AR100. 19 June 2006.
Copyright © 2006 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
by
Kevin Sharpe
The inhabitants
of this country are the miserablest people in the world…, and setting
aside their human shape they differ but little from the brutes. They are tall,
straight-bodied and thin, with s
William
Dampier,
Sooner than we think the last dark dwellers of these regions will vanish from the country which was theirs and their peoples’ from time immemorial, but in which they are now aliens, unwanted by the strange [White people] who have taken possession of their ancestral waters and bring them but death and disease as payment.
Daisy
Bates,
Richard Leakey extols the hunter-gatherers’ way of life as the most efficient method of existence and land use. We might think, superficially, of Aborigines in their original state as poor, culturally and materially. We might imagine a gaunt people who spent all their time scavenging from a barren and forbidding land for the nourishment necessary to survive. In reality, the women gathered the required amount of vegetables, seeds, and insects and small animals in perhaps two hours per day, and the men mounted hunting expeditions perhaps two times per week. The rest of their time was free for cultural pursuits and childcare. The life of hunter-gatherers leaves them more spare time than the life of agriculturalists.
I spent a night on my return journey from Koonalda asleep outside a gas station on the edge of the Nullarbor. In the morning, a group of Aborigines sat beneath the trees on the other side of the road. They sold boomerangs to tourists and lived off scraps from White civilization.
I wondered whether these Aborigines were the Mirning tribe who originally lived on the Nullarbor. But there are no more Mirning. The Mirning belong to the large number of distinct tribes of Australian Aborigines who have died out or were killed off.
The Mirning (or Meening)
who lived near
The story of the Mirning must include
the observations of Daisy Bates. It must also include a mention of her compassion
and dreams. Bates was an Edwardian woman who immigrated to
Bates camped within the border of the Nullarbor so she could intercept the Aborigines who emerged from further inland, and try to persuade them to keep their own style of life. This was their only chance, she believed. If they insisted on going to White outposts, following their curiosity and dreams, she could help them by introducing them to European food, principally warm tea and damper, and finding them clothing. ‘Guileless they stood to be buttoned into the skirt and trousers of civilization,’ she wrote. From her own resources she ministered to their basic needs: she fed them, clothed them, dressed their wounds, cared for their babies, and held the hands of their dying. She wanted to comfort the race she believed was disappearing. Extreme Aboriginal ways, like blood drinking and infanticide, she accepted and tried to change without condescension or criticism. She thought, she said, as an Aborigine.
No branch of religion could claim her adherence, but she displayed deep faith: ‘The secret of my lightness of heart is that every night I lie down and commit my soul to God.’[3]
Critics reprimand her for helping to forge the myth of ‘the dying Aboriginal race that needs the compassion of do-gooders.’ True, such a belief can obscure the problem and can hinder a just solution because it fails to confront head-on the causes of social injustice. We misjudge Bates, though, if we blame the creation of the myth on her. I say this for three reasons. Her times produced her; she probably couldn’t see the underlying issues as clearly as we think we can now. Moreover, the political and ideological causes did concern her – only she felt powerless to change them. Third, she did do the Aborigines good because they may have received no relief had she worked only at a political level and failed to convince the holders of power.
Aborigines also criticized her, especially those familiar with White settlements. ‘Too much plurry Jesus,’ one said; ‘not enough tucker.’[4]
Whites then and now find it easier to shun Bates’ example and to approach Aborigines on a level other than personal – as statistics or as objects of scientific study. The easiest way both to uphold a wish that they survive and yet to reject their culture, Terry Widders suggests, is to study them as objects.
Anthropologists visited Bates’ camp
in
A picture of Mirning life emerges from
Bates’s writings and this may in turn help us picture the life of the
people who frequented
The Nullarbor proper creates one of
the largest and most inhospitable areas that any Australian tribe occupied, the
largest piece of
The Mirning menu listed
wallaby, accompanied with snakes, iguana, wild dog, plus berries, and baked and
pounded
Water concerned the Mirning
and
its availability largely dictated their movements. Rock holes called ‘gnamma’
holes trapped rainwater and provided one source. Limestone boulders sometimes
loosely filled these holes; the fill retarded evaporation, prevented ani
The Mirning’s tools
included hand-held knives, mounted adze flakes, spears, throwers, and
boomerangs. Wilsons Bluff provided the flint. No record exists of their mining
flint in
Medicine men headed the tribe: they
decided disputes, set combat for
The Mirning treasured their children and cared for them well. They practiced infanticide to limit their population.
They feared the dead. They never buried or disposed of corpses but left those who were dying, returning when the corpse had decomposed unrecognizably. On death, all people spiritually entered a cave, passing through it, out to sea, and into the after-life where they hunted in similar grounds to those of their present life. Caves formed sacred passageways for spirits.
Their art – or at least the little that we know about it – consisted of a few simple design elements now lost to history. We don’t know how these relate to the Koonalda markings.
Possibly because of fire, the Nullarbor Plain proper may extend further now than in the past. Natural lightning may have set the plain alight; though thunderstorms would have soon drenched any fire their lightning strikes ignited. Perhaps, some have thought, the Aborigines set the plain ablaze; though, others have argued, the Aborigines probably visited the plain proper only during wet seasons. The Mirning carried fire with them (burning dry and resinous woods) when they moved. They lit fires for a number of reasons: to cook, torch a camp on someone’s death, create smoke signals, combat evil powers, hunt, and help foods grow. Fires in the coastal bush or mallee happen only in very hot weather and then burn only a few acres. Whatever their origin, fires over a long time altered the plain’s vegetation and therefore fauna. Excavations in the drier segments of the Roe Plain portion of the Nullarbor Region document this for at least the last 6,000 years.
Firings of the plain by Europeans to
produce more land for sheep devastated it worse than pre-European fires. They
wiped out several species of marsupials. The more times a piece of land burns,
the more thorough and destructive the incineration. Plants and ani
The change in flora and fauna didn’t
factor in the obliteration of the Mirning tribe of about
The local Aboriginal population usually extended friendship to the early White explorers of the Nullarbor. Readily and eagerly, they pointed out water sources. Frequently they guided the Whites long distances in intense heat and thick scrub. ‘We were indebted solely to the good nature and kindness of these children of the wilds,’ writes Edward John Eyre. ‘Unsolicited they had offered us their aid, without which we could never have accomplished our purpose.’[8]
The explorer Edgar Warburton spied smoke rising from the scrub and sent one of his companions, O’Shanahan, ‘to catch a [B]lack.’[9] He soon accomplished this. The Aborigine, though unwilling to stay, guided them to water the following day. The Europeans resorted to ‘a little coercion’ because they felt he misdirected them through thick scrub. They felt even more infuriated when he left wearing two coats…he was naked and shivering from the cold. ‘The travelers appeared to have vented their rage in denunciation of the whole race of [B]lacks in general and of their guide in particular,’ the chronicler adds, ‘for whose behoof the stockwhip was kept in constant readiness.’
Perhaps the Mirning’s belief in the existence of an evil spirit called Burga started with their experiences of European explorers. Burga could harm unseen. He was white, always lurked around intending to hurt, and accosted people anywhere after sunset.
White settlers arrived next to
establish farms. Aborigines irritated them – by slaughtering sheep, for one
thing. The first White settlers of Eucla were the Muir brothers at Moorpina
Station. Their only way to communicate with the outside world for their first
two years was via the nearest outpost, Yalata, 480 miles away. An Aborigine on
foot took three weeks to carry letters there and back. Anthony Bolam, a
long-time resident of Ooldea and its Station Master from
Bolam saw many Aborigines who had walked from the Macdonnell, Musgrave, and Everard ranges in the north, up to 450 miles away. They lived during their long trek by obtaining water from their wells and from roots of trees, and they arrived, in Bolam’s words, ‘wonderfully bright and clean.’ They then donned ‘filthy cast-off’ clothes, became ‘dirty,’ and succumbed to colds and runny noses.[11] Contact with Whites brought diseases: alcoholism, venereal disease, and measles proved deadly. So did missionary benevolence: Aborigines had to wear clothes, they got wet when it rained and, too frightened to remove their soaked apparel, they become chilled and died of pneumonia.
Those who subsisted beside the railway quickly learned that the ‘big train’ trailed chocolates and coins.[12] The journalist Ernestine Hill saw travelers amuse themselves by leaning out the windows of their carriages to watch ‘a cannibal scramble for a pink-topped’ cookie.[13] The ‘denizens of the central desert’ became parasites, writes W. Charnley, ‘the poorest’ of all the Aborigines who ever lived.[14]
Some Whites shot Blacks for target practice.
Ooldea Soak was one of the largest and most important watering places on the edge of the Nullarbor. Pre-European Aboriginal tribes walked long distances to attend initiation ceremonies there and, in severe drought, to bargain for water.
White travelers left a track back to their starting point at Ooldea, along which curious young Aborigines trekked. Thus began the exodus of Aborigines from their own groups and totem waters, to which they never returned. White civilization magnetically drew them and kept them. Each permanent source of water had its group of Aborigines. They cared for it and adopted as their relatives the creatures that lived by it. As the groups went to Ooldea and its Whites, the old waters around the edge of the Nullarbor fell bereft of their group owners. They were orphaned. The Ooldea water adopted these now-derelict tribes and became for them Weedula Gabbi (orphaned water).
The engineers who constructed the railway saw the water of Ooldea Soak as a gift; it provided the only adequate supply for thousands of miles. They took charge of it, ran pipes to the new siding nearby, and soon drew off tens of thousands of liters each day to satiate the demands of the steam trains. The Aboriginal population had to obtain their water from taps in the station.
Five years after the railway opened
to passengers in
Many generations of Aboriginal people
had tasted the sweet and plentiful water of Ooldea Soak, maintained by a
natural balance. Upsetting this struck a double blow for them: not only did
they lose an important source of water, but a ritual center too. The spiritual
conception of an Aborigine occurs at a water hole. From there also come their
blood relatives, their other selves, and their totem ani
Curious young Mirning tribespeople
left their traditional areas and gave up their skills and laws in favor of the
European way. They found it hard adapting to it. The old customs bonded the
people together, gave them ancestral beliefs, the feeling of belonging, and the
self-confidence necessary to learn a new life. The new way lured, then trapped
and devoured. White
[They] had no meat. They existed on Government rations of tea, flour, and sugar. When these ran out they drank water until the next supply arrived.
They are in their Wommoos [brush shelters],
these old people waiting unconsciously though it be, for the mysterious end
they know as ‘nalba’ (death). Their contact with the [W]hites has destroyed
their beliefs and now they are undecided as to whether they are going up into
the sky or under the ground – or just becoming Kambu (skeletons) like the ani
Six more years completed the
genocide. Jinjabula, the last full-blooded Yircla Mirning person, died in
Some dreams – some ambitions of White culture – are evil, despite the ambiguity of circumstances. S. A. White calls the local people of Ooldea, ‘wonderful.’[16] He writes as they died off. Another person writes of their soon being ‘as rare as the Dodo.’[17] ‘Aborigines, when properly handled, can be of great help,’ another writes of those Aborigines who were station hands at Mundrabilla Station on the Nullarbor. ‘They are naturally slow, but patient; and the lowness of their wage-rate makes them a great saving for certain work.’[18] This dominant attitude decided their fate.
The Mirning declined so quickly, in changing times. Could life not still live, even life resplendent through millennia of trials? Daisy Bates’ reflection on the Nullarbor also applies to its people:
Here there is nothing young that was not long since old. Here there is no germination potency of nature....The solemn all-embracing silence...is so impressive that one feels as if the moment of breaking will usher in some catastrophe. Even the echoes seem to be dead.[19]