Bowen, Queensland
Bowen Wharf
The Jetty
Unable to find the bakery Don Watson had mentioned when we called to Bowen in 2016, Renee and I had taken a stroll along the jetty. Signage at the entrance to the jetty informed tourists that Baz Luhrmann had shot the Darwin scenes for Australia there a decade earlier. Back in town for breakfast on July 10th 2018, we scouted possible locations and settled on Jochheim’s Pies in George Street. Not bad. My friend Gary would probably recommend it did he ever pass that way.
We walked the length of the jetty again. The fishers were still there from two years earlier
The Jetty
but the turtle had gone.
The jetty turtle
As had the original inhabitants. Korah Wills, butcher, hotelier and Bowen’s first mayor, had recommended that the wholesale killing of Aborigines be done without fanfare. It had to be done, he tells us because
“our own white people were crying out for room to stretch our legs … ”
Wills left a record of his various acts of depravity in ‘dispersing’ the indigenous inhabitants of Bowen. Lest we forget the manner in which we came to call Australia ‘home’.
Bowen had originally been called Port Denison – by Captain Sinclair in 1859. Its first European settlers – Thea Astley’s fictional Cornelius Laffey from It’s Raining in Mango among them – arrived aboard the Jeannie Dove in 1861, just as the citizens of the United States had gone to war with one another over the struggle as to which of the territories would become slave and which non-slave States. And when the American Civil War ended in 1865, Port Denison was renamed ‘Bowen’ in honour of Sir George Bowen, first Governor of the recently proclaimed Colony of Queensland.
As noted in the previous post, Nathaniel Buchanan headed a droving expedition from Port Denison to his and William Landsborough’s Bowen Downs Station lease on the Thomson River in October 1862.
In 1863 James Morril wandered into the Port Denison settlers’ midst shouting “Do not shoot. I am a B-b-british object!” Morril had been shipwrecked off the coast in 1846 and had been taken in by the local Aborigines.
Taking Morril’s faltering statement as his departure point, David Malouf explored questions raised by Morril’s experience to write his novel Remembering Babylon, the story of a castaway, Gemmy Fairley, who, living with the Aborigines but not initiated, remained a tribal fringe dweller and retained, in consequence, a dim sense of belonging elsewhere – a tenuous connection with Britain. It’s the pervasive theme in Patrick White’s fiction, of being suspended (uncomfortably) between Europe and the Great Southern Land, the problem of being an Australian. In addition, Malouf tips his hat to Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves and does so with a poetic facility mirroring D H Lawrence’s in Kangaroo – the ‘humanity at odds or at one with Nature?’ motif that White thought redeemed Lawrence’s otherwise dreadful novel.
Years later, white settlement having reached as far north as that tribe’s territory (the coastal bay the Europeans had named Port Denison) Gemmy was bailed up at a settler’s boundary – sitting on the fence – by the Beattie family’s kelpie. Pre-pubescent Lachlan Beattie took charge and Gemmy, this intermediate being, was cared for by the Europeans with whom he had first contact, the Beattie family, in that apprehensive pioneer hamlet. From their own point of view the Europeans were struggling settlers, poor folk merely “crying out for room to stretch our legs” as the mayor had characterised their predicament. As they saw it, the Aborigines were standing in the way of civilisation, primitives who must be shooed away, black creatures who hung about the waterhole to which the settlers’ livestock needed unfettered access. The new comers couldn’t see it from the point of view of the tribal inhabitants for whom this had been their territory since time out of mind. To the white newcomers those black inhabitants represented an existential threat and must be dispersed by whatever means, whatever it took.
The settlers were ready to believe (and soon enough persuaded by the usual rugged individualists) that Gemmy Fairley posed a threat, that he’d been sent to prepare the way for an avenging mob of blackfellas. It’s ever thus: the mob is putty in the hands of the single-minded types who give no quarter and often seek to rule. From their perspective the primitive is an ever-present danger – savage at best but liable to become a Svengali.
The arrival of the in-between creature highlights the precarious hold these European colonists have on civilisation: born white, had Gemmy remained so after living with blacks? His mother-tongue was English but he was no longer at home in it. What about the colonists’ children? And what of themselves? Could one cease to be white?
The settler community is split, the majority allowing fear to triumph over their oft-stated Christian values. Nothing new under the sun. Among the few who understand the true nature of the dilemma presented by the appearance of Gemmy in the settlement, the Reverend Frazer, botanist, notes in his diary that the standard response of most people is to assume the strange new land should conform to their understanding of how things are, to force the shoe to fit. And they’ll either succeed or die in the process of making it so. The Reverend believes that the newcomers ought adjust as best they can to the world in which they find themselves and in that way enhance it, that insofar as Gemmy is no longer European and yet not an indigene he points the way to the future.
Frazer prepares a report about Gemmy’s arrival in Bowen and after setting sail from the jetty delivers his findings to the Governor. Sir George fears that his visitor is a stalking horse for the legislative branch of government but, calmed by Frazer’s assurance to the contrary, loses interest – Governor Bowen’s sole objective being to succeed as midwife at the birth of the new colony, or, rather, being seen to have stamped the mark of Britain across both halves of the jurisdiction – north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and south – by giving places proper names. Being seen, that is, as bringing civilisation bequeathed to Britain by Graeco-Roman antiquity to the strange new land. And yet, like Gemmy, Babylon’s George Bowen is an outsider – a lowly Anglo-Irish cleric’s son.
George Bowen may have regarded Britain as the centre of civilisation but other European nations also lay claim, so much so that they went to war with one another ten years after the Australian slave-trade for which Bowen bore some responsibility finally ceased. Lachlan Beattie’s grandson died on the battlefield in the unspeakable carnage of that Great War. Fifty-odd years earlier, Gemmy Fairley had begged Lachlan not to shoot, that he was British. He’d been fortunate to have encountered Lachlan and Janet; they were from a civilised family – Port Denison settlers who cared.
Civilisation is a thin veneer. Too few of the town’s residents shared the Beattie outlook and Gemmy was soon the object of his fellow British subjects’ savagery – treated like an Aborigine, hunted by men of authority such as Korah Wills, men who blazed a trail for the ever-expanding British Empire. Like the indigenous tribe that had taken him in, the castaway vanished. Lachlan still cared; he wanted to know what had become of them and learned to communicate with a series of native language groups while acquiring bush skills on his way to manhood as part of an 1870s team surveying the terrain for the construction of a road – what is now the Bruce Highway – that would link the various coastal settlements.
He made enquiries at each camp but nothing much came of them until way up near Mount Elliot the smattering of Aboriginal words Gemmy had taught him a decade earlier enabled him to understand a young woman’s account of a gang of cattlemen accompanied by the Native Police having run down and killed eight or nine members of her tribal clan, the Aborigines with whom Gemmy had lived in the years between the shipwreck that rendered him a castaway and being taken in by the Beattie family. As was the custom, the survivors had parcelled up the bones of their fellow countrymen and placed those packages in tree forks. Lachlan persuaded the young woman to show him those trees. It was vague, not at all forensic, but enough for the young man, Janet Beattie’s cousin, to satisfy himself that Gemmy’s were among the bones in those haunted bundles.
And as was the colonial custom, the cold-blooded murder of Aborigines being (as Bowen’s Mayor, Korah Wills, put it) “something not to be mentioned” neither was that ‘dispersal’ reported in the newspapers. Wiping out the first inhabitants was just one of those things which
“had to be done for the protection of our own hearths and Wives and families … to keep possession of the soil that was laying to waste and no good being done with it … . [Now] we have got the Country and may we for ever hold it for we want it for the good of the whole civilized world … we have risked our lives … in arresting it from the savage.”
Janet understood that Lachlan knew he’d nothing but circumstantial evidence concerning Gemmy’s end, that he was merely seeking to staunch a wound. But he couldn’t; they couldn’t: Gemmy had come among them and they’d be forever conscious of the unresolved conflict he represented.
Fifty years on from surveying that road through the bush, with the armies of the civilised nations at each other’s throats on Flanders Field, the Somme, Amiens, et al, Lachlan and Janet were thrown together by the first casualty of war when the authorities accused them of colluding with the Germans. They hadn’t; but then, as now, Babylon triumphed: the powers-that-be, scared of their own shadow when seeking to identify the perceived enemy, find him under every rock.
Our Graeco-Roman heritage tells us that war is part and parcel of human nature; our Judeo-Christian moral compass points to Babylon as the enemy of truth. Remembering Babylon ends with Lachlan and Janet’s reunion in the garden of the house that blackbirding built. Lest we forget the utter bastardry that allows us to still call Australia home.
I left school fifty years ago secure in the knowledge that we’d advanced beyond pointless war, autocracy, and so on. Afterall, there’d be no point learning about all those disasters which threatened to undermine Western civilisation only to repeat the folly. An unflinching search for truth would see us through. Five minutes in the workplace remedied that unrealistic conclusion.
And what’s with the jetty being singled out as Bowen’s most significant landmark? Whilst the jetty has much to recommend it, frequent mention of the jetty serves only to meet an extraneous criterion about which we will put you in the picture should you enquire about the jetty.
