NAIDOC WEEK – 2021 (Pentecost 7)
Mark 6:14-29
Marian Free
In the name of God who created humankind in God’s own image and who cherishes each one of us as children of God. Amen.
The history of St Augustine’s church Restless Hearts which is in the process of being published, begins: “Sometimes it is so hard to believe how close we are, even today, to penal stations and missionary priests, Aboriginal skirmishes and interminable journeys on horseback through unchartered eucalypt forest.” It was as recently as 1823 that Thomas Pamphlett, along with three other ticket-of-leave men set out to cut cedar in Illawarra. They were caught in a storm which blew them north where they were wrecked on Moreton Island. As the book continues: “After various hardships, mitigated by help from Aboriginals, the emancipists crossed to the mainland, and, believing themselves to be south of Sydney they sought a northward route homewards. Aboriginals again helped them with food and directions, and they soon chanced upon a large river (the Brisbane). Too wide to cross, they followed its banks upwards almost to the present site of Goodna, and finding a canoe, they crossed the stream and returned along the opposite bank, again living with Aboriginals for some weeks”.
Soon after, a settlement began at Eagle Farm and in 1829 and a Patrick Logan established a farm with maize, potatoes and some cattle (on what is now the Royal Queensland Golf Club). Eagle Farm was also the site of a Women’s Prison which, as it was built on swamp land and therefore and ideal breeding spot for malaria bearing mosquitoes’. Despite this the site remained until the penal colony was closed in 1842.
Charles Fraser, the Colonial Botanist from 1821 to 1831, visited the Moreton Bay settlement in 1828. He ‘found a native cemetery represented by hollow logs filled with the bones of blacks (sic) of all sizes at the mouth of Breakfast Creek.’ Initially the new settlers and the indigenous Australians, lived together – if somewhat uncomfortably. A penal surgeon noted in 1836 that: “in the first years of the penal settlement there was a substantial population of local Aborigines in the area, their numbers depending on the season.” He also wrote of the long road between Brisbane and Eagle Farm passing through ‘the fishing ground of a tribe of aboriginal natives; at seasons of the year they are very dangerous and troublesome.’
It was when the Women’s Prison closed and the land was opened up to white settlers who used it for mixed farming – citrus fruit, dairying, cattle-grazing and small crops – that it became harder for the original inhabitants to live side-by-side with the newcomers. Tensions arose over the use of land. The destruction of crops was followed by attacks on the local indigenous by the colonists. Yet, as late as 1848, a Charles Phillips arrived in Hamilton as a small boy. He recalls that he was friendly with the Aborigines, ‘especially the Bribie Island tribe which frequented the Hamilton and Eagle Farm areas and had their camps there.’
Despite Phillip’s positive memories, tensions continued as Hendricksen notes: “between 1856 and 1867, there was continual harassment and counter-harassment, raids and robberies by Aboriginal groups, and punitive attacks by settlers including the burning of camping grounds. Such was the sense of injustice felt by the original inhabitants that Dalinkua – an Aboriginal leader and delegate – published his ‘indictments’, in the Moreton Bay Courier in 1858/9. He wrote:
“That indictment, which we are forced to bring against our white brothers … we charge them with having disregarded the command of the Great Father, and being unfaithful to the trust reposed in them; insomuch as they leave us and our people, whom they find stripped of land where our fathers hunted on, and driven off naked and wounded, diseased and destitute, to pine away and perish; while their government, like the priest in the parable, passes us by on one side, and their church, Levite-like, passes us on the other, neither of them taking any notice of our utter helplessness! Leaving us, perhaps, until some good Samaritan, of another creed and another nation, pass this way, and supply us with what is needful, both for this life and that which is to come …. But, surely, our white brothers, in their wisdom, could devise means whereby our wants could be met …. …. Christians, you are here in this land by the inscrutable Providence of God! Have you brought your religion with you? Is not its precept ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself?’ If so, ‘Love worketh no ill to his neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.’ Governed by this law you can no longer disregard the well-being of your fellow creatures. Your brotherhood must develop itself more, if ye belong to Him who does not wish that any of His ‘little ones’ perish.’”
Evidently, the church was present in the colony almost from its inception. As early as 1838 Anglican services were held in the area by The Rev’d Handt (a Lutheran!) and in May 1896 the first St Augustine’s Church in Hamilton was dedicated – only 73 years after Pamphlett found himself here and only 38 years after Dalinkua published his indictments. Though to us, it might feel like the distance past, in historical terms, colonisation of this area is recent history. The change in the landscape, its population and its use has been extraordinary in that time. Our indigenous brothers and sisters carry inter-generational trauma of all that has happened in the past two hundred years of white settlement of Moreton Bay – dispossession, massacres, stolen wages and decimation as a result of smallpox and other diseases introduced by white settlers; not to mention alcoholism, child removal.
As the note in the Pew Bulletin says, NAIDOC week invites us to embrace First Nations’ cultural knowledge and understanding of Country as part of Australia’s national heritage and equally respect the culture and values of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders as they do the cultures and values of all Australians. We can begin by trying to learn the rich history of the first peoples of the land on which we stand and endeavouring to reconnect with our brothers and sisters whose forbears walked this country for countless generations before us. May the indictments of Dalinkua not be applied to us.
Swallowsrest 