In Australian history, which now portrays the
First Australians as victims, there is a group of indigenous people who are as
fundamentally important to national heritage as the well-recognised white
explorers. Yet, they play only a limited part in the white narrative of the
country and none in the indigenous history since 1788. They are largely
unrecognised in written and spoken history.
These are the aboriginal
guides who were alongside some of the great names of exploration – Thomas
Mitchell, Charles Sturt, Ludwig Leichhardt, Edward Eyre, Edmund Kennedy, John
and Alexander Forrest - and who were brave and intrepid explorers in their own
right. For these guides, the journey from their tribal region into unknown
territory was as problematic and personally threatening as it was for the white
explorers. They brought their language, bush-craft skills and social knowledge,
but the further they travelled from their home area, the greater their linguistic
skills diminished and the higher were their chances of being perceived as an
equal threat as the white explorer they guided. The guides were equally a target
for spears as the pale strangers.
Is it blindness or
political correctness that few historians, other than Henry Reynolds, have
recognised the guides for their essential role as “ambassadors” to other
indigenous people and as fellow explorers? Or is there embarrassment that
talented indigenous people were an essential part of the development of
nineteenth century Australia into a major primary exporting nation? 225 years
after Captain Phillip established the colony at Sydney Cove it is time the
story of the aboriginal explorers was told. Their names should become as well
known as the British and European explorers who have dominated the national
narrative since the mid-late Victorian era.
Yuranigh
Two and a half kilometres east of Molong on
the Mitchell Highway in central NSW is a left turn to Yuranigh Road. Drive down
it for 750 metres and you’ll notice a parking point on the left and a sign to
Yuranigh’s grave. Open the gate and drive along to the parking area and you
will soon see an extraordinary symbol of recognition and respect for a little-known
indigenous explorer and guide, which was set up over 150 years ago. The grave,
surrounded by a low wooden fence in an open field, comprises a gravestone with
extensive and effusive text at head of a stone grave. Yuranigh was the lead guide
to the explorer Thomas Mitchell’s fourth and longest expedition in 1845/6. The
grave is testament to a rare, highly respectful relationship between a white
man and an indigenous Australian in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet it is
little known.
The gravestone, organised
by Mitchell soon after Yuranigh death, reads:
TO
NATIVE COURAGE
HONESTY AND
FIDELITY
YURANIGH
WHO ACCOMPANIED
THE
EXPEDITION OF
DISCOVERY
INTO TROPICAL
AUSTRALIA
1846
LIES BURIED HERE
ACCORDING TO THE
RITES
OF HIS
COUNTRYMEN
AND THIS SPOT
WAS
DEDICATED AND
ENCLOSED
BY THE
GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AUTHORITY
IN 1852
In the same field is the
last remnant of sacred tree that the Wiradjuri people had placed to recognise
Yuranigh who had been highly respected and possibly a leader of his tribe in
the Orange and Molong area.
Yuranigh joined Mitchell’s expedition at Boree,
27km west of Orange in the Central West in December 1845. He worked as a guide
and negotiator and gained the notoriously fractious explorer’s friendship and
deep respect. He safely guided the 12-month-long expedition, which travelled north
into what is now central Queensland, through the territories of other tribes
under very hot drought conditions. Yuranigh was the expedition’s diplomat and
liaised with local aboriginals, secured guides, and tracked wandering stock and
lost members of the party.
Mitchell made numerous references to Yuranigh in
his records. The first came three weeks after the start of the journey when he
tracked and brought back to camp three cattle that had strayed. The Australian
Dictionary of Biography (ADB) notes that “he was frequently and gratefully
referred to for finding water, scanning the country from lofty trees, pacifying
the Aborigines who shadowed the expedition, and generally imparting bush lore.”
At the end of the expedition in late 1846, Mitchell
wrote of his “guide, companion, counsellor and friend” that “his intelligence
and his judgment rendered him so necessary to me that he was ever at my elbow …
Confidence in him was never misplaced. He well knew the character of all the
white men in the party. Nothing escaped his penetrating eye and quick ear.
Yuranigh was particularly clean in his person, frequently washing, and his
glossy shining black hair, always well-combed, gave him an uncommonly clean and
decent appearance.”
Yuranigh was a small slender man who had adopted
some European ways and wore European style clothing by the time he was
recruited by Mitchell. He and another Boree-enlisted guide, Dicky, returned
with Mitchell to Sydney as the expedition completed its travels. They were rewarded with small gratuities but Yuranigh tired of Sydney and went to
work as a stockman in northern NSW. He found his way back to the Molong area
and died in autumn 1850, probably in April.
After his death, Yuranigh’s people marked his grave
with traditional carved trees. Sir Thomas Mitchell obtained government consent
to fence the site and paid for a European-style headstone with its effusive
recognition of the local guide’s “Native Courage” and “Honesty and Fidelity”. In 1900 the government renovated the headstone
which was re-erected on a base of Molong marble.
It is notable that Yuranigh
gained Mitchell’s confidence and deep respect in such a public manner, although
the Surveyor-General mostly had good relationships with aboriginal guides in
his three previous expeditions, but the one with Yuranigh appears to have been
of high mutual respect. In the first
expedition Jerram quickly deserted, and was replaced by Mr Brown. In the 1836
expedition, “The Bathurst Aborigine” guide known as John Piper was rewarded
with clothing including Mitchell’s red coat and a cocked hat and feather that
originated with Governor Darling. As well as old guns and blankets, John Piper
was given a breastplate with the “Conqueror of the Interior” inscription which
he had chosen. Reynolds comments that while his reward was little, “the
preferred inscription gave clear recognition of the crucial role played by
Aboriginal advisers and Aboriginal expertise in the exploration and settlement
of Australia.”
Others who served Mitchell in
1836 included Tommy Came-First and Tommy Came-Last, who were also from the Central
West. Mitchell met Tommy Came-Last when surveying the new gold fields around
Ophir in 1851, describing him as “now grown a powerful man in prime of manhood, but from
Mr. Davidson I learnt that he was still remarkable for docility and good
conduct.”
Aboriginal ambassadors
Yuranigh is the most evidently recognised of
those indigenous guides, whom Reynolds titles as “aboriginal
ambassador”. Without these guides, it is unlikely that the exploration of
Australia would have progressed so swiftly. They were partners in it but their
skill, knowledge and diplomacy are under-recognised.
Although none mounted an
expedition, as they had neither access to funds or organisational power, some
were more than just guides. In some cases, they were as much of the exploration
team as subordinate white men. Often, they placed themselves in danger because
they were perceived as threatening strangers in the same manner as the white men. For indigenous
people, the threat to their women, land and freedom had traditionally come from
other tribes. So a John Piper or Yuranigh was a much a stranger as the
pale skinned explorers. Their skills included identifying existing tracks for
the explorers to follow, finding sources of water, using local knowledge and
gathering intelligence about the tribes in the direction of travel, and applying bush craft to aid white men unused to the Australian climate
and landscape. Yuranigh was able to negotiate with tribesmen even though he did
not speak their language and, after one slow and delicate negotiation, induced
a young man whose language he did not understand to guide Mitchell’s party to a
river. Many of the tracks identified by the indigenous advisers soon became
important paths for trade and communication and later developed into roads.
In the margins
The Australian Dictionary of Biography refers to twelve in its “indigenous guide” category.
Some like Yuranigh, Jackey Jackey and Wylie are linked to the famous explorers
like Mitchell, Edmund Kennedy and Edward Eyre. Jackey Jackey and Wylie’s
stories have been told to generations of Australians as examples of loyal
aboriginals. Less well known, although recorded in the ADB are Bungaree,
Colebe, Cubadgee, Mokare, Tommy Windich and Erlikilyika. Many others are only
mentioned in the margins of explorers’ reports. Some are just recorded as “four
aboriginals”.
They range from Governor
Philip’s guide Colebe, Bolandree and Colbee who aided Watkin Tench’s early
explorations from the Port Jackson colony to the Nepean and Hawkesbury river
system, to Bongaree who accompanied Matthew Flinders on his exploration to
Moreton Bay and the later 1802 circumnavigation. Also recorded in some detail are
Charley Fisher and Harry Brown who were guides to Ludwig Leichhardt’s second,
successful expedition from Brisbane to Port Essington in 1844.
The records of Charles
Sturt’s extensive exploration only record the names of Nadbuck and Jacky
(Camboli) in his final 1844-45 search for the fabled inland sea, but not in two
earlier expeditions of river systems in NSW and Victoria.
By mid-century, the use of familiar white
nicknames was common. For the next sixty years of exploration, reports are littered
with Bob, Billy, Charlie or Charley, Daniel, Dick, Dicky, Harry, Jimmy, Joey,
John, Tommy and even a rather formal Warwick (Parunda) in Spencer and Gillen’s
1902 cross-continental anthropological expedition.
In the first 40 years of
the NSW colony, the guides are given anglicised versions of their tribal name except
for Moowattin who was also known as Daniel. The reports of many early explorers
from 1789 to 1830, however, often don’t mention the indigenous guides. They
were non-people, but appear to have been widely employed.
Landmarks
Some guides are still recognised by landmarks,
such the Tarra River is Gippsland, named after the Polish explorer Strzelecki’s
guide Charlie Tarra who led the expedition across the Australian Alps, where Mt
Kosciusko was named in 1840, to Western Port and Melbourne. The Gippsland
historian P.D. Gardner comments that it was the “hunting and bushcraft of
Charlie Tarra that enabled them to reach Western Port alive”. Yuranigh is
recorded by a creek near Molong, a lagoon and a county in Queensland, while
Charley Fisher, a guide to Ludwig Leichhardt, is commemorated by Charley’s
Creek near Chinchilla, Queensland and north of the Condamine River.
Historiography
The histories on which generations of
Australians were raised on largely ignored the role of aboriginal guides and
ambassadors. Henry Reynolds in his 2000 book Black Pioneers attributed this blindness to the celebration of the
explorers as necessary heroes for the creation of national image. “The
explorers were seized on by writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries to provide colour and romance to what was thought to be a ‘rather
tame and uneventful story’ singularly ‘devoid of stirring incident’. Before the
exploits of the Anzacs were brought to the nation after Gallipoli, these white
and mainly British explorers “provided the heroism supplied in other nations by
military prowess and success in battle.” The explorers “were paraded through
the minds of several generations of Australian children to promote an ‘honest
and manly’ pride in the nation.” And so the role of the aboriginal explorers
was erased.
There were the
mid-Victorian heroic tales of Wylie, guide to Edward Eyre’s crossing of the
Great Australian Bight, and Jacky Jacky (also referred to as Jackey Jackey in
ADB), the guide to the stricken Edmund Kennedy in Cape York who carried on
after the white explorer was speared and died. These were examples of the
“faithful native” rather than partners in the exploration of this country.
Examples of explorer-centric imperialist history can be found in Sir Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia (1947) and Alan Shaw's The Story of Australia (1955). These books were the staple of history education in Australia at secondary school and undergraduate education for a generation. In Scott's sole chapter on exploration, which starts with Matthew Flinders at the
beginning of the 19th century and ends with the Forrest’s
expeditions in the 1870s, not one indigenous guide is mentioned by name. Even
the celebrated Wylie is referred as “one black” who stayed with Eyre for the
bleak two-month journey across the Nullarbor. The expeditions of Leichhardt and
Kennedy in the late 1840s have no reference to the guides and Kennedy’s death
in 1848 does not mention Jacky Jacky’s heroic support for him.
Cultural
change
Not surprisingly with the sudden cultural
impact of the white British culture, some guides weren’t always faithful and
loyal. Philip Clarke writes that the mass arrival of European settlers after
the initial 50 years of the colony “came in such overwhelming numbers that they
dominated the Indigenous people”. This massive cultural change was hard for
some to comprehend, compared with their more open and sharing society. In
Gippsland, Jemmy Gibber, chief of the Maneroo tribe, acted as guide to Angus
McMillan but left him after six days because he was frightened of “Warrigals,
or wild blacks” in an area beyond the Maneroo region.
In Leichhardt’s expedition
of 1844, Charley Fisher and Harry Brown performed well as guides but had
failings as diplomats, mainly because Charley liked “native gins” (indigenous women) too much
which brought the expedition into conflict with tribes in the areas that they
passed through. One of Charley and Harry’ forays in Cape York led to an attack
by the Kokopera people in which
one explorer was killed and two wounded by spears. Leichhardt, who had been
punched by Charley after reprimanding him in mid-expedition, jailed the
guide in Port Essington for a night for stealing a sword and selling it to a
carpenter.
Although Wylie travelled
across the Great Australian Bight with Eyre in their terrible journey, there were other black
guides who were less loyal to the explorer and with good reason. Eyre
effectively kidnapped two eight-year-old boys named Cootachah and Joshuing from
the Murray River area while driving stock to the new colony of Port Phillip. He
took them on to Hobart as “crowd pleasing trophies” and they stayed with him
for his next journey from NSW to South Australia. As they neared the Murray River, the boys’ families met Eyre but he would not return them. Joshuing deserted soon
after but Cootachah stayed and was joined by another indigenous boy,
Neramberein, whom Eyre had “got”. Their revenge on Eyre for this enslavement
came three years later as the explorer prepared to go westward into the desert wilderness across the Bight. Cootachah and Neramberein shot Eyre’s companion
Baxter and ran off, as they feared for their lives. The treatment of these boys
and young men went unquestioned and was only recently noted by Reynolds.
Tommy
Windich
In Western Australia, Tommy Windich was a
guide to the Forrest brothers’ exploration and accompanied them on four
expeditions from 1869 to 1874. The Forrests were expert surveyors using
celestial navigation to plot their paths and so the aboriginal guides’ role was
to search for water and horse feed. Windich
was adept at finding native wells and waterholes, sometimes saving the
expedition. John Forrest commented that without a waterhole found by him, “our
position would be critical”. Windich gained small rewards in his lifetime and
the gratitude of the Forrests. When he died of pneumonia in 1876 at the age of 36, they erected
a tombstone over his grave inscribed with “He was an aboriginal native of
Western Australia, of great intelligence and fidelity, who accompanied them on
exploring expeditions into the interior of Australia, two of which were from
Perth to Adelaide. Be Ye Also Ready”.
Rewards and recognition
By his marble headstone and its inscription by
Mitchell, Yuranigh may be the most recognised of the aboriginal guides,
although in his lifetime he was only given a small payment at the end of the
expedition before returning to farm work. Wylie was rewarded with a pension and
remained in Albany among his people. Others went back to their tribal areas
but many faded away. Jacky Jacky, although recognised by Governor
Fitzroy with a commemorative breast plate, returned to the Muswellbrook area in
the NSW Hunter Valley. It is recorded that he fell into a fire while drunk and
died of his burns. Geoffrey Blainey bemoaned their lack of reward and recognition: "When these guides died - mostly at an early age - a few were honoured with an obituary notice in a colonial newspaper and even an iron railing around their grave."
As Australia celebrates its
national day on January 26, it is time to recognise and commemorate those
indigenous explorers – guides and trackers – who helped develop understanding
of the landscape and ecology, as well as aiding the economic exploitation that followed. The role of the "aboriginal ambassadors" is a story that deserves to be better known and their contribution recognised in Australia and in the histories of indigenous people, world-wide.
