his unauthorised cattle purchases gave the Perth Board of Missions strong grounds for a dismissal. In atonement for his sin he agreed to go on ‘furlough having accomplished all I set out to do and the future is well assured’.23 He filled in the twelve months from April 1920 with a hectic schedule of exhibitions, sermons and conferences in the eastern states, interspersed with a visit to Cairns to attend his daughter Nola’s confirmation. Archdeacon Hudleston schemed while Gribble was away. Having failed to convince Trower to remove Gribble, he approached the Chairman of the ABM in Sydney. Chairman Needham acknowledged but forgave Gribble’s flaws. After all, Needham argued, it was hard to be a spiritual and business manager at the same time. In the autumn of 1921, Gribble returned to Forrest River knowing his stocks were low and blitzed Perth with complaints that his replacement was an indolent drunkard: ‘another two months [sic] absence on my part and you would have had scandal and disaster’.24 Meanwhile, he tormented the beancounters by refusing supplies from Perth and buying the same goods at inflated prices in Wyndham. The Perth Board of Missions directed the company of Connor, Doherty and Durack in Wyndham to ignore their missionary’s orders. Gribble scarcely noticed. As the dry winter winds of 1921 swept across the north west, Gribble was so consumed with protecting Aborigines from abuse by settlers and police that he had virtually cut all contact with the ABM.


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arry Annear was found naked on Bedford Downs Station with a spear wound in his side and a bullet hole in his head. It was just before Christmas 1921. Lightberi (alias Kitty) saw the part-Aboriginal stockman die and identified his attacker as Myalliman. Police Constable Cooney led the hunt for Myalliman, accompanied by two white settlers and several black trackers. Francis Bernard Coffey (alias Bernard Patrick O’Leary), was one of the settlers with the patrol. A stockman and returned serviceman with a reputation for being tough, O’Leary knew the bush and was a skilled tracker who had spent most of his working life on stations in Queensland, the Northern Territory and in the Kimberleys. He spent three months with Cooney and his party hunting Myalliman through the Marndoc Aboriginal Reserve. Myalliman was captured in February 1922 and stood trial for Annear’s murder five months later. Lightberi was called as a witness and testified that Annear had abducted Myalliman’s two young wives, Waputer and Woolungoona. Annear was lanced with a shovel-nosed spear and, knowing he was doomed, reached for his revolver and fired a single, fatal shot into his skull. As Protector of Aborigines, Gribble defended accused Aboriginals appearing before the Wyndham courts. He hoped the jury 112


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would consider the mitigating circumstances in the case— Annear’s abduction of the women and the fatal shooting—in reaching their decision. When the all-white jury brought in a verdict of guilty, Gribble and the Crown Prosecutor in Perth were incensed and agreed that ‘if the actors in this tragedy had been white men the jury would bring in justifiable homicide’. Chief Protector Neville was angry and complained to the Minister of the North West: ‘the natives must be considerably mystified to discover wherein lies our boasted “justice” ’.1 During the hunt for Myalliman, terrified Aboriginals began fleeing to the safety of Gribble’s mission with news that Constable Cooney’s party had massacred Aboriginals in a ravine near the Durack River, making ‘the country all stink’ with ‘dead fellows’.2 Gribble immediately notified the Wyndham police and Chief Protector Neville. His allegations marked him as a meddler and a troublemaker among the townsfolk of Wyndham, whose opposition wounded and inflamed him, but firmed his confidence in the rumours. He insisted on a thorough investigation. The Police Commissioner capitulated under the pressure and the inquiry revealed that Conney’s party raided at least twenty Aboriginal camps on the Marndoc Reserve during their three-month hunt for Myalliman. Blood was shed and at least one Aboriginal man fell after shots were fired. Clara Roberts was 6 years old when Cooney’s trackers rode into her family’s camp on the Durack River. The scared young girl hid in the bushes and watched as the trackers ‘collected lots and lots of firewood, rounded up the people then shot them and burnt them’.3 In spite of evidence, the investigation concluded that Gribble’s allegations of a massacre were untrue. Chief Protector Neville declared the outcome a whitewash and made a vigorous complaint to the Minister of the North West. The ironic finale to the 1922 killings was that the Western Australian authorities spent the next nineteen years searching for Harry Annear’s next of kin. Eventually, the quest was abandoned and the government paid Annear’s estate into a special fund for the benefit of natives.


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The Annear case and 1922 killings deepened Gribble’s mistrust of and repugnance towards Europeans in the north west. They seemed united to shatter his dream of segregating Aboriginals for their physical protection and spiritual wellbeing on his mission. He bombarded the Church press, police and Chief Protector with repeated complaints about the exploitation of black labourers, and the studied reluctance of Sergeant Buckland and the police to enforce the prohibited area and remove Aboriginals from Wyndham to Forrest River Mission. In August 1922, two of Gribble’s converts, Margaret and Eric Juanniga, absconded to Wyndham where Margaret got work at the local post office. Gribble pursued the runaways and confronted them but they refused to return to the mission and vanished into the bush. Feeling his control slipping, Gribble unleashed his rage on the local postmaster, threatening to report him to the Federal postal authorities if he ever again employed mission Aboriginals. It was in the same month that a stockman called Siddons tried to abduct Aboriginal boys from the Marndoc Reserve to work as labourers. A year later he succeeded in kidnapping a young boy called Nunjune. Rumours soon flowed into the mission that the hapless lad had been killed and Gribble quickly convened an inquiry at the mission, collected testimony confirming the murder and made a formal complaint to the Chief Protector. Despite his noble intentions, his zeal proved premature. The boy turned up several months later. The air was heavy with the looming rains of the wet season in November 1922 when two ex-servicemen, Leopold Rupert Overheu and Fredrick Hay, took possession of Nulla Nulla station. The government excised the 790 000-acre property from the Marndoc Reserve and leased it to Hay and Overheu under the War Service Land Settlement scheme as part of a grander vision by the State Premier, Sir James Mitchell, to stimulate northern development and diversify primary production. Leopold Overheu and his brother Charles joined a training program at Moola Bulla cattle station after returning from the War World I and, in 1921, Leopold fell in with Fredrick Hay, a returned digger who drove


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the donkeys between Moola Bulla and Fitzroy Crossing. Hay looked older than his years. A thin, bristly beard and battered, broad-rimmed hat, shaded his round face. His flabby behind sat on thick, beefy thighs and his shirt strained across a beer belly that hung over his trouser tops and wobbled when he walked. The local people called him ‘Fatty’ Bill Hay and he sweated profusely in the Kimberley heat. Hay and Overheu conscripted another Moola Bulla worker as the cook and station hand for Nulla Nulla. He was James ‘Harry’ Dunnett, a short, thickset man with a notoriously foul temper. Hay and Dunnett ran cattle, planted cash crops of cotton and peanuts, and battled drought, an unreliable labour force and constant Aboriginal attacks on their small cattle herd. Overheu was the brains of the outfit. Ambitious, bright and from a good family, he kept destitution at bay by doing the books for local pastoralists and dreamed of transforming Nulla Nulla into a prosperous cattle station. It never happened. Gribble was furious at the government’s decision to carve off a southern slice of the Marndoc Reserve and create Nulla Nulla Station. He took it as a sinister omen and expected trouble from the start. His complaints about his new neighbours were soon flying thick and fast: Hay ridiculed the mission’s religious work; set his dog on Aboriginals; and attacked a young boy by prodding him with a wire spear. In January 1924, Gribble claimed Hay assaulted and injured an Aboriginal man with a rifle butt. He assigned guards to watch Hay and Dunnett when they visited the mission for he was sure they were plotting to go into the camps and molest the women. Gribble accused Hay of trying to seduce the wife of a local man, and when he heard rumours that Hay had undergone a tribal marriage to gain sexual partners, Gribble was certain the story was true and immediately sailed to Wyndham and cabled Chief Protector Neville. The charge proved to be false and the overly vigilant missionary had to make an embarrassing retraction. Within a few years a state of undeclared war existed between the mission and Nulla Nulla station. The main trouble, Sergeant Buckland explained to Chief Protector Neville, was the fact that mission


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inmates ran away and worked at Nulla Nulla where life was more comfortable and affluent. Gribble married Barnabas Doounder and his wife Angelina in September 1922. He put his hope for the mission’s future in such unions but the couple fled repeatedly to work at Nulla Nulla. James Noble pursued them, but Overheu claimed Noble disturbed Nulla Nulla’s cattle, and Hay accused Gribble of interfering with their labour supply by forcibly extraditing their workers to his mission. In June 1924, Dunnett and Barnabas clashed over Angelina. Dunnett demanded possession of Angelina and attacked Barnabas with an axe when he refused to hand her over. By the time the police arrived at Nulla Nulla, Barnabas was barely conscious. He had stab wounds to his face and chest, and his skull was cracked wide open exposing his brain. He was taken to Wyndham and defied all the odds by recovering. The bush telegraph ensured Gribble learned of the attack and he rode directly to Nulla Nulla, seething with anger. His concerns and predictions about Nulla Nulla had been ridiculed and rebuffed. Now they had been realised. He insisted on Dunnett’s arrest. Chief Protector Neville agreed that Gribble, as Protector of Aborigines, should prosecute Dunnett in the committal hearing. Dunnett was held over for trial and Gribble was jubilant even though he knew a jury would ‘in all probability return a verdict of not guilty’.4 Settlers rallied to fund Dunnett’s defence and a Perth lawyer, Mr Lappin, was procured. At the trial in Wyndham on 5 December 1924, Barnabas confirmed Dunnett’s sexual abuse of Angelina and other Aboriginal women: Me and Harry [Dunnett] been row. He call me bad name. He ask me for Angelina my wife. Harry been have my wife plenty time. He take her away along horse all day. Me try to take Angelina away. I been salt meat. Harry been row about Angelina. I said no give her to you. I can’t give her to you. He all day take my wife. Harry hit me with the tomahawk first. He hit me with his knife too. I no see Harry come he jump up quick fellow and hit me. James Wunnamurra been tell me Harry been cover me up with bushes. I no shoot. I no been hear gun. Arrauah been sit down along house. Waybaram husband belonga Arrauah. Plenty Nilee [women] sit down all night with Harry.5


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During the trial, Gribble was humiliated and condemned as a liar who had made false charges against a white man. Even though two mission inmates, James Wunnamurra and Ernest Unbah, witnessed the events at Nulla Nulla and testified against Dunnett, the white male jury took just five minutes to declare Dunnett innocent. Gribble had forlornly hoped that justice would prevail and his faith in the civilising force of British law collapsed: ‘the present system of [courts is] an utter farce and our boasted British justice is being besmirched’.6 This event was a personal turning point. Thereafter, Gribble became a vocal and public advocate for separate courts for Indigenous Australians. Gribble had alienated Wyndham but his courage won the respect of influential public officials. Police Inspector Douglas in Broome was sympathetic: The result was a foregone conclusion and is only an instance of the futility of taking these cases before a jury in the Kimberley. One of the jurymen, who was summoned but not empanelled, informed me after the decision that that was the verdict that they had arranged two months previously.7

Dr Archibald Adams, the cantankerous and opinionated District Medical Officer, was a firm ally. Adams was one of Gribble’s few friends in Wyndham. His special, passionate interest was how to stop male Aboriginals spreading venereal disease. He experimented with an assortment of treatments and cures but surgical removal of the penis was his favoured remedy in cases of immoderate sexual activity. Chief Protector Neville was also sure that Dunnett was guilty and commended Gribble’s efforts to the Minister for the North West, John M. Drew, so highly that the minister responded: ‘if there were more men with his sympathies, the poor unfortunate aborigines would have a better deal’.8 Neville had been pushing for a travelling Inspector of Aborigines since 1916. The Dunnett case prompted Drew to agree. Ernest Mitchell was appointed to the position later in 1925. Even before Dunnett’s trial, Gribble had become immersed in another case of injustice and abuse. Monway (alias Billy Joe) grew


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up and worked as a stockman at Junction Station. In November 1924, Monway was accused of stealing food from the station. His boots and clothes were confiscated, he was chained to two other Aboriginal prisoners and taken by police to Wyndham gaol. The long walk was a torturous trek of 75 miles over hot sand and rugged terrain. Having spent a lifetime wearing boots, Monway’s feet were so badly blistered and torn that the bone and sinew were exposed and he could barely walk by the time he arrived in Wyndham. Disgusted by his condition, Dr Adams complained to Gribble and Police Inspector Douglas. Monway alleged that he had been dragged, whipped and kicked by the police. Gribble immediately championed his cause. It seemed a clear-cut case of police abuse, wrote Gribble, to Chief Protector Neville. A protracted inquiry by the Chief Protector and Commissioner of Police followed but all hope of prosecuting the police evaporated when the two Aboriginals chained with Monway mysteriously died. The police, Gribble wrote to Chief Protector Neville, had poisoned the witnesses. It was impossible to prove his allegation and an angry, exasperated Gribble ranted to Chief Protector Neville: After twelve years in the E. [sic] Kimberley I am convinced that the Police are not the Protectors of the natives but that the natives have at all times been exploited by the Police for their or others [sic] benefit.9

Monway was released from gaol and hospitalised. Five months later his condition was still serious. Unable to work with his twisted deformed feet, he joined the growing flock of vagrants on the outskirts of Wyndham and Dr Adams reported: Both feet have contracted toes, and tender, sensitive skin, easily abraded, tendency to hammer toes marked; the left has three middle toes nail-less, with deformed nails on great and little toes. The right has no nails on first and second, but deformed nails, on great, fourth and little toes. He is still a cripple when without boots.10

Gribble was exhausted and deeply troubled. Despite his glowing reports, Forrest River Mission had not flourished and his


W. C. Staff Dining Room

Kitchen

Girls' Home

Garage

Girls' Playground

Lawn Poultry

Sister Claridge's House

Garage

We l l

R O A D

R O A D

W A R A N G E S D A

R O A D

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Wor k sh op s W. C.

R O P E R

R O A D

Garden

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R O A D

Kitchen

GUMBOOL ROAD

DARK

Wa go n Sheds

R O A D

Dispensary Harness

K E N T

F l a g s t a ff

School

Church

Houses

Y A R R A B A H

People's

D E L A G I

Married

Barn Te n n i s

M I T C H E L L

Meal House

Rectory

Cricket etc

Boys

Boys

Boys

Landin

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F o r r e s t

Forrest River Mission, c. 1928

and Fore shore

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struggle to protect the local people seemed hopelessly futile. He was physically and emotionally drained and he could feel his dream of taking on JB’s mantle as the Aboriginals’ moral champion slipping from his grasp. The Chairman of the ABM in Sydney became his sometime confidant. He wrote to Needham, confessing that failure was making him bitter and depressed. He abandoned his weekly visits to Wyndham. Relations with the town had reached an icy impasse. For the first time in his life, Gribble was profoundly and tragically aware that he was an outcast and an outsider. Loneliness gripped him. At 57, the defiant hopefulness of youth no longer compensated for his deep feelings of alienation and exclusion. He craved companionship. At Yarrabah, the ever-present Gribble clan gave him a sense of belonging but Forrest River was different and he yearned for the sanctuary and security of supportive allies. Amelia’s company would be better than loneliness, but his


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estranged wife dismissed Gribble’s repeated pleas to join him. She had no interest in missionary life or in life with him. He eventually abandoned the idea and turned to his eldest son. Jack had fought at Gallipoli and he was idle and bored after the war. Gribble pleaded with the ABM to dispatch him to Forrest River. Missionary work, Gribble argued, was in Jack’s blood. Eventually, the ABM gave in, hoping that Jack’s presence would make Gribble happier and more contented. But Jack could not provide the intimacy of a woman. Gribble had sublimated his sexual cravings and lived a life of monastic chastity ever since he arrived at Forrest River. His self-control faltered when Violet Claridge joined the staff as the mission nurse in April 1924. Gribble was instantly drawn to her. He sought her out for moonlight horseback rides, coveted her exclusive attention and behaved like a possessive lover. His open affection made the young nurse awkward and uncomfortable. Jack was deeply perturbed by his father’s behaviour. He wrote to Chairman Needham that his father had: very much fallen in true friendship with Sister Claridge, I put it true friendship but that is not the word, anyway, he worries the woman very much, and cannot bear to see anyone else (male members) talking to her, only he, and they both have had some very unpleasant words about it all, but what is going on is very wrong, indeed, if Dad is not away shortly, Sister Claridge will leave I am sure.11

It was not until Jack announced his engagement to his co-worker, Edith Kent, that Gribble realised the depths of his physical and spiritual isolation. His son’s pending marriage was a poignant counterpoint to his own wretchedness: ‘of late feeling a very lonely man. No home comforts for so many years’.12 As self-pity descended into depression, he unwittingly plotted the degeneration of his spirits in his journal. By November 1924, he confessed to experiencing ‘another great struggle against despondency & depression & (I am ashamed to write it) I failed. God forgive me but this loneliness is gripping me hard’.13 Repeating the pattern that haunted him throughout his life, his melancholy found expression in vague


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physiological illnesses that came and went. He complained of ‘feeling rotten’ and took to his bed. It made him ‘feel better in ‘‘patches’’’ but he was ‘still very depressed’.14 Violet Claridge fuelled Gribble’s awareness of his own sexual vulnerability. The overt, uninhibited sexuality of the Forrest River Aboriginals—where intercourse was considered erotic play and wife-lending a sign of generosity—had always made him uncomfortable. The first item in his first letter from the mission was a request for clothing—anything would suffice. If necessary, chaff bags served as dresses and the Aboriginal men strung Hymnal pages across their genitalia. Gribble always kept a supply of old linen on hand: ‘A man could obtain a narrow strip, about four inches in width, and the women a broader strip’.15 The local people caught on quickly. Visitors arrived wearing small flags picturing the Prince of Wales and one wore an illuminated text of Scripture inscribed with the words: ‘The Lord will provide’. Even Gribble thought it was funny to see ‘grizzled old warriors appearing with a scrap of newspaper hanging before them, or even the lids of jam-tins’.16 Inmates were strictly segregated and supervised to stop ‘the possibility of immorality taking place’, and Chairman Needham worried: ‘there seems to be an obsession with sexual morality in the mind of the Superintendent’.17 Two days before Jack wrote to Needham about his father’s ardour for Violet Claridge, Gribble stumbled across the men and women from the mission cavorting naked in the river at O’Donnell’s Crossing. The deliberate breach of mission rules underlined his sexual isolation and his failure to change the cultural behaviours of the local people. The discovery left him bitterly despondent: . . . so upset that everything else happening simply crushed me. Feel unfit for anything now & am tempted to let things go as they please. I feel so utterly despondent and depressed. So out of touch with black & white.18

He spent the next day in bed indulging in ‘a deal of the devil’.19 Masturbation was the ultimate puritan depravity—a complete


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capitulation to self-abuse and the evil sin of lust. Riddled with guilt and self-loathing, Gribble’s despondency and despair deepened. A historian would later claim he satisfied his frustration by turning to Aboriginal women for sexual comfort and companionship, but the women who grew up on the mission found the idea laughable: ‘he’s too old. He’s past it!’.20 Jack’s letters to ABM Chairman Needham documented Gribble’s mental and physical deterioration: ‘gets down in the dumps and very nervy’; his ‘very bad moods’ were ‘effecting [sic] all the staff’. He told one female worker to ‘go to Hell’ and asked others to resign, and said ‘things to staff which no man would say if he was in his normal senses’: He has threatened himself on several occasions, in one case, he told us all, that he would go and cut his throat, and went off, I ran after him and held him until he got back to his senses [but] everyday he gets worse.21

A flurry of letters descended on the ABM offices in Sydney. Jack worried that his father had suffered a breakdown. Nurses Claridge and Grieve declared Gribble ‘mentally and physically ill’. Dr Adams diagnosed his friend as ‘a mental and physical wreck’.22 All the staff talked of resigning. Chairman Needham was forced to conclude that Gribble was ‘not in his right mind’ and it would mean ‘serious trouble if he is not compelled to leave’ the mission ‘at once’.23 Bishop Trower reluctantly agreed. The ABM Executive remembered Gribble’s breakdown at Yarrabah and in May 1925 decided: the present state of Mr Gribble’s health necessitated his immediate withdrawal from his position as Head at the Forrest River Mission . . . and that he be held on long furlough until further action be taken by the Board.24

With the question of his future to be decided after he left the mission, Gribble was sent five wires to withdraw. He ignored them all and announced that he would stay at Forrest River for another two years. His defiance convinced Bishop Trower that


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Gribble had suffered ‘a distressing breakdown . . . the environment and climate and isolation and cares and anxiety have evidently unsettled his mental balance’.25 On 18 June 1925, after consulting Dr Adams about Gribble’s mental condition, Bishop Trower withdrew Gribble’s licence. He had been sacked. Feeling shattered and betrayed, Gribble confided to his journal: I have now worked over 30 yrs for the blacks & established three Missions in N. [sic] Aus[tralia] & after twelve years here having taken up a forlorn hope in 1913 my Bishop [dismissed me] quite unfairly . . . that is the way which the ch[urch] is repaying me for a hard life of self denial . . . cruel & unkind to say the least.26

In Gribble’s mind, his dismissal was a repetition of history: The old saying is that nothing succeeds like success, but as I succeed with God’s help in establishing work among these people so I step into injustice and unkindness on the part of the Church authorities. As it was with my father so it seems to be with me. The action of the Church in W.A. killed him and the peculiar action of late on the part of the authorities is not by any means likely to cause longevity on my part.27

The stubborn missionary insisted he was quite well and would stay. Now Bishop Trower was in quandary. Gribble jousted with windmills, but Trower was fond of his quixotic priest. Gribble’s passionate—almost fanatical—obsession for exposing injustice and bettering conditions for Aboriginals was exactly what Trower thought the squatters of the north west needed. The Bishop sought the advice of independent experts. Chief Protector Neville reported ‘the Mission is doing good work . . . Mr Gribble has a thorough grip on the position and a wonderful influence amongst the natives’. Ernest Mitchell, the newly appointed travelling Protector of Aborigines, had visited Forrest River Mission in 1925 and spoke admiringly of Gribble’s work and success.28 Thus reassured, Trower reinstated his difficult priest. The result was a bitter, territorial wrangle. The ABM claimed its Board of Missions in Perth controlled the appointment, salary and tenure of missionaries and that Trower merely licensed its staff to


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administer the sacraments, but Trower refused to tolerate any erosion of his authority or control. The awkward stand-off was settled during the 1925 General Synod when the ABM was obliged to apologise for appearing to try and usurp the Bishop’s episcopal powers. Trower enjoyed his victory, but remained sceptical about Gribble’s health and insisted he take a furlough. His job assured, Gribble agreed and began the journey south on 25 August 1925. Five days later there was a sudden explosion aboard the mission lugger, Fram, that engulfed the boat in flames. The lugger was destroyed, three mission residents died and Jack Gribble was badly burnt. When word of the accident reached Gribble, he instantly returned north. He was worried. Only his presence, he told Chairman Needham, would prevent a mass exodus from the mission. The victims were buried under Christian rites in Wyndham but their relatives exhumed the bones to return them to their own country for traditional mourning rites. The missionaries in the compound were terrified: ‘the wailing in the camp of the old people was most unnerving. The camp people plastered themselves with clay and some of the men looked as though they had capes on’.29 In accordance with the belief that death was the result of malevolent action, three mission women were targeted as culpable for the death of one of the victims. Without the Fram, Forrest River Mission relied on the government launch to deliver supplies. From January 1926, however, the mission was completely isolated when the launch was damaged and confined for repairs. Within two months, food at the mission was so scarce that Gribble sent the inmates into the bush to hunt. At the same time a major influenza epidemic hit the area. At least six Aboriginals died, although dozens were seriously ill and many deaths may not have been reported to the mission. Gribble’s staff worked around the clock looking after the sick in overcrowded, difficult conditions. When morale was at its lowest point and extra hands were urgently needed, a staff member, William Howarth, fell off the Wyndham wharf and was taken by crocodiles. His headless torso was later recovered from the muddy Cambridge


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Gulf. Several months later, Jack’s wife, Edith ‘Marna’ Gribble, died after a three-day illness. Gribble was deeply attached to his daughter-in-law and her death hit him hard. In his eyes she was a martyr to the Aboriginal cause. It was a grave, personal loss that tested his faith and his resilience. Two years of drought during 1924 and 1925 had turned the Kimberleys into a scorched, dying wasteland. The grasslands and waterholes had disappeared, cattle were said to be dying in droves at Moola Bulla, native food was scarce and Aboriginals ravaged Gribble’s cherished cattle herd, wantonly wounding stock and leaving them to slowly die and rot. Gribble tracked one group of culprits as far as the Patrick River. Confronting a gathering of about 400 Aboriginals, Gribble escaped attack by pretending his lunch—a shoulder of mutton wrapped up in brown paper—was a revolver. Gribble worked hard to cultivate the image that his magnetic personality and authority prevented attacks on mission cattle. The faithful who read the Western Australian Church News were told that Aboriginals did not attack stock on the nearby Bovril Estate because they thought it belonged to the mission. Rather than be caught out in a fiction and humiliated, Gribble preferred to capture, try and punish cattle-killers at the mission rather than report the attacks to the police. Mr Lacey, the mission stockman, took a different stance. As far as he was concerned, failing to call in the police merely gave cattle-killers free rein. In September 1925, the mission suffered its largest attack ever and about 80 beasts were killed and wounded. Lacey was fed up. When the culprits were caught, Lacey threatened to report Gribble unless they were handed over and charged by police. Gribble hesitated and took seven days to contact the police. At the committal proceedings Gribble insisted that only three cows were killed before 1925 and the attackers were outsiders passing through the Reserve. Those responsible for the latest slaughter, Gribble claimed, were strangers from outside the Reserve who heard rumours that he had left the district. In the private pages of his


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journal, however, Gribble confided the truth: ‘our own mission boys were partaking of the beef . . . & worse still our most trusted stock boy had rounded up the cattle & given the bush natives a beast to kill’.30 Sergeant Buckland knew the facts and was angry about the charade. Gribble’s relations with the police degenerated further. Tragedy and disaster seemed to blight Forrest River. Gribble’s mental health was uncertain before his premature return from furlough in 1925 and his fortitude was tested by the run of subsequent misfortunes. Aborigines Inspector Ernest Mitchell visited and reported positively on the mission in mid-1925, but he confided to Chief Protector Neville that Jack Gribble was ‘much concerned about his fathers [sic] ‘‘state of mind’’ through worry etc.’. Mitchell believed Gribble would benefit from a ‘complete rest’.31 By May 1926, reports about the deterioration in Gribble’s mental condition were flooding south. Jack told Chairman Needham that his father would ‘really go out of his mind at times’.32 He quarrelled constantly with his staff, several wanted to resign, one almost attacked him physically and there were rumours that an inmate tried to take Gribble’s life. Nerves were frayed, tempers were edgy and Gribble complained of difficulty controlling the inmates. The strain and struggle of years of frustration had taken its toll. Gribble was exhausted, worn down and seemed to be losing touch with reality. His repeated differences with police and pastoralists had grown in his mind and he was convinced he lived on the periphery of a hostile white world. Feeling unwelcome and unwanted, his behaviour became erratic, solitary and unstable. He refused to associate with his white staff and ate his meals with the Aboriginal inmates. Amidst their company, he found refuge and companionship. The ABM Secretary in Perth worried that Gribble had gone quite strange. By mid-1926, Gribble seemed to be teetering on the brink of another mental collapse.


7

G HOSTS

CRYING IN THE DARK

I

n 1926, the rains finally arrived and the barren Kimberley plains were smothered with swathes of waist-high grass and the waterholes were alive with preening cockatoos and flirtatious, dancing brolgas. After two years of drought, crowds of Aboriginals flowed through the Marndoc Reserve to Barungnulla, an important sacred site near Nulla Nulla in the south, to trade and perform long overdue ceremonies. Gribble did not tell the police that the travellers killed mission cattle, but in mid-May 1926 Leo Overheu lodged a formal complaint with Sergeant Buckland about the slaughter of Nulla Nulla stock. Buckland was older now and off-loaded the job of chasing cattle-killers. He despatched Constable James Graham St Jack and two trackers, Windie Joe and Jacob, to check Overheu’s complaint. The police patrol left Wyndham on 20 May and headed south west where they joined Overheu with his stockman, Tommy, and Tommy’s wife, Lyddie. The party then rode on to Durragee Hill where 200–300 Aboriginals had assembled for a large corroboree. The police patrol raided the camp in the early hours of the morning. Two Aboriginals were captured but managed to escape and flee across the Pentecost River with the others. Tommy and Windie Joe pursued them on horseback. 127


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It was dusk when the group reached Nulla Nulla station four days after leaving Wyndham. The homestead—a galvanised iron shed divided into two rooms—was in darkness. There was no sign of Hay. Three or four days of eggs lay untouched in the chicken run and the Aboriginal camp nearby was deserted. In the morning, Jacob and Windie Joe went looking for Hay. They returned a few hours later with his horse. The saddle was covered with dry blood. Overheu and St Jack found the body of Frederick Hay near the carcass of a partially dismembered cow. He was naked, except for his boots, and lying face down in a pool of dry blood. Maggots were seething all over his swollen body and most of his jaw was already eaten away. Dingoes had gnawed his hands, stripping away the flesh and exposing the bone. There was a spear wound in his right side. Messengers were dispatched to Wyndham and the government launch arrived two days later with Constable Denis Regan, Dr Adams, the District Medical Officer, and Dr Maloney, the local bookmaker and coroner. Hay’s decomposing body was buried where it lay. The first news of developments on the Marndoc Reserve arrived at Forest River Mission on 27 May 1926 when Gribble was brought word that the police tracker Windie Joe and Overheu’s stockman Tommy had killed an old blind man and thrown his body into the water during the raid on Durragee Hill. Aldoa, a frequent mission visitor, arrived the next day with more details: I was in a big camp there when the police came a little before daylight and chased up the blacks. Overheu’s boy, Tommy, caught me and put handcuffs on me and two others, but I slipped the handcuffs off and ran away. Plenty of shots were fired in the air but one old man—Umbilijie—was killed by a blow on the head.1

Gribble noted in his journal that the bush was also bristling with the story of Hay’s murder: From native Aldoa learnt that Hay has been killed by natives. My story as told us goes to show that Hay had taken some women (two) one known to me Loorabane wife of Boondung. The women race


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[sic] away after a day or two and Hay went in pursuit of them and when bringing them back was followed by natives (not Boondung) and speared. I wonder what truth there is in all this. Time will show.2

In the past, the slightest whisper of wrongdoing against Aboriginals prompted a protesting telegram to Chief Protector Neville. This time it was days before Gribble reacted, although he later testified that information of the carnage was flooding into the mission. Only a fortnight earlier Jack Gribble had written to Chairman Needham about his father’s troubling mental instability. In mid-1926, Gribble was lost in a personal abyss of dark, feverish brooding. The brutal menacing feeling of being alone and misunderstood had wormed its way back into his fragile, troubled mind. He suffered without respite: silently, profoundly and full of self-pity. Consumed by his own vicious personal demons, he was oblivious to the rest of the world and deaf to the significance of the stories arriving at the mission. It was four days before he went to Wyndham. Even then the reason for his visit was to collect the new mission launch arriving from Perth on the Kangaroo. He arrived to discover that Hay’s death had unleashed a wave of hysteria throughout the town. The fact that a bullock carcases was found near Hay’s body satisfied settlers that Hay died defending his property against hostile, cattle-killing Aboriginals. The pastoralists were panicking. Overheu claimed Nulla Nulla had lost thousands of pounds and ‘through the ravages of blacks the station has practically gone bung’.3 The Member of the Legislative Assembly for the Kimberley, Michael Durack, had reckoned that Aboriginals killed 25–30 per cent of every herd but The West Australian of 13 November 1926, exaggerating wildly, claimed that a ‘conservative estimate’ was 40–60 per cent. The Kimberley press reported that ‘much of the country . . . was inhabited by savage tribes where white men were in constant danger of losing their lives and where cannibalism was still practised’.4 The townsfolk of Wyndham feared that others would die unless Hay’s death was avenged and the territory secured. Overheu was sure Gribble harboured cattle-killers at the


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mission and was convinced that Aboriginals ‘who have been educated and have left the mission have been the most troublesome in killing our cattle and annoying us’.5 In a letter to his father, reproduced in the Daily News on 8 July 1926, Overheu reported that he had demanded ‘a strong force to go out and also that the natives be dealt with drastically . . . so as to make the place safe for myself in the future’. Gribble had taken a dislike to Hay almost as soon as they met. There was no doubt in his mind that Hay was a shameless lecher who ravished young Aboriginal girls. He was suspicious and contemptuous of him when he was alive, and did not mourn his passing. Gribble’s evangelical roots surfaced—Hay’s death was fair retribution for his sins: Without a doubt Hay has paid for his harsh unkind treatment of the natives during the last four years. He certainly took the women from the natives & now he has paid.6

In his capacity as Justice of the Peace, Gribble swore in two civilians as special constables to help Constable Regan hunt for Hay’s killer. The missionary kept his counsel in the volatile climate of Wyndham but he heard the cries for blood as the posse left town: ‘many of the male residents . . . indulged in a verbal debauch of ‘take no prisoners’, ‘our lives will soon not be safe’ with all the hysterical verbal embellishments’.7 While they waited for Regan to arrive at Nulla Nulla, St Jack, Overheu and Tommy combed the district. They reported questioning several Aboriginals, all of whom were suffering from the influenza epidemic that Gribble’s staff had been treating for weeks, but six months later the body of an Aboriginal woman was discovered. The bush telegraph fingered Tommy, Overheu’s stockman, as the culprit. Constables Regan and St Jack joined forces at Nulla Nulla. Gribble had met Constable James St Jack nearly two years earlier when he was posted to Wyndham, five months after joining the police force. The town’s barren desolation shocked the lanky lad


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with the long face and sad eyes from the fertile farms of the south west, and St Jack wept when he first stepped onto the town jetty. Gribble barely knew Constable Denis Regan. He was stationed at Turkey Creek, a scorched nowhere south of Wyndham. He hailed from the busy mining town of Kalgoorlie and joined the police force in 1922. After a two-year stint in the pearling town of Broome, he transferred to Turkey Creek where his most onerous chore was guarding the beer during the Behn River races. The combined police patrol was a formidable force consisting of the two young policemen, Leo Overheu, two special constables, Bernard O’Leary and Richard Jolly, a civilian called Daniel Murnane, seven black trackers and Tommy’s wife, Lyddie. Bernard Patrick O’Leary had spent three months tracking Harry Annear’s killer and was linked with the 1922 killings. Richard John Jolly was an unemployed wharf labourer with no tracking experience, but he was broke and needed the stipend paid to special constables. The civilian, Daniel Murnane, had fought at Gallipoli and was a veterinary surgeon with the Commonwealth Institute of Science. Hay befriended him after he arrived in the north west to research cattle diseases and pests. Of the seven trackers, Frank Comeroo was attached to the Turkey Creek police where he worked with Constable Regan. Jacob and Windie Joe worked for the Wyndham Police. Sulieman and Jim McDonald (alias Mulga Jim) were former police trackers who knew Constable Regan. Tommy, Charlie and Lyddie worked for Overheu. It was a well-equipped patrol with 42 horses/mules and 400–500 rounds of ammunition. The patrol operated singly and in two groups for seventeen days. Eventually supplies ran low and Murnane had had enough. Chancing the crocodiles and treachery of the Cambridge Gulf, he took a dinghy and rowed to Wyndham to tell Sergeant Buckland to send provisions to Forrest River Mission. At the police station, Murnane ran into Inspector William Archibald Douglas, Officer in Charge of the Kimberley who was based in Broome. Inspector Douglas was a man with a destiny and a well-groomed moustache. He had served as a mounted police constable, a


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detective with the Perth Criminal Branch and a gold escort in Kalgoorlie. He was a seasoned tracker and well versed in the practices of northern police patrols. He knew Gribble vaguely from a brief stint in charge of the Wyndham police station during 1914 and was familiar with the events surrounding the 1922 killings. Fortune would smile on Inspector Douglas, and just before the outbreak of World War II, he would be promoted to the position of Commissioner of Police. After listening to Murnane’s report, Douglas ordered Buckland to go to the mission immediately and disband the special constables. The police launch deposited Buckland at the Forrest River Mission after the police patrol arrived in two groups on 21 and 23 June. It was around the same time that Lamondilla sought refuge in the mission compound. His buttocks were riddled with buckshot and he claimed to have seen the tracker Windie Joe shoot others. Regan insisted the patrol had not seen any Aboriginals during its three-week expedition and Gribble was too distracted to record Lamondilla’s story in his journal. He had received more perturbing news on 22 June: Several more natives came in today. Aldoa told me the following this evening as regards Hay’s death. Hay rode to the river bailed out the boat . . . then found Loombea’s [Lumbia’s] wife Angloo and another woman Goolool wife of Guiubool he took the former and used her then started to take her away. Loombea got his wife by the hand and Hay held her by the other. Hay and Loombea struggled for her then Hay thrashed Loombea with his stock whip across the head and face. Loombea fell down then jumped up and stabbed Hay with his shovel-nosed spear. Gooloo was a witness.8

Sergeant Buckland despatched Regan, St Jack and their trackers to capture Lumbia, guided by Aldoa and a mission inmate called Herbert Mitchell. The others in the police party returned to Wyndham. Meanwhile Aboriginals continued to bring Gribble intelligence about the killings. On 4 July when the police returned with Lumbia and witnesses in chains, Gribble insisted on interrogating the captives. Angelina Noble translated during


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the eight-hour hearing and, at least in Gribble’s mind, the interview confirmed that Hay’s actions led to his death. Regan arrested Lumbia and three witnesses, including Lumbia’s wife and Goolool. Gribble escorted the group to Wyndham. The town buzzed as the mission launch berthed and a crush of spectators flocked to see Regan lead his captives to the lock-up. Gribble hung around. The restraint of his last visit had evaporated and he was itching to share his news and views of Hay. His broadcast was blunt: thanks to his intervention, the truth was exposed and his interview with Lumbia verified his instincts about Hay and proved he died as a result of his depraved immorality. Gribble was destined for disappointment if he hoped to be congratulated for solving a puzzle. Slurring the character of a white man was a cardinal sin in the guarded, insular north west. Instead of accolades and applause, there was denial, derision and angry loathing. Gribble claimed his life was threatened and reported that Bernard O’Leary said: Look here, Gribble, I know the kind of man you are. If your own brother made a trip as regards the Aborigines Act you would go for him. If ever I catch you on my tracks in any nigger business I will put a bullet into you.9

Gribble’s smug self-righteousness gave way to frustration at the town’s refusal to be enlightened and admit the truth. He stewed during the slow boat ride home, and was brimming with smouldering resentment by the time he reached the sanctuary of his mission. In his heart and mind, proving his account of Hay’s death had become a symbolic battle between good and evil. As he hovered between reality and delusion, his thoughts were consumed with proving his righteousness and defeating the forces of darkness. He forgot that he had not reported the rumours about the killings while he was in town. It was while Gribble was in Wyndham that Loorabane sought refuge at the mission with her brother, Kangaloo. She had been wounded by a police bullet. Her brother listed six Aboriginals


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killed by the police patrol. Inside the sanctuary of the mission compound, Loorabane told Lily Johnson her story: . . . the police got all those Aborigines from the Kular tribe that lived from the coast to the mission . . . they put the men on one chain and the women with their children and their kids on another chain. Some of those women had babes at the breast . . . they killed the men. They just lined them up and shot them one by one . . . the women had to watch those men being shot . . . their husbands and brothers and relatives . . . the men had to collect wood first. They didn’t know why they had to collect that wood but they had to get a big pile of it . . . They lined them up and shot them . . . then they cut them up into pieces, you know, a leg, an arm, just like that and those bits of body were thrown on the wood . . . and burnt there . . . the women were taken to another place just a bit away . . . and had to stand on the river bank but it was dry that time of year and they were shot there so their bodies just fell into the river . . . they bashed the brains out of the babies and threw them into the river with their mothers and burnt the lot . . . there’s a lot of bodies. It took a long time to burn . . . With the women was a mother and her two kids . . . they had bush names. They couldn’t speak English . . . The boy’s name [was] Numbunnung (Kangaloo) and the girl was Loorabane . . . the boy spoke to his sister in language and told her that when that chain came off to grab mum and head for the bush . . . they were at the end of the chain . . . but [when they ran away] the police shot at them . . . they killed the mother and the girl got shot in the leg just there [pointing] . . . they hid in the roots of the pandanus grass in the Forrest River. They hid under water and breathed through a bit of pandanus grass, you know, it’s hollow, like a straw . . . the police looked for them everywhere but they just kept real still, not moving ’cause they were so scared . . . by evening, when they thought it was safe to leave, they moved out . . . swam across the Forrest River and travelled all the next day and then the day after until the evening until they reached the mission where they knew they’d be safe . . . I was playing with the other girls . . . when Loorabane came . . . She was shaking with fright . . . She told us what happened and we told Mamma [Angelina Noble] and Mamma told Jim [Noble] and he told old Gribble.10

John Thomson, a lay worker at the mission, recited Loorabane’s story to Gribble when he got back from Wyndham on 9 July. It was two months since Gribble had heard the first murmurs of killings but he barely listened as Thomson spoke. Anger at his humiliation


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in Wyndham still flooded his thoughts. And there was another problem. The Wyndham Meatworks was waiting for his first consignment of bullocks and Gribble could not risk being late and confirming the Church’s doubts about his credentials as a stockman. Loorabane’s story was pushed aside while he mustered his cattle. Three days later, he began the difficult overland trek to Wyndham while news of the slaughtering continued to flow into the mission. Gribble’s staff was getting edgy. John Thomson sent a message to Gribble hoping he could investigate on his way to Wyndham. Gribble responded that the cattle could not be left to make a detour. It was 29 July 1926 before Gribble arrived in Wyndham and reported the rumours of the killings to Aborigines Inspector Mitchell in Wyndham. Eight days earlier, Mitchell had heard similar stories at Ivanhoe Station. He asked Gribble to prepare a written report and Mitchell cabled Chief Protector Neville that he would personally investigate the allegations. As Inspector of Aborigines, Mitchell was scheduled to represent Lumbia at Hay’s inquest in a few days time, but he and Gribble arranged to begin their investigation as soon as the inquest was over. Two qualities endeared Mitchell to Gribble. He had experience and was an ally. As the former Superintendent of the Moore River and Carrolup Aboriginal settlements, Mitchell understood the burdens of Gribble’s work. Forrest River was one of the first missions he visited after his appointment in 1925. Agreeing that it was desirable to check the flow of Aboriginals to Wyndham, Mitchell endorsed Gribble’s dream of building an out-station on the Ernest River and enforcing the prohibition area to stop interracial sexual intercourse. Mitchell’s glowing report of the mission in 1925 inspired Chief Protector Neville’s flattering tribute of Gribble to the Minister for the North West and his support for Gribble’s reinstatement after his 1925 dismissal. Gribble had comfortably pigeonholed Mitchell as a trusted ally, however, their different views of Frederick Hay’s murder ruptured the blossoming friendship. Mitchell interviewed


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Lumbia’s wives in Wyndham. Both denied being sexually molested by Hay and insisted they were gathering lily-roots when Lumbia and Hay clashed. The women repeated their story at Hay’s inquest and Lumbia gave the same account. Lily and Fred Johnson, like others at Gribble’s lengthy interrogation of Lumbia at the mission, remembered a similar version of events: A big group was going to a circumcision corroboree and Lumbia and his two wives stopped on Hay’s land. Hay came boundary riding, you know, checking his cattle and things, and when he saw Lumbia and those girls he spoke to them and he told Lumbia to get off his land. He told him to go away but Lumbia was wild. He only spoke language. He didn’t understand. So Hay . . . knocked him down. Lumbia had a bunch of spears in his hand and he put a shovel-headed spear in his woomera while he was lying down—you know knocked down on the ground—and fired it at Hay while he was riding away.11

In the absence of any corroborating evidence for Gribble’s account, the argument Mitchell presented at the inquest was that Hay struck Lumbia who killed his attacker in self-defence. Lumbia was remanded for trial and appeared before Mr W.O. Mansbridge, the Resident Magistrate from Broome, on 26 October 1926 in a special sitting of the Supreme Court in Wyndham. It took the all white jury fifteen minutes to find Lumbia guilty of murder. He was sentenced to death but this was later commuted to life imprisonment on Rottnest Island. Lily Johnson remembered the trial: Lumbia was terrified. He didn’t know what was going on. He couldn’t speak English. He didn’t understand what people were saying or why he was there or anything about it all. He just was scared. Terrified. You just had to look at him to see how terrified he was. And then in the middle of everything he jumped up and escaped. He ran out of the courtroom running just as fast as he could. It all happened so fast. He just had to get away. He was desperate but he was going so fast he crashed into the verandah post and smashed it. It knocked him down and hurt his shoulder bad. It must have been bad ’cause there was blood. That was how they caught him, when he fell over. But they just tied him up on that verandah until the trial was over. Poor man. He didn’t understand anything what was going on.12


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The minimum Gribble expected of any friend was loyalty but Mitchell’s defence of Lumbia seemed designed to foster the impression that Hay died defending himself against cattle-killers. In Gribble’s mind Mitchell had betrayed and abandoned him. It was an unforgivable personal rebuff and a humiliating, shameful act of disloyalty. Already convinced that he was alone and isolated in a hostile world, Gribble stamped Mitchell as a traitor in league with his enemies. Obsessed by this desertion, Gribble dashed off a series of angry letters to the Chief Protector, the Police Inspector in Broome and senior clergymen across Australia, cataloguing how Mitchell had tried to hide the unsavoury fact that Hay’s rape of Angaloo led to his death. Thereafter, Gribble classified everything Mitchell said and did—or was thought to have said and done—as anti-Gribble and anti-Aboriginal. Gribble had a particular talent for holding a grudge and his spite did not mellow with time. Twenty years later, when he was 78 years old and putting the finishing touches on his final autobiography, The Setting Sun, he still branded Mitchell a liar who plotted with pastoralists. Even though Gribble was sure he was the Aboriginals’ only champion in the north west, he and Mitchell spent five days searching the alleged killing sites for clues. They found nothing. Mitchell stressed the importance of finding evidence, but Gribble was positive there had been a tragedy and certain that Mitchell wanted to suppress the truth: We found the camp where the police had evidently been for some time. In this camp were unmistakable signs of the presence of native prisoners. We could find no trace of these natives leaving that camp. I was confident that there had been a tragedy, though Mitchell seemed to think otherwise.13

Just as Mitchell was leaving the mission, word arrived that Overheu’s stockman, Tommy, had confessed that the police killed Aboriginals at Gotegotemerrie, to the north west of the mission. Mitchell sent James Noble to investigate while he returned to Wyndham. Relations with Gribble had become so strained that the Inspector was feeling depressed, disgusted and hungry. He


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had changed his opinion of Gribble’s mission. Conditions, he wrote to Chief Protector Neville, were shocking. On 21 August 1926, Noble returned from Gotegotemerrie with a parcel of charred remains. Gribble was devastated. Noble’s findings confronted him with the horrifying reality that he had ignored the mounting evidence of the killings and neglected his duty to the Aboriginals. Mission inmates remember he ‘cried. Just cried. Couldn’t stand it . . . He was really upset about it’.14 Jolted from his self-absorbed fixation on Hay, Gribble vowed to avenge the deaths of those who were ‘foully murdered by the Police’ and to pursue the police patrol and use ‘every means to bring [the] offenders to justice’. It was more than just humanitarian outrage. It was an act of personal absolution driven by a sense of destiny. He was ‘sure that God in the most wonderful way directed me over the years for this very purpose’. He held a special Holy Communion ‘for the souls of those . . . so foully murdered’,15 and buried a box of bones beneath an iron cross on the hill above the mission for all to see. Inside the mission church Gribble erected a memorial inscribed with the words: ‘Sacred to the Memory of the Innocent Natives Killed by the Police’. The next day he sailed to Wyndham and left the box of remains in the safekeeping of his friend Dr Adams. Gribble did not mention the evidence to Sergeant Buckland but he wired Chief Protector Neville, the ABM Secretary in Perth and the ABM Chairman in Sydney. This done, he told Inspector Mitchell. Mitchell was scared. He knew he would be criticised if he did not investigate, but Wyndham was united in its support of the police patrol. Gribble’s life had already been threatened and Mitchell feared for his own safety. He decided action was his only recourse. Immediately after telling Sergeant Buckland of the allegations, Mitchell met Gribble at the wharf and caught the outgoing tide to the mission. By noon the next day, they had begun the eight-hour ride to Gotegotemerrie. They arrived on 25 August and any doubts Mitchell might have had about Gribble’s veracity evaporated. Mitchell was exhausted and sickened by the gruesome


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discoveries. He rummaged amidst the debris, gathering up burnt pieces of bone, teeth and bloodstained stones as evidence. They continued south to Mowerie where Mitchell found signs that Aboriginals had been chained to a tree, killed and incinerated. He returned to Wyndham and wired Chief Protector Neville. The police, said Mitchell, were responsible. Realising the seriousness of the findings, Mitchell carefully sent his telegram in code. Chief Protector Neville immediately relayed the news to John Hickey, Honorary Minister in the Collier Government with responsibility for Aboriginal affairs, citing the 1922 killings as proof that the police had a history of killing Aboriginals. Gribble also cabled Neville: ‘obtained evidence of foul murder [the police] captured natives both sexes twenty miles these shot and burnt’.16 Lacking Mitchell’s prudence, Gribble did not encode his telegram. His allegations were soon general knowledge in Wyndham. During the ensuing weeks a tone of panic crept into Mitchell’s notes and correspondence. Dr Adams could not confirm that the remains were human, and Mitchell decided they needed to be examined by an expert. He went to painstaking and elaborate lengths to ensure that the evidence was not tampered with before it reached Perth for examination by the government bacteriologist. The life of Overheu’s stockman, Tommy, was threatened by tribal retribution for his role in the killings and by the police patrol because he had incriminated them in the Marndoc killings. Mitchell did not trust the police and suggested Neville deputise Gribble to arrest Tommy and hold him in protective custody at the mission. Meanwhile, Leo Overheu met Tommy at the Six Mile camp outside of Wyndham. Overheu’s assistant, Jacky, watched them ride off together and, a few hours later, saw Overheu return wearing his revolver and leading Tommy’s horse. Jacky said he saw blood on the saddle. Soon after he learned about the allegations of a police massacre, Inspector Douglas boarded the first available steamer from Broome. He arrived in Wyndham on 28 August 1926. The town was already alive with scuttlebutt about the reasons for his visit


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and the members of the police patrol had scattered. Gribble guided Douglas to Gotegotemerrie and Mowerie but the Inspector was unprepared for what he saw. Gribble later recalled how Douglas knelt amidst the ashes and vowed: ‘I am not a praying man but I will now pray to God to bring the fiends that did this, to justice’.17 Over the next three weeks Douglas interviewed as many members of the police patrol as he could find and re-traced the patrol’s route through the Marndoc Reserve. By 21 September, Douglas was confident enough to send a coded message to Police Commissioner Connell: ‘My investigations satisfy me that sixteen natives were burned in three lots; one, six and nine; only fragments [of] bone not larger than one inch remain’.18 The cautious Inspector warned it would not be smooth sailing: the trackers had scattered and were being protected by friends; there was no physical evidence to identify the victims; and time and weather had blurred all the surviving tracks. It was one thing for Gribble to claim Aboriginals were murdered and incinerated, argued Douglas. It was another matter to find proof with everyone in the district except Gribble working against him. Gribble was mystified and enraged by Douglas’ caution. He found the vaguest hint that justice might be sacrificed to a legal technicality completely incomprehensible. It struck at the very heart of the inequities he and his father had fought to overturn. Gribble took Douglas’ circumspect logic as signalling his desire to drop the case and added him to the growing retinue of enemies who aligned with the forces of darkness to deny the defenceless their basic human rights. Meanwhile Douglas had asked for detectives to help with the investigation. Detective Sergeant Manning had a reputation for integrity and results, and Police Commissioner Connell despatched him north. It was the end of October before Manning and Douglas learned through Gribble that four elderly Aboriginals being guarded by Regan and St Jack had disappeared when the Aboriginal members of the patrol were away from the police camp at Dala searching for Lumbia. Manning sent Herbert Mitchell


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and Aldoa to gather evidence. They returned with a parcel of charred remains. A few weeks later, Gribble guided the police to Dala where they collected fragments of bone, teeth and metal buttons from the debris at the bottom of the dry pond and extracted a .44 Winchester slug from a nearby tree. Gribble swamped Chief Protector Neville with telegrams and letters documenting the mounting evidence against the police patrol. His communiqués were public knowledge in Wyndham and Mitchell begged Gribble to be guarded. The Inspector of Aborigines did not know who could be trusted. As the weeks progressed Mitchell was increasingly apprehensive that publicity would stymie the investigation and destroy any chance of charging the police. Gribble, intent on pursuing justice, read his pleas for caution as a ploy to silence the affair and contrive a ‘hush-up’. Mitchell was panic stricken: ‘God only knows what and to whom he reports on anything he hears apart from seeing’.19 Gribble’s ‘constant references to ‘‘the wicked people of Wyndham’’, Mitchell wrote to Neville on 11 September, had made him ‘so cordially hated that most men here will go to any measures to thwart his object’. Besides, the Inspector reported, his unchaperoned trips to Wyndham with Angelina Noble were the subject of vicious gossip in the town. Gribble’s history of battles with pastoralists and police convinced him that Aboriginals had been massacred, but his small circle of allies was dwindling. Bishop Trower retired in early 1927 and Charles Riley, the Archbishop of Perth, was unreliable. Riley had ruled his episcopate for 32 years and was alive to the sensibilities of Western Australians: they inhabited a peculiar, separate world subdued and liberated by geography. The single authentic element in their surreal, unfathomable existence was the fragility of race relations on the frontier. Riley was an accomplished statesman with a swag of influential allies but his most intimate friend was the late John Winthrop Hackett: diocesan registrar, fellow Mason and proprietor of The West Australian during JB’s notorious and unsuccessful libel suit in 1886. Gribble’s pursuit of the police


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and pastoralists smacked of his father’s crusade 40 years earlier and attacked the very interests that Riley needed to sustain his struggling North West diocese. When Gribble sent the Archbishop a lengthy epistle about the Marndoc killings, dated 6 August 1926, Riley quietly forwarded it to the Premier’s Department and did not mention it to anyone. In the offices of the Board of Missions in Perth, Gribble’s track record of instability and misinformation made it easy to dismiss his allegations as the unbelievable imaginings of a demented mind. The ABM Secretary in Perth was firm: Personally I think Mr Gribble is quite past either the present or any new work and I should think the best thing the Board could do would be to give him a pension on the same salary which he is getting at the present time until he could get a parish or be taken on for deputation work. But during the last few months he seems to have gone strange especially with regard to the quantities of goods ordered for [the mission] and reading between the lines from letters received from Forrest River they seem to be taking him as a big joke.20

In August 1926, Canon Burton, a long-standing friend of Gribble’s foe Canon Hudleston, took over as ABM Secretary and continued his predecessor’s theme: wasteful methods, mismanagement, stubborn defiance, refusal to carry out the Board’s wishes and insistence on having his own way. Discussing mission matters was impossible, complained Burton, because Gribble was preoccupied and in a state of ‘turmoil both mental and nervous’. Unaware that Archbishop Riley knew about the killings, Burton dismissed Gribble’s allegations as ‘not very reliable, he having been misinformed by the Blacks’. Burton demanded facts not rumours.21 The opposition steeled Gribble. His father had used the press and his book, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land, to focus attention on his cause. With an eye on history, Gribble started composing a lengthy letter in which he detailed Hay’s murder, his personal dispute with Mitchell over Lumbia’s motive for spearing Hay and the evidence that the police patrol killed Aboriginals. In early September, he posted the letter to Archbishop Riley, Chief Protector Neville


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and senior clergy across Australia including the Archbishop of Melbourne and the Bishops of Goulburn and Willochra. The Daily News of 2 September broke the story of the Marndoc killings to the public. The West Australian followed the next day with honorary minister John Hickey confirming the killings. Chief Protector Neville suspected Gribble was responsible for the leak and told the Perth Board of Missions that publicity would jeopardise the lives of witnesses and thwart the chance of successfully prosecuting the police patrol. Inspector Mitchell had lost all respect for Gribble, and his reports confirmed Chief Protector Neville’s fears: Mr Gribble is an egotist and his ways and ideas are fixed. Argument of moral suasion is lost on him. He knows all there is to know on the subject of natives and their treatment . . . to be quite candid, I am of the opinion that Mr Gribble has no deep seated real feelings for the aboriginals. His attitude has resolved itself into a habit of mind and in reality the Church Service and ritual which is carried out faithfully morning and evening with preachment, is really ‘Gribble and his works’ in Excelsis—and the effort, knowingly or not, is a conversion unto Gribble and not God, or at the best to God per medium of the Rev. Gribble.22

His language, Mitchell complained, is ‘generally intemperate making use of sweeping generalities, whilst breathing out threats as to what he intends to do to expose ‘‘the whole thing’’ in every capital in the Commonwealth’. He decided that Gribble ‘loves an audience’ and his ‘protests about native treatment by white is 95 per cent love of lime light, egotism and propaganda’.23 Inspector Douglas sent similar complaints to Police Commissioner Connell: Gribble had threatened ‘to preach on this matter from pulpit and platform [and claimed that] the general public would believe his story as he had plenty of evidence to satisfy them and that it would help the mission work considerably’. Inspector Douglas concluded Gribble was ‘actuated more from a mission propaganda point of view . . . than from other reasons’.24 When the Sydney Daily Telegraph ran the story, Neville grilled Mitchell who reported that ‘on meeting Gribble I formed the


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conclusion that, primarily, he desired publicity, at any cost’.25 Four days later, the Chief Protector met with Canon Burton. Neville gave Gribble credit for first reporting the killings and James Noble for finding proof, but was ‘suspicious’ that Gribble had initiated ‘garbled reports’ to the press. Gribble denied the charge. Neville, Burton and Needham emphasised that silence was important at this stage. Nevertheless two weeks later on 23 October, readers of the Truth picked up their Sunday edition to read a sensational headline blazoned across the front page: ‘Alarming Reports that Natives were Horribly Murdered in the North is Met by a Conspiracy of Silence’. The Truth accused the press and the Board of Missions in Perth of conspiring to conceal the murders. A second story appeared later describing the mutilation and incineration of Aboriginals on the Marndoc Reserve and Lumbia’s trial for the murder of Frederick Hay. Gribble insisted he had not fed the story to the Truth—although he later wrote to its editor urging him not to let the matter rest. By early October, Chief Protector Neville had decided it was time Archbishop Riley checked certain indiscreet actions that ‘sooner or later are bound to lead [Gribble] into trouble [and this] would be a pity as he certainly has done good work at Forrest River’.26 Neville contacted Riley’s office on 5 October and arranged a meeting. The matter was not urgent. It could wait until the end of November when Riley returned from a visit to Sydney. The meeting went ahead as scheduled on 29 November but Riley did not attend. Instead, he sent his lieutenants, Archdeacon Hudleston and Canon Burton. The only written account of what transpired is Canon Burton’s report to Chairman Needham. Burton claimed Neville set out five criticisms of Gribble: his alienation of ‘practically all white people’; his ‘intemperate speech’; his unhappy relations with his staff; the ‘poor and scanty’ food offered to visitors; and his unchaperoned trips with Angelina Noble which were ‘openly commented on in Wyndham with dark insinuations’. Burton summarised: ‘I think we are all agreed that Gribble should retire’.27


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It did not escape Needham that six days after the meeting, the Chief Protector addressed the Western Australian Synod and publicly endorsed the mission’s exposé of the killings. Believing Burton had embellished the truth, Needham rejected the suggestion of dismissal. Gribble’s aggressive manner, argued Needham, was insignificant next to his principled and courageous protection of the defenceless: Gribble may have been foolish in his actions defending the natives and thereby incurred the enmity of many whites, but I feel that we must support him in what he has done, though not in the way he has done it. That there is something radically wrong in the treatment of the native I am fully convinced and it would be disastrous to condemn their chief friend and defender.28

Meanwhile, the case was drawing headlines in Britain and the United States. Humanitarian groups were rumbling about the need for a public inquiry. Few incidents in Australia—still a remote, antipodean outpost—had attracted as much national and international interest. On 2 December 1926, in the face of growing public disquiet, the Police Commissioner recommended the appointment of a magistrate to investigate the complaints. The Minister for Justice, Mr J.C. Willcock chose Australia Day 1927—the national celebration of British colonisation—to announce the ‘Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Alleged Killing and Burning of Bodies of Aborigines in East Kimberley and into Police Methods when Effecting Arrests’. The announcement legitimised Gribble’s campaign for justice. Archbishop Riley and Canon Burton, politicians at heart, knew it was unwise to condemn the Aboriginals’ most vocal advocate and the ABM in Perth belatedly announced it intended: to back up Gribble and encourage . . . as well as advise him, for we realise that the reputation of the Church [is at stake] if for lack of vigilance on our part now, this opportunity for striking a deadly blow against the enemies of the blacks is allowed to slip.29

George Tuthill Wood, Senior Stipendiary Magistrate in Perth, was appointed Royal Commissioner. He accepted the job for a fee


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of three guineas a day. The clean-shaven, English-born magistrate was well preserved for a man in his early sixties. Full cheeks fleshed out a square jaw, topped by a generous crop of dark hair firmly greased in place. His ears were larger than most would like but he wore the relaxed look of someone who took the time to enjoy life. Schooled and admitted to the Bar in New Zealand, Wood migrated to Australia during his twenties. In 1896, after a spell as a solicitor and barrister in Victoria, he was appointed the Crown Prosecutor in Western Australia and established his place in local society by becoming Extra Aide de Camp to the Governor and playing golf and tennis with the squattocracy between race meetings. He was well respected by the establishment and his years as Resident Magistrate in Broome and Bunbury were strong credentials for leading an inquiry riddled with racial issues. Wood was a sensible choice for Royal Commissioner. There was no reason for the government to suspect that he would err from the laudable pattern of reliability that had characterised a solid if unspectacular life of public service. The Terms of Reference for the Royal Commission set out five matters for investigation: 1. The circumstances of Lumbia’s arrest. 2. The alleged killing of Aborigines at Gotegotemerrie and Mowerie. 3. The alleged killing of four Aborigines at Dala while in the custody of Constables Regan and St Jack. 4. The disappearance of Leo Overheu’s Aboriginal assistant, Tommy. 5. The employment, supervision and arming of Aboriginal trackers and police boys. The government’s failure to follow common practice and appoint a detective or solicitor to assist the Royal Commissioner fomented suspicion that the inquiry was hobbled from the start. In practical terms, it meant the full burden of interrogating witnesses and sorting through the mass of contradictory evidence


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fell on the shoulders of the slightly built Wood. Gribble’s allegation that Hay sexually assaulted Lumbia’s wife was explicitly excluded from the inquiry and Wood was told to delete all references of it from his report. Although there were allegations that Aboriginals were slaughtered at several sites throughout the Reserve, the inquiry was limited to Gotegotemerrie, Mowerie and Dala. Wood objected to having his investigation curbed and warned that any findings might understate the extent of the tragedy. East Kimberley settlers contributed generously to a fund to hire Walter Maxwell Nairn to defend the accused. Nairn would later become a Member of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly and Speaker of the House, but in 1927 the prominent solicitor was a rising star in Perth’s modest legal circle. The press blamed Gribble for the inquiry, and for seven months citizens in Britain, the United States and Australia devoured serialised accounts of the Royal Commission’s proceedings in the press. It was fodder for discussion among the fashionable and influential, a matter of debate at rural meetings and the subject of reflective ruminations over schooners of beer. In the north west, the newspapers either ignored the case or gave it only infrequent, fleeting mentions. Wood made Wyndham his base but found that there was ‘a conspiracy of silence’ across the north west. Witnesses changed their stories after being visited by Nairn and the police. Others refused to testify or mysteriously disappeared. Three trackers made statements incriminating the police, but the Wyndham police allowed them to escape and failed to procure their return. Tommy, a key witness to the Gotegotemerrie killings, had disappeared and was alleged to have been murdered. Wood formed the view that the European members of the patrol, including Constables Regan and St Jack, had lied and conspired together to make sure their testimony was compatible. Much of Nairn’s defence hinged on discrediting Gribble and proving that his campaign for justice was driven by a malicious


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hated of the police. True, Gribble admitted he had little love for the police. He told the Royal Commission that the police ‘never give me much assistance in matters dealing with the natives rather in a quiet way oppose me’.30 Constable Regan accused him of being ‘notoriously antagonistic to the police and offered us obstacles in the execution of justice’.31 Nairn also attacked Gribble’s treatment of Aboriginals: [he] treats them as the equal of whites. He continually puffs up blacks and has been a source of great mischief in the Wyndham district. That is why he is so cordially hated by those amongst whom he has lived for 13 years.32

Inflamed by Nairn, public loathing of Gribble gained momentum. There was a second threat on his life, shopkeepers in Wyndham banned the sale of goods to the mission and Dr. Adams claimed terrorism was rampant throughout the town. In Perth, parishes refused to let Gribble visit or preach and one of the faithful, Gribble related later, wished the police ‘All power . . . for shooting a few useless niggers’.33 Wood submitted his report to the Premier of Western Australia on 21 May 1927. Although he found no proof that Overheu killed Tommy, Wood concluded that the trackers with the police party were improperly supervised and often a ‘menace to the natives against whom they are operating’. On the matter of a massacre, Wood formed the view that in June 1926 the police patrol killed eleven Aboriginals at Gotegotemerrie, Mowerie and Dala and burned the bodies of their victims to conceal their crime. There was not enough evidence ‘to establish definitely the actual perpetrator or perpetrators of the murders’ at Gotegotemerrie and Mowerie but: four Aborigines [Gumbool, Boondung, Newgringie and Bungomerrie] met their death and were burned near a place called Dala about the end of June, 1926, while in the custody of Constables Regan and St. Jack, and that the only persons responsible for those deaths were Constables Regan and St. Jack.34


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Based on the register of mission visitors, Gribble was positive that about 30 Aboriginals were killed, although he admitted his records were incomplete and sometimes inaccurate: Aboriginals avoided the mission because he appropriated the children, others left the district after the killings and sought refuge at the Roman Catholic mission on the Drysdale River; and an unknown number may have died in the influenza epidemic. Police Inspector Douglas’ investigations led him to believe that as many as sixteen Aboriginals may have been killed. Charles Overheu later claimed his brother, Leo, told him the police patrol ‘shot about three hundred natives all in one hit’.35 Aboriginals who survived the rampage talk in generic terms of hundreds being killed and of the police clearing out everyone as far as the coast. The impact of the killings reverberated throughout the Kimberley. Among many Aboriginal groups, it was usual practice to lay the durdu (body wrapped in paper bark) in a tree where the juices of the decaying body could be collected and drunk by relatives to absorb the strength of the deceased. Months later, deferred mourning ceremonies were held and the people gathered to grieve, perform corroborees, exchange gifts and conduct ritual smokings to protect against vengeance by the zuari (spirit). In an interconnected cosmos, death was considered the result of a malevolent action and the Law obliged relatives to identify and extract revenge from those responsible. Only then could the zuari travel to Niligu (the home of the dead) and be ready for reincarnation. Normally, those answerable for a death were identified by the pattern of body juices falling from the decomposing durdu or the arrangement of the ashes after the deceased’s collar bone was burned. They were punished by spearing or sickening and dying from the magic of the barumannari (clever men). The bones were finally laid to rest in a secret cave after the required rites. If relatives did not avenge a death or complete the full burial ceremonies, the zuari remained at large to harass relatives and shatter tribal harmony. Consequently, the zuari of the victims of the Marndoc killings were condemned to a limbo of perpetual


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unrest, to roam lost and suffering in the hills of the Marndoc Reserve. Legend has it that ‘You can hear ghosts crying in the night . . . babies crying, troopers’ horse, chains jingling’.36 The ABM Review stated the official position of the Anglican Church in Australia: ‘It is no understatement of the situation that the national character of the Australian people was brought to the bar of judgement of the civilised world’.37 For Bishop Gerard Trower it was a triumphant swansong. As an energetic young bishop in Africa, he had built a large, vibrant Anglican community with all the badges of success: a cathedral, hospital, a clutch of schools and a dynamic Indigenous ministry. His struggling Australian diocese could not have been more different. It was huge and povertystricken: no synod, too few priests, parishioners too widely scattered, too much Roman Catholic influence, no cathedral and Trower lived in rented accommodation. They were miserable years. For a man whose heart was really in missionary work, Trower considered Forrest River Mission one of the special achievements of his fifteen-year episcopate. Recent events had proven the mission’s value as a force for protecting Aboriginals and justified his years of support for his difficult priest. It was a gratifying end. Worn out and ill, the Bishop died twelve months after the Royal Commission finished, but not before congratulating Gribble: For many years he has fought the battle of the aborigines. During the Commission he has been with his back against the wall, with all sorts of influences against him. But fearlessly he faced the odds. All honour to him for the brave fight he has put up!38

Archbishop Riley’s response consisted of a single sentence: ‘I am glad that the Royal Commissioner’s report has shown that Mr. Gribble’s complaint about the ill-treatment of natives was justified and necessary’.39 During his summation to the Wood Royal Commission, Chief Protector Neville expressed concern about the management of Aboriginal affairs by the States and resurrected debate about Federal control of Aborigines. In June 1927, Prime Minister


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Stanley Bruce proposed an extra-parliamentary Royal Commission on Aboriginal Affairs. The States refused to co-operate. A Commonwealth proposal for a joint Select Committee also fizzled, but Aboriginal Affairs was put on the agenda for the 1927 Royal Commission into the Commonwealth Constitution. By then Gribble had become a high profile public figure considered by many to be an ‘authority’ on Aboriginals. He was asked to address the Royal Commission. By the end of the 1920s, his familiar theme sounded dated and old fashioned: paternal responsibility; the obligations of the ‘white man’s burden’; and the importance of segregation under benevolent missionary control. Commissioner Wood had been careful to point out that his findings were based on the ‘balance of probabilities’—the standard of proof used in civil cases. It would be virtually impossible, he argued, to convict Constables Regan and St Jack in a criminal court where guilt had to be proven beyond all reasonable doubt. This fact did not subdue the chorus of cries for justice from humanitarian groups and concerned citizens. The government read the writing on the wall. On 28 May 1927, Constables Regan and St Jack were arrested and charged with the wilful murder of Boondung at Dala in June 1926. The news divided the nation. It was the winter of 1927 when the committal proceedings began in Perth. Gribble did not like the city or its people and he could sense their loathing as he sat waiting at the back of the crowded Beaufort Street Central Courts. He was to be the first witness against the accused. Beside him was his son, Jack, Herbert Mitchell and Aldoa. Gribble had looked older than his years when he first went bald in his early twenties. Now he was four months shy of his 57th birthday and the remaining hair around his ears was appropriately grey and offset by a close white beard and coarse moustache that disguised his unfortunately thin upper lip. His lean frame, tense with the imprisoned energy of coiled wire, bespoke a lifetime of physical labour. He felt uncomfortable in his heavy suit but, remarkably, the trials and tragedies of the last two years had not aged him. In fact, he looked younger.


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The victory of the Royal Commission had been invigorating and renewed his purpose and his passion for life. He steeled himself for another spirited confrontation. Mr Nairn represented Regan and St Jack. Neither entered a plea. Acting Police Magistrate Kidson heard three days of testimony and announced, on 10 August 1927, that there was insufficient evidence to proceed to trial. A chorus of cheers erupted from the throng of supporters in the courtroom. Regan and St Jack looked drained and relieved. They were reinstated, paid their salary arrears and returned north just long enough to collect their belongings before being transferred elsewhere. The verdict unleashed a surge of invective against Gribble. The Daily News claimed he would ‘give his soul to convict a policeman’; the Northern Times dismissed his allegations of the Marndoc killings as ‘hysterical conjecture’; and the Police News argued that Kidson’s verdict reflected public opinion in the far west and far north. The WA Pastoralist and Grazier encapsulated the tenor of feeling: ‘absurd . . . fantastic imaginings . . . a libel . . . on the character of the residents and station owners of the north west . . . no evidence . . . could be sustained when subjected to the test’.40 The people of Western Australia, threatened the WA Pastoralist and Grazier, would withdraw their support of Riley and his Church unless he ended Gribble’s defamation of the north west. Riley was intimidated. He refused to attend a public meeting of support for Gribble—claiming it was a wintry night— and ignored Needham’s urging to protest the reinstatement of the constables. The ABM in Perth refused to publish a letter congratulating Gribble. Chairman Needham was dismayed. There seemed to be such ‘a real desire to whitewash the matter’ that he packed his bags and headed west ‘to arouse Church people to take a less indulgent view of the whole affair’.41 Humanitarian groups flooded Gribble with letters applauding his success with the Royal Commission and damning the reinstatement of Regan and St Jack. Gribble gathered a new constituency of allies in groups like the Association for the Protection of Native


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Races, the Aborigines’ Friends Association, the Aborigines’ Protection League, as well as the Bendigo Anglican Synod, the Archbishop of Melbourne, Bishop Feetham of North Queensland and the Western Australian National Council of Women. The accolades topped off a bittersweet saga, but Gribble’s flustered memory fragmented reality. Just as he had reconstructed his decision to stay at Yarrabah, he reconstructed the sequence of events in Western Australia. He forgot he had not reported the first whispers of killings and insisted categorically that he heard nothing about the affair until after he took Lumbia and Regan to Wyndham. His smouldering resentment of the people he believed had betrayed him never extinguished. As he aged, he manufactured a swelling portfolio of real and imagined grievances against his illusory enemies. He alleged that the Western Australian Government destroyed all copies of Royal Commissioner Wood’s report to suppress the findings; that Inspector Mitchell suppressed Hay’s lechery to protect the reputation of ‘his fair state; and that he had conspired with the police because he was seen ‘in earnest conversation with one of the two men concerned in the murder . . . and shaking hands’. When Douglas was appointed Police Commissioner in the early 1930s, Gribble was positive he was ‘promised’ the job if he ‘did not fight’ the squattocracy and police over the massacre’.42 Despite the reconstructions that fermented in his mind, Gribble’s dogged refusal to let the case die brought race relations on the frontier into the public domain. It set in train a sequence of events that reverberated throughout the nation, and offered some small compensation for his inability to duplicate the achievements at Yarrabah in the west. Contemporary commentators noted that his success vindicated his father’s stand 40 years earlier and Gribble revelled in the historical symmetry. JB had defined the battle but Gribble attached great significance to the fact that victory went to his son: ‘The son succeeded where the father failed’.43 At last JB’s haunting spectre was vanquished—but with the blood of the people Ernest Gribble devoted his life to saving.


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ribble had been on borrowed time since his aborted 1925 furlough. Finally succumbing to pressure from the Perth Board of Missions, he surrendered in August 1927 and agreed to take a holiday knowing he might not be allowed to return to Forrest River. It was common knowledge in Church circles that Archbishop Riley and the Perth Board wanted their troublesome priest gone. The patronage of the ABM Executive, spearheaded by Chairman Needham, protected Gribble, but it did not mollify the uneasiness of the Church in Western Australia. During his furlough Reverend Webb assumed Gribble’s mantle at Forrest River and reported that the feeling in Wyndham: against Mr Gribble is very strong still, and it is rumoured that if he sends cattle to the [meat] Works the men will strike rather than deal with them, and the same embargo is likely to be placed upon eggs and vegetables from the Mission . . . there will be much anxiety and difficulty awaiting Mr. Gribble on his return, but the feeling is a personal one and not directed against the Mission . . . the place is full of the most extraordinary rumours reflecting on his moral character as well as on his general conduct . . . there have [sic] been much unhappiness and many misunderstandings at the Mission, news of which goes into Wyndham . . . most . . . has been quite unnecessary.1 154


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A troubled telegram from Jack Gribble to Perth reinforced Reverend Webb’s message: ‘father not return [sic] . . . feeling most antagonistic’.2 The Perth Board, fearing broader repercussions, suggested it was unwise for Gribble to resume his duties at the mission. Chairman Needham agreed that: there is a general hatred of Mr Gribble . . . some of the opposition would come from those who hate him because of his defence of the aborigines, and some, perhaps the most, would come from those he antagonised by his aggressive attitude towards them, and his condemnation of the whole of the white population in the north.3

Nevertheless, Needham argued that justice and moral principle were at stake: It would never do to quail before . . . unrighteousness. Mr Gribble may be tactless . . . Mr Gribble may have stirred up unnecessary opposition . . . but . . . I am fully assured that on the whole he was absolutely in the right and that it is because of his stand for justice that most of the opposition has been aroused. The Church therefore must support him.4

What irked the Perth Board was that Gribble’s ledgers never tallied. No one knew the value of the mission cattle, the cotton crop was a quarter of the promised size, Aboriginals were killing cattle again and Gribble continued to defy directives by accumulating debts in Wyndham. By July 1927, Forrest River mission was in dire financial straits. The ABM organised a nationwide fundraising campaign and set a target of £1000 for the first appeal. Donations totalled £250. The second appeal was virtually ignored. Gribble turned 59 while he was on leave and spent his birthday closeted in the ABM’s Sydney office coming to terms with a list of rules designed to redress his administrative failings and put Forrest River on a solid financial footing. Canon Burton wanted a signed declaration that Gribble would obey the instructions, but Needham argued that: ‘If in the future [Gribble] refused to abide by [them] then he must be removed’.5 Thwarted and frustrated, Canon Burton resigned as Secretary of the ABM in Perth.


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Meanwhile, Webb’s reports from Forrest River fuelled consternation in Perth. He complained that the mission was badly planned, inefficient and without clean drinking water. The buildings leaked, the dining room was ‘unsanitary’ and there was no bathroom or schoolroom or cupboards ‘to keep flies and dust from the food’. Staff had no privacy, the mud-brick and thatch buildings were a fire hazard—the girls’ dormitory burnt down on 26 July 1927—and cattle had eaten the area’s supply of thatch grass. Webb scoffed at Gribble’s plan to establish out-stations when there was so much basic building and repair work to be done. Forrest River cotton had won prizes at the Wembley Exhibition but in 1923 the government banned the export of north west cotton because of contamination. Nevertheless, Gribble continued cultivation. By 1927, with no prospect of a market, the stockpile of five years’ labour was burned to the ground. Mission finances, Webb reported, were a mess. He suspected Gribble’s stock figures were inflated and worried about the cattle eating native foods and spoiling waterholes: ‘Is it sacrilege for me to say that the placing of cattle on this reserve was an injustice to these people?’6 Chairman Needham dismissed Webb’s reports. Gribble had been on furlough and occupied by the Royal Commission, argued the Chairman. He could not be blamed for problems while he was away. The dry season had only just started when the Koolinda set out from Perth to ply its regular route along the coast to Darwin. Its passengers included Ernest Gribble, returning after a busy furlough, and Dr Adolphus Peter Elkin, a 37-year-old anthropologist and fellow priest who was to spend the next six weeks— 10 April to 27 May 1928—at Forrest River Mission. Everything about the bespectacled scientist was long and thin: his tapered nose, tight lips, lanky limbs and fine, thinning hair. The exception was a triangular face with a high broad forehead that tapered to a slightly receding, cleft chin above a prominent Adam’s apple. Elkin soon discarded the hefty supply kit he had brought with him but kept his pith helmet and colonial whites. As he leaned


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over the railings of the Koolinda, mesmerised by its wash, Elkin was fresh and enthusiastic. He had just finished a PhD at London University and had a twelve-month fellowship to research Aboriginal kinship and genealogies in the Kimberley. The qualities that would carve out his future were already well formed and uncomfortably like those of the missionary at his side. He was tireless, unforgiving, stubborn and self-righteous. The difference lay in Elkin’s glorified view of clergy. The priggish professor-to-be looked at Gribble and decided he was more like a grubby cattleman than a fellow cleric in the Anglican Church. There was no clue that in six years this ambitious, unknown priest would succeed the renowned Professor Radcliffe Brown to the Chair of Anthropology at Sydney University and dominate Aboriginal affairs in Australia for the next half-century. In April 1928, Elkin’s future was uncertain. He had a wife and young child and little likelihood of work in the immature field of anthropology after his fellowship ended. Nevertheless, he wanted his fieldwork to be a stepping-stone for the future. Forrest River Mission was not on his itinerary but he approached Charles Brown, Diocesan Registrar in Perth, about work with the Church using his special knowledge. Brown suggested he visit Forrest River. Elkin’s brief from the ABM was clear: to examine and report on the mission’s anthropology—Chairman Needham would examine the rest when he visited in June 1928 as part of a nationwide tour of ABM missions. Off his own bat, Elkin decided a fuller report was necessary. Elkin’s assessment echoed Webb’s criticisms: lack of fresh water, no vegetables, bad housing, dangerous, flammable thatch roofs, unmustered stock in poor condition. He criticised the lack of pastoral care for staff and Aboriginals: it is ‘not sufficient’ to be merely ‘a good protector of the aborigines in their contact with the white, and to be very interested in stock’. Elkin formed the view that mission inmates had little or no understanding of Christianity and no effort was made to convert the people beyond the compound. Most inmates only spoke a few words of English. They ‘did not, and do not understand baptism or what the mission


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is doing’ and people avoided the place because they knew that once a child was inside the compound: he or she will not be allowed out again except for a few hours on a holiday under the supervision of a missionary, that later the child will be married contrary to the tribal laws and to promises made by the parents and that finally, the child becomes a complete outsider to all tribal culture.7

Elkin’s list of criticisms was damning: separation of parents and children; insistence on Europeanisation; refusal to learn ‘language’; ignorance of Aboriginal customs; violation of marriage laws; and rigid segregation of the sexes. He wrote to his wife, Sally, venting his contempt: The mission is not a mission to the blacks but a place to which the Government can send half-castes and cripples. Gribble adds to these by getting hold of the children from the bush blacks (through their tummies) and as soon as they reach puberty marrying them as he thinks fit, putting each pair in a hut and getting them to breed. He says his hope for the mission lies in these babies so born. He has nothing to offer the outside black and doesn’t regard them as his mission. The married couples are separated from 5 am until 8.30 p.m. so it is no wonder that the expression Gribble’s stud farm has grown up.8

Gribble’s relations with his staff, Elkin maintained, were ‘unhappy’. Two workers had resigned since he returned from furlough and others planned to resign. Beyond the mission, Gribble was almost universally detested. It was not, argued Elkin, because of his stand on the 1926 killings. It was: a personal matter between himself and various individuals. They do not like him. This applies to people who are kindly disposed towards the mission, and show kindness towards the rest of the mission staff.9

Elkin believed Gribble was incapable of running the mission: ‘too much repression, and I regret to say, a little terrorising’. He concluded that Gribble was a ‘conceited . . . uncouth tyrant’.10 At the end of May 1928, Chief Protector Neville met the young anthropologist in Wyndham for a two-month tour of the north west.


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After Elkin shared his views of Gribble, the pair decided to sail to Darwin, meet Chairman Needham and discuss matters during the return trip to Wyndham. On 24 August, the ABM in Sydney sent Gribble a telegram. He was to leave for Sydney immediately. Official notice would come later but the message was clear: he had been sacked. Elkin took the credit: ‘the mission needed . . . a change of Superintendent. My detailed report (1928) caused surprise and some debate at the meeting of the Board. But it was adopted’.11 As Elkin’s influence and eminence grew, his version of events became conventional wisdom. In fact, the unknown anthropologist had little impact on Gribble’s fate in 1928. When the Koolinda berthed in Wyndham Needham left Elkin and Neville for a five day visit—2 to 7 June 1928—at Forrest River Mission. His time there convinced Needham that Elkin was ‘quite wrong . . . that no missionary work is done amongst the bush natives’, and that discipline and work at the mission suffered while Reverend Webb was in charge. Nevertheless, Chairman Needham’s assessment of the mission was brutal: ‘very primitive [and] rickety’, no baths and no adequate water supply. He was disappointed that ‘after fourteen years’ work there ought to be a much larger population resident in the mission. There are very few adults residing in the Mission village’. He took exception to Gribble’s ‘policy of Europeanisation’ and ‘his objections against the Missionaries learning, and using, the native tongue’, and criticised Gribble’s treatment of the inmates as repressive, obsessive, unhealthy and destined to bring about ‘cunning avoidance of the regulations’. The Chairman reserved his most scathing criticisms for Gribble’s relations with his staff and the spiritual life of the mission: Gribble’s constant nitpicking and caustic attacks had made his staff desperately unhappy. They were ‘repressed all the time [and] scared of the ill-temper of the Superintendent’. They all wanted to resign. Coming from a long-standing admirer and ally, it was a ruthless personal and professional censure: Mr Gribble is not a priest, and has never been trained to be one and is not likely to be one in the future . . . he knows little of the


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A T E R R I B LY W I L D M A N ideals of the priesthood. He has several bad faults . . . he is a most aggressive egotist and quite incapable of learning anything new. He is of the opinion that he knows all that is required to be known, and that no one can tell him anything of any value in connection with the natives of Australia and the best methods of missionary work amongst them . . . owing to his egotism he can never work with anyone of initiative. He must have everything done his own way. He is quite incapable of bringing out the best in his fellow workers . . . he will not listen to any suggestion from anyone. A consultation of the staff is only a sham, none would dare to express an opinion if thought to be unacceptable to him. It would be met with the same old remark ‘I have had thirty-six years’ experience, and I know’. He continually harps on the faults of those who have dared to criticise him, and when not doing that is mentioning facts of his own experience . . . In Church his addresses dwell too much on the work, and he uses that opportunity of hitting at both staff and inmate. There is very little spiritual help given or received. His language at times is extravagant in the extreme. One of his phrases—a favourite one—is ‘I will go through gore and blood up to the neck to get my own way’.12

By the time he left Forrest River, Needham had decided that Gribble had to go. He met with the Perth Board of Missions on 25 June 1928—long before anyone saw Elkin’s written report—to announce that Gribble’s work at Forrest River was ‘almost done’ and sometime in ‘the next three years’ Needham hoped to find a new post ‘which would suit his special ability’.13 He was more open with his confidant, Bishop Feetham of north Queensland: ‘the sooner we remove Gribble to another sphere the better’. Feetham agreed: ‘Gribble is a terribly wild man. The only hope is to move him’.14 Needham knew his decision was necessary but it made him uncomfortable. He never faltered in his admiration of Gribble’s courage and commitment to Aboriginals, and he believed the ageing missionary deserved respect and consideration for his long, self-sacrificing service to the Church. Like any politically astute administrator, Needham also knew that: any movement on our part is sure to result in an attack on Mr Gribble and the Mission, and this attack is not likely to be


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moderate but extreme in everyway. All sorts of insinuations are sure to be launched, and unfortunately Mr Gribble has left room for criticism of his actions, and his policy on the Mission . . . it would be hard to defend him entirely, and yet if the opposition came it would be necessary to defend him on account of the stand he took for the defence of the natives.15

Gribble was told he could stay just long enough to bring the mission up to its former state of efficiency providing he did not visit Wyndham, revive opposition, attack others or make the staff unhappy, use compulsion to marry mission inmates or use extravagant and indiscreet language. In the winter of 1928, Needham let Chief Protector Neville, Elkin and Webb know that Gribble would stay for a while, as long as he did not revive dormant opposition by doing something foolish. Gribble tried. He began repairs on the mission buildings, started recording local stories and customs, introduced regular staff meetings and, for the first time, allowed mission inmates to be lay readers during services. Two months later, Gribble’s removal had become urgent. When the ABM Executive met in Sydney to discuss Needham and Elkin’s reports at the end of August, Needham had already orchestrated Gribble’s departure and made overtures to a possible replacement. The next boat from Wyndham was scheduled to leave about 12 September. Gribble was told to be on it. A tribal murder triggered Needham’s change of heart. On 10 May, Gribble held a mission court at Forrest River to try Aldoa for the murder of Stuart Wajimol, a baptised mission inmate. The murder was a ritual revenge killing for Wajimol’s violation of tribal Law. Dr Elkin took notes. Aldoa had helped capture Lumbia and given evidence at both the Royal Commission and the committal hearing of Regan and St Jack. He had surrendered to Gribble and confessed his killing of Wajimol of his own volition. A second accused, Matthew Munjarra, was still at large. Munjarra helped collect the evidence of the 1926 killings by police at Dala but Gribble described him as one of the mission’s failures.


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After the mission hearing, Gribble reported the incident to Chief Protector Neville who asked him to defer the matter until he arrived in Wyndham on 1 June 1928. Neville visited the Wyndham police station when he arrived in town but Aldoa was not there. Having already arranged to continue on to Darwin with Elkin to meet Chairman Needham, Neville conferred with Gribble. The substance of their discussion later became the subject of a heated dispute. Neville claimed he told Gribble to place Aldoa in police custody and ask for an adjournment if the committal hearing was called before he returned from Darwin. Gribble alleged Neville instructed him to leave Aldoa with the police so the Chief Protector could prefer charges later. Gribble did not report Wajimol’s murder to the Wyndham police. Instead, he settled Aldoa in the trackers’ camp attached to the police station and told the ABM in Perth that Chief Protector Neville was taking action. Gribble liked Sergeant Carroll, Wyndham’s new police sergeant. Carroll had visited the mission several times and the pair hit it off. Sergeant Carroll was alarmed and mystified, however, by disconcerting rumours in Wyndham that there had been a murder at the mission and that Chief Protector Neville would investigate. When Neville returned from Darwin and visited Forrest River Mission, Sergeant Carroll sent Constable Cheeseman to investigate. Cheeseman asked to see Wajimol’s body but was told it was unnecessary because Neville had a full report from Gribble. Cheeseman was allowed to read the report but Neville refused to give him a copy. When Neville returned to Wyndham, he visited the police station, told Sergeant Carroll there was no evidence against Aldoa other than his own confession and ordered his release. Gribble, Elkin and Neville all agreed that European law should not apply to incidents sanctioned by tribal law and that Wajimol’s murder was a matter for the Chief Protector rather than the police. Sergeant Carroll was troubled by the views and irregular behaviour of Gribble and the Chief Protector. His concerns were forwarded to the Commissioner of Police who was equally mystified and could not:


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understand the attitude taken up by the Rev. Gribble and . . . the Chief Protector of Aborigines. It would appear that they have taken it on themselves to deal with a matter outside their province. Their action in withholding information from the Police is a serious matter, more especially in a murder case (tribal or otherwise).16

The Police Commissioner ordered an immediate and thorough investigation. Carroll went to Forrest River on 27 June but could not glean anything. He returned to the mission on 2 July, but everyone was guarded and silent inside the compound. Outside the mission compound, however, inmates identified Ernest Unbah as an accomplice to the murder. In his notes of the mission court, Elkin described Ernest as the most guilty of the accused but said that his name was not mentioned for fear of incurring Gribble’s wrath. Clearly, Carroll decided, the mission was ‘shielding Christian natives Matthew and Ernest to the detriment [of the] Heathen Aldoa’.17 Ernest Unbah was like a son to Gribble. He had no other family and, as one of the first lads to settle at the mission, he had particular privileges. He was Gribble’s chief messenger and carried the cross during mission processions. Gribble was livid. He was certain Ernest was innocent and lashed out at all those who accused him ‘with all the venom that he [could] put into his voice’.18 Gribble knew he should have reported the murder to the police, and Needham fretted—there would be trouble for the mission if Gribble was shielding one of the boys. As the police investigation progressed, Gribble was plagued by a growing, fearful realisation that Ernest might be arrested and punished. His rage grew as his anxiety deepened. Inmates were strapped more often and for increasingly petty offences: impudence, bad language, meddling with an alarm clock. The girls’ outings were stopped, the married women were lectured repeatedly about sexual immorality and when inmates complained about his tyrannical regime, Gribble responded: ‘the people have got sadly out of control . . . it will take time to get things normal. Lord help me to keep calm amid much that is disquieting’. There were repeated clashes with his staff and, yet


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again, Gribble tumbled into a fretful nightmare of morose hopelessness and terrible isolation: I feel as of old very much alone. At times I feel that I am the only one striving for a definite future for the mission & [sic] not living just in the present as though [sic] we had achieved all there is to be reached.19

Gribble snapped when Violet Claridge, his amore, announced her engagement to Mr Taylor, a lay co-worker. Gribble’s ferocious attacks of jealousy and anger became intolerable. Violet Claridge resigned. On 11–12 July 1928, the Coroner’s Inquest for Stuart Wajimol was convened at Forrest River Mission. Aboriginal witnesses testified that Ernest decoyed Wajimol and was an accomplice to the murder with Aldoa and Munjurra. All three were committed for trial in Wyndham on 26 September. Immediately afterwards, there were disconcerting reports from mission staff that Gribble ‘completely lost his block’ during the inquest. He ‘took everyone of the witnesses to task and said that they were not telling [the truth] and told everyone that a black’s word was not to be relied on’. He abused James Noble for identifying Ernest’s footprints at the murder scene, and Noble was so upset that he announced he would leave the mission and go back to his own country. According to reports, Gribble woke the whole mission at 4.30 am on the last day of the inquest to pray for the coming ‘day of humiliation’. When Ernest was charged, Gribble spent two days venting his fury and accusing the mission inmates of being: murderers, adulterers, liars, thieves etc . . . he said that they had murder in their hearts and that all knew that Stuart was to be done to death. He read the Commandment about murder and mentioned about 50 different things which was [sic] murder.20

The staff complained that Gribble was mentally unsound, ‘run down’, had ‘lost all control over his tongue’, and threatened to take his own life.21 By 25 July, all the male workers, including Jack Gribble and James Noble, had resigned and Needham’s worst


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fears were confirmed. He had no option. Gribble’s speedy departure was fixed. The ironic tragedy was that Gribble was an accomplice, albeit unwittingly, to the murder that sealed his dismissal. Mission residents remember Stuart Wajimol vividly. He was about 12 years old when he moved into the mission compound. They explained that he was ‘uninitiated and too young to know everything about the Law’. Isolated from his heritage, Wajimol’s cultural education and understanding of the Law was incomplete: ‘you weren’t allowed to mess around with older men’s wives . . . Stuart broke the Law. He’d been fooling around with the other men’s wives’. On the pretence of going kangaroo hunting, it was arranged that Ernest would lure Stuart to Matthew and Aldoa for: a ceremonial killing but Stuart was a mission boy. He didn’t know the Law. He didn’t understand what was going on . . . Stuart and Ernest had their faces painted white for kangaroo hunting but they didn’t talk all during the trip. That was the rule. They just had to keep quiet but there were three chances for Stuart to turn back—to get saved. Three times he could have stopped the killing. The first time was when they got to the stream and they stopped for a drink. Ernest threw water in Stuart’s face . . . That was the first sign. Then the next time, Ernest broke Stuart’s spear. Crack, just like that, over his knee. That was the second time. And then the last time, Ernest threw a spear past them to hit the tree in front. Each time it was a sign. Stuart could have turned back but he didn’t understand the warnings ‘cause he didn’t know what the signs meant. See? He was a mission boy, you see?22

Chairman Needham sealed Gribble’s removal but it did not stop the scheming of others. One player was William Drummond Hay, who joined the mission at the beginning of 1928. Around September 1928, Hay wrote a string of churlish letters that had such a damaging impact on Gribble’s already battered reputation that the ABM seriously considered laying disciplinary charges against their difficult missionary. It was not until two years later that Hay’s motive for sabotaging Gribble was exposed. In 1930, the local Protector of Aborigines collected statutory declarations from six


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Aboriginal boys who stated that William Hay was a predatory paedophile who sexually molested boys at Forrest River mission while Gribble was still Superintendent.23 One child attested that: . . . on the boat Mr Hay ties up two hands behind me then he get my tommy and play with it then he let me go. Then he get my hand and put in his overalls and put it on his tommy then he lay down he was drunk. One night . . . I saw Hobla Hay . . . lay down in one of the boys blankets [sic], he been get vaseline and he been rub it on [one boy] he rub it behind.

Another lad went to Camera Pool in the hills behind the mission with Hay and a number of other boys and reported: ‘Mr Hay attempted to play around with his tommy, he caught hold of it and just played with it’. Another testified: ‘Mr Hay was drunk on the Mission boat and he had a native called . . . in front of him and he was trying to fool with him’. Another boy saw ‘Hobla Hay and a native boy . . . having a Billy goat’ (that is an act of sodomy). Another testified that Hay caught one young lad: . . . by the shoulder and he play with him . . . he took him in his room . . . he was . . . in there . . . too long, I go and have a look, when I look I saw Hobla Hay playing fool, I saw him doing it, I run back and tell Fred, I said you come over here Hobla Hay Billygoat with [a boy who], start to cry, he want to go out, and he would not let him go, long while after he let him go, [the boy] go outside and start to cry . . . Hobla Hay try to do same thing to me . . . he tried to play the fool with me, he play with my cock and I tell him to get out of it . . . I saw him do it three times to [that same boy and] to [another boy].

Two other mission workers, a Mr R.A. Bowman and Miss Lillian Knott, later joined Hay in his depravity. The group allegedly operated singly and together, forcing young boys to submit to a range of homo/heterosexual demands and photographing naked young girls in erotic positions and selling the pictures for high prices in Wyndham. The trio were exposed in mid-1930, and the ABM instantly dispensed with their services. Elkin was touring the north west with Chief Protector Neville when he received Chairman Needham’s letter announcing that Gribble’s career would not end immediately. The stunned


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anthropologist immediately wrote to Needham insisting that his assessment, as a qualified anthropologist, had more validity than any conclusions the Chairman might form after a one-week visit to Forrest River Mission. A month earlier, Elkin had gone to great pains to impress on Needham that his report was confidential and insisted that only Chairman Needham and the ABM Board in Sydney were to know its contents. After receiving Needham’s letter, Elkin changed his mind and gave Chief Protector Neville a copy of the report to use officially. His only motive, argued Elkin, was to serve the best interests of the mission and local people. But the ambitious young anthropologist knew his future was assured if Gribble was dethroned and he was elevated to the position of the Anglican Church’s expert on Aboriginals. The model mission superintendent was described as: . . . a priest who has had experience in priestly and pastoral work amongst whites, for the white staff need such a man [and] a man with real and trained interests in the blacks, so that he will be able to grapple with their language and customs.24

Chief Protector Neville was a recent enthusiast of the emerging science of anthropology, advocating a more scientific approach to Aboriginal affairs and anthropological training for officials in his department. Neville returned to Perth at the end of July but did nothing about Elkin’s report. A month later he was contacted by the ABM Secretary in Perth. They met around 28 August 1928 but a wire had already been sent to Gribble four days earlier. His recall was a fait accompli. During the meeting, Neville drew on Elkin’s report to criticise Gribble’s administration and forwarded the report to the Minister for Aborigines on the 28 August 1928, noting that the ABM Secretary agreed Gribble should go. The Chief Protector’s fancy footwork disguised his failure to act on Elkin’s report earlier. Although Neville wrote to Needham occasionally in the years that followed insisting on the implementation of Elkin’s recommendations, he admitted he did nothing to translate his rhetoric into practice.


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A more worrying problem for Neville was the potential fall-out from his irregular involvement in the Stuart Wajimol case. For eight months after Wajimol’s inquest, he and Gribble bickered and squabbled in a series of sniping letters about who should have laid charges against Aldoa. The last thing Neville wanted was for the debacle to be resurrected during the trial of Ernest, Aldoa and Munjurra for Wajimol’s murder. Neville urged the ABM in Perth to ensure that Gribble left the Kimberley before the case came to court. Unbeknown to the Chief Protector, the police had already complained to the Commissioner of Police about Neville’s obstruction of the investigation. Their charge was ultimately laid before the Minister of the Aborigines Department and the Chief Protector was sternly reprimanded. The ABM was just as anxious to hush-up Gribble’s efforts to shield Ernest. It feared a damaging resurgence of anti-Gribble feeling in Wyndham, and was relieved when the Crown Prosecutor announced that Gribble’s presence would not be needed at the murder trial. Gribble was sent a string of telegrams directing him to leave town before the case went to court. The defiant missionary ignored his orders and insisted on staying, clinging to the hope that the three accused Aboriginal men would be cleared and his stand would be vindicated. As he awaited the trial, Gribble prayed: ‘let not my enemies prevail’.25 At the end of September 1928, Gribble was again sitting restlessly at the back of a courtroom. This time Aldoa was not at his side but in the dock with Ernest and Munjurra. Gribble’s embarrassing testimony incriminated the Chief Protector in the suppression of the murder but all three accused were acquitted on the grounds of lack of evidence. The Minister of the Aborigines Department followed up by directing Chief Protector Neville to notify all missions that only the police had jurisdiction in criminal cases. Despite his defiant stubbornness, Gribble knew his time was up. It bewildered him that he had struggled so selflessly and weathered so many trials against insurmountable obstacles, yet his opponents could cut him down so effortlessly:


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forcibly cut off from the work of my life, from my people and my plans for the future . . . My enemies seem to have succeeded against me. False brethren seem to have achieved all they aimed to do . . . my enemies are numerous within the Church as well as without.26

On 29 September 1929, Gribble received two letters. The first was from the ABM confirming his dismissal. The second contained the news of his mother’s death. It was the feeling of powerlessness that terrified and ignited him. He was fearlessly heroic in his battles against the police and squattocracy but a short communication from the other side of the continent made his faith falter and sent his world crashing. He had it fixed in his feverish despair that he was being martyred for his stand to protect Aborigines—God had led him to fight for the Aboriginal cause but his Church was afraid to defend justice and right and caved into the pastoralists who resented his refusal to run a cheap labour depot. The betrayal outraged and haunted him. He exhausted his anger and pain in ruthless, tragically futile tirades. He accused his son Jack and Archbishop Riley of being disloyal and betraying him, he charged Elkin with being an immature, inexperienced upstart, and he claimed that he was made a scapegoat so Chief Protector Neville could protect himself. On the eve of his departure from Forrest River Mission, a special farewell service was held. The members of his small congregation presented him with tokens of their affection. Gribble was profoundly and deeply moved. He left Forrest River on 20 November 1928 feeling forsaken and alone. He cried. It was three days before his sixtieth birthday.


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ost of the world celebrated the start of 1929 blissfully ignorant of the circumstances that would soon catapult it into economic depression. For Ernest Gribble, the world was already bleak and hopeless. Amelia now lived in Sydney and almost a quarter of century of managing alone had moulded her into an austere, unyielding matron who was set in her ways. She acquiesced to Gribble’s return—after all, they were married and he had nowhere to go—but she made no overtures to tempt him to stay. He had a loosely formed notion of fashioning a new life as a family man but the chimera quickly vaporised. As each day passed, he felt lonelier and more unwanted. He loathed the city, and he had no work, no savings and fewer prospects. His chief companion was his dog, Nipper—a devoted, loyal barker—and neither spent much time at Amelia’s house in Northbridge. They were more comfortable with the hospitality of Gribble’s sister, Illa, where Nipper was not barred from the house and the ageing missionary was not banished to the porch to smoke his pipe. Over the years, his passion for writing had come and gone in bursts. Now he turned to it as a refuge and release from the smouldering torment and burning injustice of his recent dismissal. His first autobiography, The Life and Times of an 170


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Australian, had been a reflective journey through his childhood and youth. This time he wrote to clear his name as a defender of Aboriginals. Three autobiographies poured forth during the four years after his dismissal and their title pages announced his credentials and implicit purpose: Pioneer missionary to Yarrabah, North Queensland; Mitchell River, North Queensland; and Forrest River, North Australia; Protector of Aborigines, Queensland, for sixteen years and Protector of Aborigines, Western Australia, sixteen years.

Woven throughout each book was the philosophy that underpinned his life’s work: that ‘the remnant that is left’ could only be saved by segregation on Christian missions. Each book was a statistical litany that showcased his achievements: the number of buildings and converts; Aboriginal involvement in the Church; agricultural progress; and literacy. Peppered in between were descriptions of his experiences bravely confronting danger and hardship to subdue nature and take Christianity and civilisation to the ‘heathen’. The first publication during these years was Forty Years with the Aborigines. This updated version of Life and Experiences included a chapter on Forrest River and a rebuttal of allegations that he took Aboriginal children from their parents and ignored the authority of Elders. Most children, he maintained, were handed over by their parents and ‘the old men . . . carry little weight’.1 In his next two books, The Problem of the Australian and A Despised Race, he set out to prove explicitly to his critics that he understood Aboriginal language and culture. Nearly half (62 of the 132 pages) of Problem was devoted to descriptions of aspects of traditional Aboriginal society—drawing on other sources to supplement his own knowledge—and he compiled a long vocabulary list for Despised Race that was cut ruthlessly by his editors. Gribble typed his manuscripts on a secondhand typewriter and flimsy, tissue-thin paper. The traces of a lifetime of frugality shone from each page for he milked the precious paper for every inch of space and let the ink in the typewriter ribbon run down


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until the print was barely readable. The typescript often drifted off the page as he became immersed in his story, but he had a bushman’s talent for spinning a good yarn. Nevertheless, his editors attacked his manuscripts ruthlessly, with a shrewd eye for dodging controversy. Editors at the ABM collapsed 22 singlespaced, closely typed pages on the 1926 killings and Royal Commission into two banal sentences: Then, in 1926, complaints were made to the police of the natives killing cattle on the station, and a party of police were sent round to investigate. This led to the awful atrocities, which caused a Royal Commission to be appointed.2

Writing filled Gribble’s time but it did not occupy him. His one wish was to return to missionary life. He pleaded with his friend Chairman Needham to find something. The paternal Needham tried to wrangle him the job in charge of a new mission at Edward River but the Bishop of Carpentaria rejected the proposal without explanation. The ageing missionary had become a problem and Needham was at a loss. It was the lanky and generous John Oliver Feetham, Bishop of North Queensland, who came to the rescue. Feetham’s boundless admiration of Gribble’s fearless defence of Aboriginals outweighed any consideration of his imperfections. There was a difficult post as chaplain on the government Aboriginal settlement at Palm Island going begging, 20 miles off the Queensland coast near Townsville. Feetham decided Gribble was his man. Gribble scoffed. The job was unworthy of his talents and experience, he told Needham, and the idea of being subordinate to secular officials was preposterous and unpalatable. For a while Gribble blustered about abandoning the priesthood and returning to life as a drover but his threats did not make a more attractive post materialise. Needham’s counsel was blunt: the options were limited for a 62-year-old missionary. Gribble accepted the post. The Wulgurugaba are the traditional owners and custodians of Greater Palm Island. The Dreaming story about the great Carpet


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Cairns Tully

CURACOA

Townsville

Great Palm Island

ISLAND

C O R A L

QUEENSLAND

JUNO B AY

FANTOME ISLAND

Brisbane

S E A CHALLENGER B AY

GREAT PALM

NORTH EAST B AY

ISLAND C A S E M E N T B AY South East Cape

P E N C I L B AY

ESK ISLAND

FALCON ISLAND

B U T L E R B AY ECLIPSE ISLAND

Miranda Head

BARBER ISLAND

BRISK ISLAND

Snake that travelled the coast creating islands from the mounds of his body explains the origin of the cluster of islands that make up the Palm Island group. Captain Cook baptised the islands to conjure seductive images of a steamy, lush Pacific paradise but he only sighted them from afar. Cook never set foot there and his choice of name was wishful thinking rather than reality. The rugged, submerged mountain range is rocky and scrubby with little arable flat ground and no natural supply of fresh running water. From the mid-nineteenth century, the Wulgurugaba were forcibly conscripted to work the beche de mer and pearling boats. Violence and disease progressively decimated their numbers. By the 1880s only a handful remained. In 1914 the Queensland Government removed the survivors to the Hull River Reserve near Tully but a cyclone flattened the four-year-old settlement killing fifteen inmates. Superintendent Kenny was lanced by a stray shaft of timber while he and his family sought protection from the


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violent gale and turbulent seas underneath their house. His wife and two children watched helplessly as he died a slow, horrific death. The surviving Wulgurugaba were transported to Greater Palm Island, and their dogs were left to mourn on the beach. Descendants of the former convict colony continued the British tradition of ostracising its unwanted souls to remote, isolated islands until well into the early twentieth century. From its inception, Palm Island was known as a violent, brutal place. By 1931 more than 1000 indigenous Australians had been transported there. Origin was no impediment to removal and inmates were sent throughout Queensland, the Torres Strait Islands, and as far away as the Northern Territory, New South Wales and Western Australia. Any offence could lead to banishment: a criminal record, unemployment, old age, destitution, immorality or being an unmarried mother. Some were sent because they committed offences sanctioned by tribal law. Others had disobeyed work orders. Many were children who were transported so they would be saved from the ‘retarding influence of the old myalls’.3 Few knew why they had been removed and fewer had been tried in a court of law. The late Neville Bonner, the first Aboriginal Federal Member of Parliament, grew up on Palm Island and remembered the history of the transportees: There was no court-case, no trial or anything like that to prove you guilty or otherwise of doing something wrong . . . they could think up reasons . . . if they wanted to get rid of you. You were classified as a trouble maker.4

Confinement was indefinite and depended on the Superintendent’s grace and goodwill. Some inmates called it the ‘punishment place’. The first Superintendent was Captain Robert Henry ‘Mad Dog’ Curry. A veteran of the Egyptian campaigns during World War I, Curry ran the island like a military depot. Work was mandatory and unpaid, curfews were religiously enforced, public


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gatherings were prohibited, and recalcitrant inmates were tried and punished in the privacy of his office. Curry kept a cat-o-nine tails on hand to make sure all complied with his rules and, despite an official inquiry and reprimand for breaching regulations by flogging a young girl, complaints about beatings continued throughout his reign. Curry’s violence and repression, fuelled by copious quantities of alcohol, extended to his treatment of white officials and fostered a climate of resentment and distrust across the settlement. On 3 February 1930, the situation exploded. Curry was drunk and nursing a potent cocktail of pain and drug withdrawal, after a falling out with the island doctor had deprived him of the Novocaine injections he needed to ease his incapacitating headaches. Curry was also anxious about another investigation into charges that he flogged, sexually abused and supplied liquor to Aboriginals. He was certain his enemies were plotting to seize his job. Demented and delusional, Curry embarked on a sixteenhour frenzy of horror. Clad in a red bathing suit, laughing hysterically and oblivious to the pouring rain, he dynamited his own house—killing his son and stepdaughter—shot and seriously wounded the doctor and his wife and then blew up the administration buildings and set fire to the island. To stop his frenzied destruction, weapons were distributed to the Aboriginal men. Curry was shot by 20-year-old Peter Prior who was later tried and acquitted of murder. In a mysterious historical irony, the report of the investigation into Curry’s administration was handed down on the same day as his rampage. It ‘found a high state of efficiency, both externally and internally in the administration of the settlement’ and that ‘the management reflected the greatest credit on all concerned’.5 Curry’s rampage delayed Gribble’s work on Palm Island. When he arrived in September 1930, the main settlement had already acquired an institutionalised persona. The streets were neatly laid in a grid complete with a school, farm, hospital, administrative buildings and clean, white houses for the officials. The tidy


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township belied the reality of life for the inmates. They lived in mia-mias of bush timber and coconut palms in camps grouped around tribal and regional connections like Cooktown, Clump Point, Torres Strait, Yarrabah, Gulf, Babinda, and the Sundowners, where the people from the western regions, including the Arunta of the Northern Territory, congregated. The inadequate government rations spawned hunger, malnutrition and illness. In 1924, the annual death rate was 16 per cent per annum compared with the State average of less than 9 per cent. Births did not exceed deaths until after World War II. Some residents discovered that their ability to find ‘bush tucker’ became a saleable skill. The quasi-military regime continued even after Curry. At night, the children were locked in fenced, segregated dormitories and socialising between the sexes was banned. The day began with bells and concluded at a curfew. Children were beaten or gaoled for swearing. If adults were disrespectful or indulged in illicit sexual relations, their heads were shaved or they were banished to nearby Brisk, Curacoa or Eclipse Island on rations of bread and water. No litany of maltreatment can unmask the human anguish of transportation and institutionalisation. Palm Island split families, separated spouses, orphaned children and left its victims bewildered, confused and grief stricken. Escape attempts were frequent but rarely successful. Few survived the long swim to the mainland through the shark infested seas. Before 1939, traditional cultural practices, including speaking ‘language’, were offences by decree of the Superintendent and punished with imprisonment or banishment. After 1939, Regulation 21 of the 1939 Aborigines Act banned Indigenous practices without official permission. Rules and regulations did not stop Palm Island’s inmates, however. Tribal taboos reigned in the camps: the people spoke the language of their country; Law and kinship prevailed; medicine men held sway; funeral dances and spirit smokings continued; and inter-group conflicts and pay-back spearings were commonplace. Dr Elliott Murray, the island’s medical officer from 1932 to 1934, documented the healing


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powers of the tribal doctors, the prevalence of death by ‘pointing the bone’ and the punishment of murderers by ‘the painful rite of ‘‘carving up’’ . . . an outsize steak . . . from his sacro-spinalis muscle’.6 The mainland press revelled in lurid, sensationalised stories that portrayed Palm Island as a hot bed of sorcery, superstition and savagery. These tales affirmed the generalised anxiety that the Aboriginal presence was a threat to the very fabric of white civilisation, and relieved Queenslanders of any moral pangs about banishing their Indigenous peoples to a desolate and remote island outpost. In many ways, Palm Island was a microcosm of Australia in the first half of the twentieth century. The schools were segregated and Mango Avenue, where the officials lived, was off-limits for inmates. The officials led luxurious, extravagant lives compared to their charges. They had iceboxes, ordered food direct from Townsville, had first choice of all government supplies and free labour to tend their houses and gardens. It was a lifestyle that fomented racial tension. Black and white lived in different realms. Some inmates released their frustration through violence. Others chose the numbing comfort of illegally smuggled alcohol and opium. An undercurrent of nascent resistance permeated all dealings with the white administration that was revealed when tourists visited the island and inmates mockingly presented them with curiosities like: coral that was not properly boiled and that stank in a few days; boomerangs made falsely to adorn mantle shelves; dogs’ teeth exhumed from middens; nullas daubed with ochre and given a murderous history in pidgin English . . . corroborees where dance steps seen on the cinema were being introduced.7

Residency restrictions prevented Gribble from living on Palm Island so he lived with Bishop Feetham as his personal chaplain and was ferried to and from Townsville. His first impressions of Palm Island confirmed his long-standing prejudice against government settlements, and he was frustrated and disappointed with his new post. He bared his heart and the questions that


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troubled his soul to his journal. How could he cope with this cesspool of rampant immorality, gambling, alcoholism and violence? How could he work with officials who disdained religion, and married and divorced couples in contempt of the law? How could he submit to an administration that clearly lacked control? The work ‘overwhelmed’ him with ‘anguish’ and for three years he pleaded with the ABM to find him something else: I know this is God’s will for me yet too I feel and cannot help feeling that I am here on sufferance and also that my Ch[urch] Authies [sic] have shelved me here if not permanently at any rate for a time. My life has been spent in pulling the Church out of Holes. 1st Yarrabah then Forrest River. I do not regret it but I miss my people and the work of building up.8

It was a desire the ABM could not—and would not—satisfy. Forsaken and abandoned, Gribble plummeted into depression: Once again I am feeling lonely. Years of loneliness . . . divided for many, many years from my family & relatives . . . I long for a wider sphere, long for my beloved Aus[tralian] bush where the whole of my life has been spent. Lord forgive my vain desires.9

Gribble whinged but the reality was that small consolations made life tolerable. Living with Feetham in Townsville, a more relaxed Gribble emerged. The strain around his pursed lips eased and the tension in his wiry limbs dissolved. He read voraciously, developed a fascination for cars, discovered films and, as with everything, was passionate in his devotion to his new interests. He took driving lessons for a while but was notoriously hopeless and the townsfolk of Townsville were relieved when he abandoned trying to get his licence. He also sought out Janie Clarke and visited regularly. His daughter, Nola, had blossomed in motherhood and he collected pictures of her children for his photo album. During quiet moments, he wrote his fifth autobiography, Over the Years. It was serialised by the Northern Churchman and later by the ABM Review after Gribble abandoned a fruitless, twenty-year search for a willing publisher. His friendship with Feetham grew during these years. Gribble


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was conscious of the Bishop’s ecclesiastical standing and was always appropriately deferential, sparing the Bishop the vagaries of his swinging moods. The kindly Feetham was devoted to Gribble and saw only an elderly man and a courageous humanitarian who had given his life to Indigenous Australians. With Feetham’s patronage Gribble was elected to the Diocesan Council of North Queensland, a position he held until 1950, and was Secretary of the Synod Mission Committee until 1945. Through these roles Gribble became the diocesan spokesperson on missions and kept a keen eye on nearby Yarrabah. His views and comments were widely reported in the Townsville Bulletin as well as the Northern Churchman. He spoke against miscegenation and assimilation and in support of Federal control of Aboriginals. He had developed some influential allies among humanitarian groups like the Aborigines’ Protection Association and his philosophy shaped missionary work in the North Queensland diocese during the 1930s and 1940s. In June 1941, Bishop Feetham elevated him to Canon of St James Cathedral. None of this, however, reconciled Gribble to his work on Palm Island, where the parade of different superintendents was a constant reminder that none could match his ability or standards. As far as he was concerned, most were unqualified bureaucrats. He dismissed Superintendent Delauney—a former Prickly Pear Inspector with no qualifications for the job. He treated Superintendent Foote with disdain—terrified of a black uprising and kept a revolver in his desk drawer. The rest he denounced as either too young, too inexperienced, drunkards or lechers who used their position to sexually molest female inmates. It was hard for him to defer to an administration he considered indolent, incompetent and irreligious, but he did not win friends by bluntly pointing out to different superintendents that the job was beyond their abilities. The problem, Gribble explained, was the lack of a Godly man at the head of the settlement. Nonetheless, amidst the crowd of reluctant inmates on the island, he discovered a small group of familiar faces from Yarrabah who had kept their faith and provided the foundation


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for a flourishing congregation. With his usual dynamism he quickly built a community of nearly 200 Anglicans complete with a Church committee, choir and two Aboriginal representatives to Synod. Within twelve months, the newly erected St George’s Church, with its thatch roof and plaited coconut palm walls, was too small but it was not until 1935 that the Anglicans secured a lease on the Palm Island Reserve and Gribble’s onerous journeys to Townsville abated. A new church was built with a small, threeroom, fibro apartment at the rear that served as a rectory. Now Gribble’s life was centred wholly on Palm Island. He acquired a horse and a launch to keep in touch with his widespread congregation. In spite of dozens of willing helpers, Gribble stubbornly insisted on the superiority of his mechanical skills. More often than not, the engine of the launch lay in pieces on the beach. With the same colonising fervour that diffused British imperialism throughout the globe, Gribble devised ways to infiltrate every nook and cranny of Palm Island. A network of churchgoers liaised with groups from different areas. The Women’s Guild visited the sick and welcomed newcomers and small chapels were built wherever pockets of people and new settlements sprang up. Gribble’s zeal was more than mere proselytising. It was his blueprint for a new order to supplant the heartless sterility of the white administration and create a compassionate, cheerful home for the island’s inmates. A handful of donated books started a busy lending library and his open air lantern lectures drew large, attentive crowds eager for his stories and pictures of Aboriginal life and missions around Australia. He gave the old thatched church a new lease of life by transforming it into a hall. After years of nagging, he secured a power generator and for years the hall was one of the few buildings with its own power and night lighting. It became a centre for the island’s organised social life—dancing lessons, boy scout meetings, weekly games nights for the men and boys, euchre evenings, band and choir practices, wedding feasts and birthday parties. Gribble introduced weekly ballroom dances. Religion did not matter. The entire community was welcome. He


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supervised with a careful, benevolent eye, evicting those caught dancing with another man’s wife. Immorality was not tolerated. Although the Australian Inland Missionaries had been on the island for seven years, Gribble did not believe they had much influence and dreamed of an Anglican monopoly. His hopes were dashed in mid-1931 when Father Moloney of the Sacred Heart Mission arrived to minister to the island’s Roman Catholics. Moloney was serious competition. At first the two priests met for sociable cups of tea and exchanged cards on their shared birth date, but the civility was short-lived. Within eighteen months, Rome’s congregation shot from fifteen to 262 and at least five Anglicans had deserted. Gribble could read the writing on the wall—clearly Rome was out to control the island. The battle lines thus drawn, Gribble declared the two denominations bitter competitors for the hearts and minds of Palm Island’s inmates. Palm Island’s religious rivalry mimicked the malicious mistrust that sectarianism fomented throughout Australia during the early twentieth century. For the elderly man inducted into the Orange League when he was ten years old, the imperative to save his people from the Popish Anti-Christ became an urgent, all-consuming passion that gave his life meaning and direction. At last, the elusive reason for his banishment to Palm Island was clear. He had a string of stormy disputes with Moloney about plotting to steal his congregation, particularly after the Roman Catholic Bishop baptised and confirmed several Anglicans while Gribble was away. Moloney’s successors did not fare any better. Gribble accused them of buying supporters, seducing Anglican boys with lollies to baptise them covertly, and allowing their women to prostitute themselves for money. As a strict teetotaller, Gribble found Rome’s liberal stance on gambling and liquor especially distressing. This, explained one Anglican defector, accounted for the leakage of his congregation to Rome—Gribble was a wowser. In a grisly contest for souls, the denominations vied to capture the living and the dying. Sometimes the competition was macabre.


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When one of Gribble’s congregation died and was buried quickly by the Roman Catholic priest on account of the summer heat, Gribble demanded the body be disinterred and reburied under Anglican rites. Only the intervention of the Superintendent brought the squabble to a close. It was the arrival of the nuns that most offended Gribble. Their work gave them access to souls at their most vulnerable—the beginning and end of life. On Palm Island the nuns set up a primary school and staffed a Lock Hospital for Venereal Disease and Leprosarium on nearby Fantome Island. Gribble was perplexed by their long shapeless robes, weird head gear and mysterious, feminine ways. He was sure they were trying to seduce his congregation away from him by bribing Anglican girls with wedding dresses to lure them into Roman marriages. He reserved his greatest contempt for the softly spoken Franciscan Missionaries of Mary who arrived from Quebec in 1944: ‘dago disturbers’ out to ‘capture the whole outfit’.10 Gribble wanted to build a house on Fantome Island to combat the influence of the nuns over the sick, but the Roman Catholic priest threatened to withdraw his staff if the authorities approved the request, complaining that Gribble’s attitude was ‘belligerent and unfriendly’ and his only intention was ‘to stir up strife’.11 Gribble continued ferrying backwards and forwards to minister to sick and dying Anglicans in the care of the Roman Catholics. Among the familiar faces on Palm Island was John Mitchell Barlow, son of Menmuny of Yarrabah. In 1933, Barlow distributed a petition to the press and Synod denouncing the Roman Catholic clergy on Palm Island for proselytising and criticising the Anglican sacraments. Unfortunately, none of the petitioners were signatories and Superintendent Delauney, a Roman Catholic, claimed Barlow confessed to acting on Gribble’s instructions. The incident attracted wide publicity and incited sectarian passions throughout north Queensland by degenerating into a vicious, three-way exchange in the press of allegations between Feetham, Gribble and the Roman Catholic Bishop.


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Determined not to be outdone on any front, Anglican rites on Palm Island soon matched the ostentation of Roman Catholicism. Gribble introduced the Angelus—an especially Anglo-Catholic prayer—as well as processions through the settlement on Sundays and feast days. When the Roman Catholic priest acquired a wireless, Gribble procured a radio to reclaim Anglicans lured away by Rome. When Roman Catholic girls were sent to work for Catholic families on the mainland, Gribble quickly pushed aside his longstanding opposition to white employment of Aboriginals and insisted his Church send their girls to work for Anglican families. Nevertheless, the vibrant social and spiritual life of his Church offered inmates an escape from the brutality of life in this world as well as in the next, and the Anglican Church was soon the dominant religion on Palm Island with almost 1000 baptisms between 1930 and 1950. Gribble’s interaction with the people revealed the compassionate soul behind his stern façade: daily visits to rub liniment on an injured back; mediation in innumerable domestic disputes; and solace offered to the sick, dying and those in gaol. These same human qualities were exposed when Gribble collapsed with laughter during Evensong when ‘some animal in the thatch roof dropped its excrement fairly on the top of [his] bald head’ or wiggled his ears during sermons to entertain the children in the congregation.12 His compassion did not temper his authoritarian streak: he took his congregation to task during sermons and lectured the children for hours on end. The young boys who got into his communion wine or stole his fruit got a well placed whack around the ears. He trained his dog to bail up parishioners in the street, hunt them into church and stand guard at the church door so no one could escape before the last hymn. In fact, Gribble approved of many of the administration’s more draconian policies: gaoling adulterers—current in the 1930s; separating children from their parents into dormitories; and banishing wrongdoers to outlying islands. He had a brainwave in the middle of World War II when American GIs invaded Townsville: a boot camp should be established for Palm Island’s


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recalcitrant inmates so they would ‘be under strict control, live in barracks, drilled and employed and when proved worthy then drafted to live amongst decent people’.13 His contemptuous defiance of the island’s administration set Gribble apart from the white officials and won him respect. His reputation as a great humanitarian preceded his arrival and his constant stories of his past fortified his standing. His enthusiastic defence of any inmate in battle with the administration confirmed his local credentials as a champion of Aboriginals. Gribble defied the administration by growing fruit and vegetables and selling them cheaply to supplement the residents’ inadequate, government rations. A decree that only white staff could use the island’s tennis court goaded Gribble into building a tennis court for the Aboriginal inmates. He fearlessly challenged superintendents about the inmates’ living conditions and the practice of gaoling residents without trial or by trial in camera. When superintendents ignored his demands, he promised to complain to the Home Secretary or the press. His threats reduced most to quivering submission. Since the victory of the Royal Commission, Gribble’s network of influential friends had grown and the defiant priest shamelessly exploited his contacts in humanitarian circles to get what he wanted and to fight for his vision of justice for Aboriginals. He corresponded regularly with Chairman Needham and Reverend Morely, Secretary of the Association for the Protection of Native Races (APNR). Both were loyal supporters. The devoted Bishop Feetham relayed all Gribble’s complaints directly to the Home Office and made sure Gribble met with senior government officials when they visited Townsville. Years of experience and a reputation as a troublemaker guaranteed that Gribble’s views were noted if not heeded. Even strangers commented on the fire in his belly: He was tall, spare, about sixty-five, with a purpose that kept his spirit and constitution iron-hard and rustless. His eyes glowed sombrely. He had spent a lifetime among the blacks . . . and he knew them. They were his friends . . . When the government rested too-heavy a


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hand on them, he, a respected clergyman, was not afraid to be agin the government. It had not made him a popular figure. He had fought many fights and written fiercely for a newer freer more liberal Black Australia Policy. He burned with injustice.14

It was during his years at Palm Island that he developed a friendship with the new generation of Aboriginal leaders, William Cooper, Secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League (AAL), and William Ferguson, founder of the Aborigines’ Progressive Association (APA). The three men discovered they had personal as well as political links. Cooper grew up on Maloga Mission, run by JB Gribble’s long-time friend and mentor, Daniel Matthews, while William Ferguson was born at Darlington Point and during the 1890s went to school at Ernest Gribble’s beloved Warangesda mission. They were thrown together by the campaign for Federal control of Aboriginals. Years of working under ineffective State authorities convinced Gribble that Australia’s Indigenous communities were a national responsibility. He pushed for Federal control during the 1927 Royal Commission into the Constitution and later in his addresses to the North Queensland Synod and his correspondence with government officials. He urged organisations like the APNR to put their weight behind the cause. A petition to King George was underway and Gribble offered to collect signatures from the inmates of Palm Island. The Commonwealth and three States refused to support the petition and the Chief Protector of Queensland banned Aboriginals from signing. Gribble relished this sort of struggle and ignored Chief Protector Bleakley’s directive. The petition was sent to Prime Minister Lyons but he failed to forward it to King George and a flurry of letters flew backwards and forwards between Gribble and his humanitarian allies. Gribble urged William Cooper to appeal to Reverend Baillie of St Georges Chapel, Windsor, because he had access to the Royal household and could press their case. The petition died but Gribble’s commitment shone. The Australian Aborigines’ League acknowledged his services by granting him the rarely awarded honour of life membership of the AAL.


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A captive to his proven formula, soon after his appointment, Gribble summoned James and Angelina Noble to help him win over the people of Palm Island. The Nobles arrived in 1933 but illness forced James to retire to Yarrabah two years later. It was a welcome relief to all. The intimacy between Gribble and Noble had never rekindled since their clash over Stuart Wajimol’s murder, and the residency restrictions of the Act forced the Nobles to eke out a miserable life on nearby Esk Island. Gribble, forever energetic and brimming with new ideas and projects, whinged that the ailing James was a burden. He regretted his callous lack of sympathy when the family had gone. News from Yarrabah of Noble’s ailing health jolted Gribble into realising the need for a new generation of Aboriginal Church leaders to follow in Noble’s footsteps. He drafted a motion to Synod. It was an ambitious scheme. In the 1940s, there was no school for Palm Island children beyond grade 4 but Gribble planned a program to sponsor the secondary education of promising Anglican children on the mainland. It would be called the James Noble Education Fund. He envisaged it would train Palm Islanders: for future usefulness amongst their own people . . . on Aboriginal missions and Settlements [to] fill many subordinate positions [under the supervision of] white officials.15

The genesis of his idea was the work of Reverend Morrison who established a ‘college’ at Yarrabah in 1909 to train Aboriginal missionaries. Later, Gribble organised the secondary education of James Noble’s son, Mark, and the Church Army sponsored the nursing training of Muriel Stanley from Yarrabah. With the support of Bishop Feetham and agreement from the Home Office to pay half the costs, the James Noble Fund came into being in 1942—one year after James Noble quietly passed away. Gribble managed the program, personally selecting each promising young student and writing glowing reports of their successes for Church journals. Competition for sponsorship was sometimes intense but it is impossible to decipher who or how many were educated


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through the Fund for, as Gribble aged, his records became more muddled and confused. It filled Gribble’s heart with pride that one of the Fund’s beneficiaries became a typist and pay-clerk in Ingham, but it did not match his notion of the Fund’s purpose or his vision of Australia’s Indigenous people living on segregated settlements under benevolent, missionary guidance. It was difficult for Gribble to relinquish the values that had shaped a lifetime’s work and to come to terms with this unfamiliar new world: ‘these people are not as the Abos [sic] were in these parts 40 years ago. Many read and write & are thinkers and know what is right and just’.16 His old fashioned notions did not worry Palm Islanders. His history and good intentions pardoned and protected him from criticism. Neville Bonner remembered that: The Aboriginal people had such a love and respect for Father Gribble, no one would dare say anything about him that was in anyway derogatory . . . it didn’t matter what Church you belonged to.17

Age took its toll and from the 1940s, questions were being asked in the offices of the ABM in Sydney. Surely it was time for the old fellow to step gracefully aside? Until his death in September 1947, Bishop Feetham protected Gribble and would not hear of his retirement. Feetham argued that Gribble’s past entitled him to ‘die in harness’ and ‘it would be wasteful and unjust to put him on the shelf’.18 It was clear, however, that he needed an assistant. The Church sent a succession of promising hopefuls but none could match Gribble’s exacting standards. His reputation for being notoriously difficult and unrealistically demanding made it increasingly impossible to entice anyone to help. Poor Feetham was very fond of old Gribble but how could he manage an elderly priest who accused his assistants of lacking a priestly vocation because they rested on their day off? The same problem blighted Gribble’s domestic domain until the Church Army sent the Killarney-born, Sister Irene Johnson, in 1939. Gribble and Johnson were a perfect match: determined, cantankerous and


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passionately devoted to their work. Neville Bonner remembered that they: . . . fought . . . like two . . . bloody Kilkenny cats . . . He was the boss and this young woman gonna come . . . throwing her weight around. Oh the women used to tell me some stories . . . they reckoned they used to often hear them arguing the toss . . . No-one ever told Sister Johnson what she had to do.19

Sister Johnson stayed for ten years and made sure Gribble changed his clothes and had his meals at roughly the right times. He needed looking after. By 1949, he was 80 years old and withered by time and work. He was almost deaf but refused to get a hearing aid. Respiratory problems blighted his life, and even the walk up the gentle incline of Gribble Street to his church left him breathless and weak. He was often smitten by painful bouts of thrombosis that confined him to his bed for weeks, and he never left the rectory without a walking stick. Reluctantly, he delegated the job of reciting the graveside burial rites because the long walk from the church to the cemetery was too much. He would not concede that age was slowly and unrelentingly creeping up but his correspondence was increasingly disjointed and repetitive. It distressed him when he was forgetful and lost the thread of a conversation, but his memories of Yarrabah and Forrest River glowed vividly and he talked nostalgically of his wife and idyllic times past. As he aged, his muscular body became thin, frail and brittle, and he seemed smaller—as if time had worn away the inches. He neglected himself and forgot to eat and the skin hung loosely on his shrinking limbs. Sunday services left him exhausted and he spent most of Monday sleeping. After Sister Johnson left, the kind, loyal women of St George’s Church kept Gribble alive by silently taking charge of his duties and his cooking, cleaning and washing. May Smith remembered Father Gribble: taking the service . . . when he reading the Bible, you can see that he miss something . . . He missing something . . . not saying the right thing. I said . . . ‘Father forgetting himself’. When he preached he


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don’t preach it properly, you know? He forgetting what he’s saying . . . They said ‘Father too old to take service’ . . . he . . . almost fall when he giving communion. He have to have a man beside him, a helper, you know, to walk with him to each person . . . he have to hold Father because he can’t come down that step . . . That man had to help him down. Father was too old. We said that. The people, you know, we talk. He was too old to come down the step to give Communion. He was shaking.20

In 1950, death hovered and the Superintendent of Palm Island, George Sturges, wrote to the Gribble family urging them to visit and pay their final respects. Old Gribble surprised everyone by recovering but he found it hard to move around and spent most of his remaining years confined to the small rectory at the back of St George’s Church. Being unable to fulfil his clerical duties distressed him deeply and he worried that he was losing people from his Church. He pleaded constantly for an understudy to take up the reins but the Church found it impossible to persuade a priest to work with him. As awareness of death’s inevitability jolted his consciousness of his own mortality, he craved a spiritual and moral heir. Time had blurred his resentment of being pushed into missionary work under similar circumstances by his own father. Now his only thought was to ensure that the family’s missionary dynasty continued. He suggested his eldest son, Jack, as a possible successor but Chairman Needham declared him ineligible. Jack had been forced to resign from Forrest River Mission after allegations that he flogged inmates, chained them to posts for sexual offences and poured water over sleeping boys. Besides, Needham pointed out, Jack was not a priest and a serious head injury during World War II had left him with distressing, frequent headaches. Gribble proposed his second son. Eric had studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1924. Gribble was positive he would be loyal to his plans and methods. Eric agreed to fulfil his father’s wish but Bishop Feetham would not have it. He considered Eric: a terrible young man. I had him at Hughenden and he was drunken. He went to Longreach and was more drunken. His other peculiarity


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A T E R R I B LY W I L D M A N was pugilism. He knocks people down in the street and has to pay damages. [Feetham had] stopped him everywhere by warning Bishops against him.21

Age brought into focus life’s omissions. Fantasising about the family solidarity and companionship that had eluded him, Gribble redrew his relationship with Amelia and his sons in his imagination. He dedicated his autobiography Over the Years to the ‘wife who has faithfully borne her part in Missionary work’ and in his final weeks talked with sadness and sentimental attachment about the woman with whom he could not share a life. The distant past was more vivid than the present. He crafted his final autobiography during the 1940s and tellingly entitled it The Setting Sun, but ripping yarns of missionary adventures belonged to a different, long-gone world. The Setting Sun met the same fate as his previous autobiography and, unable to find a publisher, a disappointed Gribble accepted serialisation in the Northern Churchman (1940s) and the ABM Review (1950s). Gribble’s long career had made him a legend in humanitarian circles. In 1953, he received the Queen’s Coronation Medal in recognition of his work for Aboriginals. He was thrilled. Time had not faded his devotion to the monarchy and when one of his congregation invited him to a birthday party or a special occasion, he proudly donned his treasured award—at last, public acknowledgment of his efforts. In January 1957, his work was acknowledged again with the presentation of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his contribution to the ‘uplift’ of the Aboriginals. The elderly missionary was delighted. Ian Shevill, Bishop of North Queensland, decided the OBE decoration ceremony in Townsville was a chance to save Gribble from himself and to force him into retirement. But Gribble, cagey as ever, knew he would not be allowed to return to Palm Island. He refused to attend the ceremony and continued to talk about his future plans for the island. As a last resort, Shevill announced that Gribble’s salary would be terminated at the end of 1957 and sent the air force crash launch—generally used for emergencies—to collect him. A


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crowd of friends gathered on the beach and cried as they watched the stubborn, protesting priest carried through the shallow water to the launch. Some believed his departure killed him: ‘He died of a broken heart. He did not want to go. He wanted to die with his people’.22 Gribble was sent to Yarrabah. His body and mind faded quickly but word of his return spread quickly and, during the weeks that followed, a flood of Aboriginal visitors—old friends and younger generations reared on stories of a life of stability and order with Dadda Gribble—made their way to Yarrabah to pay their last respects and attend his funeral. As Ernest Gribble’s life neared its close, the controversial missionary occupied a more ambivalent place in the collective memory of non-Aboriginal Australia. A small constituency recognised him as a humanitarian and defender of Aboriginal rights but in 1949 his Golden Jubilee in Holy Orders and 80th birthday had passed without notice or comment. In 1951, the ABM Review wrongly attributed his autobiography Over the Years to JB Gribble, crediting JB with establishing Forrest River Mission and playing ‘an important part’ in the 1927 Royal Commission. Ernest Richard Bulmer Gribble died in October 1957. After 65 years of dedicated missionary service the wrong name was engraved on his tombstone. It read ‘Ernest Reginald Bulmer Gribble’. A generation later in mid-1992, crowds of well wishers swarmed to Trinity Bay to commemorate the centenary of the foundation of Yarrabah. After decades of wrestling to balance God and mammon, the Anglican Church had handed secular control of Yarrabah to the Queensland Government during the 1960s. The Church’s presence was still pervasive but the High Church flavour of the Anglican rites was overlaid by a fundamentalist zeal that resonated with the mysticism of the Dreaming and the evangelical roots laid down by Ernest Gribble. Leading the official celebrations was Bishop Arthur Malcolm,


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Australia’s first Aboriginal Anglican Bishop, former minister on Palm Island and heir to the path forged by James Noble. A crowd of Gribble descendants—black and white—were among the specially invited guests who came to celebrate and pay their respects. The atmosphere was buoyant and festive. It was a time for remembering the history of a community, honouring its people and paying tribute to the man who had defied the odds, stepped into his father’s shoes, forged a vibrant, lasting Christian enclave in north Queensland and devoted the rest of his life to Indigenous Australians. Two years later, an article appeared in The West Australian to ensure that the controversy that haunted Gribble’s life continued to taunt his ghost. Reviewing some of the evidence presented to the Wood Royal Commission and drawing on fragments of memoirs written by Constable St Jack, historian Rod Moran alleged that the Marndoc killings never happened but were the fabrication of a deranged, vindictive priest to conceal his illicit affair with an Aboriginal woman. Politics and history merged in the ensuing debate, with conservatives and the right wing literary magazine, Quadrant, arguing the revisionist case for re-writing the history of white Australia’s maltreatment of its Indigenous peoples. Ironically, the squalling dust of academic duels echoed the tragic dualities that marked Gribble’s world: conscious and unconscious motive; protection and oppression; escape and refuge; resilience and defeat; altruism and self-interest; and reality and illusion. These oppositions were embedded in the life and work of the insecure authoritarian who fought with all his heart to protect Aboriginal Australians and fulfil his paternalistic vision, but with only a partial understanding of the complex forces driving his actions and the actions of others. Today, as in the past, Ernest Gribble’s life stands as a testimony to the intricate intersection of personality, experience and culture that shaped Australian race relations and touched all who struggled to create a new space in the blurred boundaries between culture and race.


E NDNOTES

Note on abbreviations ABM ABMA ABMR ABMWA AIATSIS AN BDioA BL CA CC CP CP CPA CSO DN EP GP ML MN

Australian Board of Missions Australian Board of Missions Archives ABM Review Australian Board of Missions in Western Australia Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Aboriginal News Brisbane Diocesan Archives Battye Library Cairns Argus Church Chronicles Cairns Post Chief Protector Chief Protector of Aborigines Colonial Secretary’s Office Daily News Elkin Papers, Sydney University Gribble Papers, Mitchell Library Mitchell Library Missionary Notes 193


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MP Morning Post NC Northern Churchman NPA Northern Protector of Aborigines NQDioA North Queensland Diocesan Archives NT Northern Times QLCJ Queenland Legislative Council Journals QPD Queensland Parliamentary Debates QPP Queensland Parliamentary Papers QPVP Queensland Parliament Votes and Proceedings QSA Queensland State Archives RC Royal Commission WACN Western Australian Church News WAPD Western Australian Parliamentary Debates

1 Mostly of tears 11. Sally Wilcox to Amelia Gribble, 21 Oct. 1957, in the possession of Mrs Jill Murray. 12. Jones, D. 1976, Trinity Phoenix: A History of Cairns. Cairns, Cairns Post Ltd., pp. 335–6; Wise, T. 1985, The Self-made Anthropologist: A Life of A.P. Elkin, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, p. 61. 13. Gribble, Over the Years, 11/18/18, GP. 14. Gribble, Over the Years, 11/18/18, GP. 15. Gribble, Over the Years, 11/18/18, GP. 16. Gribble, Over the Years, 11/18/18, GP. 17. Gribble, J., Autobiography, 2/4/2, GP. 8. Gribble, Over the Years, 11/18/18, GP. 19. Gribble, Over the Years, 11/18/18, GP. 10. Gribble, J., 26 Oct., 23 Nov. 1885, Journal, 1/1/6, GP. 11. Gribble, J., 14, 24 Jan. 1886, Journal, 1/1/6, GP. 12. Inquirer, 18 May 1887. 13. Gribble, Forty Years, p. 26. 14. Gribble, Forty Years, p. 53. 15. CP, 15, 6 Aug., 14, 17 Oct. 1891, 29 Jun. 1892. 16. CA, 19 Feb. 1892. CP, 25 Jun. 1882. 17. Gribble, The Setting Sun, NC, May 1946, p. 9.


ENDNOTES

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Gribble, J., 15 Aug. 1884, Journal, 1/1/5, GP. Gribble, J. to Gribble, M., 9 Aug. 1892, 4 Sept. 1891, 2/8/1, GP. Gribble, 25 Oct. 1892, Journal, 3/10/1, GP. Gribble, 31 Oct., 13 Nov. 1882, Journal, 3/10/1, GP. Gribble, 6 Jun. 1893, Journal, 3/10/1; Gribble to Needham, 5 Jun. 1940, 8/12/5; unidentified newspaper cutting, 13/20/4; unpublished portion of Over the Years, 11/18/17, GP.

2 Clasping their children tightly 11. Jones, Trinity Phoenix, p. 293. 12. Gribble, 21 Jan. 1894, Journal, 3/10/3, GP; MN, 15 May 1895, p. 35; Gribble, Forty Years, pp. 115–23; NC, 1 Mar. 1931, p. 2. 13. Archibald Meston, cited in Jones, Trinity Phoenix, p. 318. 14. Interview, Hazel Barlow, Yarrabah, 30 Dec. 1984. 15. Gribble, Forty Years, p. 78. 16. Gribble, Problem, pp. 9, 29, 47–9, 121; Gribble in MN, 18 Dec. 1896, p. 107; Gribble to Roth, 14 Jul. 1900, 9/12/7, GP. 17. Gribble, 19 Jan. 1894, Journal, 3/10/3, GP. 18. MN, Dec. 1895, p. 104. 19. Gribble, Problem, p. 90. 10. CA, 10 Aug. 1893. 11. MN, 22 Jun. 1896, p. 44. 12. MN, 15 May 1896, p. 36. 13. Gribble, unpublished draft of Forty Years, 11/18/10, GP. 14. CC, 1 May 1894, p. 15. 15. Meston, Report, 5 Jan. 1897, COL/143, QSA. 16. QPD, 1897, p. 1542. 17. CPA, Report for 1901, QPP, 1902, p. 1146. 18. MN, Dec. 1897, p. 107. 19. MN, Jan. 1902, p. 4. 20. MN, Aug. 1899, p. 79. 21. Dyott, R., 1912, Travels in Australasia, Birmingham, Cornish Brothers Ltd. pp. 137–8. 22. Gribble, Forty Years, p. 77.


196


23. Yarrabah Government and Court Minutes, 14 Jan. 1901, NQDioA. 24. ABM Minutes, 20 Jul. 1906, M2/2, ML. 25. NPA, Report for 1901, QPP, vol. 1, 1902, p. 1147. 26. Saumarez Smith to Gribble, 24 Dec. 1898, GP, 8/11/11, ML. 27. Interview, May Smith, Cairns, 28 Dec. 1984. 28. MN, Jul. 1898, p. 72. 29. MP, 9 Jun. 1897, p. 5. 30. Unidentified newspaper cutting, 13/20/4, GP. 31. Gribble, Over the Years, 11/18/18, GP.

3 Porridge for every meal 11. Gribble, Despised Race, p. 44. 12. NPA, Report for 1900, QLCJ, 1900, pp. 193–4. 13. Kidd, R. 1997, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs: The Untold Story, Brisbane: Queensland University Press, pp. 50–1. 14. NPA, Report for 1899, QLCJ, 1900, pp. 797. 15. Dyott, Travels in Australasia, p. 134. 16. Queenslander, 3 Jul. 1897, pp. 20, 188. Also Parry Okeden, Report, QPVP, 1897, p. 38; Meston, Report 1896, QPVP, p. 727; Roth, Report, QLCJ, 1900, pp. 193–4. 17. MP, 1 Jan. 1901, p. 5 quoting Hansard, 15 Dec. 1900. 18. Gribble to Dixon, 20 Jun. 1900, 9/12/7, GP. 19. Roth, Report, 1903, DPL/33606, QSA; Roth, Report, 1899, QLCJ, 1900, p. 800; Gribble to the Registrar General, 15 Dec. 1900, 9/12/7, GP. 10. MP, 31 Oct. 1902, p. 2. 11. MP, 1 Jan. 1901, p. 5 quoting Hansard, 15 Dec. 1900. 12. MN, Nov. 1895, p. 96. 13. MN, Jan. 1902, p. 3. 14. Interview, May Smith, Cairns, 28 Dec. 1984. 15. Interview, May Smith, Cairns, 28 Dec. 1984. 16. Gribble, Problem, p. 39. 17. Gribble, Problem, p. xi.


ENDNOTES

197

18. Unidentified newspaper cutting, 13/20/4, GP. 19. MN, Nov. 1902, p. 51; Gribble, Report to the Brisbane Diocesan Board of Missions, 1 Mar. 1900/3052, A15992, QSA. 20. MN, 25 Feb. 1901, p. 1. 21. QSA PRE/A163, 4 Dec. 1903, cited in R. Kidd, The Way We Civilise, p. 56. 22. MN, Jul. 1902, p. 65; Gribble, Life and Experiences, 15/20/9, GP. 23. Gribble, Life and Experiences, 15/20/9, GP. 24. MN, Mar. 1901, p. 19. 25. Interview, May Smith, Cairns, 28 Dec. 1984. 26. Gribble, 26 May 1905, Journal, 3/10/9, GP; MP, 18 Sept. 1905, p. 2. 27. Yarrabah Government and Court Minutes, 8 Jan. 1903, NQDioA. 28. ABM Minutes, 11 Oct. 1907, M2/2, ML; Dixon to Gribble, 16 Jun. 1903, 7/11/3, GP. 29. AN, 15 Aug. 1907. 30. Yarrabah Government and Court Minutes, 14 Jan. 1901, 7 Nov. 1902, NQDioA. 31. Gribble, The Setting Sun, NC, Jun. 1946, p. 13.

4 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 10. 11. 12.

Horse-thieves and harlots North Queensland Herald, 28 May 1910, Yarrabah File, BDioA. Grant, P. G., Report, 20 Jun. 1910, Yarrabah File, BDioA. Gribble, 21 Nov. 1893, Journal, 3/10/3, GP. MN, Sept. 1901, p. 93. Jones, Trinity Phoenix, p. 317. CP, Report for 1907, QPP, 1908, p. 942. AN, May 1908. Gribble, Over the Years, 11/18/18, GP. CC, April 1895, p. 13. Rules and Regulations of Yarrabah, NQDioA. CP, Report for 1905, QPP, 1906, vol. 2, p. 938. Gribble, 5 Dec. 1929, Journal, 5/10/15, GP.


198


13. MP, 20 Aug. 1907, p. 2. 14. Bishop of North Queensland to the Archbishop, 12 May 1910, ABM Minutes, BDioA. 15. ABMR, April 1927, p. 8. 16. Interview, May Smith and Elva Sands, Cairns, 28 Dec. 1984. Correspondence from Linda Lawson about interview with Maise Reading, 5 Feb. 1985. 17. Gribble, nd, Notes for Synod speech, 12/18/25, GP. 18. Interview, May Smith, Cairns, 28 Dec. 1984. 19. Bishop of North Queensland to the Diocesan Committee for Yarrabah, 20 Oct. 1911, BDioA. 20. Gribble, Forty Years, p. 89. 21. AN, 15 Jun. 1908. 22. Report of Bishop of North Queensland, ABM Minutes, 4 Jun. 1909, M2/2, ML. 23. Gribble to Bishop of North Queensland, 20 May 1909, 9 Jul. 1909, M2/2, ML. 24. NC, Jan. 1910, p. 5. 25. Bishop of North Queensland to Archbishop of Brisbane, 8 Jun. 1911, Yarrabah File, BDioA. 26. NC, May 1909, p. 8.

5 When native fruits are ripe 11. Gribble, Despised Race, p. 88. 12. Gribble, Forty Years, p. 173. 13. Green, N. 1995, Forrest River Massacre, Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Press, p. 59. 14. CSO 90/1894, BL. 15. WAPD, vol. 5, p. 1050 in Gill, A., 1977, ‘Aborigines, Settlers and Police in the Kimberleys 1887–1905’, Studies in Western Australian History, p. 11. 16. WACN, 1 Jun. 1914, p. 3. 17. Interview, Lovie Kiuna, Yarrabah, 31 Dec. 1984. 18. Interview, Lily and Fred Johnson, Wyndham, 16 Jan. 1986. 19. Elkin, Report, PMS 4176, AIAS.


ENDNOTES

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

199

ABMR, Jul. 1916, p. 95; WACN, Jul. 1918, pp. 20–1. ABMR, Oct. 1915, p. 143. ABMR, Oct. 1915, p. 143. Gribble to Hudleston, 9 Jun., 31 Jul., 19 Nov. 1918, ABMWA, 2/6, GP. WA, 4 Apr. 1917, p. 8. Elkin, Report, PMS 4176, AIATSIS. ABMR, Aug. 1914, p. 112. Haining to Riley, 5 Dec. 1928, Box 5.8, ABMA. WACN, May 1918, pp. 17–18; Jul. 1918, pp. 20–1. Interview, Lily and Fred Johnson, Wyndham, 16 Jan. 1986. Interview, Clara Roberts, Oombulgurri, 18 Jan. 1986. WACN, Nov. 1916, p. 12. Jones to Hudleston, 9 Feb. 1921, ABMWA, 2/6, GP; Needham to Canon Burton, St Thomas’ Day, 1927, Box, 5.8, ABMA. Gribble to Hudleston, 8 Dec. 1919, ABMWA, 2/6, GP. Gribble to Batchelor, 25 Apr. 1921, AMBWA, 2/6, GP.

6 Dark deeds in a sunny land 11. CPA to Minister for the North West, 15 Dec. 1922, 1/4, 653, 655/22, BL. 12. Gribble to CPA, 23 Jul. 1922, 1/4, 653, 655/22, BL. 13. Interview, Clara Roberts, Oombulgurri, 18 Jan. 1986. 14. Gribble to CPA, 15 Sept. 1924, 1/4, 653, 294/24, BL. 15. Cited in Green, Forrest River Massacre, p. 125. 16. Gribble to Needham, 22 Feb. 1925, Box 5.8, ABMA. 17. Douglas to Commissioner of Police, 17 Dec. 1924, 1/4, 653, 294/24, BL. 18. CPA to Minister, 18 Jul. 1924, 25 Jan. 1925, Minister to CPA, 19 Mar. 1925, 1/4, 653, 294/24. CPA to Minister, 29 Jul. 1927, 1/7, 993, 412/27, BL. 19. Gribble to CPA, 9 Feb. 1925, 1/4, 653, 604/24, BL. 10. Adams to CPA, 8 Jun. 1927, 1/4, 653, 604/24, BL. 11. Jack Gribble to Needham, 30 Mar. 1925, Box 5.8, ABMA. 12. Gribble, 24 Sept. 1924, Journal, 4/10/13, GP.


200


13. Gribble, 2 Nov. 1924; 22 Apr., 14 May 1925, Journal, MN 545 2389A/11, BL. 14. Gribble, 17, 18, 30 Dec. 1924, Journal, MN 545 2389A/10; 20 Mar. 1925, Journal, MN 545 2389A/11, BL. 15. Gribble, Problem, p. 36. 16. Gribble, Problem, pp. 36–7. 17. ABMWA Mins, 25 Jun. 1928, M1, ML. 18. Gribble, 28 Mar. 1925, Journal, MN 545 2389A/11, BL. 19. Gribble, 29 Mar. 1925, Journal, MN 545 2389A/11, BL. 20. Moran, R., 1999, Massacre Myth, Bassendeon, Western Australia, Access Press; Interview, Clara Roberts, Oombulgurri, 18 Jan. 1986. 21. Jack Gribble to Needham, 15 Mar. 1925, 30 Mar. 1925, Box 5.8, ABMA. 22. Claridge to Needham, 14 May 1925, Trower to Hudleston, 18 Jun. 1925, Box 5.8, ABMA. 23. Needham to Hudleston, 6 Jun. 1925, Box 5.8, ABMA. 24. ABM Minutes, May 1925, M4/3, ML. 25. Trower to Hudleston, 18 Jun. 1925, Box 5.8, ABMA. 26. Gribble, 21 Jun. 1925, Journal, 4/10/13, GP. 27. Gribble to Needham, 27 Jun. 1925, Box 5.8, ABMA. 28. CPA to the Minister for the North West, 15 Aug. 1925, 1/7, 993, 196/46; Mitchell, Report, 29 Jun. 1925, BL. 29. ABMR, Mar. 1926, p. 197. 30. Gribble, undated entry, Journal, 4/10/13, GP. 31. Mitchell, Report, 29 Jun. 1925, 1/7, 993, 196/46, BL. 32. Jack Gribble to Needham, 13 May 1926, Box 5.8, ABMA.

7 Ghosts crying in the dark 11. 12. 13. 14.

RC, p. 48, Item 1720. Gribble, 28 May 1926, Journal, 4/10/14, GP. RC, p. 51, Item 1827. NT, 5 Nov. 1926, p. 3; NW Echo, 6 Nov. 1926; unidentified newspaper cutting, 14/20/6, GP. 15. RC, p. 50.


ENDNOTES

16. 17. 18. 19. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

201

Gribble, 9 Jun. 1926, Journal, 4/10/14, GP. Mitchell to CPA, 14 Oct. 1926, 1/7, 993, 4347/26, BL. Gribble, 5 Jul. 1926, Journal, 4/10/14, GP. RC, p. 5. Thomson, 6 Jul. 1926, 4/10/14, GP. Interview, Lily and Fred Johnson, Wyndham, 16 Jan. 1986. Interview, Lily and Fred Johnson, Wyndham, 16 Jan. 1986. RC, p. 6. Interview, Lily and Fred Johnson, Wyndham, 16 Jan. 1986. Gribble, 27 Aug. 1926, Journal, 4/10/14, GP; Gribble to Needham, 22 Feb. 1927, Box 5.8, ABMA. Gribble to CPA, 27 Aug. 1926, AF 437/26. Gribble, Problem, p. 107. RC, p. 67. Mitchell, Report, 11 Sept. 1926; Mitchell to CPA, Journal, 27 Aug., 4 Sept. 1926, 1/7, 993, 196/46, BL. Batchelor to Sydney Secretary, 21 Aug. 1928, Box 5.8, ABMA. Burton to Needham, 31 May 1927, ABMWA, Box 3/21; 22 Sept. 1926, ABMWA, Box 3/27, ML. Mitchell, 11 Sept. 1926, 1/7, 993, 196/46, BL. Mitchell, Report, 11, 25 Sept. 1926, 1/7, 993, 196/46, BL. Douglas to Commissioner of Police, 1 Dec. 1926, 5/3, 430, 5374/26, BL. Mitchell to CPA, 14 Oct. 1926, 1/7, 993, 437/26, BL. CPA to Undersecretary of the Colonial Secretary’s Department, 28 Sept. 1926, 1/7, 993, 196/46, BL. Burton to Needham, 30 Nov. 1926, Box 5.8, ABMA. Needham to Burton, 20 Dec. 1926, Box 5.8, ML. Burton to Needham, 26 Jan. 1927, ABMWA, Box 28/21, ML. Gribble, 3 Jul. 1926, Journal, 4/10/14, GP. RC, p. 25. RC, p. 87. Gribble, Over the Years, 11/18/18, GP. RC, p. xv.


202


35. Interview, Charles Overheu by Green, N. 1989, ‘The Marndoc Reserve massacres of 1926’, PhD, University of Western Australia, p. 410. 36. Interview, Daniel Evans in Stow, R., 1958, To the Islands, Middlesex, UK, Penguin, p. 57. 37. ABMR, 12 Jul. 1927 cited in Reynolds, H., 1998, This Whispering in Our Hearts, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, p. 189. 38. WACN, Jun. 1927, pp. 1–2. 39. WACN, Jun. 1927, p. 7. 40. DN, 10 Aug. 1927, p. 2: NT, 13 Aug. 1927, p. 2: Police News, 25 Oct. 1927, p. 82; WA Pastoralist and Grazier, 30 Nov. 1927, pp. 10–11. 41. Sydney Secretary to Feetham, 19 Jun. 1928, Box 5.8, ABMA. 42. Gribble, The Setting Sun, NC, Oct. 1946, pp. 9–10. 43. Gribble, Over the Years, ABMR, Jun. 1950, p. 92.

8 A complete outsider 11. Webb, Report, 28 Feb. 1928; Webb to Needham, 13 Mar. 1928, Box 5.8, ABMA. 12. Quoted in Hudleston to Needham, 20 Mar. 1928, Box 5.8, ABMA. 13. ABM Minutes, 23–24 Nov. 1927, M4/4, GP. 14. Needham to Bird, 30 Mar. 1928, Box 5.8, ABMA. 15. Needham to Archdeacon of Perth, St Thomas’ Day 1927, Box 5.8, ABMA. 16. Webb to ABM Perth, 27 May, 3, 10 Aug. 1927, Box 5.8, ABMA. 17. Elkin, Report, PMS 4176, AIATSIS. 18. Elkin to Sally, 13 May 1928, Box 216, 5/2/1, EP. 19. Elkin, Report, PMS 4176, AIATSIS. 10. Elkin, Report, PMS 4176, AIATSIS; Elkin to Sally, 13 May 1928, Box 2165/2/1; 29 May 1928, Journal, Box 1, 1/1/1, EP. 11. Elkin cited in R.M. & C.H. Berndt, (eds), 1979, Aborigines of the West: Their Past and their Present, Nedlands, UWA Press, p. 303. 12. Needham, ABM Minutes, 22–23 Aug. 1928, M4/5, GP.


ENDNOTES

203

13. Needham, ABM Minutes, 22–23 Aug. 1928, M4/5, GP. 14. Needham to Feetham, 13 Jul. 1928; Feetham to Needham, 18 Jul. 1928, Box 5.8, ABMA. 15. ABM Minutes, 28 Aug. 1928, M4/5, GP. 16. Leen to CPA, 22, 28 Jun. 1928, 5/3, 403, 4031/28, BL. 17. Carroll to CPA, 22 Jul. 1928, 5/3, 403, 4031/28, BL. 18. Wood to Elkin, 8 Jul. 1928, Box 6, 1/1/68, EP. 19. Gribble, 10, 12 May, 19 Jul. 1928, Journal, 5/10/15, GP. 20. Wood to Elkin, 12, 25 Jul. 1928, Box 6, 1/1/68, EP. 21. Needham to Mrs Stephen, 7 Sept. 1928, 9/14/3, GP. 22. Interview, Lily and Fred Johnson, Wyndham, 16, 18 Jan. 1986. 23. Statutory declarations, 4 Apr. 1930, Box 5.8, ABMA. 24. Elkin, Report, PMS 4176, AIAS. 25. Gribble, 25 Sept. 1928, Journal, 5/10/15, GP. 26. Gribble, 6 Jan. 1928, 5 Dec. 1929, Journal, 5/10/15, GP.

9 Punishment place 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 10. 11. 12.

Gribble, Forty Years, p. 177. Gribble, Despised Race, p. 124. Truth, 24 Aug. 1930, p. 13. Interview, Neville Bonner, Sydney, 20 Aug. 1986. See Watson, J. 1994, ‘Becoming Bwyggloman: exile and survival on Palm Island’, PhD, University of Queensland. Murray, E. 1935, Palm Island Memories, Sydney University Medical Society Medical Journal, vol. 29, pp. 14–15. Birtles, D. 1935, North-West by North: A Journey of a Voyage. London, Jonathan Cape, p. 148. Gribble, 9 Jan., 4 Apr. 1931, Journal, 5/10/16, GP. Gribble, 8 Oct. 1932, Journal, 5/10/16, GP. Gribble to Feetham, 10 Mar. 1947, Chairman’s Correspondence 1945–49, Series 4, GP. Foster to O’Leary, 19 Nov. 1947, Anglican Church File, Department of Community Services, Palm Island. Gribble, 24 Apr. 1932, Journal, 5/10/16, GP; Interview, May Smith, Cairns, 28 Dec. 1984.


204

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.


Gribble, Report, 11 Sept. 1941, 10/16/1, GP. Birtles, North-West by North, p. 148. NC, Jan. 1942, p. 3; Feb. 1944, p. 14. Gribble, 29 Jan. 1934, Journal, 5/10/17, GP. Interview, Neville Bonner, Sydney, 30 Aug. 1986. Feetham to Chairman, 9 Jul., 16 Dec. 1945, Chairman’s Correspondence, 1945–49, Series 4, ML. Interview, Neville Bonner, Sydney, 30 Aug. 1986. Interview, May Smith, Cairns, 28 Dec. 1984. Feetham to Needham, 17 Apr. 1946, Chairman’s Correspondence 1945–49, Series 4, ML. Interview, Neville Bonner, Sydney, 30 Aug. 1986.


S OURCES

AND A SELECT GUIDE TO READING

T

he story of Ernest Gribble lies buried in archives, libraries, private collections and memories around Australia. The personal papers of John and Ernest Gribble are in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and National Library, Canberra. The Minute Books and Correspondence of the Australia Board of Missions are housed in the Mitchell Library and the ABM Archives, Sydney. Gribble wrote six autobiographies. Three were commercially published: Forty Years with the Aborigines (Angus & Robertson, 1930), The Problem of the Australian Aborigines (Angus & Robertson, 1932) and A Despised Race (ABM, 1933). The others were serialised in journals and newspapers: Life and Experiences of an Australian (Gosford Times, 1915), Over the Years (Northern Churchman, 1930s and ABM Review, 1950) and The Setting Sun (ABM Review and Northern Churchman, 1940s). Gribble was also a regular contributor to Church journals like Missionary Notes, Australian Board of Missions Review, Western Australian Church News, North West Quarterly, Northern Churchman and Church Chronicle. Insights into Gribble’s psycho-social development, character and relationship with his father were provided by a substantial body of psychoanalytical theory and literature. Erik Erikson’s work on identity formation, especially Identity, Youth and Crisis (Norton, 205


SOURCES

AND A SELECT GUIDE TO READING

206

1968) details adolescent identity crises. Theodore Adorno (ed.) The Authoritarian Personality (Harper, 1950) still stands as the seminal entrée to the psychopathology of authoritarianism. The historical and government records of Yarrabah, Fraser Island and Palm Island are housed in the Queensland State Archives. Additional material related to the Church’s involvement with Yarrabah, Fraser Island and Palm Island is held in the Brisbane Diocesan Archives and the North Queensland Diocesan Archives, Townsville. The Aborigines Files and Police Files in the Battye Library, Perth, contain papers relevant to Forrest River, the Marndoc killings and the Wood Royal Commission. The papers of A.P. Elkin can be consulted at the Sydney University Archives, Sydney. A duplicate of Elkin’s Report on Forrest River, as well as the personal papers of anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry, are held in the AIATSIS Library in Canberra. The surviving archival material offers limited insights into Gribble’s personal life or his relations and his impact on Indigenous culture and society. Extensive interviews with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people redressed this lack. Unless otherwise specified, all interviews were conducted by the author. The Black Oral History Collection at James Cook University of North Queensland offers another source of oral history. Information about pre-invasion Aboriginal culture and society can be located in collections of legends and stories by Aboriginal writers from Yarrabah, Forrest River and Palm Island held in the AIATSIS Library, Canberra, as well as the writings of anthropologists R.M. and C. Berndt (for a general overview), Walter Roth and Norman Tindale (for Queensland), Phyllis Kaberry and A.P. Elkin (for Western Australia). Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts (Allen & Unwin, 1998) provides an introduction to the general field of humanitarian endeavour. John Harris’ One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounters with Christianity: A Story of Hope (Albatross, 1990) gives a broad overview of missionary work in Australia. The History of the Church of England in Queensland is the subject of a PhD of the


M O S T LY

OF

TEARS

207

same name by Keith Rayner (University of Queensland, 1962). For a general history of Queensland, readers should consult Geoffrey Bolton’s A Thousand Miles Away (Jacaranda, 1963). In Trinity Phoenix: A History of Cairns (Cairns & District Centenary Committee, 1976), Dorothy Jones documents the history of Cairns and surrounding regions. There are several quality accounts of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations in north Queensland. Noel Loos’ Invasion and resistance: Aboriginal-European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier 1861–1897 (ANU Press, 1982) provides a comprehensive early history. Raymond Evans’ publications have been reproduced in a highly recommended collection, Fighting Words: Writing About Race (QUP, 1999). In The Way We Civilise (QUP, 1997), Rosalind Kidd presents a well researched, readable account of the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland. For the early years of Fraser Island see Raymond Evans, ‘A permanent precedent, dispossession, social control and the Fraser Island Reserve and Mission, 1897–1904’, Ngulaid, 5, 1991, and Raymond Evans and Jan Walker, ‘These strangers, where are they going?—Aboriginal-European Relations in the Fraser Island and Wide Bay Region 1770–1905’, Occasional Papers in Anthropology, 8 March 1977. There are several studies of Yarrabah during the Gribble years. Paul Smith provides an optimistic account in his BA (Hons) thesis. ‘Like a watered garden: Yarrabah 1892-1909’ (James Cook University of North Queensland, 1980). Daniel Craig’s PhD, ‘The social impact of the state on an Aboriginal reserve in Queensland’ (University of California, Berkeley, 1979), illustrates the tenuous relationship between Yarrabah and the Queensland Government. For the history of Western Australia and Aboriginal/nonAboriginal relations see Tom Stannage (ed.), A New History of Western Australia (UWA Press, 1981); Anna Haebich, For Their Own Good (UWA Press, 1988) and Peter Biskup’s Not Slaves Not Citizens: The Aboriginal Problem in Western Australia 1898–1954 (QUP, 1973). The Marndoc killings have been the subject of a ballooning body of publications. In The Forrest River Massacres


208


(Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995), Neville Green provides a sympathetic account of Gribble. In Massacre Myth (Access Press, 1999), Rod Moran presents the revisionist case. A fictionalised account drawing on interviews with Daniel Evans can be found in Randolf Stow’s, To the Islands (Penguin, 1958). Many of the people in Gribble’s life have been the subject of studies in their own right. John Brown Gribble is the focus of a BA (Hons) by Susan Hunt, ‘The Gribble affair: a study of aboriginalEuropean labour relations in north-west Australia during the 1880s’, (Murdoch University, 1978) and a BA (Letters) by Anne McGrath, ‘John Brown Gribble’ (ANU, 1989). William Thorpe provides insights into the colourful character of Queensland’s Southern Protector of Aborigines in his BA (Hons) thesis ‘Archibald Meston and the Aborigines: ideology and practice, 1870–1970’ (Queensland University, 1978). In The Self-Made Anthropologist: A life of A.P. Elkin (Allen & Unwin, 1985), Tigger Wise presents an engaging profile of A.P. Elkin. Neville Bonner is the subject of a biography by Angela Burger (Macmillan, 1979). For a comprehensive study of Chief Protector Neville and Aboriginal Affairs in Western Australia during the first half of the twentieth century, see Pat Jacobs’ Mister Neville (Fremantle Arts Press, 1990). Several histories and memoirs document the story of Palm Island, including Marna Kennedy’s, Born a Half-caste (AIAS, 1985); Bill Rosser’s, This is Palm Island (AIAS, 1978) and Dreamtime Nightmares (AIAS, 1985). Joanne Watson’s impressive PhD, ‘Becoming Bwyggloman: exile and survival on Palm Island’ (University of Queensland, 1994) is highly recommended. Further information on sources can be found by consulting the PhD on which this book was based: ‘The Reverend Ernest Gribble and race relations in Northern Australia’ (University of Queensland, 1992) where the extensive footnotes and bibliography catalogue in detail the evidence that establish the facts of Gribble’s life.


I NDEX

and forced labour 25, 26, 37, 71, 105, 114, 173 health 12, 26, 59 hunting 97–8 and impact of white settlement 12, 39, 49, 53, 55–6, 74–6, 97–111, 117, 174 Indindji 39, 40, 42, 89 Irukandji 39 and isolation from white settlements 31, 38, 48–9, 50–3, 55–6, 57–8, 75–6, 105–6, 114, 135, 174 Kongkandji 22–3, 25, 26–9, 33, 39–40, 42, 50, 55, 89 Kwini 97 Maday 39 marriage 29, 41, 77–9, 84–5, 107, 116 massacre of 98–9, 113, 131–2, 133–53 passim, 172

Aboriginal News 69, 70, 71 Aboriginal people Arnga 96, 97 Bemba 96 children 31, 51–6, 79–80, 103, 108, 110, 165–6, 171, 183 and Christianity 28–9, 41, 46, 89, 108–9 conflict with settlers 12, 98–102, 112, 127–53 customs and culture 27–30, 39–40, 50, 51–2, 56, 75, 78, 79–80, 89–90, 96–8, 107–11, 127, 149, 161, 165, 171 and dancing 89–90 and education 52, 186–7 Elders 30, 37, 40, 41–2, 43, 89 and Federal government control 185 209


210


and missions 7–8, 17–18, 21, 29–31, 33–4, 40, 42–3, 46, 49, 54–5, 56, 58, 100–5, 190–2 and police abuse/killings 118, 133–53 passim, 161, 172 promised brides 29, 76, 78, 107–8 and reciprocity 27–8, 68, 78, 97, 103–4 Royal Commission into killings in East Kimberley 145–53 passim, 172 sacred sites 99, 127 and seasonal trading 39–40, 97, 127 and sexuality 74–5, 79–80, 87, 117, 121, 165 and slaughter of cattle 98, 125–6, 127–8, 129 Stolen Children 31, 53, 110 treatment of by white population 12, 18, 25–6, 37–8, 49, 50–5, 71, 74–5, 98–100, 105, 112–14, 116–18, 128–32, 165–6, 173, 174 tribal law 162–3, 165 Wanur 39 war of extermination 99 warriors 98 Webra 96, 99

Western Australia 11–14, 16, 71–2, 94–111 passim, 127–53 passim women 26, 29, 30, 51, 52, 54–5, 56, 74–5, 104, 107–8, 116, 133, 137 Wulgurugaba 172, 173 Wunumbul 97 Yeidji 96, 99 Yura 96 Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 37–8, 51 Aboriginal Synod representatives, first 89 Aborigines’ Progressive Association (APA) 185 Aborigines’ Protection Association 179 Aborigines Protection Board 8, 10, 11, 38, 44 Adams, Archibald 117, 118, 122, 123 Ah Sing 98 Aldoa 132, 141, 151, 161, 162, 164, 168 Ambrym, Willie 16, 31, 41 Anglican Church 1, 4, 8–9, 12–13, 17–18, 31–2, 44, 72, 142–4, 150, 180–3, 191 Annear, Harry 112–14, 131 Australian Aborigines’ League (AAL) 185 Australian Board of Missions (ABM) 18, 32, 35, 36, 40,


INDEX

41, 52, 58, 69, 70, 72, 84, 106, 111, 120, 142, 154, 167, 169 Australian Inland Missionaries 181 Ballarat 2 Barlow, Christopher 18, 35–6, 44, 68 Barlow, John Mitchell (Albert Maywe) 28, 42, 182 beche de mer 25, 50, 69, 173 Bellenden Ker see Yarrabah Black but Comely 11 Bogimbah Creek settlement see Fraser Island Bonner, Neville 174, 187, 188 Boondung 151 Brown, Billie 55 Brown, Charles 157 Brown, Janie 85–8, 178 see also Forbes, Jeannie Buckland, Archie 105–6, 109–10, 114, 115, 126, 127, 132, 138 Buddababoo 48 Burton, Canon 142, 144, 155 Caboolture 60 Cairns 16–17, 31, 39, 40, 53–4, 70 Cairns Argus 54 Cairns Morning Post 46, 53, 54, 66, 70

211

Cambridge Gulf 94–5 Cape Grafton see Yarrabah Carnarvon 11, 12 Carroll, Sergeant 162, 163 cattle, Aboriginal slaughter of 98, 125–6, 127–8, 129 Cheemo, Henry 78 Christian, George 28, 78 Christianity 29, 38, 46, 89 Church, Billy 28 Church of St Michael and All Angels 100, 107 Church Lads Brigade (CLB) 66 Church Missionary Society Mission 89 Clarke, Janie see Brown, Janie Clarke, Nola 86, 92, 111, 178 Clarke, Willie 85–6, 87–8 Claridge, Violet 120, 121, 164 Coffey, Francis Bernard 112 colonisation 26, 38, 39 Comeroo, Frank 131 Congregational Union of Victoria 4 Connor, Francis 99 Cooktown 71 Cooney, Police Constable 112, 113 Cooper, Police Sub-Inspector 46 Cooper, William 185 Curry, Robert Henry ‘Mad Dog’ 174–5


212


Dadaway Lagoon 99–100, 102 Dala 140–1, 146, 148, 151, 161 Deeds in a Sunny Land or Blacks and Whites in North-West Australia 12, 142 Despised Race, A 84, 171 Dixon, John 73 Doounder, Barnabas and Angelina 116 Douglas, William Archibald 117, 118, 131–2, 139–40, 143, 153 Drew, John M. 117 Dunnett, James ‘Harry’ 115, 116–17 Durack, Jerry 98, 99 Durack, John 98 Durack, Michael 107, 129 Durragee Hill 128 Durundur Reserve 60 Dyott, Richard 42, 51 Edward River mission 172 Elkin, Adolphus Peter 156–9, 161, 166–7 Feetham, John Oliver 160, 172, 177, 178–9, 187, 189 Ferguson, William 185 fishing industry 25, 48, 50, 51, 70 Fitzroy Island 68, 70, 71, 88 Forbes, Jeannie 54, 85

see also Brown, Janie Forrest, Alexander 95 Forrest River Mission 94, 96, 100–11 passim, 114, 118–26 passim, 128, 129–30, 137–8, 150, 154–6, 157–62, 166–9 see also Marndoc Aboriginal Reserve Forty Years with the Aborigines 171 Foxton, Justin Fox Greenlaw 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58 Fraser Island Aboriginal Reserve (Bogimbah Creek settlement) 56–60, 62, 63, 66–7, 68, 72, 83, 84 Frodsham, George 68, 89, 90–1 Gascoyne River mission 11, 12, 96 Geelong 2, 8 Gomerie 29, 78 Gooloo 132, 133 Goondoon 28 Gosford 93 Gosford Times 93 Grant, P.G. 75 Green Island 70 Gribble, Amy 7 Gribble, Arthur 5, 6, 14 Gribble, Edith ‘Marna’ (née Kent) 120, 125 Gribble, Emile Julia ‘Amelia’ ‘Millie’ (née Wreide)


INDEX

character 36–7, 170 children 37, 63 conflict with husband 62–3, 67, 80–1, 86, 93, 119–20, 170 marriage 36, 62–4, 80–1, 85, 86, 93, 119–20, 170, 190 at Yarrabah 40, 41, 46, 63 Gribble, Eric Livingstone 37, 189–90 Gribble, Ernest Richard Bulmer and Aboriginal children 50–6, 103, 110, 114, 171, 183 on Aboriginal culture and customs 29–30, 76, 78–9, 107–10 and Aboriginal people 8, 16, 24–5, 26–34, 49–50, 55–6, 76, 78, 101–7, 112–17, 129–30, 132–53 passim, 160, 171, 172, 183–8, 190–2 appearance 3, 151, 184 awarded OBE 190 awarded Queen’s Coronation Medal 190 born 2 and British Empire 65–6, 190 career 10–11, 14–15, 16, 19–20, 190 at Carnarvon 12–13

213

character 1–2, 3, 8, 14–15, 20–1, 25, 33, 45, 47, 48, 61, 67, 72, 81, 82, 85–6, 88, 91, 104, 114, 120, 130, 153, 163, 164, 170, 183–4, 187–8, 190 childhood 4–7, 10 children 37, 63, 86, 92 on Church funding 31–2, 69–70 clash with Roman Catholic Church 181–3 conflict with ABM 52, 59, 63, 72, 90, 91, 93, 106–7, 111, 123–4, 142, 154–5, 158–63, 165–9, 178, 187 conflict with Amelia 62, 67, 80–1, 86, 93, 119–20, 170 contempt for white society 49, 53–4, 70, 113–17, 148 and corporal punishment 67, 68–9, 163–4 curate 19 death 1, 191 dismissal 91–2, 93, 111, 154–5, 165–6, 167, 169, 187, 190–1 education 4, 8–10, 35–6, 44 finances for Yarrabah 32, 40 at Forrest River Mission 94, 101–11, 118, 119–23, 129–30, 134–5, 144, 154–5, 157–64, 166–9, 171 and Fraser Island Aboriginal


214


Reserve (Bogimbah Creek settlement) 56–60, 62, 63 at Gosford 93–4 health 21, 31, 81, 87, 90, 120–3, 126, 129, 163, 188, 189 at King’s School 8–10 leaves home 14 life membership of AAL 185 marriage 36, 62–4, 80–1, 85, 86, 93, 119–20, 170, 190 missionary 16, 19, 20–1, 23–4, 29, 31, 33, 49–50, 63, 65, 80, 94, 123, 191 and Mitchell River cattle 125–6, 134–5 and Mitchell River mission 61–2, 80 and morality 54, 75–9, 81, 85, 86–7, 88, 105, 121–2, 163, 181 and murder of Matthew Munjarra 161–5 Orange League 4, 181 ordained 36, 44 at Palm Island 172, 175–91 as preacher 2–3, 16, 19, 44–5 protection of Ernest Unbah 117, 163–5, 168 psychological illness 21, 67, 81, 85, 87, 88, 90, 120–3, 126, 129, 163, 164, 178

relationship with father 7–9, 14, 19–21 relationship with Foxton 49, 51, 55 relationship with Mitchell 135–6, 137–8, 143 relationship with Needham (Chairman of ABN) 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129, 152, 154, 155, 159–60, 161–2, 166–7, 172, 184 relationship with Roth 49, 50, 60, 71–2 relationship with Archbishop Smith 32 relationship with Violet Claridge 120, 121, 164 and religion 4–5, 49–50, 93, 159–60 romance 15, 37, 85–7, 91, 120–1 salary 31 self-aggrandisement 33, 72, 155–6 self-doubt 33, 85, 107, 119, 120, 121–2 and sexuality 37, 54, 75–9, 81, 85–7, 88, 105, 120–2, 163 and sport 10 stockman 15, 61, 70, 110–11, 125–6, 127, 134–5 teenage years 13–14


INDEX

at Wyndham 94, 101, 154–5 writings 34–5, 50, 61, 84, 93, 137, 170–2, 178, 190 Yarrabah Mission (Cape Grafton; Trinity Bay; Bellenden Ker) 1, 20–1, 24, 26–92, 191 Gribble, Ernest Yarrabah 37 Gribble, Ethel 7, 35, 40, 59, 63, 82–4 Gribble, Evangeline 7 Gribble, Illa 7, 33, 40, 92 Gribble, John Benjamin Herbert (Bert) 6, 76 Gribble, John Brown (JB) and Aboriginal people 8, 11–12, 14, 16–18, 21, 72, 94, 96, 107 appearance 2–3 on being British 9–10 character 2–4, 6, 9–10, 19, 82 children 4 conflict with white population 12–13, 72, 106–7, 141–2, 153 Congregational Union of Victoria 4 death 21 health 18–19, 20 libel suit against The West Australian 13–14 marriage 4 Methodist minister 4

215

ministry 5 as missionary 6, 11–14, 16–19, 92 on morality 76 in New South Wales 14 in Queensland 16–18 ordained 7 and religion 3–4, 7 salary 31 tours England 11 in Western Australia 11–14, 16, 72, 94, 96, 107, 140 writings 11, 12 Yarrabah Mission (Cape Grafton; Trinity Bay; Bellenden Ker) 16–21, 24, 25 Gribble, John Bulmer (Jack) 37, 120, 122, 124, 126, 129, 141, 155, 164, 189 Gribble, Mary Ann (née Bulmer) 3, 4, 7, 12, 15, 16, 18, 31, 32–3, 40, 59, 63, 82, 92, 169 Gribble, Muriel (Stella) 7, 33, 40 Gribble, Stuart 33, 40 Gulf of Carpentaria 61–2 Hackett, John Winthrop 13, 141 Hadley, Sidney 100 Hale, Harold 99–100 Halls Creek 98


216


Hamilton, John 55, 71 Hann, Frank 98 Hart, Steve 5 Hay, Frederick 114–15, 128–9, 130, 132–3, 135–7, 142, 144 Hay, William Drummond 165–6 Herbst, Christopher 35 Hickey, John 139, 143 Howard, Richard 72 Howarth, William 124 Hudleston, Archdeacon 107, 110, 111, 142, 144 Industrial and Reformatories Schools Act 1865 52, 55 James Noble Education Fund 186 Jerilderie 5 Johnson, Irene 187–8 Johnson, Lily 134, 136 Johnstone, Lizzie 54–5 Johnstone, Phillip 55 Jolly, Richard 131 Juanniga, Margaret and Eric 114 Kaberry, Phyllis 108 Katchewan, Jinny 29, 40, 76–7, 78 Katchewan, Pompo 16, 18, 31, 78 Kelly, Ned 5

Kelly gang 5 Kent, Edith see Gribble, Edith ‘Marna’ Kianna, Lovie 102 Kimberley 95–111 passim Lamondilla 132 Lesina, Joe 71 Life and Experiences of an Australian 61, 93, 170–1 Lightberi (alias Kitty) 112 Ling, Henry 50 Loorabane 134 Lumbia 132–3, 135, 136, 144, 146, 147 Macarthur, George Fairfowl 9, 35 McDonald, Jim (alias Mulga Jim) 131 Malcolm, Bishop Arthur 191–2 Maloga mission 6 Manning, Detective Sergeant 140 Marndoc Aboriginal Reserve 96, 112, 113, 114, 115, 127, 128, 139, 140, 142, 144, 149–50 see also Forrest River Mission Marriot, Fred 98 Maspero, Deaconess 35 massacre of Aboriginal people


INDEX

98–9, 113, 131–2, 133–53, 172 Matthews, Daniel 6, 185 Maywe, Albert see Barlow, John Mitchell (Albert Maywe) Menmuny 27, 28, 30, 42, 88 Meston, Archibald 37, 57, 59–60 Meston, Harold 58 Methodists 4 Miller, William 98 missions and Aboriginal people 7–8, 17–18, 21, 29–31, 33–4, 40, 42–3, 46, 49, 54–5, 56, 58, 100–5, 190–2 Queensland 17–18, 46, 55, 56, 58, 60–1, 70, 179 Western Australia 13, 94, 100–1, 105, 137–8 Mitchell, Ernest 117, 123, 126 Mitchell, Herbert 132, 135, 137, 138–9, 140, 141, 143 Mitchell River mission 61–2, 80 Monway (alias Billy Joe) 117–18 Moola Bulla cattle station 98, 114 morality 74–7, 79, 84–5, 86–7, 105, 121, 155, 163 Munjarra, Matthew 161, 164, 168

217

Murnane, Daniel 131, 132 Myalliman 112–13 Nairn, Walter Maxwell 147, 148, 152 Native Police Force 39, 61, 99 Needham (Chairman of ABN) 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129, 152, 154, 155, 159–60, 161–2, 166–7, 172, 184 Neville, Auber Octavius 105, 113, 115, 117, 118, 123, 126, 129, 135, 139, 143–4, 150, 158, 162, 167, 168 Noble, Angelina 89, 101, 102, 132, 141, 186 Noble, James 89, 101–2, 137, 164, 186 Nulla Nulla station 114–17, 127, 128, 129, 130 Obah, Andrew 35, 49 O’Leary, Bernard Patrick 112, 131 Orange League 4 Over the Years 178, 190 Overheu, Leopold Rupert 114–15, 127, 129–30, 131, 139, 148, 149 Palm Island 172–91 passim Parramatta 8 Parry, Bishop 12, 13


218


pearl shell industry 25, 173 Pearson, Mr 31, 76 Pickles, Ada 86, 87–8 Pitt, Myra 86 police abuse/killings of Aboriginal people 118, 133–53 passim, 161, 172 Problem of the Australian, The 171 Protestants 4 Rackarock 104 Reeves, William 35, 59, 82–3, 84 Regan, Denis 128, 130, 131, 132, 140, 146, 148, 151, 152 Reid, Horace 89 religion in Australia 4, 89, 181–3 Ricketson, J.H. 99 Riley, Charles 141, 142, 144, 152, 154 Roberts, Clara 113 Rocky Island 48, 49, 70, 79 Roman Catholicism 4, 150, 181–3 Roper River mission 89, 101 Roth, Walter Edmund 38, 44, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 60, 71–2, 79, 105 Royal Commission, Roth 71–2, 105 Royal Commission, Wood 145–53 Rutherglen 4

Setting Sun, The 137, 190 settlers and conflict with Aborigines 97–111 passim, 126, 127–53 passim sexual abuse of Aboriginals boys 165–6 women 26, 29, 30, 51, 52, 54–5, 56, 74–5, 104, 107–8, 116, 133, 137 Shevill, Ian 190 Smith, May 66, 188 Smith, Archbishop Saumerez 32, 36, 44 St Alban’s Church 1, 45, 50 St Jack, James Graham 127, 128, 130–1, 140, 146, 151, 152 Stockdale, Harry 99 Stolen Children 31, 53, 110 Stone-Wigg, Canon 16 Stuart, Sir Alexander 10 Sturges, George 189 Temora 15 Thomas, Mesac (Bishop of Goulburn) 7, 15, 16 Thomson, John 134, 135 timbergetters 39, 40, 48 Tommy 128, 131, 137, 139, 146, 148 Townsville 39 Townsville Daily Bulletin 75 Tozer, Horace 18 Trinity Bay see Yarrabah


INDEX

Trower, Gerard 94, 100, 107, 111, 122, 123–4, 141, 150 Turkey Creek 98, 131 Tumbarumba 16, 19, 21 Tyson, James 16, 19 Unbah, Ernest 168

117, 163, 164,

Victoria Pastoral Company 99, 100 Wajimol, Stuart 161, 164–5, 168, 186 Warangesda mission 6–7, 8, 11, 185 Webb, Reverend 154, 155, 156, 159 West Australian, The 13–14, 106, 129, 143, 192 Western Australian Record 100 Western Australia 11–14, 16, 71–2, 94–111 passim, 112–14 White, Gilbert 41, 46–7, 60, 61, 62 Willcock, J.C. 145 Windie Joe 127, 128, 131, 132 Wondunna, Fred 82, 83–4 Wood, George Tuthill 145–6, 147, 148, 151 Woopah, Billy 28 Wreide, Emile Julia see Gribble, Emile Julia

219

Wright, John Charles 91 Wunnamurra, James 117 Wyndham 94–5, 98, 105–6, 117, 129, 130, 135, 154 Yarrabah Mission (Cape Grafton; Trinity Bay; Bellenden Ker) 16–21, 24, 25, 27, 28–32, 33, 38, 40, 45, 47, 48–9, 70, 179, 191 and Aboriginal children 52–4, 66 administration 64, 87, 90 animals 48 band 35 boats 32, 35, 42, 64, 69 buildings 35, 45–6, 69, 72–3 Cadet Corps 43–4 Church Lads Brigade (CLB) 66 Court 43 cyclone 72 diet 66–7 discipline 41, 42–3, 56, 67, 68–9, 88, 89 finances 31–2, 40, 69–70, 72, 90 and Fraser Island people integration 66–7, 72, 83 food distribution centre 41 Government 43 Industrial School 52–3


220


and licensed fishing 51 life style 42, 45–6, 56, 69, 77–8, 90 and married couples 41, 64, 77–8, 79, 84–5 and morality 54, 74–7, 79, 83–5, 86, 88, 121 population 33, 38–9, 40, 55–6, 66 Rule Book 41, 43, 64, 77

spiritual life 35, 44–5, 65, 69, 88–9, 90–1 sport 42 St Alban’s Church 45, 46 staff 35, 41, 67, 68, 92 territorial threat 48 and work 41, 42 Yarrabah Times 69 Yarraburra 25 Yimbungi, Dick 28









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