A White Hot Flame : Mary Montgomerie Bennett, Author, Educator, Activist for Indigenous Justice 9781925523195, 9781925523188

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‘A white hot flame indeed – here is an important contribution to our national story.’

KIM SCOTT

A White Hot Flame

MARY MONTGOMERIE BENNETT

AUTHOR, EDUCATOR, ACTIVIST FOR INDIGENOUS JUSTICE

SUE TAFFE

A White Hot Flame

Mary Bennett was like a white hot flame, and I have never met or shall meet anyone with such singleness of mind – utter unselfishness. Doris Beckh, 26 May 1962 The result to the desert Aborigines of being under this [Western Australian] law and not knowing English is that they lose their Human Rights: for State Departments deal with the native community IN THE MASS, but human beings suffer INDIVIDUALLY. They suffer the oppression and frustration of discriminatory laws which infringe more than one Human Right, and they suffer their personal tragedies. Mary Bennett, 27 March 1954

A White Hot Flame Mar y Montgomer ie Bennett – Auth or, Educator, Act ivist for Indigenou s Ju st ice

S UE TAFFE

COPYRIGHT AND IMPRINT INFORMATION A White Hot Flame: Mary Montgomerie Bennett – Author, Educator, Activist for Indigenous Justice © Copyright 2018 Sue Taffe All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher. Monash University Publishing Matheson Library and Information Services Building 40 Exhibition Walk Monash University Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia www.publishing.monash.edu Monash University Publishing brings to the world publications which advance the best traditions of humane and enlightened thought. Monash University Publishing titles pass through a rigorous process of independent peer review. www.publishing.monash.edu/books/whf-9781925523188.html ISBN: 978-1-925523-18-8 (pb) ISBN: 978-1-925523-19-5 (pdf ) ISBN: 978-1-925523-20-1 (epub) Series: Australian History Series Editor: Sean Scalmer Design: Les Thomas Cover images: Photograph of Mary Bennett courtesy of Elizabeth Roberts, Mary Bennett’s niece. Letter written by Mary Bennett to Dr Barry Christophers, 1960, courtesy of Dr Barry Christophers.

. Assisted by a grant from the Western Australian History Foundation WESTERN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY FOUNDATION

C ON T EN T S Title page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii Copyright and imprint information. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv List of maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Parents and C hildhood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1 Parents: A pioneer Scots pastoralist and a London artist . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Chapter 2 Mimi’s childhood: ‘Queensland, Our Home’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Author to Activist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Chapter 3 Mimi Christison: Art student and young English lady. . . . . . . . . . . 61 Chapter 4 Christison of Lammermoor: Romance burdened by reality. . . . . . . . . . 86 Chapter 5 M. M. Bennett: Emerging activist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 The E astern G oldfields of Western Austr alia . . . . . . . . . 167 Chapter 6 Learning about Western Australia: ‘My eyes open and my mouth shut’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Chapter 7 Mrs Bennett, Teacher: Mount Margaret Mission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Chapter 8 Commissioner Moseley and Chief Protector Neville. . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Chapter 9 Disillusionment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 I mage block

Belonging, I dentity, C ommitment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Chapter 10 Dora and Gladys: Wartime London and a return to Australia. . . . . 267 Chapter 11 Families: Peter Pontara and Human Rights for Aborigines. . . . . . . . . 299 Chapter 12 The Wongatha people of Kalgoorlie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 Chapter 13 Final days . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409 Further reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 Back cover. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cov2

L I S T OF M A P S Map 1: Southern New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. . . . . xviii Map 2: Queensland and northern New South Wales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Map 3: England and southern Scotland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Map 4: Central and South Australia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Map 5: South-west and west coast of Western Australia . . . . . . . . . 168 Map 6: Eastern goldfields of Western Australia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

I N T ROD UC T ION On 26 January 1938 Aboriginal people in Sydney marked the sesqui­ centenary of the arrival of Captain Arthur Phillip and the first fleet

with a ‘Day of Mourning’. Mary Montgomerie Bennett, the English-

born daughter of a successful Queensland cattle and horse breeder, was there also, having been told of the Aboriginal plans and travelled across the deserts from Kalgoorlie in Western Australia on the Indian–

Pacific train. Bennett supported the Aboriginal cry for recognition

of this day as marking the invasion of their lands, in the face of the celebration of white settlement replete with yachts flying Australian flags on Sydney Harbour. Eighty years later Australian society is

now beginning to realise the insensitivity of a national day being celebrated on the day marking such loss for Indigenous Australians.

Mary Bennett is now an almost forgotten figure in Australian his­

tory but her thinking eighty years ago about Indigenous Aus­tralians

and their place in Australian society displayed great intel­ligence,

a strong moral compass and a palpable love for the first peoples of

this land. On her death in 1961, a large crowd of Wongatha, the Aboriginal people from the region, gathered in the heat on the red earth of the Kalgoorlie cemetery to mourn the loss of their friend

and patron. There were elderly folk, weather-beaten pastoral work­ers,

family groups carrying their young children. The Aboriginal mourners’

lives would become more difficult with the loss of their friend and advocate. It was Mrs Bennett they visited to work out how to apply

for an old-age pension, and Mrs Bennett who could assist when the bureaucrat disputed their age. Mary Bennett helped them when they

I ntroduction

could not get the rations to which they were entitled because their guarantor was on holidays. She tried to help them find work. She was

with them in court to help them understand the white man’s legal processes. She encouraged them to educate their children in the ways of the white man, and provided that education.

A local paper recorded that ‘the woman who worked for natives’

had died. But she was in fact much more than that. Writer, speaker, talented educator, fierce advocate for social reforms, she was far ahead

of her time. Many of her key notions are now accepted, though Aus­

tralian society is still catching up with the ideas and the senti­ments she expressed.

Born in 1881, Mary was the eldest child of Robert Christison, a

Scot who had come to Queensland in the first rush of land speculat­ ors almost twenty years earlier and established a pastoral station on

the remote, undeveloped north-western plains. Mary was reared away

from the property in the small communities on the eastern escarp­ ment and in London when her mother, Mary Christison, could no

longer stand the heat, dust and insects of northern Australia and returned to England with her children.

When she was nearly twelve her mother and siblings came back

to Australia and, for the first time in the winter of 1893, Mary lived

on her father’s station, ‘Lammermoor’, the location of so many of his stories and yarns. She was entranced by the wide skies, the tall swaying grasses, the bellowing of hundreds of cattle being mustered, and the alternative view of the world which she learned about from

the Dalleburra people, on whose traditional land Lammermoor stood. Mrs Christison and the children avoided the Queensland

summer heat by living in cooler, greener Hobart. During the winter

Mary experienced further stays at Lammermoor, where she met – ix –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

members of her father’s Dalleburra workforce. Her experiences as an

adolescent with some of the Dalleburra workers who shared aspects

of their culture with her became etched on her developing mind and conscience. She learned some language, asked questions about the natural world and came to understand and respect an appreciation

of life which saw plants, animals and humans as a part of an inte­ grated meaningful whole. She never forgot her teenage winters at

Lammermoor. One woman in particular, Wyma, had been prepared

to leave her home country to travel to Tenterfield to look after Mary and her sister when they were toddlers. Reconnecting with Wyma, a

lively, intelligent woman who was valued in the Christison house­hold,

the young Mary Christison loved her spontaneity, her generosity of spirit. Mary never forgot her.

Thirty years after her magical Lammermoor winters, as they

later seemed to her, Mary’s first book Christison of Lammermoor was

published in 1927. She had written it to recognise her father’s achieve­

ments as a successful pastoralist who improved the soil, established artesian wells and pioneered the beef freezing industry. In the pro­cess of writing, however, she researched her father’s early years in Queens­

land and came to understand that the cattle stations of Queens­land

emerged from violent frontier wars. She depicted her father as an outstanding example of a pastoralist whose relations with those he dispossessed were cordial. She came to understand as she researched

further that violence continued in Australia as the frontier moved

west. The writing of Christison of Lammermoor was the beginning of Mary Bennett’s conflicted identity as she strove both to exonerate her

father from any wrongdoing and educate the reading public about the attitudes of the white majority who seemed to accept frontier violence as inevitable.

– x –

I ntroduction

A reviewer of Christison of Lammermoor described Mary’s political

stance as Tory, and yet within the next decade Mary Bennett would

become known in Perth, Western Australia, as a vociferous adver­

sary of the state government, described as obsessive and fanatical by a senior bureaucrat. She shocked Perth society by speaking publicly

about the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women by white men in the north of the state.

Mary’s second book, written quickly, was The Australian Aborig­

inal as a Human Being, published in 1930. She dedicated it to ‘My Childhood’s Friends’, the Dalleburra people of north-west Queens­

land, a world away from her London home. It set out what seems self-evident to twenty-first century readers – the case for the full humanity of Aboriginal people. At the time of publication, however, the Aboriginal race was considered inherently inferior to the white

races. Social Darwinist thinking that ‘inferior’ races would die out was still commonly accepted. Mary’s title confronted and rejected these prejudices but she was aware of her limited first-hand knowledge of life for Aboriginal people in Australia in the 1930s.

At the age of 49 she left England and travelled alone to the west

coast of Australia for the first time. Her much-loved husband had died

three years earlier, in 1927. Her parents were dead. She was childless and estranged from her sister and brother who had moved to the east coast of Australia some years previously. In Western Australia

she would teach Aboriginal children and write and speak to educate

an apathetic public about the living conditions of the dispossessed. From this time until her death in 1961 Mary Bennett spoke and wrote in vehement opposition to Western Australian policies of

removing mixed-descent children from their Aboriginal mothers.

She was influential in the shift away from that policy in the 1950s. – xi –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

It was not, however, until the 1990s that the Australian populace at large became aware of the ‘stolen generations’ of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families.

On the question of land, Mary’s vision was that people should

be allowed to stay in their own territories. She argued in 1934 that fifty reserves needed to be created in Western Australia, spaced

through the different tribal districts. Tribes where tribal government was still intact should, she believed, be granted land in perpetuity.

Such an idea would have seemed outlandish at a time when views

of Aborigines as a dying race were still current and the future for mixed descent people was seen to be within the mainstream society.

It would not be until the 1960s that the call for an Indigenous right to land was heard and another three decades before the High Court of Australia recognised the native title of the Meriam people of the

Torres Strait in the historic Mabo case. Mary Bennett was making this argument in the 1930s.

We might wonder how a woman who would describe her young

self as a ‘shocking Imperialist’ and who was called a Tory when her

first book was published could develop ideas which were so radical

for her time. This book attempts an explanation of this radical shift.

Many contributing factors – meeting influential people, the death of her husband, her intense, imaginative nature, her unusual upbring­

ing, her loyalty, and a conflicted personality developing in response to life trauma – all played a part.

She often seemed haunted by an intense realisation of the suffer­

ings experienced by past displaced generations as well as present

neglected ones. She saw the squattocracy as a self-serving group of people. Her father had been a member of this group but she excluded

him from this judgment. She saw Aboriginal traditional cultural – xii –

I ntroduction

life destroyed by colonialism yet she clung to her vision of an idyllic

childhood, telling people than she ‘grew up with the Aborigines’ on her father’s cattle station. She wrote often about her experience of the pangs of conscience and of guilt. Her most painful memories of ado­

lescence and of the sufferings of an Aboriginal child who was once a member of her family remained buried, unspoken of. She seemed driven throughout her life to show her father in an utterly exemplary

light, often attributing to him honourable actions for which evidence cannot now be found. Might these experiences of painful conflict be

the force which drove her until her final illness to dedicate her life single-mindedly to working for justice for Aboriginal Australians?

Mary Bennett was by no means the only daughter of a pioneer

pastoralist in Australia to write hagiographically about her father.

Mary Durack, daughter of Michael Patsy Durack who established

his vast cattle kingdom in northern Australia, and Judith Wright, whose family established its pastoral interests in the New England

region of New South Wales, are two well-known writers from a pastoral background who admired their fathers and grandfathers

for their pioneering achievements. Their imaginations, like Mary’s, were stimulated by family stories of heroic struggles to establish their

cattle stations against tough odds. As for Mary, family loyalty played a crucial part in their various accounts of how these stations were

established as the local people were dispossessed and accommoda­

tions were reached after conflicts which saw the white men emerge as victorious. Wright wrote a family history, The Generations of Men, in

the heroic ‘pioneer against the odds’ genre, and decades later Cry for

the Dead which considered the losses of the Wadja people in the making of the Wyndham estate. Mary Durack wrote Kings in Grass Castles

and other works and acknowledged in her writing the consequences – xiii –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

of the sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. The children of such unions, such as a child called Daffodil, were

sought out by the police and taken away so they could ‘learn to read and write and sew fine seams … and learn the godlessness of her

mother’s people’. After living for more than a year as a young woman on Ivanhoe in the Kimberley, Mary Durack confronted in her writ­

ing the ‘blind exploitation of the Aborigines’. She acknowledged that her father was complicit in such exploitation, but out of loyalty she omitted the telling anecdotes from her published work.1

Judith Wright’s journey from The Generations of Men to Cry for the

Dead was also a journey of acknowledgement. In the earlier book her interest was in the family story of ‘the great and almost unchronicled pastoral migrations in which my forebears had taken part’. The later

work took her into ‘dark places’, although, like Durack, she avoided con­front­ing her ancestors’ likely direct engagement in shooting parties against Aborigines. Both women, through the act of writing,

grappled with what would seem to be their own pangs of conscience as they researched and told their family stories.2

Mary Bennett’s journey was a different one. She seemed unwilling

or unable to ever face the likelihood of her father being involved in any violent altercation with Aborigines on the frontier. She seemed to avoid the issue of sexual relations in north Queensland where there

were few white women when her father took up land, though her

sister did write about this in an unpublished novel set in Queensland 1 2

Quoted in Brenda Niall, True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack, Text, Melbourne, 2012, p. 136. Judith Wright, The Generations of Men, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1959. See also Georgina Arnott, The Unknown Judith Wright, University of Western Australia Publishing, Crawley, 2016, for a discussion of Wright’s journey from Generations to Cry for the Dead.

– xiv –

I ntroduction

with a protagonist who seems to be based on Robert Christison. A conflicted emotional state compounded by family secrets which were not spoken of probably contributed to Mary’s life of dedication. She

wrote about the stab of conscience, of her conscience being burned. At the end of her life she wondered why she grew up and lived ‘so

ignorant in a world of desperate need’. Perhaps a close look at her childhood, at her adolescent years coming and going to Lammermoor and at the comforting, if distorted, memories of growing up with

the Dalleburra people will help us to understand something of this

complex woman so driven to work until she could physically do no more for Aboriginal people whom she had come to love with the intensity of family connections.

Mary Montgomerie Bennett has remained a puzzling enigma.

His­tor­ians have researched her achievements in public life from about 1929 to her death in 1961 but curiously Mary’s childhood and early

adulthood have been of no interest to them.3 This may be because they 3

Alison Holland, Marilyn Lake and Fiona Paisley together have produced more than twenty chapters and articles on the work of Mary Bennett, concentrating on the 1930s. These include: Holland, A., ‘Wives and Mothers Like Ourselves? Exploring White Women’s Intervention in the Politics of Race, 1920s–1940s’, Australian Historical Studies, 32, no. 117, 2001, pp. 292-310; Holland, A., ‘The Campaign for Woman Protectors: Gender, Race and Frontier between the Wars’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no. 34, 2001, pp. 27-42; Holland, A., ‘Feminism, Colonialism and Aboriginal Workers: An Anti-Slavery Crusade’, Labour History, no. 69, November, 1995, pp. 52-64; Lake, M., ‘Feminism and the Gendered Politics of Anti-Racism, Australia 1927–1957: From Maternal Protectionism to Leftist Assimilation’, Australian Historical Studies, 110, 1998, pp. 91-108; Lake, M., ‘Childbearers as Rights-Bearers: Feminist Discourse on the Rights of Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Mothers in Australia, 1920–50’, Women’s History Review, 8:2, 1999, pp. 347-63; Marilyn Lake’s Getting Equal: The history of Australian feminism, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1999, includes a substantial chapter on Mary Bennett’s work; Paisley, F., ‘“Don’t Tell England!”: Women of Empire Campaign to Change Aboriginal Policy in Australia Between the Wars’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, no. 8, Summer 1993; Paisley, F., Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919–1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2000; Paisley, F., ‘Race and Remembrance: Contesting Aboriginal Child Removal in the Inter-War Years’, Australian Humanities Review, November 1997. Most

– xv –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

have accepted what she herself has written about her life. Certainly her biography Christison of Lammermoor has, with one exception, been

accepted rather uncritically as a reliable source of information about her father.4 No-one, to date, has undertaken any research into her

mother. There is no published information about her sister. Mary’s story of ‘growing up among the Aborigines’ has not been questioned,

nor has anyone to date tracked the family’s movements – and they

were constantly on the move – throughout her youth, despite the availability of shipping records. Mary once wrote that her mother was taken from her. She wrote that her father intended to write about the Aborigines but that he didn’t have time. She claimed that Robert Christison wanted to build a hospital for the Aborigines.

None of these dubious assertions has been questioned. An inves­

tigation of the circumstances in which she made them will deepen our understanding of what these statements tell us about her and why she made them. Her story takes us to the silences, evasions

and unfinished business of our past. It also highlights what can be achieved and what is possible when a just solution is imagined and worked towards with passion, intelligence, dedication and love.

Mimi, as the young Mary was known within her family, the young

Miss Christison who trained to become an artist, was the daughter

of a member of the gentry who sang at the Christmas concerts for the

4

recently Alison Holland has published Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, WA, 2015. See also Sue Taffe, ‘Behind the Mulga Curtain and beyond the Grave: Mary Montgomerie Bennett’s Leadership in Aboriginal Affairs, 1930–1961’ in Rosemary Francis, Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish (eds), Seizing the Initiative: Australian Woman Leaders in Politics, Workplaces and Communities, eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Carlton, 2012. Mark Cryle, ‘A “Fantastic adventure”: Reading Christison of Lammermoor’, in Journeys through Queensland History: Landscape, Place and Society, proceedings of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland) conference, 3–4 September 2009, St Lucia, Queensland.

– xvi –

I ntroduction

poor children of Burwell village in Lincolnshire. After becoming the

biographer of her pastoralist father she relinquished her privileged lifestyle. She knew the Australian squattocracy but she disputed their

right to control the lives of Aboriginal people whose land they took.

She might have looked like an English gentlewoman but she became a forthright critic of governments. She held, throughout her life, to the principle that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights must apply to all people.

‘These two strands – the love of the land we have invaded and the

guilt of the invasion – have become part of me’, wrote Judith Wright. She described Australia as a ‘haunted country’.5 Mary Bennett would have agreed about the guilt of the invasion, but for her the love was

of the people who had suffered as a consequence. Their suffering mo­

ti­vated her. From the 1930s she sought to reshape the debate about the place of Indigenous people within the Australian state, seeing

them as full citizens. Mary Montgomerie Bennett’s life story speaks to us as we rethink the appropriateness of celebrating Australia Day

on 26 January, re-engage with the discussion about recognition of first Australians within our Constitution and recognise the damage of racial stereotyping.

5

Judith Wright, Born of the Conquerors, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1991, p. 30.

– xvii –

Map 1: Southern New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania

Parents and Childhood

Map 2: Queensland and northern New South Wales

Cha pte r 1

PA R EN T S A pioneer Scots pastoralist and a London artist The beautiful and accomplished young woman who had written so kindly to Christison appeared unconscious that she was the cause of his traversing the twelve thousand miles from Lammermoor to Chelsea, when he called in the summer of 1880, yet in a few months they were married. M. M. Bennett, Christison of Lammermoor, Alston Rivers, London, 1927, p. 145

At an elegant pre-Raphaelite church in Pimlico, a fashionable part

of London, an unlikely union took place on 28 October 1880. The groom was a tall, handsome, bearded Scot, Robert Christison, from

the colony of Queensland in far distant Australia. His bearing was

confident and he had the air of a man who knew his own mind. He described himself on the marriage certificate as a gentleman, though

those who knew him realised the toil and skill involved in being able to describe himself so. A more accurate description might have been pastoralist, entrepreneur and businessman.

His betrothed was Miss Mary Godsall, a beautiful and stylishly-

dressed woman with an erect bearing. She was an artist who had lived in various parts of London, mostly in the East End, all her life.

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

With an artist’s eye she had chosen St Barnabas’ Church for its preRaphaelite beauty.

The couple had known each other for just a few months, but for

different reasons neither had time to lose. Robert was on a business trip to the Old Country and would soon be returning to Queensland.

Mary, while beautiful, was from humble stock and without a dowry. She was thirty-six years old and he was forty-three. It would be an unusual marriage with them spending more of their married life apart than together despite seeming to be very much in love.

Robert and Mary spent their honeymoon in Paris. In April

1881, Robert set sail for Australia and on 8 July their first child, Mary Montgomerie Christison, was born.1 She was the first of four

children born to this couple. Young Mary Montgomerie was always known as Mimi in the family and as this story concerns three people

with the name of Mary Christison, Mimi will be her name in this account of her life until she marries. Mimi’s extraordinary life had its beginnings in the strange circumstances of her childhood. Her

mother and siblings moved between England and Australia when

she was young. Later the family moved between her father’s pastor­ al property, Lammermoor, in north-west Queensland, and Hobart.

Robert’s letters to his children were rich with anecdotes about life at

Lammermoor. When the family was together they were told and retold and would appear in both Mimi and her sister Helen’s later writings.2 1 2

Montgomerie was the maiden name of Robert’s maternal grandmother. Information provided by Jan Christison, 24 August 2017. Mrs Mary Christison unsuccessfully sought a publisher for her memoir of Queensland. Robert offered to provide financial backing for it but the project did not proceed. Helen Christison began writing seriously, earlier than her older sister. She submitted her manuscript ‘Like the Pelican’, which she described as

– 4 –

Parents

The life experiences of the resilient and resourceful Londoner,

Mary Godsall, and Queensland pastoralist Robert Christison provide insights into the development of young Mimi, whom we only really

get to know when she becomes a public person, the biographer who published Christison of Lammermoor in 1927. The peripatetic exper­

ience of family life, the rich fabric of stories told by her father, and her own adolescent experiences at Lammermoor influenced the young Mimi. Both father and elder daughter shared a tendency to take

the facts of a story and see them through a romantic lens. When his family was living in London and he was alone battling a long

drought in north-west Queensland, he compared himself to Horatio: ‘steadily stuck to my post. [I have] never left the bridge’, he told his

wife, defending their land and their children’s inheritance. Similarly

Christison of Lammermoor is described by its author as ‘romantic

history’.3 Stories and the way they were shaped by their authors pro­ vide particular insights into Robert and his biographer-daughter,

whom we now know as Mary Montgomerie Bennett. We will begin, therefore by considering the facts of her parents’ lives, which do

not always accord with the story of her father’s life, which she later tells.

***

3

a novel set in pioneering times, to a number of publishers from 1920 until 1958 without success. The manuscript is held in the British Library, MS57043. The novel draws on the character and personality of Robert Christison for a young pioneer and an older experienced one. Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 22 June 1901, Christison family papers, TR1867/172, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland (hereafter SLQ ); M. M. Bennett, Christison of Lammermoor, Alston Rivers, London, 1927, p. 13.

– 5 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Robert Christison When Bob Christison and his brother Tom left their home village of Foulden in 1852, Australia was being referred to in Scotland as

the land of promise, flowing with milk and honey.4 Their father

Alexander Christison, the minister at Foulden in the border country

of Scotland, had already sent Alexander, William and John, three of Bob’s elder brothers, to Australia to create their own futures. The

boys’ mother, Helen Cameron Christison, had died in 1839 giving

birth to her ninth child. She was thirty-three years old. Alexander

Christison had remarried to a widow who had three children of her own. He saw few opportunities for his sons in Scotland.

The second wave of Highland clearances in the early nineteenth

century had resulted in widespread dislocation, starvation and often

death for those forced from their homes, as landowners reclaimed the Highlands and islands of Scotland from unproductive tenant farmers for more profitable purposes such as sheep, deer, or tourism. The

Highland lairds had been drawn into British capitalism by the 1840s. The lairds’ requirement that their lands be more productive led to the

clearances of people from ancestral estates and relocation on crofts – smaller allotments on less productive coastal land. Here the crofters survived by activities such as gathering kelp, which was used at this

time in the manufacture of glass, linen and soap.5 The failure of the

potato crop in the mid-1800s added to their social distress. A cholera epidemic followed, and, for the fortunate, emigration. As a result of these catastrophic events and a failing economy, the Scots diaspora took people to Canada, the United States and to Australia. 4 5

Robert Christison, Reminiscences, written on board S.S. Jumna, 18 October 1892, Christison family papers, TR1867/172, SLQ. Don Watson, Caledonia Australis, 1984, Vintage edition, North Sydney, 1997, Chapter 1.

– 6 –

Parents

The year after the Christison brothers arrived at the port of

Melbourne, Karl Marx reported that figures from the Colonial

Land Emigration Office showed that nearly four-fifths of emigration in the preceding six years had been Celts from Ireland and the

Highlands and Islands of Scotland.6 The Christisons were not from the Highlands, but from the border lowlands country. Although the

Highlanders were more politically powerful, the border folk were

also undergoing an agrarian revolution, which led to social upheaval

and loss of work. For Reverend Alexander Christison, assisting his sons to make a future for themselves in the Australian colonies appeared to be the best thing he could do for them. They were going

where many of their kinsmen had gone before. Reverend Christison

borrowed money to purchase two second-class passages to Australia for fifteen-year-old Bob and his sixteen-year old brother, Tom.

While the boys were from a physically impoverished environment,

they had a strong sense of their social and intellectual heritage.

Their uncle, Sir Robert Christison, their father’s twin, was a famous forensic physician, a renowned toxicologist and doctor to Queen Victoria when she was residing in Scotland. Their paternal grand­ father, also Alexander, had started life as a shepherd, and through an

interest in the classics during his school years had become a scholar and had risen to the post of Professor of Humanities at Edin­burgh

University. Bob Christison was aware of the standing of these relatives in the social and intellectual life of Edinburgh. So, as he

departed for the other side of the world to fend for himself at a young age, he had family models of success through dedicated hard work to inspire him. George Bernard Shaw has ascribed the success

of the Scottish model of education to the rigorous training in the 6

Cited in Watson, Caledonia Australis, p. 67.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Shorter Catechism, saying that the Scots were able to transfer the ‘intellectual keenness in learning the Catechism to business and to

get the better of everybody’. While this sounds like an indictment of Scots’ ambition, Bob Christison was certainly able to apply what he

learned in the schoolroom to the broader community. He had been

given the confidence to learn from life and use the lessons to his advantage.7

It was still the southern winter but the wattle was in bloom

when young Bob first saw the shore as the Garland sailed through the heads and towards Liardet’s Beach, the port of Melbourne. For

two Scots boys who had never left their village before they took

the journey to Liverpool to board ship, life away from home would

have been full of surprises. The sea around the docks was a mass of

discarded human possessions such as mattresses and other bedding, tossed overboard by poor passengers who could not pay the cost of getting their belongings from Hobson’s Bay to the shore.8 The shortage of accommodation for the people flooding in to Melbourne

had given rise to camps along the Yarra River. The Argus newspaper

advertised much sought after canvas for tents as more permanent accommodation was in very short supply.9 Of the older Christison brothers who had previously been sent out by their father, John had died on the journey, Alexander had been lost in the bush and a third,

William, who was to meet them, had travelled to Ballarat to try his hand at finding gold.

7 8 9

Malcolm Prentis, The Scots in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2008, p. 20. Henry Giles Turner, A History of Colonial Victoria vol. 1, 1904, Longmans, Melbourne, p. 370. See Turner, Colonial Victoria vol. 1 for a description of Melbourne town in 1852.

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The Christison brothers, who disembarked on 1 August, were

among the 33,000 unassisted immigrants who arrived at the port of Melbourne in 1852.10 It was a time of great social and political dis­

or­ganisation for the young colony, with Melbourne town in turmoil.11

Just a year after the colony had separated from New South Wales news spread of the gold finds at Bendigo Creek, Mount Alexander

and Clunes, inducing people to leave their jobs, and desert their

families to head for the diggings. As word travelled, others rode or tramped overland from Adelaide or Sydney. The desertion of rural labourers led the pastoral lobby to urge Governor Latrobe to push for as many assisted immigrants as possible to take up farm work.

The boys carried with them a letter from their father to Andrew

and Thomas Chirnside, pastoralists in the Western District of the

colony of Victoria. The Chirnsides had been regular worshippers at Minister Christison’s church at Foulden. Thomas Chirnside had

arrived in Adelaide in 1839 to be joined by his brother later that year. By the time Tom and Bob arrived, carrying their father’s letter

asking his former parishioners to give the Minister’s sons work, Andrew and Thomas had a number of pastoral leases (or runs as they were often called) in the Western District and had acquired

land at Wyndham on the Werribee River which would become their

home base.12 This start in life in the colonies could not have been better for Bob. Moreover at least two-thirds of the pioneer settlers

of the Western District were Scots and nearly all of these were 10

Richard Broome, The Victorians: Arriving, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, Melbourne, 1984, p. 69. 11 Turner, Colonial Victoria, p. 364. 12 Helen Cameron Roberts, ‘Errors and Omissions’, n.d. but early 1950s, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Noel Butlin archive, Menzies Library, Australian National University (hereafter ANU).

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

farmers from the lowlands.13 Niel Black, a successful stockbreeder,

described Port Phillip as ‘a Scotch settlement’, observing that ‘the people are, as far as I can judge, altogether Scotch in their habits

and manners’.14 So Bob and Tom, while far from their home, were

amongst their own people who were busily engaged in building a new society – Angus McMillan’s ‘Caledonia Australis’, an Eldorado for the hungry, as Don Watson would later describe it.15

Christison worked for the canny and successful Niel Black, who

had begun with little capital but much ability. Black was ‘the very type of a Scots pioneer – righteous, frugal, hard-working, no-

one’s fool with an instinctive knowledge of how the commercial

cat might jump’; all epithets which could be applied to the mature Robert Christison.16 The Chirnside brothers and Black had deep experience in the Australian pastoral world. Bob Christison learned not just about breeding and the management of sheep and cattle

but about land selec­tion and the many ways of gaining economic advantage through land dealing and the manipulation of the Land

Acts. It was a valu­able apprenticeship.17 Black had formed a company and took risks, but well-calculated ones. Apart from learning

about stock man­age­ment and how to make money through land speculation, Bob would have heard their accounts of the frontier,

and of actions by his countrymen against the local Aboriginal tribes,

which Tom Griffiths, referring to Black, described as ‘murderous 13

Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria 1834–1890, Melbourne University Press (hereafter MUP), Parkville, Victoria, 1961, p. 14. 14 Journal of Niel Black, 27 November 1839, MS Box 99/2, State Library of Victoria (hereafter ‘SLV’). 15 Watson, Caledonia Australis, p. 165. 16 Kiddle, Men of Yesterday, pp. 43-44. 17 S. E. Pearson, ‘In the Tracks of the Pioneers’, Pastoral Review, 16 November 1928.

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Parents

necessities’.18 Black held that the best way to acquire land was to take

up a new run, ‘provided that the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives right and left’.19 If the conscience wasn’t sufficiently seared to do this, Black suggested finding runs where the Aboriginal people had already been wiped out. He wrote that ‘pastoral success depended on not having to fight the Aborigines for the land’.20

On 6 June 1859, when Bob Christison was twenty-two years old,

Queen Victoria signed the letters patent, which established Queens­

land as a colony, separate from New South Wales. ‘Everyone was infatuated’, wrote Mary McManus, a pioneer settler of the Maranoa district, ‘with the desire to possess a run in Queensland’.21 The fever

for land rose with the expectation of hundreds of thousands of square miles being opened for settlement. In September 1860 An Act for

Regulating the Occupation of Unoccupied Crown Land in the Unsettled Districts was assented to. Expeditions returned with news of rich pas­toral land in north Queensland. While the primary pur­pose of

such expeditions was to search for Burke and Wills party, the writ­ ing indi­cates a secondary purpose: to describe the locations of quality

grazing land. These descriptions stimulated the frenzy for land in Queensland to which McManus referred.

In October 1862 an enthusiastic Melbourne reception welcomed

William Landsborough and John McKinlay, both Scots, who had led parties in search of the missing explorers. Both had crossed 18

Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 107. 19 Griffiths, Hunters, pp. 106-107. 20 Maggie MacKellar, Strangers in a Foreign Land: The Journal of Niel Black and Other Voices from the Western District, Miegunyah Press, MUP, Carlton, 2008, p. 24. 21 Mary A. McManus, Reminiscences of the Early Settlement of the Maranoa District, Brisbane, Charleville Times, 1903.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

the continent, McKinlay from the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria

and Landsborough in the opposite direction. Christison may have

been among the three thousand people who welcomed the explorers at a reception in the Exhibition Building in William Street Mel­ bourne; certainly he would have read the newspaper reports. In

1862 Lands­borough’s journal was published describing his journey

up the Flinders River through fine pastoral country to the downs he named after Queens­land Governor, Sir George Bowen.22 Christison

read and re-read his descriptions of this country with a keen eye for any information that would assist him in developing his plans.

Landsborough’s descriptions of the fine pastoral land of the Flinders

enticed the young Robert Christison.23 He was among hundreds of young adventurers, some of them with stock and money, and others,

like him, without, who were travelling north, overland and by sea, eager to acquire land.

The Queensland frontier, 1860s The men who rode out west driving their flocks of sheep and herds of cattle saw land ripe for development. They were Christians – many

of them, like Robert Christison, devout Scots Presbyterians. In their own minds and consciences they would have accepted and respected

the fifth commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ and yet the Queensland frontier became a site of violent conflict and murder. Many of the early pastoralists in north Queensland came from the southern colonies

and brought with them already entrenched attitudes concerning the

inevitability of a Stone Age culture giving way to a civilised one. 22

William Landsborough, Journal of Landsborough’s Expedition from Carpentaria, Melbourne, 1862, Project Gutenberg Australia. 23 Landsborough, Journal, 2 June 1862 entry.

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Parents

As Russell McGregor has argued, the concept of race was combined with the idea of progress. The Enlightenment tradition and the post-

Enlightenment science of race would together explain the course of human progress.24 This point is borne out by squatter Edward Kennedy writing about Queensland in the 1860s. He stated that the

Aboriginals were fast disappearing before the advance of the white man. He derided the Aboriginal race: ‘there is no savage in the world so thoroughly low and degraded as the Queensland Black’. Right

or wrong, we are in Australia, he concluded, with what might seem

today to be a self-serving brutality, ‘and we may take it for granted that we mean to stop here’.25

While pioneer pastoralists understood that they were taking over

the lands of the original inhabitants, a commonly expressed pos­i­tion was that it was ‘a choice between the protection of the pastoral indus-

try or the abandonment of that pursuit.26 Reflective souls acknowl­ edged ‘naturally they may say that it was their country and ask what

business we had there’, while the more imaginative recognised that

‘they fight obstinately for their country’.27 While official figures do not confirm the number of Aborigines killed on the Queens­land frontier, historian Ørsted-Jensen has argued that primary sources, including

reports for the colonial press, frequently claimed that every attack

and every white killed by Aborigines was retaliated ‘tenfold’.28 If the 24

Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939, MUP, Carlton, 1997, p. 21. 25 E. B. Kennedy, Four Years in Queensland, Edward Stanford, London 1870, p. 73. 26 Charles Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland: An Eight Years’ Experience in the Above Colony, with Some Account of Polynesian Labour, Longmans, London, 1872, p. 114. 27 Thomas Major, Leaves from a Squatter’s Notebook, Sands and Company, London, 1900, p. 165; Carl Adolph Feilberg, editor Queenslander, cited in Robert ØrstedJensen, Frontier History Revisited – Colonial Queensland and the ‘History War, Lux Mundi Publishing, Brisbane, 2011, p. 2. 28 Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History, p. 19.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

ratio was anything like this, how did the pastoralists, Christians as

observed earlier, justify this retributive violence? One commonly expressed position was the notion, coined by Herbert Spencer, of the survival of the fittest. Squatter Thomas Major, for example, wrote that we cannot change ‘the unalterable law of Nature’:

For untold centuries the aborigines have had the use of the country, but in the march of time they, like the extinct fossil, must make way … The sooner they are taught that a superior race has come among them, and are made to feel its power, the better for them … The survival of the fittest is Nature’s law and must be obeyed.29

Charles Darwin’s theory about the development of species was twisted to justify the forceful taking of the lands of other people.

Another justification expressed was that Aboriginal peoples were

‘utterly destitute of the faintest ray of religion’, instead being ‘imbued

with superstition’. Generalisations as to the lack of a moral code were

frequently made by Queensland pioneer pastoralists, such as ‘ingrat­i­ tude is innate in them’, they are ‘a lazy lot’, ‘cunning and treacher­ ous’.30 Indeed George Carrington described a weaving together of

what would later be described as social Darwinist thinking and God’s will as the basis of Queensland policy:

… they are a relic, so to speak, of the past, intruders in the path of the white man … Therefore, says the white man, in his superiority of strength and knowledge, away with them, dis­ perse them, shoot and poison them, until there be none remain­ ing; we will utterly destroy them, their wives and their little ones, and all they have, and we will go in and possess the land. 29 Major, Squatter’s Note Book, p. 165. 30 George Carrington, Colonial Adventures and Experience by a University Man, London, Bell and Daldy, 1871, p. 108; Kennedy, Four Years, p. 78; Carrington, Colonial Adventures, p. 146.

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Parents

This is no rhapsody or overstatement, but represents, in words, the actual policy which has been pursued towards the natives of the Australian colonies, and which is being acted upon vig­ orously in Queensland today.31

Carrington held that ‘wherever the white man sets his foot, there

the aboriginal inhabitant shall wither and die’. He told his readers, ‘still there are some doings involved, upon which humanity should

cry shame’.32 Christison would have been aware of this thinking

as he prepared for his journey to Queensland and to the frontier, which he saw as providing a chance of land and a pastoral enterprise

of his own. Charles Eden, another pastoralist, who arrived at Port Denison not long after Christison, admitted that a policy ‘tending

to extermination is of necessity frightfully revolting to the Christian mind’ but that as it was the government’s duty to afford protection for the settlers a native police force was necessary.33

More a military organisation than a law enforcement agency, the

Native Police force was the only instrument of native administration

that Queensland inherited from New South Wales.34 White men,

often with a military background, commanded Aboriginal recruits. In 1848 the Governor of New South Wales had argued that after ‘cer­

tain collisions’ had taken place ‘in parts beyond the Settled Dis­tricts, between the white inhabitants and the Aborigines’, a small Corps of

Native Police should be formed and employed ‘for their [Aborigines] repression’. As Jonathan Richards explains, it was described as a

Corps, not a Constabulary, which at the time commonly meant a 31 Carrington, Colonial Adventures, pp. 143-44. 32 Carrington, Colonial Adventures, p. 144. 33 Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, p. 113. 34 C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, ANU Press, Canberra, 1970, p. 159.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

military unit.35 Aboriginal people were not offered the same protec­

tion as European citizens and according to Richards no evidence has

been found of any Aboriginal trooper swearing an oath to uphold justice.36

Many regarded the force as essential for the development of the

pastoral and other industries in Queensland. One squatter, William

Hill, explained that the squatters hailed the advent of the Native Police force ‘with delight and killed the fatted calf in their honour’.37 Richards’ detailed study of the Native Police Force shows convin­

cing­ly that by the time of separation of Queensland from New South Wales it was well-established as a ‘violent institution’. Richards

con­c luded that today the Native Police would be termed ‘Special Forces’. Its specific purpose was to suppress Indigenous resistance

to col­oni­sa­tion.38 Statements made to the 1861 Queensland Select Com­mit­tee inquiring into the Native Police Force support this view,

with one member arguing that Aboriginal people ‘must be regarded

in the same light as inhabitants of a country under martial law’ and that they ‘must be taught to feel the mastery of the whites’.39

If the Native Police force was a military organisation, then it

existed, ipso facto, to be engaged in warfare. The research over the last thirty years conducted by Raymond Evans, Noel Loos and Henry

Reynolds and more recently by Jonathan Richards, Robert ØrstedJensen, Timothy Bottoms, Tony Roberts and others, leaves us in no 35

Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2008, pp. 8-9. 36 Richards, The Secret War, p. 9. 37 W. R. O. Hill, Forty-five Years’ Experience in North Queensland, 1861–1905, Pole and Company, Brisbane, 1907, p. 24. 38 Richards, The Secret War, p. 9. 39 Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 25 July 1861, quoted in Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History, p. 43.

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Parents

doubt that the Queensland frontier was a war zone, with the Native

Police employed on behalf of the squatters and against the tribes who were being systematically dispossessed. Loos observes the uncon­

scious irony of pioneer pastoralist Edward Palmer who described the settlers as ‘a great advancing army, confident in their numbers and strength, and so they advanced into the unknown land and left the rest to fortune.40

This was the world that young Bob Christison was planning to

enter. He would most likely have read of the killings in central

Queens­land of nineteen members of the Wills family and their assoc­

i­ates when he was still in Victoria, he may even have known Horatio Wills who had been elected to the Victorian Legislative Council in 1855. Newspaper articles observed that the mistake the Wills family

made was to allow the local Aboriginal people to come in near the homestead.41

North to Queensland Late in 1863 Bob Christison, now twenty-six, boarded a ship for Port Denison (which would soon be renamed as Bowen), the northern­

most port on the eastern seaboard, nearly 2,000 kilometres north of

Sydney, with his savings from a decade of work on Victorian pastoral

stations. When he arrived, he had to swim his horse ashore as the jetty was not yet built.42 Queensland legislators had tried to learn

from the land rushes of the south to guard against land speculation. 40 41 42

Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal–European relations on the North Queensland Frontier 1861–1897, Canberra, ANU Press, 1982, p. 30. The Argus, 20 November 1861; The Age, 28 November 1861. Robert Christison, Notes for ‘Tropical Life’, Christison family papers and Lammermoor Station Records (hereafter Christison family papers), item 157, John Oxley Library, University of Queensland.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

The four Queensland Land Acts of 1860 consequently established a

sys­tem of temporary occupation by means of licences. The first step in legalising land occupation was to apply for a licence to occupy a run of at least 25 square miles. An intending applicant could occupy land for up to two months without risk of prosecution under trespass

laws. Once the licence was granted the pastoralist had ninety days to pay for it at the rate of ten shillings per square mile. Within the

next nine months a licence holder could apply for a lease for the run, providing that he could make a declaration that the run had been stocked ‘equal to one fourth of the number of sheep or equivalent

number of cattle which each Run shall by this Act be deemed to be capable of carrying’.43 Runs were taken up quickly. By 1864 there were 2,849. It was a time of confidence and optimism for these new

squatters, with wool prices high on the English market as a result of cotton supplies being cut due to the American Civil War.44

Despite these attempts to control land speculation, squatters

devised tactics, strategies and ploys, legal and otherwise, to gain control of fertile land. Bob Christison initially squatted on the banks

of Skeleton Creek, a tributary of Towerhill Creek which fed into the Thomson River, flowed south-west, joined the Barcoo and became Cooper Creek, eventually flowing into Lake Eyre. On the banks of Towerhill Creek he would later build his first house.

From 1864 to 1866 Robert Christison was a squatter in the orig­

inal sense of the word. He did not apply for a licence during these years, standing his ground when his occupancy was challenged by 43

44

An Act for Regulating the Occupation of Unoccupied Crown Lands in the Unsettled Districts, No. 11, 17 September 1860, Queensland; Beverley Kingston, ‘The Origin of Queensland’s “Comprehensive” Land Policy’, Queensland Heritage, vol. 1, no. 2, November 1964, pp. 3-10. David S. Macmillan, ‘The Scottish Australian Company and Pastoral Development in Queensland 1860–1890’, 1960, espace.library.uq.edu.au, pp. 457-60.

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Nat Buchanan who was managing Bowen Downs to the south for the Scottish Australian Investment Company. According to Christison,

Buchanan accused him of trespass, claiming that his firm owned all

the country on the Thomson watershed as well as a great portion of the Flinders country down to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Christison stayed put, asking Buchanan if he also claimed all the territory lying

to the west of his hut to Western Australia.45 The Bowen Downs lease was significantly reduced in size in 1864.46

Christison played the system, as most suc­cess­ful pastoralists did,

keeping the good land, letting other leases go, practising dummying, occupying land without fully stocking it and transferring blocks to his brothers. By 1884, when his elder daughter Mimi was three,

the Crown Lands Act was passed requiring pastoralists to consolidate

their holdings. Robert Christison was the leaseholder of Lammer­ muir numbers 1, 2 and 3, Lammermoor West, Lammermoor South

numbers 1 and 2, Redpath, Jireena, Wanglejelbie, St Ronan’s, Mont­

gomerie and Foulden. These runs amounted to 609 square miles and he would continue to expand.47 He was well on the way in his journey to become a successful Queensland pastoralist. 45 46

47

Dalgety’s Review, 16 December 1896, p. 30. In 1861 Bowen Downs comprised 36,000 square miles and stretched from Hughenden in the north to the Queensland–New South Wales border in the south. In 1864 it was reduced in size to an area which includes today’s shires of Aramac, Barcaldine, Blackall, Ilfracombe and Tambo as well as parts of the Barcoo and Flinders shires. See Anne Smith, ‘Bowen Downs, 1862–72: A Case Study in Pastoral Settlement’, in B. J. Dalton (ed.), Peripheral Visions: Essays on Australian Regional and Local History, Department of History and Politics, James Cook University, Townsville, 1991, p. 235. Microfilm reels Z4361, folios 88–92, reel no. 4135 folio 81, Queensland State Archives. I am indebted to Kaye Nardella, Senior Curator, Museum of Lands, Mapping and Surveying, Department of Natural Resources and Mines, for helping me locate the records of Christison’s lease applications in the Queensland State Archives; R. C. Sharman, Queensland state archivist, to V. B. Jones, 18 and 28 August 1964, Bowen Historical Society.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Robert Christison was, unlike most of his fellow pastoralists, suc­

cessful in gaining a local Aboriginal labour force in exchange for

food and protection. Charles Bowly, a young English immigrant who

worked for Christison in the 1870s, confirmed that Lammermoor was probably the first station in north-west Queensland to ‘employ’ Aboriginal labour and allow the Dalleburra tribe to live and hunt on their land, which had become Christison’s leased runs. Bowly

observed that only on Lammermoor or one of the very few other

stations where Aborigines had never been ‘kept out’ could he have taken a photograph of fifty Aboriginal men, women and children.

‘Anywhere else an assembly of this size would have invited dispersal by the Native Mounted Police’, he explained.48

It is a lively, energetic photograph with thirteen young, some

beard­ed, men standing at the back flourishing their throwing sticks

exub­er­antly. Seated in front are women, some clothed, some bare

breasted, and others wearing headbands and there are nine children. One of the station buildings is in the background. Bowly explained

that Robert had placed them in position for the camera. He told his parents: ‘I should think they had never been photographed before, &

it is most astonishing how they seem to comprehend at once what I was doing’.

49

This group provided a workforce for washing sheep,

shepherding, wool pressing, fencing and domestic work. A cor­re­ spon­dent to the Port Denison Times corroborated, writing that ‘I can mention two large stations in this locality, viz Natal Downs and 48

49

Anne Smith and B. J. Dalton (eds), The Bowly Papers, Records of North Queensland History No. 7, Department of History and Politics, James Cook University, 1995, photograph 18 ‘At Lammermoor Station North Queensland 1874’. ‘Powlaburries’ is most likely how Dalleburra sounded to Bowly. The name now used for the same people and language group is Yirandali or Yirendali. See David Horton (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, vol. 2, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1994, p. 1227. Smith and Dalton (eds), The Bowly Papers, letter no. XI, 3 September 1874.

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Lammermoor, where more than half of the station work is done by

them’ [Aboriginal workers].50 Bowly described the carrot-and-stick

approach that Christison employed to keep his workforce, noting that they soon tired of anything like work but keep going in the ex­

pec­tation of what they would get, with the best men getting a shirt,

trousers, tobacco and a blanket. He described Christison shooting a

wild bull, which came in amongst his cattle on the road. The dray was then ‘hauled to the spot by a lot of blacks and the beast cut up; it weighed we calculated about 1000 lbs, the meat will be princi­pal­ ly used by the blacks as they will have to work now at the paddock

fencing’.51 Theft of sheep on Lammermoor resulted in a whipping. Bowly comments that on some stations they would be hunted down

and shot.52 The Aboriginal population seemed to fluctuate, especially when the Native Police visited. In one of his reminiscences Bowly wrote of one Aboriginal man on a neighbouring property who was

frightened of the Native Police troopers and asked to be branded so that he could be identified as a ‘station black’ and avoid being shot by them. ‘A small Billy lid was heated and clapped on the boy’s hinderpart’. He yelled out, but was satisfied with the brand.53

The frontier was still an insecure place for whites as the war for

resources continued between the original occupants and the new­ comers. We hear of the murder of William Chatfield who had

followed Christison’s example of allowing the local Aborigines to be on the station but was ‘killed in the night by blacks’ despite kindly

treatment.54 Through letters and reminiscences Bowly provides an 50 51 52 53 54

Maeroo, letter to the editor ‘The Aborigines’, Port Denison Times, 23 July 1876. Bowly, p. 66. Bowly, p. 72. Bowly, p. 163. Bowly, p. 68.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

insight into the formation of a new society on Lammermoor, but it is still fragile. One local pointed out that the system of using the Native Police was counterproductive to a broad accommodation being reached between the invaders and the invaded.55 Christison how­ever,

was widely regarded as being a very powerful man, who ‘had great influence among the blacks’.56

Christison now had a compliant workforce living on his runs.

Non-native labour was expensive. It was difficult to find European

shepherds. The work was lonely and for some, fearing native attack, frightening. Christison told a local newspaper in 1881 that he had ‘about 150 aboriginals constantly employed on his stations’ and that

he found them ‘very good servants, considering their nature and want of training’.57 Even an intermittent workforce of that size, who were

not asking for wages, was clearly of very significant financial bene­ fit. The Dalleburra on Lammermoor included shepherds on outlying

areas, a cook, a man to assist in the building program, stockmen, and young people to work as rouseabouts. A journalist writing later,

at the time that Christison sold Lammermoor, observed that both

Tom and Robert Christison were ‘good hands with blacks – and were wonderfully well served’.58 Another north Queenslander wrote that

those who knew Lammermoor doubted if Christison could have succeeded except for the help rendered him in the early stages by the Dalleburra tribe of blacks.59 55 56 57 58 59

Maeroo, ‘The Aborigines’, Port Denison Times, 23 July 1876. Robert Gray, Reminiscences of India and North Queensland, 1857–1912, Constable, London, 1913, p. 130. ‘The Blacks’, Port Denison Times, 5 November 1881. ‘Lammermoor Station: Along the Line’, The Northern Miner, Charters Towers, Queensland, 3 May 1910, p. 6. S. E. Pearson, ‘In the Tracks of the Pioneers’, The Pastoral Review, 16 November 1928, p. 1128.

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The want of capital remained an impediment in the development

of his expanding cattle empire. William and Thomas Christison, Robert’s brothers, had joined him, bringing their cheerful prepared­ ness to work hard, but they were penniless. The three brothers under­

took shearing for their neighbouring pastoralist Robert Gray whose Hughenden property was fifty miles to the north-west of Lammer­

moor, to be paid in unbranded weaners when they could be mustered after the first good fall of rain.60 The discovery of gold at Cape River, north-east of Lammermoor, saw Robert trying his luck at prospecting but with no success, though the rush of 2,500 diggers to the Cape River goldfields in 1868 did provide a market for meat.61

Twenty-five years after arriving in Melbourne, Robert Christison

returned to England as a forty-year-old, apparently successful, self-

made man. During a visit to his sister Agnes who was living in Bristol with her husband Dr Beddoe, he met Mary Tovey, an artist who was

painting Agnes’ portrait. The couple got on well and after a short

courtship they were married at St Paul’s Church, Belsize Park in North London, on 3 January 1878 by Mary’s brother Reverend

J. D. Tovey assisted by another brother, Rev Duncan Tovey. Like Robert she was from a religious family.

Importantly for his financial future, Robert also met his uncle,

Sir Robert Christison, his father’s twin brother. The younger Robert listened as his uncle described his father Alexander’s last years.

Robert junior had not seen Sir Robert since he left Scotland as a boy. He now described Queensland, with eloquence and enthusiasm, as his uncle quizzed him about plant life, the pastoral industry and 60 Gray, Reminiscences, p. 117. 61 William Henry Corfield, Reminiscences of Queensland, 1862–1869, Project Gutenberg e-book, 2008.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

the illnesses – often referred to in generic terms as ‘the fever’ – which so affected newcomers to northern Queensland. The two men, a generation apart, got on well. Sir Robert was impressed enough by

his nephew’s business acumen and exuberant optimism to agree to

lend Robert thirteen thousand pounds, a very large sum (perhaps

equivalent to a million dollars in Australian currency today) at six per cent interest. This was the break that Christison needed to stock

his runs with high-quality cattle. It allowed him to purchase 900 Herefords from Lyndhurst station and ninety pure Hereford bulls, which would become the basis of the Hereford herd which he would

develop over the next thirty years and which would produce prize-

winning beasts even when western Queensland was in the grip of drought.62

The new Mrs Christison apparently loved what she saw of northern

Australia. She enjoyed being outside, travelling through the bush,

painting landscapes of the swaying grasslands, the ironbark trees and

the vast blue sky. She was in Australia for less than a year, however, when she became ill, going down quickly with the fever, which was

most likely malaria. The race towards the coast to get a doctor was in vain. Mary died on 1 April 1879. After an Anglican burial ceremony,

Robert heartbrokenly gave his wife’s body to the Lammermoor soil.

He threw himself into his work; always his method for dealing with suffering.

Mary Ann Godsall Much less is known about Mary Ann Godsall, who became Robert’s

second wife and gave birth to Mary Montgomerie Christison, than 62

Jane Black (comp.), Queensland Pioneer Book, Country Women’s Association, n.d. but c.1932, p. 2.

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Parents

is known about Robert. The stories of her family – working-class

people from the East End – did not belong in the heroic biography that Mary Bennett would later write of her father.

Mary Godsall was the first child of George Godsall and Elizabeth

Smith. When Mary was born on 26 June 1844, her mother was a London seamstress, while George was in India serving in the British

Army. The couple were not married at the time of the birth. George

was granted an honourable discharge on 10 March 1846 on medical grounds, due to his disability from the effects of the tropical climate

on his constitution. He suffered from intermittent fever, most likely

from malaria. George was awarded a military pension but it was an-

other three years before the couple wed and in 1850 another daughter, Eliza, was born.63 It was not until 1859, when she was fifteen, that Mary was baptised at St Giles in the Fields, at Holborn.64

The family moved often, mainly in the Shoreditch district in the

East End, at a time when social and industrial changes were creating great stress for the growing community. The population of Shore­

ditch almost doubled between 1800 and 1830 and doubled again between 1830 and 1860. It was the centre for the furniture trade. The building of warehouses and railways destroyed many residential

areas but the 4,000 dispossessed people were not given other homes. Journalist John Hollingshead provides us with a graphic picture of

the social conditions of Shoreditch citizens during Mary Godsall’s growing years:

Its men are mainly poor dock labourers, poor costermon­ gers, poorer silk weavers, clinging hopelessly to a withering 63 64

George Godsall British Army Service Record, Findmypast.co.uk, accessed January 2014. Holborn St Giles in the Fields Baptism register 1859, Ancestry.co.uk, accessed January 2014.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

handicraft, the lowest kind of thieves, the most ill-disguised class of swell-mobsmen, with a sprinkling of box and toy makers, shoe-makers, and cheap cabinet-makers. Its women are mainly hawkers, sempstresses, the coarsest order of pros­ti­ tutes, and aged stall-keepers, who often sit at the street corners in old sedan-chairs, and sometimes die, like sentinels, at their posts.65

Perhaps to lend credence to a negative impression of Shoreditch, Hollingshead, a local, explained: ‘I have known the neighbourhood

for twenty years, and, if anything, it seems to me to be getting dirtier and more miserable every year’.66

In these difficult circumstances, George worked as a labourer and

Elizabeth sewed. Young Mary grew up seeing the struggle of life

played out as people used their skills and ingenuity in the oftendesperate pursuit of a living. Her family were poor but they saw

that their children were educated. Elizabeth ensured that Mary was always well dressed and well presented to the world.

Mid-nineteenth century Shoreditch would have provided models

for enterprise and initiative for a young woman considering her op-

tions. It was renowned as an early centre for theatre. The first two London theatres were built in Shoreditch in the sixteenth cen­t ury

and, although the area was impoverished when Mary was a child, it remained a lively centre of entertainment. Concerts in public houses catered for the poorest residents while, for those who could afford it,

the National Standard Theatre in Shoreditch High Street and the London Music Hall further down the street offered classier entertainment. The Britannia, a working-class theatre, provided pantomimes and melodramas and the Royal Albert Saloon specialised 65 John Hollingshead, Ragged London in 1861, London, Smith, Elder and Co, 1861. 66 Hollingshead, ‘Ragged London’.

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Parents

in burlesque and vaudeville but also concerts and ballet.67 As she

grew into a beautiful, graceful young woman, well turned out by her

mother Elizabeth, the theatre offered a challenging prospect, at least more appealing than her mother’s work as a seamstress.

At the time when Robert was considering his position as a squatter

on the banks of Tower Hill Creek with no capital or stock to secure

his claim, twenty-year-old Mary Godsall was considering the stage. An early performance in The Sisters, or The Rovers of Salee at the

Cabinet Theatre London, though negatively reviewed, offered faint encouragement. ‘It is just possible that with training and educa­ tion Mr Bingley, [her co-lead] and Miss Mary Godsall might learn

to make a passable use of what natural qualifications they pos­

sess’, the reviewer wrote, adding: ‘The others have none.’68 In 1865

Mary starred as Meenie in a dramatisation of Rip Van Winkle by

Dion Boucicault at the Adelphi Theatre, London. The next year her performance in La Belle Helene was remarked upon by a reviewer who commented on Miss Godsall’s ‘beauty of feature and remarkable

grace of movement and expression’. Through 1865 and 1866 she took minor roles such as lady’s maid in a dozen plays, working mainly at the Adelphi Theatre. The following year she took roles at the New

Prince of Wales and the Theatre Royal in Liverpool but it seems that

opportunities were drying up. She advertised in the theatre magazine

The Era to say that she would ‘be Disengaged at Easter’, and would ‘be

happy to treat with responsible managers for Juvenile and Burlesque Business’.69 It seems that further engagements did not eventuate. 67 68 69

Kay Owen, ‘A General History of Shoreditch and South Hoxton’, August 1991, epshoreditch-history.pdf, accessed February 2014. The Era, London, Sunday 13 March 1864, p. 10; Adelphi Theatre records January 1865 – June 1866, Victoria and Albert Archives, Blythe House, London. The Era, London, 31 March 1867, p. 1b; footlightnotes.tumblr.com/mary-godsall1844-1922-english-actress, accessed January 2014.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

The acting profession for women was, at this time, still tainted by

an earlier association with prostitution. So poorly paid were actress­ es that even in respectable theatres they would often parade in the foyer after the show, open to propositions. Mary’s ‘happy to treat

with responsible managers’ suggests her consciousness of the diffi­ culty of maintaining a reputation as a respectable woman while she

was earning a living as an actress. By 1871 she had switched from

acting to painting, a more acceptable occupation for an aspiring

young lady.70 Just a year after Mary had left the theatre her father George died, leaving his widow Elizabeth, nine-year-old Alexander, daughter Eliza who was eighteen, and Mary who by this time was

twenty-three years of age. Mrs Godsall set herself up as a ‘ladies outfitter’ but the prospects for poor but respectable families without

a male breadwinner were extremely limited.71 Mary was encouraged by William Frith, a member of the Royal Academy whom she may have met through her theatre circle. He supported her application

for entry to the Royal Academy of Arts and in January 1871, when

she was twenty-six, Mary joined the small but growing number of

female art students who had only been admitted since 1860. She studied at the Royal Academy with some success, on a seven-year

studentship, taught by the famed painter and sculptor George Watts. A commission from the British Museum to make drawings of ancient Roman coins and a medal of Queen Victoria in 1874 established her reputation as an artist.72 70

71 72

Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’, Jonathan Cape, London, 2007, Chapter 10; Mary Godsall was a student at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1871. Her candidature was supported by W. P. Frith. Information supplied by Mark Pomeroy, archivist, Royal Academy of Arts. Pall Mall Gazette, 22 March 1873. Phillip Attwood, Keeper of Coins and Medals, British Museum, email 18 February 2014; Pall Mall Gazette, 5 December 1874.

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Parents

When she learned of the death of her artist friend, Mary Tovey, in

Queensland, in April 1879 Mary Godsall sat down to write a letter of

condolence to Robert Christison. By the time he received it in Aus­ tralia he was dealing with his grief in the only way he knew: work.

He began excavating for a huge reservoir during the dry season. He

was also planning a trip to England next year to float a loan for his newest idea, the establishment of a meat freezing works at the port of

Bowen in north Queensland. Lonely after his short time of marital happiness, he resolved to call upon the kindly woman who expressed

her condolences in a strong hand. As with his earlier trip his personal life and business interests were both attended to. He hadn’t seemed to consider the possibility of finding a mate in the Australian colonies.

When they met, Mary Godsall was an accomplished water­colour­

ist, exhibiting and being favourably reviewed at the Dudley Gallery in Piccadilly and at the Royal Academy. She painted scenes of ‘melancholy maidens’ such as a Brittany fish girl and a Cinderella,

such young attractive women, as was she, romantically treated in order to evoke an empathy for these honourable women trying to

earn an honest living in difficult circumstances. Her understanding of the difficult lives of her subjects shines through their expressive faces.

After a short courtship the couple married on 28 October 1880.

Their Paris honeymoon was followed by Robert’s return to Australia.

He had secured £47,000 investment capital for his meat-freezing

proposal and had to secure Australian shareholders willing to sub­

scribe an additional £15,000 for the project to be viable.73 When he 73

John F. Stevens, ‘A Brief History of the Poole Island Meatworks’, typescript, 1964; Troubridge Critchell James and Joseph Raymond, A History of the Frozen Meat Trade, 2nd edn, Constable, London, 1912.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

left London in April 1881 Mary was six months pregnant and the

couple decided that she should give birth in London and sail when the baby was well established.

Mrs Robert Christison knew little about the place she was going to,

apart from the rapturous descriptions drawn by her new, enthusiastic

husband and the knowledge that her friend, Mary Tovey, the first

Mrs Christison, had died there after contracting malaria. She most likely had rather mixed feelings about leaving London, her milieu, her home, a place where, as an artist, she felt she belonged.

– 30 –

Cha pte r 2

M I M I ’ S CH I L DHO OD ‘Queensland, Our Home’? Dear Papa, I am so glad to hear that Mama and Roy are on their journey home and that you have nearly struck water. Mimi Christison, 14 January 1890 (eight years old)

My dear Mimi and Lily, … all those articles [artists’ supplies] were got through Mama’s foresight of your actual requirements to study your profession. I only found the money, for you all know ‘that all that’s mine is thine lassies’ and Mama’s and Roy’s too. Now this is as it should be in such a family as ours. Not everyone for oneself but for each other. My great pleasure in work is to obtain for you all, everything that can make you comfortable and happy. Robert Christison, 24 October 1896, to Mimi (fifteen) and Helen (thirteen)

In July 1881, Robert received a much-awaited cable announcing the safe arrival into the world of Mary Montgomerie on the 6th of

that month. He worked with a new urgency, establishing the meat-

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

freezing company and preparing for the arrival of his wife and daugh­

ter. Hughenden district pastoralists enthusiastically took up shares

in the freezing works venture and expressed confidence in Chris­ti­ son’s ability to manage the project.1 Aware of his wife’s trepidation in

coming to such a comparatively wild, uncivilised place as northern Queens­land, Robert purchased Adelaide House, on Poole Island, just off the coast from Bowen, where the freezing works were to be

established. This beautiful home had been built by J. G. Macdonald, a member of George Elphingstone Dalrymple’s exploration party, which had established the township of Bowen. Robert wrote to his

wife, no doubt conscious of her nervousness about what she would find when she arrived, assuring her that ‘when you come you will have all you desire, a nice garden and house, an orange grove and

a vinery, with beautiful creepers and tropical flowers and fruits’. Hoping to stimulate the interest of the artist, he described it as:

the most lovely situation, the Pacific washing the Point, and over the Bay rises up perpendicularly above the sea Gloucester Island. Four miles in another direction is the town of Bowen, and at the back, looking inland, are continuous mountains equal to the Alps or Pyrenees.2

An island home Mary Montgomerie was christened at St Michael’s, Pimlico on 13th November and just a week later, with her mother Mary and maternal grandmother Elizabeth Godsall, she was bound for Australia. The

ship berthed on 16 January 1882 at Brisbane and six month old Mary, who would always be known within the family as Mimi (perhaps 1 2

Brisbane Courier, 17 September 1881. Quoted in Bennett, Christison of Lammermoor, p. 156.

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M imi ’ s childhood

her early attempts at saying Mary Montgomerie), experi­enced the sights, sounds and smells of a new country. Mrs Godsall, Mimi’s

only living grandparent, always known to her as Granny, came to help her daughter raise her first child in this strange, new land.

We know little about Mimi’s first years in Australia, apart from

the fact that, as was the custom, her mother and grandmother were the care providers while Robert was fully engaged with overseeing the building of the freezing works on the island. This venture, which

he had conceived and campaigned for, was dear to his heart. Always the visionary, he had to deal with the problems of implementation, such as incompetent workmen sent out from England to construct the works. He had to persuade his pastoralist neighbours to part

with some of their cash to buy shares in the venture, and also had to oversee the management of his own property over two hundred miles

out west by making trips, on the rough tracks he and other settlers

had hacked through the bush years earlier, when he could afford the time.

Life on Poole Island, near the port town of Bowen (Port Denison

it had been called when Christison first arrived there nineteen years earlier) was busy. Men worked on the construction, while politicians and pastoralists came to consult with Christison on the progress of

the works. There was much for a little girl to see and hear on morning

walks with Mama or Granny. Wetlands full of croaking frogs, water birds rising from the mangroves, swaying palm trees, red sunsets

and the mountain range across the harbour in the background gave

the Londoners an introduction to the beauty of the tropics, but Mrs Christison was not easily won over. There were also mosquitoes,

flies and heat to contend with. By August she was again pregnant. The humidity of the tropics was trying for a well-dressed London – 33 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

lady coming to pregnancy late in her reproductive life and needing

to maintain appearances. In April 1883 the couple’s second child,

Helen Cameron, given Robert’s mother’s maiden name, was born.

By October, in response to his wife’s avowal that she thought she would die if she spent another summer in the north, Robert rented a

house at Stanthorpe, a thousand miles south, for his wife, mother-inlaw and two little daughters.3 By the time they were packed up and ready for the journey to the cooler air of the Great Dividing Ranges, Mrs Christison was yet again pregnant. Mimi had lived in Adelaide

House on Poole Island at Bowen for twenty-one months. She was a baby and would not remember this special time of living together for

so long with both parents. It would be decades before they were all under the same roof for so long again.

Further south The cool, dry air of Stanthorpe in the granite belt of south-east Queens­land was a relief after the tropical humidity of Poole Island.

The place had been a centre for tin mining but by the time the Christisons arrived tin prices had fallen and farming was more pop­ ular. The climate was suitable for growing fruit and vegetables, and

Italian grape growers were beginning to produce local wine. The

railway had also recently reached Stanthorpe, making it easier for Robert to visit his family when he could find the time.

Back on Poole Island disaster struck: a cyclone destroyed the just

completed freezing works. Four chambers in the freezing house were full of quarters of beef, some of which were to be shipped on board the Fiado the following morning. Christison described the scene: 3 Bennett, Christison, pp. 159-60.

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M imi ’ s childhood

A dashing rain was falling, with a force of wind so powerful that a man could not stand without a fast hold on something stationary … The steam launch, punts and boats were driven from their moorings and disappeared; the jetty, after a great tussle with the wind and sea, next gave way, the massive timbers of which it was built being broken into fragments, were driven on to the pumping machinery which supplied the works with 30,000 gallons of sea water per hour. By noon the wreck was complete and although the damage done has not yet been fully ascertained it cannot come short of ₤12,000. Only to an eyewitness could the full force of this cyclone be realized but a conception of it may be gained when I explain that rocks of tons weight disappeared from their beds, and stones fully a hundred lb in weight were thrown in masses fully 30 feet high. Volumes of water rose 50 feet high, which the wind separated into spray, and which disappeared as mist. Even the sea birds were killed, and trees apparently of fifty years growth were snapped like carrots.4

His work of two-and-a-half years was in tatters. It was a devas­

tating blow to Robert who had invested energy, money and much thought and anxiety through the development phase. His three year

managerial contract was coming to an end. He had had to battle the London-based company, which had sent out a mentally unstable person posing as an engineer who made an attempt on Christison’s

life before suiciding. The company headquarters in London changed its plans with regard to which ships would take the beef, leading

to a loss of markets, and then the cyclone occurred. Life as a cattle

man at Lammermoor, where Christison had a manager in charge of the property, must have beckoned even though the country was in

drought, but his family were at Stanthorpe and his wife was about 4

Robert Christison, Manager, Australian Company Limited, Poole Island, Bowen, ‘The Cyclone at Bowen’, Brisbane Courier, 9 February 1884, p. 5.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

to give birth to their third child in three years. He travelled south, rejoining them, and was overjoyed at the birth of their son, in March

1884. Following Christison family tradition, he was christened Robert Alexander, but would be known as Roy. For Robert, a son

offered the promise of handing on the product of decades of hard work and effort battling droughts to establish a large pastoral prop­ er­t y where he was now specialising in Hereford cattle.

When baby Roy was five months old, Robert persuaded his wife

to visit Lammermoor for the first time. Nervous about the children becoming ill in such a remote location Mrs Christison left them in

the care of her mother at Stanthorpe. Robert’s wife spent a month at Lammermoor in the winter of 1884. She had only been back with her children for a few weeks when a family tragedy occurred. Even at Stanthorpe, where there were doctors (unlike out west at

Lammermoor), serious illness threatened. On a hot day in late Oc­

to­ber a nursemaid gave the children contaminated tank water. Mimi and Helen recovered but seven-month-old ‘darling Roy’ died on 3rd November. Robert travelled by horseback, rail and steamer to be with his distraught wife. 5

Robert realised that Mary needed to be moved from a place of such

sadness and so bought a substantial brick and stone house on one and

a half acres with an established orchard, vineyard, tennis lawn and flower garden at Tenterfield, a hundred miles south of Stan­thorpe, in

New South Wales. Perhaps hoping to create a sense of family con-

tinuity in this new land which his wife was not warming to, Robert

named the house Montgomerie. To help her with the children he suggested to his wife that Wyma, his trusted Dalleburra housekeeper 5

Personal notices, Brisbane Courier, 3 December 1884.

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M imi ’ s childhood

at Lammermoor, come down to help look after them. 6 Mimi was

three and a half when Wyma came into her world as nursemaid and companion to both her and her sister Helen. Wyma was an intelli-

gent woman with an infectious sense of humour, still in touch with her own culture. Having become a loyal and skilled parlourmaid

in Christison’s household, she accepted the role of nursemaid. She

would gather wildflowers for the two little girls and take them to the

highest spot on a walk to ‘peer long and long into the north-west’ and point towards Lammermoor. She sang traditional melodies, introducing Mimi and Helen to her language.7

Meanwhile, Mary Christison engaged with her new local com­

mun­ity. In May 1885, drawing on her earlier careers as actress and artist, she played a pivotal role in the production of a play called

Sweethearts, which was performed in Tenterfield to raise money for

the local church. With her mother and Wyma to look after the

children, Mary threw herself into the local production with energy

and enthusiasm. The Tenterfield Record praised Mrs Christison, ‘the

lady whose name has been in everyone’s mouth for the past week and whose generous efforts in aid of the Presbyterian Church Manse

Fund have been echoed from almost every member of the com­ munity’.8 It effused:

As is well known, this movement [the entertainment for the Manse Fund] has been brought about by the efforts of a lady who has only been a resident amongst us for a comparatively short time, but who, being endowed with exceptional gifts as 6 7 8

‘A New England Home’, Classified advertisements, Brisbane Courier, 7 January 1886; Bennett, Christison, p. 167. M. M. Bennett, ‘Wyma’, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 19 May 1928, p. 9. ‘Presbyterian Manse Fund Concert’, Tenterfield Record, 29 May 1885, cutting in Christison family papers TR1867/238, John Oxley Library, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

an artist, and of accomplishments of wonderful excellence, and possessed of great force of character to originate and carry out her ideas, has kindly and generously placed her services at the disposal of the community, in aid of any local object of a phil­ anthropic and deserving character.9

The Tenterfield Record reviewer described her as a talented, ener­

get­­ic, resourceful woman who painted the sets for the play and per­ formed the main female lead. She was, according to this reviewer, ‘simply beyond all praise’.10 For Mary it was a diversion, but it was

not enough.

In the winter Mrs Christison made a second visit to Lammermoor,

leaving Granny Godsall and Wyma in charge of her daughters so she could be with her husband when Robert’s sister Agnes and brother-

in-law Dr John Beddoe arrived from England on a visit. Robert had

given a third share in his pastoral enterprise to the Beddoes. Tom Christison, the other shareholder, who managed Cameron Downs, and Robert now wished to buy out the Beddoes by paying them a

third of the value of the stock on the runs. Unhappy with the terms offered by Robert, the Beddoes arrived to negotiate and Mary trav­

el­led to Lammermoor to play hostess to her husband’s relatives in what became an acrimonious family dispute between Beddoe and Christison. Terms were finally agreed to, in Robert’s favour, after

tense arbitration meetings between the parties. The rift in the family over this dispute never healed.11

By January 1886 the Tenterfield house, Montgomerie, was on the

market ‘in consequence of the projected departure of the proprietor 9 ‘Presbyterian Manse Fund Concert’. 10 ‘Presbyterian Manse Fund Concert’. 11 Bennett, Christison, pp. 168-68; John Beddoe, Memories of Eighty Years, Arrowsmith, Bristol, 1910, Chapter XI ‘Australasia’.

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M imi ’ s childhood

and family for Europe’. By this time, however Mary Christison was

four months into her fourth pregnancy and though she pined for London the family remained at Montgomerie where a second son,

also named Robert Alexander, and like his deceased brother known in the family as ‘Darling Roy’, was born on 9th June.12

For eighteen months Wyma cared for the children at Tenterfield,

sharing stories from her own world with the little girls. It was through

Wyma that young Mimi first learned about life on her father’s prop­

er­t y, which was Wyma’s tribal land. Wyma’s stories were expand­ed

upon in the happy times when Papa was able to visit his family from a thousand miles away.

‘Queensland, Our Home’; England, ‘Mama’s country’ Mimi’s parents were living in separate worlds. At Lammermoor,

Christison faced drought, debt and the restrictions of the new Land Bill. After his day’s work in the saddle he began charting his thoughts about Queensland. His musings about the future of the state became a twenty-five page pamphlet which he called ‘Queens­

land Our Home: “To be or not to be – that is the question”’. It would be his first publication, coming out in 1886 under his nom-de-plume,

Veritas. He prefaced his views with a statement of intent, describing

himself as a successful man who owed his success entirely to his own energy and a certain amount of pluck, and clarifying that he did not and never had belonged to a political party. After giving

some background on the establishment of the pastoral industry in northern Queensland, Christison argued that political decisions were

being made in the parliament which were based on ignorance and devoid of a realistic vision concerning the future development of 12

Family notices, The Queenslander, 3 July 1886.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

north Queensland society. Most of the essay was concerned with what he asserted were the negative and ill-considered likely effects of the Land Act of 1884. He argued that it showed little consideration

of the expenses facing the new settler in the north, far from Brisbane and the southern pastoral country. Under the legislation, the govern­

ment was able to increase rents on fifteen-year leases after five and again after ten years. He argued that no other capitalist would invest

in conditions that were so uncertain. He also opposed what he described as the ‘selfish and un-English cry of “Queensland for the

white man”’ but his reasoning displayed the prejudices of the era. He proposed that Aboriginal men had thicker skins and that they also

had thicker skulls, making them capable of working in a high tem­

pera­ture without inconvenience. He shared other misconceptions of the times, generalising from his wife’s experience, such as that women

and children do not thrive in very hot climates.Apart from these now discredited notions, the pamphlet shows a thinking man deeply engaged in considering labour and land policies as they impinged on

the pastoralist. Drought and the need for permanent water where evaporation is the greatest enemy had to be addressed.13 Christison

was thinking about the future and pointing to the lack of long-term

planning by the incumbent legislators. He now had a son to think of,

to whom one day he might pass on the property which he had been building up over decades.

To Mary Christison, engaged with looking after a baby as well

as Mimi and Helen, ‘home’ always meant London, although she had made an attempt to become part of the artistic community in Tenterfield.

13 Veritas, Queensland Our Home [pamphlet], Alex Muir and Morcom, Creek Street [Brisbane], 1886.

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M imi ’ s childhood

She still pined for her former life as an artist exhibiting at the

Royal Academy. Since those days she had been pregnant, recovering from birth and lactating over five years of maternity. She was now forty-two. The possibility of a further pregnancy would probably

not have been welcomed. She had given birth to two sons and would now take extremely good care of the surviving one. What a contrast this life in a strange, uncultivated land must have been to that earlier

creative time in London where she was an established artist exhibiting

regularly. She mourned this loss. As well, there was the debilitating Queensland heat, which she could not endure. London beckoned.

In March 1887 Mama, Granny, five-year-old Mimi, three-year-

old Helen, and baby Roy with a nursemaid to care for him boarded

the RMS Parramatta. Robert’s journeys to see his family would now take seven long weeks, instead of a few days.

Mimi’s mother knew London, its people and their ways. She set

up house in West Kensington and gave her two young daughters a taste of the rich cultural experiences that London could offer

them. At Christmas time Mimi and Helen experienced for the

first time the awe and wonder of Westminster Abbey, listening to

the choir singing Christ­mas hymns. The soaring splendour of the Gothic cathedral and the beauti­ful voices would have been a magical

experience for Mimi. The chil­dren were also introduced to theatre,

seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream which Mimi enjoyed. A London childhood for Mimi and Helen meant a governess, and Granny to

take the children for walks while Mama painted or drew. ‘I hope you like England. “Mama’s country”’, Christison wrote wistfully in

a letter to his daughters at this time.14 He made the journey to visit 14

Robert Christison to Helen Christison, 31 August 1887, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 2, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

his family for a few months in 1887 and 1888. The children were overjoyed to see him and to hear his news of Wyma who had decided to return to Lammermoor even though Mrs Christison had invited her to accompany the family to London. Robert told tales of station

life at Lammermoor, which the children knew only through his and Wyma’s stories.

After a year and a half living in West Kensington, Mary took the

children to Paris for four months in the summer of 1889. She enrolled to study painting under Charles Augustus Lasar who had opened a

studio for pupils in Montparnasse.15 Granny Godsall looked after the children while her daughter enjoyed a return to the artistic milieu un­

der this popular and influential teacher. Mary’s painting ‘Give a Dog a Bad Name and hang Him’ was accepted for an exhibition at the Royal Academy. She was back in her own world. Mimi was eight, a

good age to benefit by four months in France practising the language. Mrs Christison, Granny and the children were not long back in

the West Kensington house when there was another shift. In 1889

Mary Christison decided to sail to Australia with Roy, now a four

year old, to spend some time with her husband. Mimi and Helen

went to live with family friends Dr and Mrs Epps for eight months

in Suffolk. Mama and Roy were back in England by March 1890 and soon Mrs Christison was planning the next trip to France. This

time it was to Mers-les-Bains, a seaside resort in Picardy facing the English Channel where they spent four and a half months in the summer of 1890. Mimi and Helen attended French classes with

other little English girls in the mornings, played on the beach and went for country walks in the afternoons.16 15 16

http://footlightnotes.wordpress.com/tag/dion-boucicault/ accessed 1 March 2014. Mary Christison to Robert Christison, 1890, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 2, SLQ.

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M imi ’ s childhood

By now nine years old, Mimi was writing letters about her activ­

ities to her father. She was a happy, biddable child, engaged in her lessons. She wrote of learning to dance the quadrille, and of playing

the mazurka. She tells her father that she likes ‘that piece of poetry that you want me to learn very much’ and that she is learning the fifth chapter of Saint Matthew and reading ‘Aladdin and the Won­ der­ful Lamp’. She asks him to pass on her thanks to Wyma for

the lovely brooch. She includes her early attempts at writing ‘some

non­sensical rhymes’. Altogether her letters give an unremarkable

picture of a bright, happy child, enjoying her lessons and conveying her activities and interests to her distant father.17 There is one point,

however, in her writing, which strikes an odd note. At the time of

writing, Mrs Christison is planning to move from the house they

are renting in West Kensington to Hampstead. Mimi writes to her

father: ‘Mama has let her house and is now getting it ready for the ladies who are going to take it’.18 It is, to Mimi, Mama’s house, not the family home.

In the three and a half years since Mrs Christison returned to

England with the children they had moved from Kensington to the south of France and back, then to Suffolk, and back to France again. In 1890, Mama, Granny and the three children relocated to

Hampstead, which Mary described in a letter to Robert as ‘a nice healthy place, unlike inner London where the air is not good’.19

We might wonder what he made of this comment, living in the clear, uncontaminated air of sparsely populated western Queensland. 17 18 19

Mimi Christison to Robert Christison, 26 March [1890], Christison family papers, SLQ. Mimi Christison to Robert Christison, 1889–1890, Christison family papers, SLQ. Mary Christison to Robert Christison, 25 April 1890, Christison family papers, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Perhaps the repeated movement and change explains Mimi’s talk of

Mama letting her house, rather than ‘our house’ or of Mama ‘taking

a house’ rather than ‘we are moving’. By the time she was nine years old she had lived in ten different places: in the Australian colonies of Queensland and New South Wales, various places in London

and elsewhere in England, and also in France. Perhaps none of the houses she had lived in had ever become home for her. Perhaps also such early experiences made travel an attractive proposition in adult life.

For young Mimi, Queensland – Papa’s country – was a land almost

of the imagination. It was kept alive for her through descriptions

and anecdotes of Queensland life in her father’s letters. He wrote of the long rides mustering when the men slept under the stars in their swags. He told stories such as the one he called ‘The Watch and the

Blacks’, telling his daughters how he dropped his watch in a yard holding 500 cattle. He promised a reward of two sticks of tobacco for its return. ‘The Gins, Fanny and Rosey were there so off they all started in search’, he explained.

The blacks you know have wonderfully quite sharp eyesight. In about half an hour Fanny came running to me saying ‘Massa me findem watch baal cattle kill him, that fellow baal lazy fellow, plenty that fellow tick tick laughing fellow my word’. So I got the watch safe and sound and I rewarded Fanny with the two sticks of tobacco as promised.20

We wonder what a little girl living in London might make of this

but Mimi had been fortunate enough to have Wyma as a nursemaid. 20

Robert Christison to Helen Christison, 31 August 1887, Christison family papers, SLQ. ‘Baal’ is an Aboriginal term expressing disgust or disapproval. Gilbert H. Lawson, A Dictionary of Australian Words and Terms, a project Gutenberg of Australia e-book, Direct Hosiery Company, Balmain, Sydney, 1924.

– 44 –

M imi ’ s childhood

Mimi practised her writing in letters to Papa, showing an awareness of his concerns, ending one letter, ‘I hope you have nearly struck

water, Love and kisses to you, your loving child Mimi Christison’.21

She knew Lammermoor to be Papa’s home, and she had not forgotten

Wyma, who sent her presents and messages and who had left her own

country to come to Tenterfield to look after her and her sister when her mother was grieving for her dead baby. For Wyma, as for the other Dalleburra people who lived and worked at Lammermoor,

home was the land of their ancestors, the land that sustained them. Per­haps the young Mimi already sensed, without being able to artic­ ulate it, their connectedness to place, a linking of land and home, which was in contrast to her life experience.

After the first two years back in England, including a painting

sojourn in France, Mrs Christison told her husband that she was ‘deeply impressed with the responsibilities of Wifehood and Mother­

hood’ and she prayed ‘that God may give me His help to meet and to fulfil those responsibilities’.22 Did this reference to the respon­si­bil­ities of wifehood seem strange to Robert seeing that she had left, taking their children 12,000 miles away from him? There is no evidence to suggest that he did think it strange. Mary told her husband that she

would take responsibility for the children’s education herself rather than keeping a governess and would ‘let outside matters go – so I

am quite unable to attend picture exhibitions or to visit friends’.23 She was very conscious of Robert’s thrift and often showed the need 21 22 23

Mimi Christison to Robert Christison, n.d. but probably 1890. Mary is eight or nine, Christison family papers, SLQ. Mary Christison to Robert Christison, 10 January 1890, Christison family papers, TR1867, John Oxley Library, Brisbane. Mary Christison to Robert Christison, 13 March 1890, Christison family papers, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

to justify her spending. Although Lammermoor was the source of financial support for the family, she constantly urged Robert to come

‘home’ as soon as he could.24 Christison did spend a number of months in 1888 and 1891 in London with his family but he saw his

primary responsibility as providing for them. This meant the man­

age­ment of affairs at Lammermoor had to be a priority. And, despite his family being so far away, he was attached to the pastoral station he had created. Lammermoor was still his home, one he had carved

out of the bush for himself, and for a future family, despite the fact that they had never lived there.

Hobart summers, Lammermoor winters In December 1892, when she was eleven years old, Mimi, with Helen,

Roy and Mrs Christison again boarded a ship bound for Australia. This time, unlike on her first journey when she was a six-month-old

infant, Mimi was alive to all that was going on about her. She was already competent in French, having been taught by her mother and

having spent the summers of 1889 and 1890 in France practising her conversation. She was lively and intelligent and enjoyed learning.

Elizabeth Godsall who had been such a support to her daughter, assist­ing with the children, had died in November 1892, aged seventy-

three. This was perhaps the catalyst for Mrs Christison’s decision to

give the colonies another chance, but she was still adamant about not living at Lammermoor through the long months of summer heat. The shifting and travelling and fractures in the family would continue. The children were older and by now Lammermoor was not

so isolated. The Great Northern Railway now extended to the closest 24

Mary Christison to Robert Christison, January 1,10, 14, 27, Feb 2, 1890, Christison family papers, SLQ.

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M imi ’ s childhood

town of Prairie, thirty miles north of Lammermoor, so winters at Lammermoor were now considered acceptable.

Mrs Christison arrived in Australia with the children in January.

Robert met the ship at Townsville and the whole family then travelled south to Sydney, until the intensity of the Queensland summer sun

had passed. A German governess was engaged to be responsible for the children’s education. The family spent the summer in the cooler climate of Tenterfield.25

The journey in the autumn of 1893 on the Great Northern Rail­

way from the coast at Townsville out west to Prairie would have been

exciting for a twelve year old. They would travel for three days to

reach Lammermoor – such a contrast to the teeming London life

Mimi had left behind. As she peered out the window on the first day as the train chugged up the range she would have seen kangaroos bounding away from the track. On the second day when they had reached the black soil plains she may have seen brolgas dancing in the

distance, or emus rushing away from the sound of the approaching

train and great flocks of parrots. Here the cloudless, intense blue sky

of the inland seemed vast. The train now connected the previously quite isolated communities, bringing crowds to the stations it passed

through, as people came to board, meet passengers or to collect

goods they had ordered. Finally the family arrived at the small town of Prairie where they spent the night in the primitive weatherboard

and tin hotel, before the buggy arrived from Lammermoor the next

day to take them on the final leg, thirty miles south on the dusty, potholed tracks to her father’s property. It had been thirteen years since he had married Mary, and now, finally, and for the first time, Robert welcomed their children to his home.

25 Bennett, Christison, p. 207; Brisbane Courier, 16 February 1893, p. 4.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

From the age of twelve until she was seventeen, Lammermoor was

Mimi’s winter home. When later writing the biography of her father,

she recalled that for her and her siblings station life was ‘Paradise, with horses to ride, and hounds to hunt, and blacks and stockmen to spoil them’. This description is a strange mix of traditional English

gentry life, with horses and hounds, and of British colonialism, with

devoted black servants. Sundays, Mimi recalled, was the children’s favourite day of the week, for there were no lessons, ‘and they trailed off on a “walkabout” with Fraulein, the governess, and the blacks and

the dogs, along the Prairie road as far as a sandy hollow, which they called Sunday Creek’.26

As she grew older Mimi became interested in the material culture

of the Dalleburra people. Wyma might leave a quartz knife, or a headband or a grass necklace on her dressing table and Mimi would question her about them. Wyma would happily explain the processes involved in the manufacture of these items.

At night she would watch the moon rise ‘like a bushfire behind

the great trees and the shadowy winding creek’, as she sat outside

listening to the adults talk of cattle and low prices.27 Discussions about ‘the Blacks’ were no longer urgent though they may have dis­

cussed the new government Bill, to ‘make provision for the better Protection and Care of the Aboriginal and Half-caste Inhabitants of

the Colony’.28 The Dalleburra and neighbouring tribes had lost their land and their way of life, though at stations such as Lammermoor

and Natal Downs where Aboriginal workers were employed, they 26 Bennett, Christison, p. 207. 27 Bennett, Christison, p. 257. 28 The full title of this Act, assented to in 1897, is An Act to make provision for the better Protection and Care of the Aboriginal and Half-caste Inhabitants of the Colony, and to make more effectual Provision for Restricting the Sale and Distribution of Opium.

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M imi ’ s childhood

were at least still in their own country and were able to hunt and maintain some customary practices. At Lammermoor, adaptation to

the now dominant culture was evidenced in some station hands con­ vert­ing to Christianity and requesting marriage within the Anglican

church when Bishop Stanton, the first bishop of North Queens­land and friend of Christison’s, travelled out west in 1881.

For adolescent Mimi, not yet aware of the political realities under­

lying her family’s large and productive cattle station, Aboriginal

people belonged to one of two categories: they were either the people who worked for her father such as Wyma and Barney, or they were

‘blackfellows’. By the 1890s the brutal conflicts between the Aborig­

inal occupants and the squatting pioneers in north-west Queensland were over.

The Dalleburra who worked at Lammermoor had been provided

with sanctuary from the violent, often indiscriminate responses of the

Native Police. As ‘station blacks’ they were protected by being given a role in a world which had displaced their own. Mimi saw Wyma and

the Aboriginal stockmen as a familiar part of Lammermoor, a part of the rich diversity, which included a Cingalese cook, Pacific islander men known as Kanakas and other men who came from Ireland, Scotland or England.

The other category, the ‘blackfellows’ as Mimi called them, were

commonly described at the time as ‘vagrant blacks’. They were peo­

ple who had lost their hunting grounds to pastoralism and had not

attached themselves to a station on their traditional lands. They wandered over the land and were prey to manipulation by white men who traded alcohol and Chinese men who offered opium.

In September 1893, when the temperature rose, Mrs Christison

packed up the household and she and the children moved to Hobart, – 49 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

which held particular attractions for her. As the second oldest Aus­

tralian city it was further advanced in the development of cultural institutions than was Brisbane. A lively art scene was developing and Mary Christison became involved both as an exhibitor and as a judge

of the local art show. She contributed a series of articles to The Mercury

critiquing the work displayed at a major exhibition held in 1894.29 The other advantage of Hobart was its cool climate and she could paint outdoors near the springs and fern gullies. For the next three

years summers were spent in Hobart and winters at Lammermoor. Hobart was so much to Mrs Christison’s liking that the family

stayed there from October 1896 until May 1898 with Robert visiting, especially at Christmas. Here the children were taught by James Hebbelthwaite, an English clergyman and teacher who had come to

Hobart for health reasons. Education was in the classics, French and German, history and geography, painting, English literature, music and mathematics.30

It was an education that encouraged self-belief and confidence. For

an adolescent girl, however, moving from Hobart to Lammermoor, and aware of London as the next destination, socialising and devel­op­

ing friendships would have been difficult. Mimi knew the daughters and sons of her father’s squatter neighbours, such as Robert Gray’s

family, fifty miles to the north, and socialised with them when she was at Lammermoor. But the movement away every summer, and staying in Hobart for eighteen months from 1896, meant that her social connections were regularly interrupted. 29 30

Mary Christison, ‘English Pictures at the Exhibition’, The Mercury, 23 November, 1 December, 15 December, 1896. Helen Roberts, ‘Errors and Omissions’, a critique of Percival Serle’s entry on Christison in the Dictionary of Australian Biography which is largely based on Christison of Lammermoor. Australian Dictionary of Biography files, ANU archives, Canberra.

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M imi ’ s childhood

As was often the case with upper-class girls in the Victorian era,

Mimi had no experience of school, being home tutored by her mother, taught by a governess and then by James Hebblethwaite. Mary became

art tutor to her daughters. When Mimi was fifteen her father paid for brushes and other art materials ‘got through Mama’s fore­sight of your actual requirements to study your profession’.31 A young English lady’s education was in the arts, languages and literature. Social education for young women was limited to the art of conversation

and the development of ladylike manners. As young upper-middle-

class women the expectation was that they would marry and that their future would be in the domestic sphere.

Hobart was the town where Mimi spent most of her adolescence

but she never referred to it in her writings. The five memorable

winters which she spent at Lammermoor between the ages of twelve

and seventeen expanded in her imagination to become the place where she grew up. While the Hobart residences changed, Lammermoor was constant. It included Wyma who had looked after her when she

lived in Tenterfield as well as her loved father. It was the place of

stories about the Dalleburra workers and the cattle and the droughts. She was never there long enough or through the intense long summer to see it in any way but through rose-coloured glasses.

A similar process was underway with regard to her response to her

father. He was the attractive, loving visitor who came to see them for Christmas holidays in Hobart and who welcomed them back to Queensland in winter. Viewing her childhood through the veil

of nostalgia perhaps prevented a cooler assessment when she later 31

Robert Christison to Mimi and Helen (Lily), 24 October 1896, Christison family papers, TR 1867/22, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

came to write her father’s biography. Winter interludes, rather than experi­en­cing the full seasonal cycle, and her youth meant that she was unaware of the stresses and changes taking place in western

Queens­land society as parliament, finally forced to recognise the de-

structive effect of colonisation on the original societies, debated the

Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Bill. Lammermoor offered a temporary escape from the preparation for

young ladyhood, which would have been pre-eminent in Hobart. Lammermoor, the home where her father had lived for decades and

where Wyma’s people had lived for far longer, could show her another way of understanding the world.

An incident at Lammermoor By the time Mrs Christison and children returned to Lammermoor for the winter of 1898 it must have seemed an age to Mimi since she had last been there a year and a half ago. She was now, at almost

seventeen, on the brink of womanhood. Helen was fifteen and Roy

was now at an age to attend school, such socialisation being seen as necessary for boys who, unlike their sisters, would have a future in the world. Mary Christison had decided that it was time to return to London. Lammermoor offered a freedom that Mimi may have

sensed would not continue for her. She rode over the property on her own horse. She listened to Wyma’s description of how to make

‘poorrbooroo’, the necklace cut from the freshwater reed, and ‘chairrbo’,

a net band whitened with a paste and worn tied around the forehead. She learned many Dalleburra names such as ‘tangga kamboona’, the

blood­wood tree, and ‘tangga woombooroo’, the gum of the white­ wood tree, and continued to ask Wyma ques­tions about what things – 52 –

M imi ’ s childhood

were called, about cultural practices and about her rich and extensive knowledge of the natural world.32

If Mimi had been living at Lammermoor all through 1897 and

into 1898 instead of being in Tasmania she may have gleaned, through the north Queensland press, something of the response to

the passage of the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the sale of Opium Act. Finally, with reports tabled by Archibald Meston and

William Parry-Okeden, the Queensland Parliament took legis­lative

action to ‘make Provision for the better Protection and Care of the

Aboriginal and Half-caste Inhabitants of the Colony, and to make more effectual Provision for Restricting the Sale and Distrib­ution of Opium’.33 Archibald Meston had been commissioned by Home

Secretary Horace Tozer to travel the colony and make a full assess-

ment of Aboriginal conditions. His report was debated, with Police Commissioner William Parry-Okeden taking issue with Meston’s

recommendation that the Native Police force be abolished. The two men did agree, however, on the injury wrought among the Abor­ig­in­

al population by the opium habit. The Act allowed for the removal of Aboriginal people to reserves, and the establishment of a permit system to regulate employment of Aboriginal workers. Both moves

were debated, with one critic from the far west describing the regulation of employment as ‘simply a farce in that it would prevent white townspeople from employing Aboriginal people to do odd jobs such

as cutting wood, thus leading to more social distress’.34 The world 32 33 34

Bennett, ‘Wyma’. The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, Queensland, 16 December 1897. Verax, ‘The Aboriginals Protection Act of 1897’, The Queenslander, 22 October 1898.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

outside Lammermoor, however, forced itself in to the Christison sanctuary.

In July a little toddler, about three years old and in a filthy con­

dition, came begging for food at the Lammermoor kitchen door.

Mrs Christison fed her, saying that she was so light that at first

she mistook her for a white child. Maggie, whom Mrs Christison

described as an Aboriginal ‘opium drunkard’, was with the child as the child’s mother, Judy, was in Hughenden Hospital. When Judy

was discharged from hospital she came to Lammermoor. She told

Mrs Christison that her daughter’s name was Jane Gordon and that she was born at Yarrow Mere Station, which was managed by a Mr

Gordon. Mary enquired of a stockman employed by her husband, Robert, who confirmed these details.35

In October, knowing that she would be returning to England

the following month, Mrs Christison wrote to Alexander Douglas, Senior Inspector of Police and a Protector of Aboriginals. Under

the regulations of the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act she could apply for a permit to employ Jane de­

spite her being a small child. In November she received permission

from Douglas to employ three-year-old Jane for a period of twelve

months. Douglas had passed the permit on to the Commissioner of Police who added a sentence giving permission ‘to take this half caste female out of the Colony’.36 While there was a trade in buying

and selling Aboriginal child workers at this time, there is nothing to suggest that Mary Christison intended to use this little girl as 35 36

Mary Christison to Mr Gordon, Manager Yarrow Mere Station, 22 June 1900, item ID 17983, Microfilm Z1613, Queensland State Archives (hereafter QSA), Brisbane. Permit No. 610, COL/145 00/4806, Microfilm Z1613, QSA.

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M imi ’ s childhood

a servant. It may be that gaining a permit to employ a child was, under the Act, the easiest way to provide a home for a child in need.37 Mary Christison stated that her intention was to educate Jane and bring her up as an English child.38 The Aboriginal Protec­

tion and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act had only just come into operation, making the Queensland Government responsible for

‘aboriginal and half-caste inhabitants’. Mrs Christison argued that

‘the gentleman who sent this form probably concluded that it would

be better for the child to be carefully and religiously trained by an English lady than that she should be left to drift about in opium camps, or offered for sale in Hughenden’ as she had been, according to Mary Christison, by her then step-father for one pound.39

Within the family, Jane Gordon, pale skinned but with an

Aborig­in­al mother and ‘rescued’ from an opium camp, would have unsettled Mimi’s assumptions about the separate categories: vagrant

black­fellows who could be abused and loyal servants such as Wyma who helped her learn about the Dalleburra world. Mimi later re­ called that as a girl she used to abuse ‘blackfellows’ to Wyma, ap­

parently unconscious that Wyma was black. Wyma would just beam indulgently.40

As she said goodbye to Wyma, Rosey, Kyra, and the other Dalle­

burra station people as well as the white stockmen on the property, Mimi most likely realised that this was the end of the carefree

times of childhood in the paradise that had been Lammermoor. She 37 38 39 40

Shirleene Robinson, Something Like Slavery? Queensland Aboriginal Child Workers, 1842–1945, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2008. Mary Christison to Mr Gordon, Manager, Yarrow Mere Station, COL/145 00/4806, Microfilm Z1613, QSA Mary Christison to Horace Tozer, 18 July 1900, Microfilm Z1613, QSA. Bennett, ‘Wyma,’ p. 9.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

was going to England, Mama’s country, which would also become

hers, as she became a young English lady. Her future lay not on the property her father had carved out from the hunting grounds of the

Dalle­burra and made into his home, but in London society where

she would benefit from his financial success. As she did the rounds saying good­bye to the station hands, black and white, of whom she had become fond, she knew she was losing her father as a part of

her life as well as Wyma and the other Dalleburra people on the station. The Lammermoor world was etched into her memory and

her experiences there would set her apart from her English peers who would never comprehend this other place that was so meaningful to her.

A peripatetic childhood, a mother who was always there, who

had to educate and discipline the growing child, and a father who it was always wonderful to see, after months or years of separation, had shaped her. Accordingly her education prepared her to be an English lady, but she had also been introduced to the world of Lam­

mermoor and the Dalleburra people who worked for her father. By the time she entered the Royal Academy of Arts as a student when

she was twenty-one, she had lived together with her father and mother and siblings for a total of only eight years, mostly in periods

of between three and five months. The rest of the time she was with her mother and sister and brother. Lammermoor, of the five

magical winters, peopled by folk so different to the class-conscious Londoners, expanded in her imagination to become the place where she grew up.

The Christisons were going home, with a new member of the

family, little Jane Gordon, to remind them of where they had come

– 56 –

M imi ’ s childhood

from. Jane had no choice as to where her future home might be, nor

did her mother or the other family members she had left behind. Mimi’s future was as an art student in London. As a seventeen year old she would also have had little choice in the matter.

– 57 –

Map 3: England and southern Scotland

Author to Activist

Map 4: Central and South Australia

Cha pte r 3

M I M I CH R I S T I S ON Art student and young English lady My sister and I were presented at Buckingham Palace night court to King George and Queen Mary and had the honour of being commended to a State Ball … We lived in great luxury prior to World War I. Butler, footman, chauffeur, my sister had her own ladies’ maid and we had a fashionable life of people of high social standing. Helen Cameron Roberts to Rev. F. H. Griffiths, 21 November 1961

The month-long ship voyage back to England in 1898–99 would have been one which Mimi and her sister Helen never forgot. The family was bringing with them three-year-old Jane Gordon, whom Mrs Christison had ‘rescued’ as she described it. Although it was not

formalised as such, Mrs Christison had effectively adopted Jane.1 This pretty, fair-skinned little girl was the centre of attention for this

family during their journey to England. Mimi and Helen were very

much engaged in the socialisation project, teaching Jane her English manners, her pleases and thank-yous, dressing her in pretty, clean 1

Mary Christison to Mr Gordon, 22 June 1900, item ID 17983, Microfilm Z1613, QSA.

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

dresses such as she had never had in her earlier life.2 No doubt both

girls bonded with the pretty and adaptable little girl who was also a

reminder of the social devastation accompanying alcohol and opium

abuse for the fringe-dwelling, displaced Aboriginal people of northwestern Queensland who were not employed on cattle stations such

as Lammermoor. The case of Jane blurred the boundaries in Mimi’s

mind. Jane was a ‘half-caste’ and Mimi and Helen had both absorbed their father’s negative stereotype of people of mixed descent being in­ ferior to both races. Jane, however, was being offered a more hopeful future. Unlike Wyma who, while intelligent, had had a very limited education in the white man’s world, Jane, a member of the generation

after first contact and carrying both Anglo and Aboriginal genes, would be offered an English education so valued by the Christisons.

London Hampstead – from two Anglo-Saxon words ‘ham’ and ‘stede’ which together meant homestead – became the family’s next abode. For Mrs Christison it was a much longed-for homecoming. The conver­ sation between her and Robert was underway for Robert to sell

Lammermoor and the children were being prepared for their life as young English gentry. In place of the lowing of cattle and the nearest

neighbours fifty miles away, young Mimi was now in easy reach, by train, of London four miles to the south. Hampstead was favoured

by the intelligentsia – writers, composers, artists and actors – who formed her mother’s cultural milieu.

Mimi was spending time developing her drawing and painting

skills with a view to applying for entry to the Royal Academy of 2

Mary Christison to Mr Gordon, 22 June 1900, item ID 17983, Microfilm Z1613, QSA.

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M imi C hristison

Arts, when illness struck. Unexplained headaches and blurred vision interrupted these drawing and painting ambitions. For two years her

mother took her to specialist doctors and oculists trying to find a cause

and treatment for persistent headaches and blurred vision. Her father

wrote regularly with anxious advice about second, third and fourth

opinions while her mother consulted with neurologists and followed various suggestions which they offered. Christison urged his daughter to rest and forbade her to strain her eyes by writing to him.3

Mimi’s illness coincided with and possibly influenced her mother’s

decision at the end of winter 1900 to relinquish Jane whom she had ‘rescued’ so enthusiastically two years earlier. The family, including Robert, had spent 1899 together at Hampstead. The child had been

christened Jane Gordon because her mother, Judy, had told Mrs

Christison that she was born on Yarrow Mere Station which was

managed by a Mr Gordon and that her father had given her this name. This story was confirmed, according to Mary Christison, by Sharman, a stockman employed by Robert Christison.4 The family

enjoyed a summer holiday together in Robert’s beloved Scotland, and, as always, he used the opportunity of being in England to purchase stock, this time Hereford bulls to improve his Lammermoor herd. Did the parents discuss Jane’s future during this year? We do not know but it would seem likely.

By May 1900 when Robert was back in Australia their corre­spon­

dence displays a decision to end the fostering arrangement which 3 4

Letters from Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 31 May 1900 – 16 June 1901, Christison family papers, TR 1867, SLQ. Mary Christison to Horace Tozer, 19 July 1900, Mary Christison to Mr Gordon, 22 June 1900, COL/145 00/14806, microfilm frame nos 64–80, QSA. Readers may wonder if Robert Christison could have been the father of Jane. This is highly unlikely as he was in Hobart with his family during the summer of 1895 when Jane would most likely have been conceived.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Mary Christison had initiated. According to Mrs Christison in the

winter of 1900 Jane had had a severe attack of bronchitis. Mrs Chris­ tison reported that her doctor said that Jane could not live through another winter in England, and that she should go back to her own

country ‘on account of the extreme sensitiveness of her lungs to cold and damp’.5 Reading the correspondence between the parents

over Jane’s future, however, leads us to question this explanation for sending Jane back to Australia. Letters from Robert Christison to his wife indicate that Mary Christison was at different times trying to get Jane into an English and then a Canadian ‘Home’; presumably

these were institutions.6 Robert urged Mary to free herself from both responsibility and cost, as it seemed that the Canadian Home would require continuance payments for her upkeep. He wrote, ‘you know dearie that whatever you do in the matter I will help you’

but this is after he has asserted ‘it is the Government’s duty to take care of her’ and had asked rhetorically ‘why should you and I work

and economise for such a purpose’? These letters suggest that Jane’s bronchitis and her consequent need for a warmer climate were not

the main factors.7 Robert later wrote to his daughter Helen, ‘I hope

that Jane has been sent away, she will be indeed a good riddance’,

and later, more directly to his wife, he wrote, ‘I trust that Jane has disappeared for good’, making his own position quite clear.8 5 6 7 8

Mary Christison to Mr Gordon, Yarrow Mere Station, 22 June 1900; Mary Christison to Alex Douglas, Protector of Aborigines, 15 June 1900, item ID 17983, Microfilm Z1613, QSA. Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 28, 31 May 1900, Christison family papers, TR1867, items 32, 35, SLQ. Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 31 May 1900, Christison family papers and Lammermoor Station records, series 2, TR 1867, SLQ. Robert Christison to Helen Christison, 26 June 1900; Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 13 July 1900, Christison family papers and Lammermoor Station records, series 2, TR 1867, SLQ.

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With the stress of their elder daughter’s ongoing strange, un­ex­

plained illness, perhaps both parents withdrew from an initial worthy

act of charity. The ties of blood may have been a contributing factor.

Robert wrote constantly to his wife with suggestions about further possible medical specialists who might be consulted regarding Mimi’s illness. Perhaps Jane’s needs were sacrificed as Robert and Mary rationalised that she was better off back in a warmer climate where

the government would fulfil its duty. Later Mimi would describe her mother as ‘impulsive’. Perhaps the adoption of Jane was an example

of her impulsivity. It may have taken some time for Mrs Christison,

who was in her fifties when she arranged to take Jane, to realise the full implications of raising another child. We know too that Robert

Christison had sent some Aboriginal men from Lammermoor to

England for an education in 1881 and as nothing more was heard of this we can probably assume that the venture had not been suc­ cess­ful. Perhaps this could have influenced Robert in his approach

to the fostering of Jane.9 Or perhaps his hostility towards Jane was

yet another example of his negativity towards people of mixed

descent, a prejudice that he passed on to his daughters. Was it an uncomfortable reminder of the negligence of white men in rejecting responsibility for the children born of their sexual encounters with Aboriginal women?

After making the travel arrangements for Jane to return to Queens­

land, Mrs Christison made an eleventh hour attempt to persuade

the man whom she believed to be Jane’s father to take responsibility for her:

I am sending you a photograph of her so that you can see what a very handsome child she has grown. She is remarkably clever 9 Bennett, Christison, p. 169; W. Chatfield, Port Denison Times, 1 March 1881.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

and attractive, and as my young daughters and I have taken a great deal of trouble to teach her clean habits and good manners, she is now a very nice child, fit for a really good school where she would be well brought up and educated. She made great progress at a school I sent her to, for she loves lessons and is wonderfully quick to learn – so much so that I believe her to be capable of being very highly educated.

She sent this letter to Thomas Gordon, Manager, Yarrow Mere

Station. Perhaps not believing that her words would be persuasive Mary Christison added moralistically:

Whoever her father may be, he will henceforth be morally re­ spon­sible for her conduct, whether he accepts the responsibility or not, and if he neglects this responsibility he may be quite sure that any evil she may afterwards commit, through his neglect of his duty to her, will follow him through all Eternity.10

Was this projection? We do not know if Mrs Christison felt guilt

for abandoning the child she had ‘rescued’, but a decision had been made despite Jane being ‘a very nice child’ who was ‘quick to learn’. It

is likely that Mr Gordon never received this letter as there is evidence that Thomas Gordon ‘threw up the management of Yarrowmere

Station’ to enlist to fight in the Boer War. Perhaps sending it assuaged

Mrs Christison’s sense of guilt over her key part in Jane’s second huge dislocation.11

In June, while Mrs Christison was still negotiating Jane’s future,

she arranged for her daughters to be confirmed in their Anglican faith. Confirmation, the ritual affirming of a believer’s faith, usually took place when churchgoers were younger than nineteen. Perhaps 10 11

Mary Christison to Mr Gordon, 22 June 1900, item ID 17983, Microfilm Z1613, QSA. The North Queensland Register, 15 January 1900, p. 28.

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Mary Christison had deferred this step in her daughters’ religious life

because she wished the ceremony to take place in London. Mimi was at an age when her English peers were ‘coming out’ but Lammermoor

had not yet been sold. Robert was battling drought, making a dowry impossible at this time.

He wrote wistfully to his wife imagining his daughters in their

white, virginal confirmation dresses.12 Illness, confirmation in a relig­

ion which preached charity and the abandonment of five-year-old

Jane coincided. There is no evidence of Mimi’s response to these events at the time, but her later total silence about this time in her life is telling.

On 4 August 1900 Jane was put on The Duke of Sutherland, under

the care of a stewardess. The little girl who had been a member of the family for two years was cast off. We do know from Mary

Christison’s correspondence that she was discussing the matter of Jane’s future with her daughters, Mimi and Helen, but we don’t

know how Mimi, battling mysterious headaches and blurred vision, responded to this decision at the time.13 There was a family silence

about Jane after 1900. The abortive adoption of Jane was not passed

down in the family story as so many other incidents were. Nor was there any clear evidence that any member of the Christison family checked with authorities to see what had become of the little girl who was judged ‘capable of being very highly educated’. Many years

later, when she was deeply engaged at Mount Margaret Mission in Western Australia in teaching little girls with similar sad stories of 12 13

Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 26 June, 1900, Christison family papers, series 2, TR1867, SLQ. Mary Christison to Horace Tozer, 18 July 1900, COL/145 00/14806, microfilm frame nos 64–80, QSA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

abandonment by their white fathers, Mary Bennett did not refer to Jane. And she chose not to mention anything about Jane in Christison

of Lammermoor.

Art student at the Royal Academy By 1903 Mimi had recovered from her as yet undiagnosed illness

and, at twenty-two years of age, was accepted as a probationary

student at the Royal Academy of Arts. Her mother had been a student thirty years before and had exhibited with the Academy just a decade earlier. Mimi’s candidature was confirmed after six months and she

studied painting and drawing for the next five years. She appears

to have been a conscientious, even enthusiastic student, taking extra lessons, often attending painting classes by day and drawing classes

in the evening, but she was not an award- or prize-winning student.14 When she enrolled in 1903 it was only forty years since the Academy

had allowed female students, but by this time there were twice as many women as men. The classes in painting and drawing were

gender segregated. After much agitation, in the years before she enrolled, women had been allowed to draw the semi-draped male

form. This was an advance on an earlier era when the male form had

to be fully draped for the women to draw, and explains the perceived need for gender-segregated classes.15 For male students there was no such corresponding restriction.

Attendance at the Academy provided Mary with her first sustained

opportunity to socialise with young men of her class. Activities between male and female students took the form of student-initiated 14 15

Register of attendance, Royal Academy of Arts Archives, London.

Sidney C. Hutchison, The History of the Royal Academy, 2nd edn, Robert Royce Ltd, London, 1986.

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clubs, dances and picnics as well as attendances at lectures given by eminent visiting artists. We do not know about Mimi’s social life or experience with men through these years, but, in the biography

of her father, she later wrote scathingly about her male fellow art students as a group, depicting them as shallow and affected fops. Her experience growing up in Queensland, New South Wales,

Tasmania and London gave her a perspective which was wider than that of her upper-middle-class London peers and perhaps contributed to this assessment. Memories of Lammermoor, a world so outside the experience of her fellow students, produced a gulf between her and

these young Englishmen who appeared so confident in their narrow, comfortable world.16

In her first year of study news came of her strong, resilient father

succumbing to serious illness. Distant from his family in northwestern Queensland, Robert was unable to write for a time. He was

diagnosed with diabetes and began a regime of regular urine testing of his sugar intake and a careful diet. Insulin was still not being used to treat the disorder at this time, so diet was the only way to manage

the condition. Robert’s father had also succumbed, in his later years,

to what was earlier known as Bright’s disease, and had gone blind. This was most likely what we now know as late onset type-one

diabetes. The mysterious illness which had delayed Mimi’s entry to the Royal Academy would later also be diagnosed as diabetes.

Mimi studied at the Royal Academy until 1908. When a former

Queensland neighbour had suggested that Mimi or Helen should go to Australia to help their ailing father, they had both rejected

this idea with a self-important: ‘I with my Art!’ And yet two years 16 Hutchison, Royal Academy; Bennett, Christison, p. 258.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

after she had completed the course she wrote about it in utterly disparaging terms when a friend commented on how interesting it must have been.

What exactly had she learnt in the five years’ course? She remembered a ranting voice, a student in the men’s room, declaiming, ‘My God-d, how good-d it is to see!’ briskly, ‘whatfun-it-is-to see!’ and sometimes a crash when all the easels were knocked over, which brought the curator down from his room: the women co-operated in a mass sneeze.17

Unlike her mother who earned a livelihood from her art, Mimi did

not continue painting. Her answer to her inquiring friend suggests

that the idea of her attending the Royal Academy did not come from her passionate desire to be an artist. Rather it most likely came from

her mother and was endorsed by her father who considered painting an occupation suitable for a young lady. Mary probably had few choices in her life at this time.

In the year that Mary completed her formal study at the Royal

Academy, her father, still unwell, was with his family in their rented Hampstead Heath house. Negotiations to sell Lammermoor were

underway and he was exploring the property market in England. Burwell Park, a splendid estate in the tiny Burwell village in the East Lincolnshire wolds, caught his attention. It was not too far from his beloved Scotland. Robert arranged to purchase the property, which included a beautiful house, where he could reunite with his wife and

children without the constant journeying back to Australia. The five members of the Christison family enjoyed their first Christmas together in 1909 in Burwell Hall. Finally there was a family home they could all share.

17 Bennett, Christison, p. 258.

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Goodbye to Lammermoor Accompanied by his elder daughter, a frail Robert Christison made

his final journey from England to Lammermoor in May 1910. It was his twentieth sea crossing in a lifetime of journeys to be with his distant family. For the father it was a painful, emotional parting from

the pastoral station he had created and the people who worked it. For Mimi, the visit was a return to a place of happy childhood memories. She met Wyma, the Aboriginal woman who had looked after her

when she was three at Tenterfield, and whom she got to know when

she went to Lammermoor as a teenager. And most significantly, on this journey she met the man whom she would later marry.

It was eleven years since she was last at Lammermoor as a young

person on the verge of adulthood. The journey out took over a month and the time spent with Robert in Melbourne, Sydney and north-

western Queensland provided father and adult daughter with the opportunity for sustained communication. Twelve years earlier Mimi had been on a ship with her mother and siblings and little Jane

Gordon, who, by now, would be fifteen years old, just two years younger that Mimi was at the time of that earlier voyage. Being back

on board ship would most likely have stimulated Mimi’s memories of this time with the sweet little girl who was learning new ways.

As first class passengers Robert and Mimi were invited to dine with

Commander Charles Douglas Bennett, the Master of the Macedonia

on which they were travelling. Charles had entered service with the

Peninsular and Orient Steamship Navigation Company (P&O) as a second officer in 1883, two years after Mimi was born.18 While 18

Peninsula and Orient Archives, P & O 75/6, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.

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his work was predominantly with the merchant navy, like many professional sailors at this time Charles also joined the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR), a force set up in 1859 to enable the British Navy to

draw on the expertise of merchant seamen in times of war or threat

of war. He rose through the ranks both in P&O and in the RNR, captaining ships to empire posts in India, Africa and Australia.

Charles was 54 years old when he met Mimi Christison who was,

by now, twenty-eight. He was at the peak of his career, having been awarded the Transport Medal, South Africa, in 1904. The year before

they met, Charles’ service in the RNR had been recognised in the

award of the Reserve Decoration (RD), the RNR’s officers’ award

for distinguished service. He had risen to the rank of Commander.19 The navy had recently established fifty years of age as the compulsory

retirement for officers who had been commissioned as lieutenants after 1896. This condition did not apply to Charles, but he knew

that his days at sea were coming to an end. Charles, like Robert, was a man who was curious about the world, whose ambitions and

intelligence had taken him, through his chosen profession, to ports all over the British Empire as well as European holiday destinations for the English such as Marseilles and Brindisi.

For a man whose living came from the land rather than the sea

Robert Christison was extraordinarily well travelled. He had been a passenger on ships crossing the world since his first voyage in 1852, before the Suez Canal had opened to shipping, and had seen the

duration of the journey to Australia halved in that time. He had witnessed the development of steamships and the mass migrations of people from Scotland, Ireland and England. He had visited ports 19

Charles Douglas Bennett, Record of Service, Royal Naval Reserve Records, ADM/340/10, image ref. 31, National Archives, London, United Kingdom.

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in Ceylon where he had hired workers for Lammermoor and Rio de Janeiro where he had studied developments in the cattle industry such as the frozen meat trade.20 Explorers of sea and land, the two

men would have had much to converse about despite Robert being nearly twenty years Charles’ senior.

Though less widely travelled, Mimi, who spoke both French and

German, had spent time in Europe since she was a child. Tall, at­

trac­tive, confident and intelligent, she would have been appeal-

ing to a man such as Bennett. Urbane and sophisticated, Charles Bennett would have been an impressive contrast to Mimi’s male con-

temporaries at the Royal Academy. The Christisons left the ship in

Melbourne. Robert, a noted breeder of thoroughbred horses, had been asked by the Duke of Portland, who owned the famous Carbine,

to begin the negotia­tions offering the horse’s skeleton, when he died,

to the Melbourne Museum.21 The Christisons farewelled Captain Bennett, assuring him of an invitation to visit the family at Burwell Park on their return.22

For Mimi this time with her father in his home of nearly fifty

years was precious. Her writing displays a detailed observation of

the country, love, respect and anxiety about the health of her ailing

father, and a contrasting assessment of the three intersecting social worlds of the great northern pastoral stations. These worlds – of the 20 21

22

Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 9 April 1900, Christison family papers, TR1867/2/333, SLQ. ‘Skeleton of a famous Racehorse’, Kalgoorlie Western Argus, 21 June 1910, p. 33; Carbine was a New Zealand–bred horse who competed in Australia with an outstanding record of 33 wins out of 43 starts. He was purchased by the Duke of Portland in 1895 for 13,000 guineas. Over half of the 65 Melbourne Cup winners from 1914 to 1978, including Phar Lap, were descendants of Carbine. Ross de Bourg, The Australian and New Zealand Thoroughbred, Nelson, West Melbourne, 1910. In October 1911, Charles Bennett was given a ‘Souvenir of Burwell Park’ from ‘the Christisons’. Townsville Municipal Library, Queensland.

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white bushmen, the Dalleburra workers on Lammermoor station

and the gentlemen-pastoralists such as Henry Coldham, the new

owner, who saw himself and his social class as superior to the other two – are drawn and assessed by Mimi.

She writes with clarity and love of the land, intensely aware of her

father’s pain in parting with it. She describes ‘the peaks and long-

backed sierras and the island spurs that encircle the wide, almost land-locked Bay’ where she began her life in Australia at Bowen in Queensland. She brings to life the rough galvanised iron hotels of

the inland where ‘every sound was heard, and above the clatter of washing up and the knocking of billiard balls a cockatoo asked –

‘Whose yer sweetheart?’, hotels which her mother had so disliked on her first trip to Lammermoor so many years ago.23 She described

the devastation of the drought that her father had endured alone, ‘the

dead trees that still stood up from the silvery grass for miles upon miles, black trunks grotesquely abbreviated, for winds had whipped

away the branches. Mimi was appalled by the sight: ‘“Surely those

trees have not been killed by the drought?” she said, but her father did not answer’.24 She conveys the intensity of her experience of returning to this land:

But how strange to the white woman was this coming back! She walked up the garden path in a dream, and paused by a geranium bush for no apparent reason, seeing not the geranium, but a smother of sandalwood blossom that she had brought back from a ride and stuck in the ground … She glanced at the bookcase and looked for the natural bent and the scars of the sapling supports, which it had been her father’s whim to

23 Bennett, Christison, p. 250. 24 Bennett, Christison, p. 253.

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preserve. ‘Well’, he said, ‘well?’ he appealed – ‘what do you think of the old place?’ But she stared and said nothing.25

Apprehension about her father’s health is ever present as Mimi

comes to realise that he is much weakened by illness and is suffering through this parting with his life’s endeavour. She conveys her father’s stoic response to isolation: ‘Christison fought his fight out alone as he had always had to’. And his sense of duty: ‘A man cannot be

too severely condemned’, he tells his daughter, ‘if he fails to make

provision for his family while he is able, or if he neglects to put his

affairs into such good order that no trouble or litigation can arise after he is gone’.26 She understands his sadness at leaving. They com­

municate often through silence, finding words inadequate for the intensity of their experiences.

Mimi valued the simplicity of her father’s bush home with its

unpretentious hospitality. She writes with affection of conversations under the stars at the end of a hot day when the workers talked bush

talk – of cattle and low prices, of stores and old identities. These conversations stir her memory of similar conversations in her last

winter at Lammermoor when as a seventeen year old she listened to the concerns of the adults.

She describes listening to the Dalleburra people and of Wyma who

spoke of Koonkoolmujja, a creature who lived in the mountains and filled the people with dread. Wyma enacted Koonkoolmujja’s story,

weaving a spell over the listening Dalleburra group until she broke it by rejecting Koonkoolmujja’s existence. Wyma, who had become a Christian when Bishop Stanton, the first bishop of the north-west, 25 Bennett, Christison, p. 254. 26 Bennett, Christison, pp. 264, 244.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

conducted a marriage service for her and Freddy-Kanaka in 1881, successfully negotiated the two cultures. Wyma respected the culture

held by the old people and was aware of the losses that accompanied the people’s shift from their old ways to those of the imported cattle station.

At the Lammermoor dinner table with the new owner, Henry

Coldham, Mimi experienced a sense of alienation from her social class. Robert was unimpressed with the trappings of power and social class, which mattered so much to his wife. Yet here they were

at Lammermoor, having to endure Coldham’s pretentiousness. Mimi

ridi­culed him as a grimacing, shrugging marionette with a startling black moustache. Unlike the conversations which she has observed

between the bush workers and the Dalleburra which she described

with respect and affection, Coldham’s words are shown as affected and facile. The marionette speaks of ‘bridge, golf and the Governor

General’. He refuses to drink tea at dinner: ‘there should always be that difference between him and bushmen’. Mimi parodies his response to the lack of wine:

He squeaked: ‘Reahly, I did not expect in this hopelessly rus­ ticated spot, Veuve Clicquot, or Ruinart, or – or Heidsieck’. Nobody seemed to mind. He looked at the young women. ‘If – evah – you visit the station again, I promise you won’t recognize it; a motah will bring you out from Prairie, and you will find – bettah society!’27

Startled by this grandiose boast, Mimi’s eyes go to her father but

she sees that he has removed himself from the triviality of this talk

and is lost in his own world. She recalls: ‘How profound was the

silence that surged in her ears like a tide, the tide of memories from 27 Bennett, Christison, p. 263.

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which she had exiled herself, memories that for her were silence’. The

trip to Queensland, out of her own society, seems to stimulate her to

evaluate the life she was living in London. So this 29-year-old Mimi,

if we are to accept her memoir of the final visit to Lammermoor, was deeply moved, unsettled by powerful memories. She wrote of being exiled, or rather of exiling herself. She describes these memories as

silence. She reconnects with Lammermoor and its people wordlessly as both she and her father are inarticulate in the face of their emo­tions in parting with this place with its complex history of suffering and of

achievement, of gains and of losses, for her father, for the Dalleburra

people, and also for herself. After two weeks they were again on

board ship for England; for Robert it was his last such journey. They were returning to their other world – English society – and their place in it as gentry in a northern English county.

Burwell Park Back in England, Mimi’s life was at Burwell in Lincolnshire, far from the bustle of London and even farther from the Dalleburra at

Tower Hill Creek on the black soil plains of western Queensland. The Dallebura people, however, lived on in her emotional world when

she thought of Wyma, to whom she wrote regularly. Robert and his wife were now lord and lady of the manor. He was one of four large land holders at Burwell, a tiny village of 163 inhabitants south-east of

Louth, many of whom lived and worked on Christison’s estate. Burwell was an attractive town with a sense of its own medieval roots in its church and the octagonal butter market building erected when it was a medieval market town.

The Christison residence, Burwell Hall, was a stately mansion,

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Edwardian style of the day. The Hall stood proudly in Burwell Park,

200 acres of ash, oak, elm, beech and hawthorn, as well as hazel, alder, willow birch, poplar and sycamore trees. Underfoot in spring­ time were primroses and wood anemones, wild strawberries, ground

ivy and wild arum. The parish church of St Michael’s, a Norman building which dated from the twelfth century, was in need of restor­ ation and in 1911 the cost of this was defrayed by its new parish­ ioner, Robert Christison. How green and lush and rooted in past

tradition as expressed by the medieval buildings Burwell must have seemed to the travellers recently returned from the dry, more ancient

lands of western Queensland where man-made structures seemed an imposition.

At a time when many young women would already have left home

to marry, Mimi, her sister Helen and brother Roy were finally living

permanently with both parents in the family home for the first time

in eleven years. Now, after the stress of the drought, Robert’s illness and the sale of Lammermoor, they took up their responsibilities in the privileged but responsible world of the landed gentry. In their thirty-

roomed imposing residence, the five adults had seven servants to look after them.28 Mimi had her own lady’s maid. Mrs Christison and the Misses Christison performed charitable works, opening the great hall

for Christmas parties for the village children. Punch and Judy shows

were arranged. Mimi sang soprano at concerts for the villagers. Mrs Christison opened a church sale of work by inmates of the aged and

infirm workhouse in Louth. Entertainments on the estate included hunting and fishing and Mrs Christison, Mimi and Roy assembled in the Louth marketplace with other local gentry for the meet of the 28

Census of England and Wales, 1911, National Archives, London.

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Southwold hounds. Roy was active in the local cricket club. A local

naturalists’ group was invited into Burwell Park and entertained by Mrs Christison with ‘courtly grace and generous hospitality’ as she spoke to them of art and artists, and showed them her own art work

adorning the walls of the parlour.29 For a young woman like Mimi

the only socially acceptable way out of this constrained role as the elder daughter in her family’s home was marriage.

The strangest effect of the time lag in this family’s life caused by

the drought which delayed the sale of Lammermoor was the presen­

tation of Mimi and Helen to King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace in March 1913. Young women from the upper

classes would traditionally begin their adult lives at eighteen when

they would put their hair up and their hemlines down and don ele­

gant, expensive ball gowns for presentation to Court at the beginning of the London Season. Once presented they were in the mar-

riage market for eligible young men looking for wives. Mimi and Helen, at thirty-one and twenty-nine respectively, must have felt very

odd, being more than a decade older than the young women just out of childhood who were with them. Mrs Harcourt, the wife of the Right Honourable Lewis Harcourt, Secretary of State for the colonies

in Asquith’s government, presented the two women to the King and Queen. The event was enthusiastically reported by The Queenslander

which followed the fortunes of former residents who had returned

to the Old Country. It remarked on Miss Mary Christison’s ‘charm-

ing presentation gown of chartreuse satin trimmed with silver tissue roses and Renaissance lace and gracefully draped’.30 At a time when a dowry was still a part of the marriage settlement in English society it 29 30

Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser, 1910–1912. ‘Queenslanders at Court’, The Queenslander, 29 March 1913.

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is likely that the delay in the selling of Lammermoor led to Robert’s

daughters being publicly ‘launched’ into Society much later than was customary.

Into this settled Lincolnshire world came the urbane Charles

Bennett, responding to invitations to visit when Mimi and Robert

had left the Macedonia in 1910 in Melbourne. Robert welcomed him

with a photo album of Burwell Park inscribed ‘for auld lang syne’.31

Robert continued his entrepreneurial activities at Burwell. He cut the ash and elm forests for timber, sold bulls, and carved up the estate, selling the cottages to the blacksmith and farm workers who lived in

them, thus bringing to an end the ancient feudal relationships on the

800 acre estate.32 It seems likely that these activities were motiv­ated by a desire to ensure that his wife and children would be well provided

for after his death. Or perhaps it is just that as an entre­pre­neur­ial businessman all his life he continued doing what he knew best. At

least for his daughters, marriage could be on their own terms. After the sale of Lammermoor Mimi and her sister had their own in­come.

Life at Burwell Park for this family, in retrospect, was ominously

calm as the tensions in Europe, which would irrevocably change the

world as they knew it, built up. The family focus was local, although Robert spoke out on some political issues such as for free trade and in opposition to Home Rule. Charles, who was 58, and Mimi, now

32, announced their engagement in January 1914 and planned to marry in September, but news from the Balkans and Alsace affected

their plans. Through 1914 The Times reported the German build-up

of armaments as England and Germany increased spending on their 31 32

Deposits in Townsville Public Library made by Mary Montgomerie Bennett in 1929. Indenture between Robert Christison and Gertrude Julia Watson, 28 March 1912, provided to the author by Fiona, a descendant of Gertrude Julia Watson at Burwell, August 2013.

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naval fleets and shipbuilding boomed. As German nationalism and

tensions in the Balkans made war seem likely, the marriage was re­scheduled. On 4 August Britain declared war on Germany. The

Times reported that the outbreak of war was received in London with

impressive calm and expressions of nationalistic fervor.33 On Tues­day 18 August Charles Douglas Bennett and Mary Montgomerie Chris­ tison married quietly at St Michael’s, Burwell, the parish church

which her father had paid to have restored. Charles had been acting

as Com­mander of the Dock Staff since he was called upon when war was declared. On 1st September he was engaged as Master of the Kaisar-i-Hind, a new P&O ship, which would soon depart for Bombay.34

Did Mimi marry her father? Charles at fifty-eight was closer in age

to Robert than to Mimi who was, upon her marriage, thirty-three.

Like Robert, Charles was an explorer, though of the sea rather than the land. Because his family was in England Robert had crossed the world many times and knew, as did Charles, the trading ports of the

empire such as Ceylon where Robert had offered work to men want­

ing to come to Australia, and Buenos Aires where he had in­vesti­gated his ‘formidable’ sheep industry competitors. Charles’ kindliness was remarked on by a neighbour who described him as ‘a dear man’. This

quality, perhaps above all others, is the one Mary most admired in her father, in his relationships with the Dalleburra people.35 33 34

‘London and the Coming of War’, The Times, 5 August 1914, p. 9. Marriage certificate, Charles Douglas Bennett and Mary Montgomerie Christison, 18 August 1914, General Register Office, England, MXG 136170; Peninsula and Orient Archives, P&O/75/6, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England. 35 Veritas, Queensland Our Home, p. 17; Doris Beckh to Ada Bromham, 26 May 1962, Mary Montgomerie Bennett and Ada Bromham papers, MN2958, ACC 8303A, Battye Library, State Library of Western Australia (hereafter SLWA).

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While her husband was away on active naval duty, Robert’s diabetes

and a pulmonary tubercule, which he had had for seven months, took their toll. He died on 25 October 1915.36

For his wife and children Robert’s death was a great sadness. His

daughter Helen would write years later that his spirit was broken by the war and its effects. ‘The War killed my father – the shock

that there could be a world war, many of his investments were lost

forever – the life went.’37 His obituary in the local Louth and North

Lincolnshire Advertiser was written by an admirer who placed him within that ‘grand old “squattocracy” of Australia. They toiled all day,

and at night when there was a moon, applying grim lessons from adversity; harnessing the elements to their purpose of developing

primeval bush into the Commonwealth of today’.38 Mary Bennett read this tribute to her brave and enterprising father.39

At the funeral, apart from family, there were others paying their

respects, including the High Commissioner for New Zealand, Thomas

McKenzie, and a representative of the Agent-General for Queens­

land, Sir Thomas Robinson. Mary listened to the eulogies which recognised her father’s skills as a horseman, cattle breeder and initiator

of so many new ideas in Queensland, such as establishing sub-artesian bores and contributing to the development of the trade in frozen meat.

She would have valued the respect shown for his ‘brave, true religious spirit’. His personal characteristics, ‘patient industry, business capacity 36 37 38 39

Robert Christison death certificate, 27 October 1915, General Register Office, DYD555165, England. Helen Cameron Roberts to Rev. F. H. Griffiths, 21 November 1961, in the author’s possession. ‘The Late Mr Robert Christison’, Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser, 13 November 1915, p. 3. ‘Funeral of Mr R. Christison’, Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser, 8 November 1915.

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M imi C hristison

and enterprise’ leading to the amassing of a large fortune, were also recognised.40 Perhaps, as she listened, the idea began to take shape that she might attempt his biography.

In November 1915 the Christison family accompanied the body of

Robert back to Scotland to Foulden, his birthplace, where he would be

buried. Charles Bennett was not present as he was still at sea. While it was a time of loss and sadness, Robert’s death was not unexpected.

Mary recalled her anxiety and apprehension during the journey to Queensland and back five years earlier, when she was worried that

he might not make the trip home. Leaving Lammermoor had been a painful parting for him. The people, the work of almost half a

century and the land itself had made this place his home, but he had had to forsake it, for his family were back in England.

The Christisons took their religious responsibilities seriously. When

he was battling the long turn-of-the-century drought he looked forward to selling, telling his wife that it would be ‘intense pleasure

to you and to me to present to Jesus our promised tenth to offer to

God in aid of good works’. He had endowed the Diocese of North Queensland, the Diocese of Carpentaria, the Salvation Army, the Bush Brotherhood, and paid for the land for a church at Prairie, just

north of Lammermoor.41 In England he had contributed a thousand

pounds for the restoration of St Michael’s Burwell parish church.42 40 41

42

‘Funeral of Mr. R. Christison’, 10 November 1915, ‘The Late Mr Robert Christison’, 13 November 1915, Louth and Lincolnshire Advertiser. Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 24 March 1901, Christison family papers TR1867/238, series 2, SLQ ; ‘The Late Mr Robert Christison’, 13 November 1915, Louth and Lincolnshire Advertiser; Alma Bode (comp), ‘Memories of Prairie District Since its Discovery by William Landsborough 1862’, typescript lent to author by the manager of the Prairie Hotel, June 2013. ‘Burwell’, Kelly’s Directory of Lincolnshire, London, 1913. I have found no evidence to support the claim made by Alison Holland in Just Relations, p. 172,

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Robert’s death also changed the dynamic in the Christison family.

Although married, the new Mrs Mary Bennett was still under the

family roof while her husband was on active naval service. Tensions between Mary senior and her elder daughter became strained with­

out Robert’s diplomacy. For Mrs Christison, born out of wedlock to a seamstress mother in the East End, propriety was everything. She had gone to great lengths to see her daughters accepted in English

society. According to Mary Bennett’s niece, Elizabeth Roberts, Mrs Christison expressed her disapproval of Charles’ behavior to her

elder daughter at this time, suggesting that he was still in contact with a former mistress after his marriage. Perhaps Mary resented that

presentation to Court when she was thirty-two and the wasted time

at the Academy of Arts, following in her mother’s footsteps. Unlike her sister Helen, who like their mother seemed to put great store by

the external signs of wealth and position in society, Mary was less

impressed by conventional markers of acceptance. There may have

been deeper resentments of her mother to do with the sending away of Jane and their limited time when growing up at Lammermoor.

Whatever the causes, this criticism of Charles seems to have been the breaking point in the relationship between mother and daughter.43

War continued with English losses in France affecting morale

at home. The Kaisar-i-Hind with Charles at the helm broke the Plymouth to Bombay record on her maiden voyage to Australia in

1916, taking seventeen days, twenty hours and fifty-two minutes.44

43 44

that Robert Christison wished to build a hospital for the Dalleburra, other than Mary Bennett’s assertion to the press when she donated money for the building of a hospital at Mount Margaret which she named the Christison Memorial Hospital. Elizabeth Roberts, pers. comm., 27 August 2008. P&O Heritage website: www.pandosnco.co.uk/Kaisar-I-Hind, accessed October 2013.

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M imi C hristison

On its return voyage the ship was carrying Lord Chelmsford, recently appointed Viceroy of India, and his family, when it was the object of a near miss by a German torpedo. Charles was approaching sixty

and, after getting his ship back into port safely after this close call, he decided to end his working life. The Kaisar-i-Hind would later be taken over by the Royal Navy for troop deployment. Charles retired from P&O in May 1916 and the couple began their life together in Hertfordshire, some distance from Burwell Park.45

45

P&O Heritage Collections, P&O/75/6, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Charles Douglas Bennett, Royal Navy Record of Service, ADM/340/10, image ref. 31, National Archives, London.

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Cha pte r 4

C H R I S T I S O N OF L A M M E R MO OR Romance burdened by reality Why do we neglect the romantic history of our own time, and the deeds of men of our own race, who adventured alone? No race could survive the conditions that the Australian blacks have to suffer – conditions that have exterminated the Tasmanian race and the tribes of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, (where few full bloods can now be found), that are rapidly destroying the tribes of Queensland, and will soon wipe out the thousands still in the Northern Territory and the north of Western Australia. Opening sentences of Chapters 1 and 9, M. M. Bennett, Christison of Lammermoor

Charles and Mary set up house in Charlingleye, a substantial, com­ fort­able home in Great Amwell, Hertfordshire. Through this peace­

ful and verdant village ran the New River which supplied water to Londoners. Here Mary could walk and reflect but she was still in easy distance, by train, to London where she could read Australian

CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

newspapers in the British Library. She was about to begin the

biography of her father, an endeavour which would take the best part of the next decade.

Writing was very much a part of the Christison family experience.

Robert had had a number of essays and pamphlets on the pastoral industry and the future of Queensland published.1 There were of

course the earlier generations of Christison scholars, Robert’s grand­

father, the Professor of Humanities at Edinburgh, and his uncle, physician and toxicologist Sir Robert Christison. More recently, Mrs

Mary Christison had attempted to join the popular genre of those returning from the colonies with memoirs of their battles against

drought and ‘wild blacks’. Despite her manuscript being accom­ panied by her photographs of Lammermoor, she could not attract a

publisher, but Robert’s brother-in-law John Beddoe, who had stayed at Lammermoor in the 1880s and was both a medical practitioner

and an anthropologist, had his Memories of Eighty Years published in 1910. Mary and her sister Helen had collaborated in writing ‘a

natural account of a happy family circle’ when they were in their teens. They sent the manuscript to Manville Fenn, a prolific and popular novelist, but he advised that it would ‘not suit the pockets of London publishers’. Robert encouraged his daughters with a promise to

be their publisher when he had sold Lammermoor if Black­wood, the

next publishing company they were approaching, refused.2 Nothing

came of this early venture but later Helen began a novel using her 1

2

See, for example, Robert Christison, using the non de plume Veritas, Queensland Our Home, Brisbane, 1886; ‘The Queensland Flocks and Herds’, Dalgety’s Review, December 1896; ‘United Australia and Imperial Federation’, Westminster Review, London, September 1888. Robert Christison to Helen Christison, 5 April 1901, Christison family papers, TR1867/163, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

father as the model for the protagonist.3 Surrounded by examples

of family members writing and being published, and hearing the accolades as her father’s friends listed his achievements, writing her father’s biography probably presented itself to Mary as a worthy endeavour which she could take on.

Mary’s desire to have Robert’s work and achievements recognised

was a powerful motivation to write his biography. He was gone, but

he left records – letters, diaries and published works – and there

were those stories that had fired her childhood imagination. A biography would ensure that the world knew and appreciated Robert

Christison’s achievements and the character of the man who was not beaten by the trials which life threw up to him.

A complex of emotions probably underlay Mary’s commitment

to this biographical project. We know that she loved, admired, and respected her father. Also present was her shameful recollection of

not returning to Queensland to help her father when he became

ill in 1904 and was diagnosed with diabetes.4 There may also have

been a resentment of her mother for depriving her of time with her father at Lammermoor by taking the children back to London

in 1887. When they returned to Australia in 1893 it was still not unreservedly to Lammermoor as Mrs Christison would only go to Queensland for the winter months. Mary expressed these negative

emotions by almost writing her mother out of Robert’s life, despite the fact that her parents seemed to share a mutual love and respect 3 Beddoe, Memories of Eighty Years; Robert Christison to Helen Christison, 5 April 1901, Christison family papers TR1867/238, series 2, SLQ. Helen would seek publication for ‘Like the Pelican’ for a number of decades. The manuscript is held in the Society of Authors Archive, vol. CCCLXIX (ff315), British Library. Correspondence with the Society of Authors, 1920–1958, Add MS56791, ff1-78, British Library. 4 Bennett, Christison, p. 243.

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CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

for each other.5 His successes are his alone, while the depiction of his

wife is of a Victorian stereotype of a weak woman with the vapours – far from the real Mrs Mary Christison. After her father’s death Mary’s resentment of her mother’s depriving her of time at Lammer­ moor with her father may have been more deeply felt as she faced the

loss of her father. Christison of Lammermoor reveals something of the

adult Mary’s feelings about her mother. It displays her admiration

of her father’s achievements as she came to realise, in her research journey, his intelligence, bravery and dedication to the pastoral en­

deavour. His contributions to debates about tick management, sub-

artesian bores, cattle breeding and the establishment of the frozen beef trade were legendary.

The biography also tells us about the tortuous journey she began

when she started researching the history in the colonies of the dis­

possession and then exploitation of the Aboriginal people. This expe-

rience most likely led to emotional conflict as she sought to preserve her father’s story as an honourable one while she came to under­stand,

ever more deeply, the cost to the peoples across the continent whose way of life came to an inevitable end.

The mother as absence By the time Mary was deeply engaged in writing the biography of her father, her sister Helen, brother Roy and their widowed mother had left England for Australia. Her mother died in 1922, two years after

leaving England for the country she abhorred when her husband lived

there. Mary’s siblings lived the rest of their lives on the east coast of 5 Bennett, Christison, There are fifteen references to Mrs Mary Christison in the book. All but one are negative.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Australia but it seems that, despite herself living in Australia in the

1930s and the 1950s, Mary did not reply to her sister’s letters and never saw Helen or Roy again.

There was an antipathy between the sisters as adults which was

expressed in both directions. As young women Helen chose writing when Mary chose art but Helen had the galling experience of re­

jection after rejection for her novel ‘Like the Pelican’ and then saw her sister’s Christison of Lammermoor in print.6

In Christison of Lammermoor we first meet Miss Mary Godsall,

who became the second Mrs Christison, when she wrote a letter of condolence to Robert on the occasion of the death of his first wife, her artist friend, Mary Tovey. It is by far the most positive image of her in the whole book.

The beautiful and accomplished woman who had written so kind­ly to Christison appeared unconscious that she was the cause of his traversing the twelve thousand miles from Lam­ mermoor to Chelsea, when he called in the summer of 1880, yet in a few months they were married.7

Mary Godsall was thirty-six when they met. While she was

beau­tiful and stylish, she did not come from a family with money; Robert, a handsome man, seven years her senior, who described

himself on the marriage certificate as a gentleman, offered Mary a financially secure future, even if it was in the colonies. Their letters

display a reciprocal love and respect for each other but the woman who emerges in Christison of Lammermoor is one-dimensional. She

is often ‘ill and depressed’. The heat tried her; she never ceased to 6

Correspondence between Helen Roberts and the British Society of Authors, 1921–1945, MSS56791, British Library. 7 Bennett, Christison, p. 145.

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CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

pine for London; she thought she would die if she spent another

summer in the north of Australia. She was offended by the western Queensland shanty towns with their flimsy weatherboard and tin hotels. The biographer charts Robert’s emotional response: his lone­ liness, the stark reality of a twelve thousand mile journey in order

to see his children and his wife, the shocked realisation of what he had lost.

One of the most vivid pieces of atmospheric writing in the book

is the description of the western Queensland black soil plains as seen through Mrs Christison’s eyes. Robert is eager to introduce his wife to landscapes that he had described as being beautiful. Instead

the new Mrs Christison found ‘monotony, the fierce unmitigated heat, the deathlike stillness’ which ‘combined to induce a sort of

stupor’. Torrens Creek, to Robert, was a fine creek, while his wife

‘thought that Dante would have added another circle to the Inferno if he could have made that journey across the Sandstone Desert to

Torrens Creek’. Bennett builds to a sense of gothic horror when Barney, Robert’s Dalleburra right-hand man, stops the travelling party:

Three starving old women appeared, and Barney stood with bowed head waiting and did not speak or move, for he recog­ nized the remnant of an allied tribe, the unhappy blacks of the Cape River, ‘dispersed’ in the inhospitable Sandstone Desert; the scarecrow wretches began a low sobbing that grew into a wail, wild, despairing, the unavailing crying of a murdered race. In the extremity of grief they stretched their wasted arms to the unregarding heavens that burnt on steadily like the end of the world.8

8 Bennett, Christison, p. 166.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

This was Mrs Mary Christison’s first journey to Lammermoor in

the winter of 1884 when young Mimi was a toddler being looked after

with her sister and baby brother by Granny Godsall at Stanthorpe, in southern Queensland. The biographer contrasts the ‘strange spell of the bush’, which induced the first Mrs Christison to think

Lammermoor was ‘heaven’, with the second Mrs Christison’s view of outback Queensland as ‘another circle of Hell’.9

The unpublished novel ‘Like the Pelican’ by Helen Christison

includes a scene remarkably similar to this, which suggests that

both of Robert’s daughters may have recalled their father’s vivid description of the destructive effect of the discovery of gold on the

Aboriginal people of the Cape River area.10 Prospectors had located payable gold on the Cape River, about a hundred kilometres north-

east of Lammermoor station, in July 1967. By October that year the rush was on with 600 diggers overlanding from Bowen or from

the Peak Downs goldfield in central Queensland. The next year numbers had climbed to 2,500 men, described by a government

official as ‘representing many nationalities, and among them the scum of all the Southern goldfields’. ‘Brutal fights were a daily

occurrence’, he reported.11 The sudden invasion of their lands by

men hungry for quick wealth was devastating for the Aboriginal residents of that area.

Half of the references to Mrs Mary Christison in Christison of

Lammermoor emphasise her negative reactions to Queensland. She 9 Bennett, Christison, pp. 136-37. 10 Helen Roberts describes a scene with some similarities in her novel ‘Like the Pelican’, p. 176. In both Scenes, in answer to inquiries about their kin the old women declaring ‘Bung’, meaning dead. G. C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, ANU Press, 1970, pp. 45-46. 11 Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away, pp. 45-46; Hill (Goldfield Warden), Forty-Five Years’ Experience in North Queensland, p. 47.

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CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

suffered from the heat and viewed life in Australia as exile.12 Mrs Christison made her decision to leave Australia the first time when

she was living with the children away from the Queensland heat, in the ranges of northern New South Wales at Tenterfield. Mary

Bennett ends Chapter 18 with a description of her mother making this decision:

She had said ‘It must be London or the bush’; it could not be the bush because of the children, so it must be London. Robert could not realize it. Tenterfield a thousand miles away, was far – but twelve thousand miles away! – He could not tell when he would be able to leave the station for a run home. – It was so good and thoughtful of her to write that she would try to wait till he could accompany her.13

After conveying empathy for her father who was losing access to

his children, it seems that Mary, the author, could not resist this final sarcastic barb against her mother.

Another scene, a re-enactment of a conversation between Mrs

Christison and Wyma, displays the author’s scorn. As Mrs Christison prepares to leave Australia she asks Wyma, the Dalleburra woman

who had been the devoted nursemaid to the children during their

time at Tenterfield, if she would like to come with her and the children to England.

Wyma knew that she must part either from Freddy [her husband] or from the two little girls and the new baby whom she adored. ‘I think I stop with my husband’ she had concluded. ‘You are quite right, Wyma, I should do the same’, had been the white woman’s surprising rejoinder.14 12 Bennett, Christison, pp. 159, 165, 172, 185, 210, 222. 13 Bennett, Christison, p. 172. 14 Bennett, Christison, p. 174.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Mary Bennett uses italics to highlight for her readers Mrs

Christison’s apparent blindness to the contradiction between her

words and actions, as she prepares to leave her own husband. Mimi

Christison was five years old at this time so it is difficult to know who reported this conversation to her. Was it Wyma years later, perhaps

when Mimi returned to Lammermoor with her father when she was

twenty-nine? There is no way of knowing, but Bennett’s use of italics shows us that she wants readers to notice the irony in this interchange.

A further scene, this time set in London when Robert has come

to visit his family, serves to show where the biographer’s sympathies

lie. Mrs Christison is described as a ‘clever lass’ who has furnished the house in West Kensington so tastefully. ‘It is a great mistake to be so long out of London’, Mary’s friends told her. The author then

retells an episode in which an affected man is commanding attention at a social gathering. We are told that Robert resented the fellow’s insolent manner:

… “a clout on the lug”, seemed the proper rejoinder, and the place was not suitable. He walked away. “But he took a double first in Greek at Oxford”, Mary protested. “Then he’s worse,” Robert growled uncompromisingly’.15

The author highlights her mother’s concern for social position, im­

pressed as she was by the affected fop with his first class Oxford degree. These three cameos – the decision to leave Australia, the offer

to Wyma to accompany her, and the London society scene – make plain the negative light in which Mary Bennett presents her mother.

Mary Christison’s tombstone, under a marble cross in the Tenter­

field cemetery reads:

15 Bennett, Christison, p. 179.

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CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

In loving memory of Mary (neé Godsall), beloved wife of Robert Christison of Lammermoor, North Queensland. Died 7th Nov 1922. Aged 76 years. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee: Because he trusted in Thee’. Erected by her three children Vitam Dirigat

While Mary Bennett was involved in this public honouring of her

mother, her equally public assessment, shown in the negative cameos of Mary Christison, remained when Christison of Lammermoor went

to press five years later.16

The father as romantic hero In contrast to the negative light in which her mother is cast, Robert Christison is drawn as a man without flaws. The opening paragraph of the biography should prepare us for much of what follows:

Why do we neglect the romantic history of our own time, and the deeds of men of our own race, who adventured alone? Their life’s story is our country’s history, but they left no record except their inarticulate work. The men they helped are dead; the tracks they blazed, the homesteads they built, the wells they sunk, are used by others, who have forgotten, if they ever heard, their benefactors’ names. Yet some may ask what manner of men they were who built up our country. This story is written for them, and for the delight of recalling the old colonial days and a great pioneer.17

16

Mary Christison gravestone, Church of England section, Tenterfield cemetery. ‘Vitam Dirigat’ translates as ‘Direct life’. 17 Bennett, Christison, p. 13.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Mary’s purpose at the outset is clear. This biography will honour

the pioneering work of Robert Christison; those who knew him who were still alive would enjoy reading this tale, and by virtue of the

biography Robert Christison and the record of his achievements

would be articulated for posterity. The opening sentence also serves to warn us. It is a ‘romantic history’ we will be reading.

Mary Bennett employs a rags-to-riches trope, exaggerating

disadvantage, in a distorted version of Robert’s start in the colonies. She writes that the boys were taught by their minister father, but her

sister Helen, who later corrects the record, tells us that Robert was well educated at the local parish school. Helen also observed that

the Christison of Lammermoor version of their father’s impoverished youth underplayed the Christison family position of respect among ‘the eminent coterie of philosophical, literary and scientific men

in Edinburgh’ where his uncle, also Robert, was a well-regarded medical doctor and his grandfather Alexander had held the position

of Professor of Humanities at Edinburgh University.18 Although still young, Robert had family role models of impoverished individuals

who had risen to positions of respect in Edinburgh society as well as his father who was a poor but well-educated and respected minister of the Presbyterian Church.

Mary had the Christison brothers landing ‘without friends or

money’, but she doesn’t mention their letter of introduction to the Chirnside brothers who had been in their father’s parish. As the Chirnsides by this time were established, prosperous pastoralists, this was a priceless meal ticket. They had a home to go to, a job and 18

Helen Cameron Roberts, ‘Errors and Omissions’, a critique of Percival Serle’s entry on Christison, in Percival Serle, Dictionary of Australian Biography, Angus and Robinson, Melbourne, 1949. The entry is largely based on Christison of Lammermoor. Robert Christison file, Australian Dictionary of Biography archive, ANU Archives, Canberra.

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CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

the possibility to learn the pastoralist’s trade from their countrymen

who had succeeded.19 It was an absolutely invaluable introduction. Some years later when there was a call for applications to join the

expedition being led by Robert O’Hara Burke, we are told that

Robert Christison applied to join the contingent but later withdrew

his application. Perhaps Mary was influenced by an article in Dalgety’s Monthly Review, published in 1896 in which Christison told the journalist that he did apply to join the Burke and Wills expedition

‘offering to act as scout with his black boys’ but later withdrew the application. There is no evidence of his application, and his daughter Helen was adamant that while he thought of going he didn’t actually apply.20

The romantic imagination influenced Robert as well as Mary. She

records his introduction to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. He ‘devoured it almost at a reading … new worlds opened to his vision. He was

another knight without inheritance, and the earth a Holy Land for service and adventure’.21 Mary’s romantic telling of her father’s life

has him arriving in Queensland as a young man with ‘the excitement of anticipation’. Robert sets out to find a kingdom. He is adventurous

but has no capital to apply for a lease of land. A stranger on horseback approaches him when he is cutting down trees for a horse yard. The stranger asks Robert if he worked for Christison. Robert said ‘Yes …

Do you want to see him?’ The stranger goes into fits of laughter and riding off says he’d see him later. Once he had left, Christison saddles

up his horse, Jack Straw, and in four days covers three hundred and 19 20

Roberts, ‘Errors and Omissions’. ‘Lammermoor Station’, Dalgety’s Monthly Review, 16 December 1896, p. 3; Records of the Burke and Wills Expedition 1857–1875, MS Box 2076/1, State Library of Victoria (hereafter SLV); Roberts, ‘Errors and Omissions’. 21 Bennett, Christison, p. 15.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

twenty miles to beat the stranger to the Land Commissioner’s office to apply for a licence.

Stories of legendary rides between rivals to take up land in newly

proclaimed districts abound in north Queensland pastoral history. Geoffrey Bolton writes of ‘a half a dozen stories of two squatters

simultaneously happening on a piece of country, taking to their horses and riding furiously to Bowen to establish a prior claim to the

land’. He details numerous competitions between squatters. One is

of Ernest Henry who was engaged in a heroic race with 800 head of cattle overtaking Walter Hays’ party just forty miles from the

Flinders River, the destination for both groups.22 Both Mary and

Robert would have read some of these exciting yarns.

As David Denholm has pointed out, ‘men dream dreams to render

life more comfortable than it really is’. He argues that ‘after a while they believe their dreams, which is why the reminiscences they spin

in their old age have a poetic nobility that historians were wont to mistake for evidence’.23 Robert’s version of land acquisition in

a biographical note which he wrote when he was in his seventies exemplifies this observation:

This western country with its plains & Downs, is the finest pastoral country I have seen in Australia. Spent a month investigating this country, then returned to Bowen. Went to Lands Office and took 2000 S. M. [square miles] and called property Lammermoor aft [sic] the hills in Berwickshire my Birthplace.24 22 Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away, p. 26; D. F. and J. Erricker, The Centenary of Settlement in Hughenden and District 1863–1963, T. Willmett and Sons Pty Ltd, Townsville, 1963, pp. 11-12. 23 David Denholm, The Colonial Australians, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1979, p. 137. 24 Robert Christison, ‘Notes for Tropical Life’, Christison family papers TR1867/238, series 4, item 156, SLQ.

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CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

The published version of this is abridged, with the time period of

one month removed and two thousand square miles reduced to one thousand. It is noteworthy that Robert doesn’t describe a ride against a competitor.25

Queensland land records show a longer and more complex story

of land acquisition. To start with, James Alexander McLeod, not

Robert Christison, first leased runs in north-west Queensland

called Lammermuir.26 McLeod applied for occupation licences for Lammermuir 1, 2 and 3, a total of 200 square miles, which Christison

later purchased. Helen Roberts observed, more than twenty years after Christison of Lammermoor was published, that the story of the race

against a competitor which was repeated by historian Percival Serle in his entry on Christison in the Dictionary of Australian Biography was pointless without the story of taking up Lammermoor.27 If

Helen knew something of the real account of land acquisition Mary

would have heard it also. Were these distortions unconscious as the daughter romanced her father into a knight without inheritance in

search of a kingdom? It seems almost as if the father, from beyond the grave, colluded with his daughter to create this romantic account so at odds with the land records.

A further anecdote illustrates both Robert’s preparedness to ro-

manticise his past, and Mary’s to embellish the tale. Robert, a shrewd businessman, was in England in 1880 when he met and mar-

ried Mary Godsall, He was, most importantly, looking for business 25 26 27

Biographical Notice in Tropical Life, July 1913, ‘Records collected by Mrs Bennett and presented to Queensland University’, vol. 1, Fryer Library, University of Queensland (hereafter UQ ). Lease Applications, microfilm reels Z4361, folios 19, 80–81, 89–93, Museum of Lands, Mapping and Surveying, Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Queensland Government. Roberts, ‘Errors and Omissions’.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

partners for his beef-freezing proposal. He went on a speaking tour

with the dual purpose of supporting Bishop Stanton, the first bishop

of north Queensland, as Stanton sought financial support for his vast new bishopric, and encouraging skilled workmen to consider

emigration to north Queensland. Christison was in discussions with Scottish ship owner William Mackinnon, founder of the British

India Steam Navigation Company, who was expanding his operations to Australia at a time when Queensland was in need of labour.28

Christison assured Mackinnon that at the end of the outward voyage, when the new immigrants disembarked, Queensland primary producers could fill the ship with their produce for the return voyage.

It was very much in Christison’s interests to go on a speaking tour in London and northern cities to promote Queensland to would-be

immigrant workers. He spoke in ten or more different locations in

London and northern England. His speech draft states, ‘I feel I may speak with some authority, as I have spent fully a quarter of a century in exploring and turning into pastoral use, large tracts of country’.29

The man who in his own words can speak ‘with some authority’

becomes in Mary’s version a self-doubting speaker who wonders

‘I don’t know that I’ve done much’. He begins nervously, ‘Kindly pardon me if I read from a paper’, as she describes him giving one single talk rather than ten or more.30 Christison has his audience

spellbound with a story of an expedition in 1870, a year of financial 28

By 1881 Mackinnon had both mail and emigration contracts with the Queensland Government. See J. Forbes Munro, Maritime Enterprise and Empire: Sir William Mackinnon and his Business Network, 1823–1893, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2003. 29 Robert Christison, Address delivered at Hereford, Clifton, Manchester, Sheffield, South Kensington, Red Hill, Ealing, Hampstead, Bournemouth etc., 1881, Christison family papers, TR1867/163, SLQ. 30 Bennett, Christison, p. 145; ‘Address delivered at various places in England including overview of “shameful treatment of the blacks”’, 1881, Christison family papers, SLQ.

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CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

crisis when the price of sheep fell to one shilling and sixpence per head. Over eleven months he moved 7,000 sheep towards Adelaide,

selling them for a much better price. He clearly enjoyed telling his

English audience that it was ‘not far, only 1500 miles’!31 We can imagine the gasps of surprise. He was a polished performer who

clearly enjoyed himself while he encouraged migrants to fill the ships

which would then bring his beef back to the English market, even if

he does stretch the truth. He tells his audience, rather unbelievably:

‘I have made friends with over 500’ Aboriginal people. We know

that Mary had read Robert’s speech notes and knew that he spoke at a number of venues across the country. For some reason she chose

to write about one speech. She downplayed Robert’s attempts to persuade new migrant workers to come to Queensland, instead creating a portrait of her father as a self-deprecatory speaker who

overcame his nervousness in order to support Bishop Stanton who

was ‘devoting his time and energy for the welfare of colonists and

blacks’.32 In fact, Robert Christison’s second trip back to the Old Country, like his first, had a sound commercial motivation. His ten

or more speeches aimed to stimulate workers to come to Queensland. Even if he did feel initially nervous, his performances would have been purposeful and polished.

Reality of a most unromantic kind discordantly interrupts the

romance at different points throughout the book. One early example prepares us. In an early chapter, which surveys exploration history by

sea and then land from the Portuguese in the seventeenth century to the expeditions undertaken by Leichhardt, Eyre, Mitchell, Kennedy

and others who opened the land for pastoralists such as her father, we 31 Robert Christison, ‘Address delivered at various places in England’, SLQ. 32 Bennett, Christison, pp. 145-46.

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come across this sentence: ‘Unfortunately the mass of white Australians have always objected to any kind of justice or protection for the

unhappy people whom they are dispossessing’.33 It was unusual to

find such an observation made in a published work in the 1920s.

A footnote just before this statement is direct and confronting. She quotes Edward Curr and The Queenslander:

To an observer of languages it is interesting to note the new signification of the verb to disperse: that when a black girl of fifteen is shot down she is said to be dispersed … What “disperse” means is well enough known. The word has been adopted as a convenient euphemism for wholesale massacre 34

A reading of the opening paragraph of the book does not prepare

us for these sentiments. She describes the massacre at Myall Creek in New South Wales and Governor Gipps’ determination to bring the

killers to justice. These were the ‘lawless conditions’ she explained into which young Robert Christison and his brother Tom arrived

in 1852. What Mary discovered through the years of writing and research was that the lawlessness was not confined to the past.

‘What to do about the Blacks?’ Christison of Lammermoor shows us Mary Bennett’s negative feelings

about her mother, the person she most likely saw as responsible for her earlier fractured experience of family life. It demonstrates her

love for her father and determination to establish him not only as a

pioneer pastoralist who succeeded magnificently against the odds,

but as a good man. As well as these two insights, the biography 33 Bennett, Christison, p. 29. 34 Bennett, Christison, p. 28 citing Edward. M. Curr, The Australian Race, John Farnes, Govt Printer: Trubner, Melbourne, London, 1886–1887 and Queenslander, 29 May 1890.

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shows the writer becoming more conflicted as her research uncovers brutality and the destruction of a people’s way of life in the making

of the vast pastoral enterprises such as her father’s. How can she resolve her image of Robert as a good and honourable man when she knows what the Dalleburra have lost? A way of life and an integrated understanding of their world have been shattered; diseases such as

syphilis have caused havoc. By the time Mary first saw Lammermoor

in 1893 there were very few babies.35 She wants to convey her painful

research findings into the colonial past and distance her father from the endemic brutality of the pastoralists’ world. After all, those winter

sojourns when she was a teenager, when she met Barney, her father’s trusted Dalleburra worker, and reconnected with her childhood nurse

Wyma, seemed to be her happiest family experiences. In two chapters in the book she explores the history of conflict and then exploitation

and distinguishes her father’s accommodation with the Dalleburra

from the more brutal contacts with most pastoralists. Mary comes to

understand the loss, the suffering, the end of the Dalleburra world

when the accommodation is reached and the Dalleburra ‘come in’ to Lammermoor station.

There are three chapters with ‘What to do about the Blacks?’

in the title. She explains that this question was posed by Robert

Christison’s pastoralist neighbours when they met at Fairlight Station (a mail distribution point) on the Flinders River in the late 1860s. During this first decade of the pastoral invasion in north-west Queensland, sheep and cattle had been introduced into country

which had been Aboriginal tribal land. Homesteads were set up near 35

Of the two dozen photographs taken by Mrs Mary Christison in the 1890s, a number of them group photographs of Lammermoor workers, only two babies feature: Topsy born in c.1890 and Tommy born c.1894. Photographs deposited by Mary Bennett, UQFL202. in the Fryer Library, UQ.

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the most reliable sources of precious water, in an area where drought was a normal part of the life cycle. When the frontier pastoralists

met at Fairlight Station, the question of ‘letting the blacks in’, that is,

allowing them to hunt and camp near the homestead, was discussed.

Christison ‘declared energetically’ for this approach, which included

encouraging them to stay and work on his station in return for rations. The majority position, Bennett tells us, was to contact the Native

Police if stock were found speared. Frequently this resulted in

scapegoating, when any Aboriginal man met by the Native Police

was shot.36 Bennett explains how Christison discovered that his prized ram had been killed when Warmboomooloo, ‘over six feet

tall and magnificently built’, had sent one of his wives to catch the ram when it came down to the creek for water. Bennett dramatises the confrontation between two powerful men – Robert Christison, enraged at losing his valuable ram but admiring his opponent, and

Warmboomooloo, who in this version of the story is not supported

by his own people in the fight against Christison. She tells us that ‘the useful hag triumphed in his [Warmboomooloo’s] discomfiture

reckless of the nulla-nulla that she was laying up for her lotus bedecked head. “Give ’im more, master; give ’im more” she cried insatiably’.37 The

punishment is completed when Christison builds a huge destructive fire and makes the group watch while the ram meat, which was to be

their feast, is burnt to cinders. It is a story which asserts Christison’s physical, psychological and moral authority. ‘I’ll teach you to leave

my sheep alone’, he tells the Dalleburra in Mary’s account, as they watch food being destroyed. Mary informs us that Christison also 36 Bennett, Christison, Chapter 8. See Richards, The Secret War for more on this police force and its methods. 37 Bennett, Christison, p. 80.

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made it plain to Warmboomooloo that if he knocked his wives about he would be punished even more severely.38 They might be allowed to

stay on his property but he would decide about acceptable behaviour for those who chose to stay.

Through a number of lively anecdotes we see Christison, probably

the first white man that the Dalleburra had met, employ a range

of strategies to outwit them. One involves a roughly devised tin king plate and a mirror. When in the early 1860s a large group of

men grasping clubs and boomerangs came into his camp Christison recognised an opportunity to crown a man who would be of service to

him. He placed a tin plate around the neck of the one who seemed to be the head man. He proclaimed him King Narkool of the Dalleburra Tribe. Ceremonially he got the head man to sit, produced a mirror and turned the glass so he saw his reflection. The man ‘gave a yell,

bounded on to his feet and ran like an emu, plunged into the river and disappeared in the scrub’.39 Christison learned that the people

believed that he had brought back to life the headman’s brother, who looked like him, and who was killed many years ago in a fight with

the neighbouring tribe. It was the mirror, not the tin king plate, which led to an increase in Christison’s power.40

Christison used kindness and intelligence rather than bullets and

in the long term was richly rewarded. We read the story of a little

boy of about seven who falls out of a tree when he is tracking a native bee. The child broke his thigh-bone and, while the tribe was dig­ging

his grave, Mary tells us, Christison volunteered to cure him. She

recounts the anecdote of Christison setting the bone, arranging a 38 Bennett, Christison, p. 80-81 39 Bennett, Christison, pp. 63-64. 40 L. Cameron Christison (Mrs Stewart Roberts), ‘Like the Pelican’, pp. 188-89, MS 57043, British Library.

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continual watch on the boy so that he didn’t tear off the bandages and

splint, nursing him through a fever, and entertaining and amusing him during the recovery process. The accident, she explains, gave

Christison immense power over the people who were astonished at

the boy’s recovery, which they attributed to magic.41 We also learn of Christison removing a bullet from a lame man, Woonggoo, who had

been shot by the Native Police. And of Christison sitting perched in a tree at night when he learned to expect an attack on his homestead.

He filled his gun with rock salt and when the shadowy figures arrived he shot at them, frightening them and covering them with salt dust. The next morning he strode into the intruders’ camp and berated

the young men with the tell-tale salt in their hair.42 Through such anecdotes – and there are a number of them – we see a man who,

through his self-confidence and wit, is able to arrive, over some years, at an accommodation with the people whose land it had been.

One of Bennett’s purposes in these chapters is to show Aboriginal

people to her readers in all their humanity. She does this through

anecdotes that illustrate admirable attributes: kindness, fidelity,

intelligence. She describes a ‘virile, vivacious race that filled Australia, as full as the means of life permitted, a hundred years ago’.43 She

draws on her father’s notes about the Dalleburra, which he had

sent to Alfred Howitt in the 1880s when the anthropologist was collecting data for a study of eastern Australian clans, and other notes

he compiled on a journey back to England in 1877.44 She also read 41 Bennett, Christison, pp. 106-8; Robert Christison, ‘Notes on aborigines compiled for W. Howitt’, 13 January 1885, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 4, SLQ. 42 Bennett, Christison, pp. 67, 110. 43 Bennett, Christison, p. 101. 44 Correspondence between A. W. Howitt and R. Christison relating to ethnographic research, Christison family papers, TR1867/183-190, SLQ.

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Eyre’s Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of Australia and Howitt’s

The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. She shows a people with a

highly developed understanding of their natural world, attuned to country in which all living things have meaning. They are engaged in

making tools, fishing and hunting, digging for water and harvesting yams, understanding how to treat snake bite and able to track for days

to find a lost white child. She explains marriage customs and shows

the stoicism and self-control of the young men enduring initiation rites. She writes of their kindness and peaceableness and of Christison’s interest in, and respect for, their culture, while he believed that the

arrival of the squatter with his flocks and herds doomed their way of life.45

While Mary shows Christison’s success in forming relationships

with those whose land he has taken, she avoids discussion of the

benefits which accrue to him, having a workforce who don’t expect money. Once Christison’s power was asserted, through strategies

such as defeating a Dalleburra warrior and curing the child with the broken leg, he was able to establish a new relationship with the

people whose land it had been. In an article published in 1927, Mary wrote that in 1895, when she was fourteen, Barney had told her of a conversation between him and Christison thirty years earlier. Christison told Barney: ‘You and me two fellow messmates. Country

belonging to you: sheep belonging to me.’ She wrote that Barney regarded this declaration as a charter but she knew that under the

Queensland Lands Acts the country belonged solely to Christison.46 45 46

Robert Christison, ‘The Aborigines’, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 4, SLQ. M. M. Bennett, ‘Notes on the Dalleburra Tribe of Northern Queensland’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. LVII, July– December 1927, pp. 400-15. The meaning is the same but the words are slightly

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He held the leases and when any Aboriginal person behaved in a

way he didn’t like he sent them off his property. Even Wyma who

is presented to us as Christison’s trusted housekeeper and nurse to the children when they were small, was banished in 1901 with her

husband Freddy, who offended Christison in some way.47 The early

pact between Barney and Christison was, however, advantageous to both groups. The Dalleburra were relatively safe from the Native

Police if they were on Christison’s leases and could hunt on their traditional land, and he had a compliant workforce.

He could be kindly and understanding but Christison was also a

pragmatic businessman. He had a low opinion of people of mixed

descent as did many of his contemporaries and when he was preparing to sell his station Christison informed the Chief Secretary’s

department, using the cattleman’s language, that he intended to ‘cull the half-castes on Lammermoor’.48 Left out of Mary’s account of her father’s relationships with the Dalleburra are the comments from

Christison’s own diary such as his plans for Harry, ‘a dangerous

boy … who must be got rid of in some way: send him off a long way or exchange him’.49 If Mary did read this comment when she was reading the family papers, she chose to overlook what it told her: the land now belonged to Christison, not Barney or any other of the Dalleburra people.

Robert’s approach to Aboriginal people, however, was in stark

contrast to most pioneer pastoralists. Mary set out the ‘lamentable

47 48 49

varied in Christison of Lammermoor, p. 68. Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 31 March 1901, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 2, SLQ. Chief Protector of Aborigines inwards correspondence register, ID 89689, A/58996 – Agreements, QSA. Robert Christison diary, 12 August 1868, TR 1867/1, Box 9568, SLQ.

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history’ of the blacks, from Lieutenant Moore’s order to fire on a

party of men, women and children at Risdon, Tasmania, in 1804 to ‘ghastly repetitions’ at Myall Creek in central New South Wales

and Manumbar, north of Brisbane. This was in no sense ‘romantic

history’. John Mortimer of Manumbar was a Scottish pastoralist

with much in common with her father. He valued education, was

a pious Calvinist and a hard worker. Moreover he allowed the local

Aboriginal people to live and work on his station and taught them to identify themselves when Native Police officers targeted Aboriginal people indiscriminatingly. ‘Bale you shoot. Bale you shoot.50 Me

belonging to Mr Mortimer’ his employees were told to call out, but during the Bunya season in the summer of 1861, when the Kabi

and Wakka peoples of south-eastern Queensland were joined by others for the Bunya nut feast and the white settlers were fearful and

paranoid about the large numbers of Aboriginal people, they were shot anyway.51

In 1867 the Native Police were confronted by Christison who

insisted that ‘his blacks’ had nothing to do with a cattle spearing. He managed to persuade the officer to leave, though he later found that

Woonggoo, a middle-aged man, had been wounded when a Native

Police scout fired into a group. The question of ‘what to do about the blacks’ is unresolved in the discussions in these chapters; they remain

the victims of the Native Police force, outside the protection of the law. Mary tells us that Robert never had to take life but that he had ‘some narrow escapes in strange country’. This may be a reference to 50 51

‘Bale’ denoting the negative, i.e. ‘don’t you shoot’. See Malcolm D. Prentis, ‘John Mortimer of Manumbar and the 1861 Native Police Inquiry in Queensland’, espace.library.uq.edu.au, University of Queensland, for a detailed account of this atrocity.

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Christison’s involvement in a shooting episode against Kaiadilt men at Sweers Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1872.52

Desperate for cash to stock and expand his holdings, Christison

took a government job as a coxswain on Sweers Island in 1869. In

1872 he was one of four white men involved in a violent altercation with Kaiadilt hunters who came to the island from nearby Bentinck

Island. Christison and his colleagues tried unsuccessfully to get the

men to leave. A fight broke out, with the white men firing shots at the Kaiadilt. A hearing in the magistrates’ court was held the next year with one man admitting to breaking the stock of his rifle when

he hit one of the hunters over the head, but as no bodies had been discovered the case was dismissed.53 Such incidents were omitted from Mary’s biography of her father.

Christison’s accommodation with the Dalleburra meant that they

could stay on his run as long as they didn’t interfere with his stock.

As Anne Allingham has observed, with Aboriginal loss of access to water and spearing of stock as a consequence, a negotiated settlement with a pastoralist such as Christison was the best option.54 It was a

compromise which worked for both sides, although Christison had the upper hand. He informed the Port Denison Times in 1881 that he had about 150 Aboriginal people ‘constantly employed on this

station’. Such a labour force would have been a boon: he did not need money for wages at this time.

52 Bennett, Christison, p. 81. 53 ‘Sweers Island 1873’, COL/A182/849, QSA; Peter Saenger, ‘Sweers Island Chronology’, unpublished, provided by the author. 54 Anne Allingham, ‘Taming the Wilderness’: The First Decade of Pastoral Settlement in the Kennedy District, Studies in North Queensland History No. 1, History Department, James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville, 1977, pp. 165-67.

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What we don’t hear about in Christison of Lammermoor are the strat­

egies employed against those who did not comply with Christison’s

edicts. An explicit 1868 diary entry expressing his frustration at stock killing was: ‘war to the knife with the men and the whip to

the boys’.55 ‘Coming in [to the pastoralist’s fold]’ meant clothes and rations and medical attention ‘for the faithful’. The Dalleburra could

also continue with their own cultural practices if they didn’t offend Christison, though they were also introduced to Christian church

service and offered the opportunity of Christian marriage when Bishop Stanton visited Lammermoor in 1881. They cherished the

imported deerhounds which Christison let them use to help them

hunt. In return Christison was served loyally by his ‘faithful’, rationed

servants. If they misbehaved there were ‘wallopings for the naughty’. The language of childhood punishment is Bennett’s; it is not used

by Christison who writes in his diary rather of giving a thief ‘a dressing he will never forget’.56 Mary Bennett plays down the eco­

nom­ic advantage of a compliant Aboriginal workforce but father and daughter agree that the pastoral patronage enjoyed by ‘the faith­ful Dalleburra’ offers advantages to both master and servants.

The model of paternalistic patronage that worked so well for

Christison became a labour model for the great northern cattle

stations of Australia. Tim Rowse has explored this relationship

between white pastoralists and Aboriginal insiders who worked for families such as the Duracks. He argues that the distinctions in the

Kimberley, as in north Queensland where the Duracks began their

pastoral enterprise, were not simply between black and white. When 55 56

Robert Christison diary, 12 August 1868, Christison family papers, TR1867 box 9568, SLQ. Robert Christison diary, 1868–69, Christison family papers, TR1867 box 9568, SLQ.

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the Duracks struck out to the west from Queensland they brought with them fourteen Aboriginal ‘insiders’. In reading the memoir of

Jack Sullivan, one of these insiders, Rowse shows that Jack’s account

of his past that shaped the world he grew into ‘is based on a simple moral and sociological polarity between those who did and those who did not make peace’ with their masters.57 In the Lammermoor world the polarity is between the ‘faithful Dalleburra’ and ‘vagrant blacks’.

By the end of 1926 Mary had completed the manuscript – or so

she thought – and submitted it to Alston Rivers, a reputable London publishing company. Living in Hertfordshire had served its purpose

and Charles and Mary moved from the peaceful countryside of Great Amwell to central London. Their new apartment in Thurloe Place, South Kensington, was near the Natural History Museum which held Dalleburra artefacts donated by Christison. Mary moved from

tranquil walks by the New River near Amwell to fashionable South Kensington, the working heart of the British Empire.

In the spring of 1927 Charles and Mary went to Marseilles, a well-

earned holiday for Mary after completing the manuscript which had dominated her life for so many years. Not long before she boarded

she had read a short article buried on page 13 of the Times: ‘Alleged

Murder of Natives’.58 It was a report of a Reverend Gribble giving evidence before a Royal Commissioner who was inquiring into the alleged murder and burning of Aboriginal men and women in

the north-west of Australia. She read that the ‘native version’ was that an Aboriginal man had lent his wife to the squatter for work

but that the Aboriginal husband had ‘objected to her going to the 57 58

Tim Rowse, ‘“Were You Ever Savages?” Aboriginal Insiders and Pastoralists’ Patronage’, Oceania, vol. 58 no. 1, December 1987, p. 83. The Times, 9 March 1927.

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station house’. ‘The squatter hit the native who speared the squatter.

The native was sentenced to imprisonment for life’.59 The month

after her return from France she read a further report of the royal

commission inquiring into these killings. Seven Aboriginal people, five of them women, were killed and burned while in the custody of constables Regan and St Jack in June 1926 and later in the same

month a further four were killed and burned. For Mary, having been absorbed in reading 1890s newspapers accounts of brutality, violence,

abuse of women, abducting and killing of children, stories she could

not forget, the Times reports showed what she described as a ‘deadly continuity’ which horrified her.60 Perhaps all that had changed was that the violent frontier had moved west. White men continued to use Aboriginal women for sex and to retaliate viciously and often indiscriminately against cattle theft.

At some point in mid-1927 it seems that Mary decided that her

manuscript would not go to press without her adding a chapter on the current situation of Aboriginal people in Australia. Perhaps she

was dissatisfied with her treatment of the ‘what to do about the blacks’ question. We do not know how the negotiation went with the publishing company but the end result was that an extra chapter,

‘What to do about the Blacks today’, was inserted between existing

material relating to 1867, as if the publishers wished to bury material that did not add to the knowledge about the subject of the biography.

So when the book came out it included an awkward sequence:

Chapter 8 ‘What to do about the Blacks (1867)’, followed by Chapter 59 60

‘Alleged Murder of Natives: Australian Missionary’s Evidence’, The Times, 9 March 1927, p. 13. ‘Killing of Aborigines in N.-W. Australia: Two Constables Accused’, The Times, 27 May 1927, p. 15; Queenslander, North Queensland Register, and the North Queensland Herald; Bennett, Christison, p. 87.

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9 ‘What to do about the Blacks today’ and then Chapter 10 ‘What to do about the Blacks (continued) (1867)’.61 The style of Chapter 9 is in stark contrast to the rest of the book. It opens:

No race could survive the conditions that the Australian blacks have to suffer – conditions that have exterminated the Tasmanian race and the tribes of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, (where few full bloods can now be found), that are rapidly destroying the tribes of Queensland, and will soon wipe out the thousands still in the Northern Territory and the north of West Australia.62

The tone is direct, confident, knowledgeable, with a smouldering but controlled sense of moral outrage just under the surface. The added chapter looks different to the rest of the book. A number of pages

are dominated by footnotes which take up between a third and twothirds of the page. These pages are written in two columns, the first one headed ‘Any Time Last Century’ and the second ‘And NOW’.

Bennett draws attention to the lack of substantial difference between the times in question as regards the abuse of women, the shooting

of innocent people and the inevitability of Aboriginal people being driven off their lands in the interests of pastoral and agricultural

enterprises. Her sources – revered explorers such as Captain Sturt

and E. J. Eyre, newspapers, a royal commission report, parliamentary records and reports of the Administrator of the Northern Territory – 61

My evidence for this being a very late insertion is fourfold. Firstly, Chapter 10 ‘What to do about the Blacks (continued)’ is not a continuation of the previous chapter, but rather of the one before; secondly, many of the references in the footnotes in ‘What to do about the Blacks today’ do not appear in the Bibliography; thirdly the footnotes for ‘What to do about the Blacks today’ include newspaper articles from May 1927. Lastly, the chapter heading for Chapter 9 is typeset further down the page than all the other chapter headings. As Christison of Lammermoor is reviewed as early as 27 October by the Times Literary Supplement, Chapter 9 must have been added and the book repaginated at the very last moment. 62 Bennett, Christison, p. 86.

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strengthen her case. She argues that evidence, which in a court of law

is inadmissible due to Aboriginality, makes a fair trial impossible. She points to protectors who don’t protect and argues that no recognised

rights to tribal lands produce intolerable conditions of which the recent killings in north-west Australia were but a symptom. She sets out to build a picture of Aboriginal people as intelligent, generous, brave and open. She quotes Eyre to establish the fact that they were

land owners in the sense that they understood proprietary rights connected with land.63

Chapter 9 ends with a more explicit answer to the question she

had posed earlier. Christison’s answer – paternalistic patronage on the pastoral station – was only an answer for a generation or two. A

longer view was required. While acknowledging that it was probably

impractical, she concludes that ‘segregation is the only hope of saving the race’. Mary Bennett had just met Constance Cooke, an activist

from Adelaide who had introduced her to the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (ASAPS).

At the British Commonwealth League’s 1927 conference, Cooke,

a member of the Australian delegation to the conference, proposed that ‘an inviolable Native State’ should be set up in the north of the

country and ‘administered in the interests of the aborigines’. She was a foundation member of the Adelaide-based Aborigines’ Protection League. A visit to what she described as ‘the disgraceful condition

of the Federal Home for half-caste children at Alice Springs’ led to

a life-long involvement in working for improved living conditions for

Aboriginal Australians. She was also president of the South-Australian Women’s Non-Party Association and a justice of the peace. 64 The 63 Bennett, Christison, Chapter 9. 64 ‘Cooke, Constance Mary Ternent’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (hereafter ADB), Supplementary volume, MUP, Carlton Victoria, 2005.

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Adelaide-based Aborigines Protection League promoted the idea of

self-determining ‘Native States’ as a way for Aboriginal communities to adapt to radical change while being protected from the introduction

of alcohol by manipulative whites. Mary described Cooke’s address as ‘admirable’, understood the objections that it was probably impractical but held that it was ‘the only hope of saving the race’.65

One scene, from the last chapter of Christison of Lammermoor, reveals

Mary’s then prejudice against people of mixed race. She describes a meeting with Wyma when she had returned to Lammermoor in

1910. She had entered Wyma’s hut and expressed disgust when she saw a strange young black woman with a mixed-descent baby:

The miserable creature sat on a bed, seemingly in the deepest dejection, never raising her eyes from the ground; a pipe was in her mouth; she was wearing some of Wyma’s clothes … As for the baby, it was the most complete contrast to all the full blooded black children Mimi could remember; instead of glowing copper, its skin was sickly yellow; instead of the lively intelligence and concentration of aboriginal children, it had a vacant look, mean and complaining, and its wobbly mouth was pulled down in a whine. The mother was Jenny-Lin from a camp of blacks at Torrens Creek township, the father a white man unknown.66

There are distinct similarities in this negative description of a

person of mixed descent with a similar passage in Helen Roberts’

novel. 67 Both refer to glowing copper skin contrasted with ‘dingy muddy yellow’ in Helen’s manuscript and ‘sickly yellow’ in Mary’s. Helen’s girl has a ‘flaccid mouth’ while Mary described the child’s 65 Bennett, Christison, p. 99. 66 Bennett, Christison, p. 259. 67 L. Cameron Christison (Mrs Stewart Roberts), ‘Like the Pelican’, British Library.

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mouth as ‘wobbly’. Both daughters had absorbed their father’s neg­ ative attitudes to people of mixed descent. It was ‘the half-castes’

whom Christison wrote about culling, as if they were herd animals,

before he sold Lammermoor. Mixed descent people were considered at this time to be inferior to both races. They were also a physical reminder of the exploitative behaviour of white men which led to

this unwanted population, even though there is no evidence that

Christison had fathered a mixed race child in his long, womanless years before he married Mary Godsall.

*** Readers of Christison of Lammermoor have overlooked the fact that

a daughter is writing about a much-loved father. Vance Palmer and Percival Serle accepted Mary’s version of events without question.68

Journalists have added to the mythologising of Christison’s land

acquisition, accepting Mary’s account of the race to Bowen to beat a competitor. The Courier Mail published ‘A Young Man in a Hurry: Four Days Race for a Kingdom’ in 1934 and six years later ‘Race for

a Kingdom’ was retold, extolling Bennett’s biography as ‘a magnificent narrative of pioneer achievement in the days when no banking

institution would consider risking a shilling in North Queensland’.69

Both Glenville Pike and H. M. Barker, writing Queensland pastoral history decades after the publication of Christison of Lammermoor, 68 69

Vance Palmer, National Portraits, MUP, Carlton, 1954; Percival Serle, Dictionary of Australian Biography, Angus and Robinson, Melbourne, 1949. A. E. Yarra, ‘A Young Man in a Hurry: Four Days Race for a Kingdom’, The Courier-Mail, 24 March 1934, p. 18; Clem Lack, ‘Race for a Kingdom’, Sunday Mail (Brisbane), 2 June 1940, p. 6.

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tell the race for a kingdom story.70 Mary’s lively writing style and

selective treatment of the facts succeeded in presenting her father for future generations as a heroic, brave adventurer, rather than a complex, multi-faceted and astute man in whom self-interest and kindness were both evident.

Published critical analysis of Christison of Lammermoor was non-

existent for the book’s first eighty years. In the early 1950s, following

the publication of Percival Serle’s Dictionary of Australian Biography, Mary’s sister Helen wrote an unpublished critique of the extract

on her father Robert Christison. As Serle’s biographical entry on

Christison was heavily reliant on Christison of Lammermoor, we can

read it also as a critique of her sister’s work. Helen disagreed with Serle (and her sister) pointing out exaggerations and distortions, a number of which have been referred to in this chapter. She observed that there

‘seems to be a convention of sycophancy in Australian biography that

makes the colourful characters of “our old identities” unrecognizable

and largely devoid of human interest’. She gave advice for future biographers. ‘I suggest that good Australian biographies will not

be written till we follow Oliver Cromwell’s advice to his portrait painter: “Paint me with my warts Mr Lelly!”’71 Among historians Peter Biskup is unusual in referring to Christison of Lammermoor dismissively as Mary’s ‘first excursion into creative writing’ though

he does not elaborate. More recently in 2009 Mark Cryle has produced the first textual analysis of Christison of Lammermoor as a

historical source. His ‘A “Fantastic adventure”: Reading Christison of Lammermoor’ is a thoughtful study of the book, read against primary 70 71

Glenville Pike, Queensland Frontier, Rigby, Adelaide, 1978; H. M. Barker, Droving Days, Pitman, London, 1966. Roberts, ‘Errors and Omissions’, Noel Butlin Archives, ANU.

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CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

sources such as Christison’s own diaries, which demonstrates Mary Bennett’s selectivity when drawing on her family papers.72

Mary began the book by referring to her father’s life story as a

‘romantic history’. As we have seen, her romanticism led to some

facts about his life being omitted and others being reshaped. Her reference to ‘narrow escapes’ in a strange country suggested that she may have known about the shooting incident at Sweers Island in

which Christison was involved. There is no doubt about her knowing of Jane Gordon being taken to England and two years later put on a

boat back to Queensland as a little five year old. The treatment of Jane

is very much at odds with the portrait she has drawn of Christison as unblemished humanitarian. He had written that it would be ‘good

riddance’ when Jane is on the ship back to Australia and he had asked his wife, rhetorically, ‘why should you and I work and economise

for such a purpose [to care for Jane]?73 The evidence is that he was fair and just to his Aboriginal workforce within the framework

which gave him power as a land-holder, without recognising any Aboriginal moral claim to traditional lands. Moreover, he was genuinely interested in their culture and appreciative of their skills.

His comment, however, that he intended to ‘cull the half-castes from Lammermoor’ shows little sympathy for the unacknowledged offspring of white pastoralists who were commonly seen as inferior to

both Aboriginal and white people at this time. And Mary Bennett’s 72

73

Peter Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens: The Aboriginal Problem in Western Australia 1898–1954, University of Queensland Press (hereafter UQP), St Lucia, 1973, p. 93; Mary Cryle, ‘A “Fantastic adventure”: Reading Christison of Lammermoor’, in Journeys through Queensland History: Landscape, Place and Society, proceedings of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland) conference, 3–4 September 2009, St Lucia, Queensland. Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 31 May 1900, Christison family papers, TR1867 series 2, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

uncritical retelling of the pact with Barney in the early days of his pastoral runs – ‘Country belonging to you: sheep belonging to me’

– seems utterly disingenuous.74 She wanted to believe this while she knew it to be untrue.

Reality intruded into the romance when Mary read the Queensland

colonial newspapers and saw expressed there the negative attitudes

towards Aboriginal people. Her research both of past treatment of the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia and of the killings in the

Kimberley as recently as 1926 took her far away from the image of the happy accommodation with the Dalleburra at Lammermoor.

She did not accept her father’s proposition that meeting with the

white man doomed Aboriginal society but she did advocate that in the short term it would be in their interests if a separate ‘inviolable Native State’ were established.

A close reading of Christison of Lammermoor shows the author to

have become emotionally torn. Her initial purpose was to record and celebrate the achievements of her father as a pioneer pastoralist.

But, as she researched, she came face to face with the reality of the

destruction of Aboriginal societies that resulted from the pastoralists’ successes. The style and tone of Chapter 9 which she inserted at the eleventh hour shows us a woman who has been changed by her

research. The four-year-long Queensland ‘war of extermination’

broke ‘the heroic tribes of the Palmer’ and left the unhappy survivors ‘to die off like rotten sheep’.75 Mary was horrified by what she had come to understand. 74

Chief Protector of Aborigines inwards correspondence register, ID 89689, A/58996 – Agreements, QSA; see McGregor, Imagined destinies, pp. 134-41, for attitudes towards mixed race people; Bennett, Christison, p. 68. 75 Bennett, Christison. p. 97.

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CHR IST ISON OF L A M M ER MOOR

Christison of Lammermoor came out in early October of 1927. It

was dedicated simply ‘To C.D.B’. These were her husband’s initials. Charles had been immensely supportive both emotionally and

intellectually during her writing endeavour. He had been active in his retirement with the Missions to Seamen, on two committees and

particularly concerned about educational opportunities for sailors.

On 1 November he attended his final committee meeting. Ten days later on 11 November he had a sudden and fatal heart attack.76 Mary was forty-six years old. Both her parents had died. She was

estranged from her siblings, and childless.77 The death of Charles was devastating for her but the work which she had just completed

had raised questions about Aboriginal Australians which would soon profoundly occupy her heart and mind.

76 77

Missions to Seamen papers, U DMS/1/23, Hull History Centre, Hull, UK. Undiagnosed diabetes was highly likely to be the reason for her childlessness. Pregnancy in the pre- Insulin era was a rare event. Insulin was used to treat diabetes from1923 onwards but Mary’s condition was not diagnosed until 1930, after Charles had died. See J. A. L. Gilbert and D. M. Dunlop, ‘Diabetic Fertility, Maternal Mortality, and Foetal Loss Rate’ and H. H. Fouracre Barns and M. E. Morgans, ‘Pregnancy Complicated by Diabetes Mellitus’ in British Medical Journal, 8 January 1949; Endrocrinologist, Dennis Engler, to author, 7 July 2013, Monash University, Melbourne.

– 1 21 –

Cha pte r 5

M . M . BEN N E T T Emerging activist I think life is intolerable if one must stand idly by while helpless natives and poor children are done to death in various ways and I will work one way or another while I have breath. Mary Bennett to Travers Buxton, 19 November 1929

Following the sudden death of Charles, Mary was bereft. She confided in a friend: ‘You see I have not my husband to encourage and support

me now, and I am very wretched being by myself’.1 She was still living

in Empire House, the well-appointed Baroque-style flat in Thurloe Place, South Kensington, to which she and Charles had moved once

she had submitted the manuscript of Christison of Lammermoor. It was a convenient location for a Londoner who was about to become

a very active member of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (ASAPS). Mary looked down from her apartment on the

confident grandeur of that emblem of empire, the Victoria and Albert

Museum, which was opposite. How far this world was from north-west

Queensland, the vast rolling grasslands, the bellowing of the cattle, the 1

Mary Bennett to Constance Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke papers, GRG 52/32/22, State Archives of South Australia (hereafter SASA).

M . M . Bennett

broad blue sky and the intense heat: the world of Lammermoor. She was still alive to that place and its people, especially Wyma to whom

she wrote an annual Christmas letter and regularly posted clothes such as a warm coat to protect her from the cold inland winters.2

Volunteering for the Mission to Seamen in which Charles had

been active during his retirement provided meaningful activity for the grieving Mary. She gained some satisfaction in working to support

sailors, assisting them with educational opportunities. The secretary of the Mission and his wife had been good friends of Charles. The office

staff thought highly of him and were kind to Mary in her bereavement.

She was happier than she thought possible to be working on matters

which had been close to her husband’s heart, while also addressing some unfinished business in the biography of her father.3

Her eleventh-hour additional chapter in Christison of Lammermoor

had been prompted by reports she had read concerning the 1926 killings of Aboriginal people at Forrest River, in the Kimberley district in the north-west of Western Australia and the royal commission into the matter which followed. By the time her manuscript had gone

to press Mary had read a newspaper report of Commissioner Wood’s findings that ‘the natives were dealt with drastically by bullet and

fire, that at least four natives met their death at the hands of the

police party at Gotengote Merrie, three women at Mowerie, two

men and two women at Dala; and on Inspector Douglas’ report, it is most probable that nine more natives shared a similar fate beyond

No. 3 Police Camp’.4 We can imagine her shock then, in reading in 2 3 4

Correspondence between Helen Coldham and the Sub-Collector of Customs, May to June 1924 regarding duty liable on parcel of clothes sent to her for Wyma, J2773, 264/ 1924, National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA). Bennett to Cooke, 19 January 1929, Cooke papers, GRG 52/32/22, SASA. South Australian Register, 27 May 1927. Cited in Bennett, Christison, 1st and 2nd editions, p. 91; see Neville Green, The Forrest River Massacres, Fremantle Arts

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

the October 1927 issue of The Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, that constables Regan and St Jack, who had been charged

with killing Aboriginal men and women, had been reinstated as police officers.5 Alston Rivers, her publishers, had decided on a

second edition of Christison of Lammermoor so she had a limited

opportunity to add to the account, although only in a footnote. She added a lengthy one quoting the Reporter:

We were astonished to see from a telegram in The Times of August 11th that the two police constables, Regan and St Jack, who were charged with the murder of aboriginals, were released by the Police magistrate on August 10th, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence against them for the case to go for trial … We have since heard from Australia that the men have been re-instated.6

This was the only substantial addition to the 1928 edition. Mary

was determined that her readers should know the end of this shameful episode. She would later learn that witnesses had retracted statements, refused to testify or disappeared. None of the Aboriginal

people named to the commission, who had witnessed the killings or who had lost relatives, had been called to testify.

The first edition of Christison of Lammermoor had been favourably

reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement but the reviewer took

issue with Mary’s interpretation of relations between settlers and Indigenous Australians. ‘It is wrong’, reviewer Captain Arthur Wilberforce Jose asserted, to publish at this time such a statement as ‘Unfortunately the mass of white Australians have always objected to

5 6

Centre Press, South Fremantle, 1995. Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, journal of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, October 1927, p. 109. Cited in Bennett, Christison, p. 91.

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M . M . Bennett

any kind of justice or protection for the unhappy people whom they

are dispossessing’. ‘It has never been true’ Jose stated, ‘and nowadays it is more inexcusably false than ever’.7 The information concerning

the reinstatement of the police officers accused of the retaliatory

killings which Mary inserted into the second edition answered Jose to some extent. At the same time, Jose’s questioning of Mary’s damning generalisations about white Australians drew attention to

her inability or unpreparedness to temper her sense of moral outrage with a more diplomatic style which might be less offensive to readers. It was a characteristic which would cause her difficulties in the future.

The only other changes Mary made to the second edition seemed

to be in response to Jose’s criticism. Apropos of her account of the shearers’ strike of 1891, he advised readers to keep in mind that the

author’s point of view is ‘obstinately Tory’. Mary had described the striking shearers as a ‘cruel and cowardly lot’ whose ‘tyranny would

be crushed’. Seeming to not like her Tory image, in the second edition she removed these florid phrases along with the descriptions

of the Douglas and Griffith Queensland ministries as ‘domineering, extravagant, socialistic’.8

In 1930, Mary delivered the manuscript of her second book The

Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being to her publishers before

preparing to leave England for Australia. Unlike her first book this

one was written quickly, in less than two years. She made plans to board ship in the northern autumn for Western Australia, a place she had never visited, far from the east coast with which she was more

familiar and where her estranged sister Helen and brother Roy now 7

Arthur Wilberforce Jose, ‘An Australian Pioneer’, Times Literary Supplement, issue 1,343, 1927, p. 753, quoting Bennett. Christison, p. 29.

8 Bennett, Christison, 1st and 2nd editions, pp. 138, 191, 215.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

lived. Mary was almost fifty, widowed and without children when she made this decision. She told Travers Buxton, the secretary of the

ASAPS that she felt her work was among the Aboriginals, though she did add that she believed that it was the work of people in the cities which remained most important in influencing public opinion.9

Six months before she made her decision to migrate, Mary had

been in a London hospital with eye trouble, blind for a time. She had experienced a recurrence of the headaches and blurred vision of thirty years earlier, before she began her studies at the Academy of Arts. This time she must have been diagnosed with the illness which

had struck down her strong and healthy father when he was 67 and managing Lammermoor alone through the drought while his wife and children were in London. Earlier her grandfather went blind as a

result of the same illness.10 Diabetes would very likely have been the

cause of her childlessness. Very few diabetic women conceived in the pre-insulin era, and while her husband was alive she was not aware

9 10

Bennett to Buxton, 6 August 1930, Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society papers (hereafter ASAPS), MSS Brit Emp s22, G374, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies, Rhodes House, Oxford University. Geoff Bolton’s interview with Mysie Schenk confirms that when Mary Bennett arrived at Mount Margaret Mission she told Mrs Schenk that she suffered from diabetes. Australian Dictionary of Biography file for Mary Montgomerie Bennett entry, Noel Butlin Archive, ANU. She told Travers Buxton that she had to interrupt her work because of trouble with her eyes. Buxton to Lefroy, 13 January 1930, Buxton to Bennett, 16 and 20 January 1930, ASAPS, MSS Brit Emp s22, G374. I conducted an extensive search of London hospital archives but could not confirm the date of diagnosis. Medical archivists explained that in this period British hospitals were only required to hold records for public patients. The details of patients of independent means were not kept; ‘Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adults (LADA) may pursue a prolonged mild course before insulin is required. Presumably the destruction of the insulin-producing cells is slow and the residual insulin production, although lower than normal, is sufficient to allow the patient to survive. A high blood sugar alone can cause blurred vision by affecting the amount of water in the lens, thus changing its size.’ Professor Dennis Engler, endocrinologist, Monash University, email 8 July 2013.

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M . M . Bennett

that she had the condition.11 Given her diagnosis, and her view of the importance of the advocacy work of city activists, the plan to go to what she described as ‘the wilds of Australia’ is rather remarkable. Her

experiences in London from 1928 to 1930 may help us to understand some of the influences in her life which led to this decision.

*** London, late 1920s With the changes for the second edition of Christison of Lammermoor

submitted, Mary turned to another writing project which had been in her mind for some time: an essay about Wyma, her Dalleburra

nursemaid, who had died in 1926. She had been a loyal domestic

servant in the Lammermoor household for four decades. Mary could never think of Lammermoor without thinking of Wyma. She had written to her on 27 June 1926, the day on which, she would later

learn, that her old nurse had died. Mary’s four thousand word essay,

lengthy for a newspaper, gives us an insight into the nature of her own position as an activist in support of justice for Aboriginal people,

whom she describes as ‘dear friends of mine’.12 She was motivated by

the people she knew and loved from her childhood: Wyma, and later

during her adolescence Barney, her father’s loyal lieutenant, Rosey the laundry maid, Micky and his wife Mary, trusted stock workers.

They were fully human, rounded individuals who could make her 11

12

‘Pregnancy in diabetic women in the pre-insulin era was a rare event … Amenorrhoea due to uncontrolled diabetes accounted for the low fertility rates of 2–6%’. See J. A. L. Gilbert and D. M. Dunlop, ‘Diabetic Fertility, Maternal Mortality, and Foetal Loss Rate’, British Medical Journal, 8 January 1949. Bennett to Buxton, 13 September 1928, ASAPS, Brit Emp s22, D2/21.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

laugh, and who knew another world and its language, both of which Mary only began to understand during her Lammermoor winters as an adolescent.

Wyma is introduced to the reader in her own cultural context

as Booloodea Timulinya Bunberry of the Dalleburra tribe. She was born at Beroota, ‘by whose placid waters where blue waterlilies grow, her happy early years were spent’. The essay describes an intelli­gent,

adaptable individual who met Mary’s father when she was the youngest wife of Warmboomooloo, the headman of the Dalleburra peo-

ple whom Christison had confronted over sheep stealing. We meet Wyma in her own world, singing and gathering food, making necklaces and telling stories. Wyma escapes the constraints of her culture

in choosing her own husband after her first husband died and learns

the skills of housekeeping and being a nursemaid. Mary brings her to life as a vivacious woman with a keen sense of humour, a strong

sense of loyalty and a love of children. We see, in this extended song of praise for an Aboriginal woman, the humanising intent of the author. We can better understand Mary’s sense of urgency in her Aboriginal reform work when we realise that her passion to work

for justice for Aboriginal people was rooted in relationships, such as

her friendship with Wyma.13 The Townsville Daily Bulletin published

Mary’s extended eulogy in May, with a photo of Wyma which Mrs

Christison had taken before she left Lammermoor in 1898. Mary does not allude to Wyma’s banishment from Lammermoor with her husband Freddy in 2001 due to some misdemeanour of Freddy’s.14

13 14

M. M. Bennett, ‘Wyma’, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 19 May 1928, p. 9. Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 31 March 1901, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 2, SLQ.

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M . M . Bennett

As with Christison of Lammermoor, the purpose was celebration – negativity and conflict were omitted.

Wednesday 5 September 1928 was for Mary the day on which

she was galvanised to action. She had arranged to meet Mr Travers

Buxton, the honorary secretary of the ASAPS at Denison House, the Society’s headquarters, that morning, to discuss the Aboriginal question which she described to him as ‘urgent and desperate’. This would be the beginning of an ongoing correspondence with Buxton

whose family had been active in the anti-slavery movement for

generations. Buxton appreciated the material that Mary provided to him, while at the time seeming chary of her intensity about the issue. She told Buxton that ‘an enlightened national conscience here

as well as in Australia is much needed, partly because there are many

Australians over here who can be reached’. She referred to the ‘heartrending conditions of this very fine race’.15 On her way back home, after this, their first meeting, she bought The Times, seeking news

of Australia as she always did. Buried on page 11 she read ‘Raids by Blacks in Australia: Police Aid Asked For’.

Reports from Central Australia indicate that there is serious trouble among the blacks who are killing settlers’ cattle. Since the police arrested the two blacks alleged to be concerned in the murder of Fred Brookes, a stockman, at a lonely spot 80 miles to the north of Alice Springs, the tribe has again concentrated in the vicinity of Mr Stafford’s station, and is showing suspicious activity nightly.16

The police reports in regard to the murder of Fred Brookes referred

to the necessity ‘to resort to drastic measures’. The reporter explained 15 16

Bennett to Buxton, 25 August 1928, ASAPS papers, Brit Emp s22, D2/21. ‘Raids by Blacks in Australia’, The Times, 5 September 1928, p. 11.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

that this was taken to mean that most of the Aboriginal men sighted

by police were shot, and added, ‘which usually happens nine times out of ten in similar circumstances’.17 The reprisal killings which followed the murder of Brookes would later be described as the

Coniston Massacre. Mary learned that two people had been arrested

and others had been shot. Her reading of colonial newspapers, and government reports alerted her to the likelihood of a more complex story than the one broadcast. She was horrified by what she read.

Following this meeting with Buxton, Mary spent a frenetic

afternoon composing letters to English newspapers on this brutality. She explained: ‘I felt I dare not lose any time – so much depends on

striking the iron while it is hot’. She wrote to The Times, the Morning

Post, The Scotsman, Truth, The Spectator and the Manchester Guardian, sending copies to Buxton and adding:

I should be so grateful of any criticisms from you to guide me in future ventures … I am perfectly futile in correspondence and dialectic, but perhaps your society may be moved to readjust people’s views, and in case Australia House claims that at all times and in all cases the Government has acted justly, I will also enclose an extract that I copied from the report of the administrator of the Northern Territory for 1912. I will now set to work to write to the members of the Committee whom you mentioned, and hope to send on the letters to you tomorrow or the next day. I shall be grateful if you will put in a word asking their attention. The case of the aborigines is so urgent that a very little more civilisation will I am afraid drive them beyond recall.18

Mary’s response to the news of these killings conveys both her

empathy with the victims as well as her awareness that she has 17 18

‘Raids by Blacks in Australia’. Bennett to Buxton, 5 September 1928, ASAPS papers, Brit Emp s22, D2/21.

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M . M . Bennett

not developed the skill of writing persuasive, informed letters to

newspapers. She drew attention to the effects of the British colonising

endeavour on its subjects with her satiric crack about the dangers of ‘more civilisation’ on Aboriginal people. Her burst of letter writing was not successful, in that none was published, although it seems

that both Truth and the Manchester Guardian drew on Mary’s letters

to write their own brief articles on the topic. Undeterred, she asked Buxton for stylistic advice on writing to the newspapers, accepting his caution that the papers could be alarmed by communications

which may appear propagandistic.19 It would be another year before she had her first letter to a newspaper editor published.20

As she sought to find out what really happened in central Australia

she became more and more aware of the disadvantages of being

so far away. She knew that advocacy, to be effective, had to have

a solid, reliable information base. She believed that there was ‘an organised conspiracy to keep people in the dark’, a continuation

of the conspiracy of silence to which Commissioner Wood had referred when investigating the earlier shootings in the Kimberley.21

Police and pastoralists supported each other’s versions of events. She combed the newspapers searching for information about the central Australian shootings and waited impatiently for the findings 19 20

21

Bennett to Buxton, 5, 7 September 1928, ASAPS papers, Brit Emp s22, D2/21. This was ‘A Reproach to Australia’, Manchester Guardian 9 September 1929. It was republished on 13 September 1929 in the Manchester Guardian Weekly. Helen Swainger, Manchester Guardian archivist, has confirmed that this was the only letter by Mary Bennett published in The Manchester Guardian. Helen Swainger email, 9 June 2016. Bennett to Buxton, 18 March 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, G374; Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke papers, GRG52/32/25, SASA records; G. T. Wood, ‘Royal Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Killing and Burning of Bodies of Aborigines in East Kimberley and into Police Methods When Effecting Arrests’, Perth, Government Printer, 1927.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

from the inquiry which Prime Minister Bruce had announced in November 1928. As well as her reading in Australian history and anthropology, she began to look more broadly at the British imperial

colonising endeavour. In March 1929 she attended a conference held under the auspices of the ASAPS on the Hilton Young Commission

which had been set up to consider the possibility of a closer union between British territories in East and Central Africa. One of the

issues under discussion was the need for a coherent native policy and a

consideration of the relationship between indigenous and immigrant

communities. Passions ran high. Debaters seemed to think in terms

of settlers and indigenous people as necessarily being in opposition. Mary rejected this adversarial approach, considering the possibility

of respectful coexistence.22 She added to her reading colonial policy in Africa and elsewhere, as she became more deeply engaged in

think­ing about the position of Aboriginal people in Australia as a part of the British imperial story. She needed to understand how these imperial colonisers thought about the people and societies they over­took in the process of establishing new British societies.

Encountering two extraordinary people The day after the conference on colonial policy Mary came face to face with someone who had suffered from its consequences. She met Anthony Fernando, an elderly Australian Aboriginal man who was being held in the Old Bailey. She had read of the assault charge

against him in an article in The Times on 23 January 1929. She learned

that Fernando, who was working as a street trader, had been racially taunted by another stall holder. Fernando had responded by striking 22

Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, GRG52/32/25, SASA.

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M . M . Bennett

the man who had provoked him and then pointing a loaded revolver at him.23 Fernando initially pleaded ‘not guilty’ to assault and was

committed for trial. Mary invited Douglas Jones, the lawyer for whom

Fernando had worked as a cook and manservant, to afternoon tea at her home in Thurloe Place and listened, engrossed by Fernando’s life

story as told by Jones.24 She was determined to meet him. Fernando

initially refused to see her or have anything to do with philanthropic

societies but relented when he was still in the Old Bailey and agreed

to a meeting. Mary described Fernando as ‘small and delicate with a gentle gravity of demeanour which only girding [sic] and insult

can rouse him from’.25 She wrote with enthusiastic appreciation to her activist friend Constance Cooke, commenting on Fernando’s

gratitude and affection for Mr Crawshaw, his patron and employer. Mary records that he said to Mr Crawshaw’s mother: ‘A good father

is good, but a good mother is above every other good. I was taken from my mother when I was little, but the thought of her has been

the guiding star of my life’.26 She reported that Fernando warned her: ‘If you want to help my people, you must be quick, for there are not many left. When the stations are wired in, my people die’. 27

Her meeting with Fernando had a profound effect on Mary. He

was an educated man, eloquent in his description of the injustices his people faced. She had her own first-hand experience of the intelligence, honesty and fidelity of Wyma, Barney and other 23 24 25 26 27

‘Charges Against Man of Colour: Street Trader and a Loaded Revolver’, The Times, 23 Jan 1929, p. 11. Bennett to Haynes, 21 February 1929, cited in Fiona Paisley, The Lone Protestor, p. 125. Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929. She probably means ‘goading’ rather than ‘girding’. Cooke papers, GRG 52/32/25, SASA. Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke papers, GRG 52/32/25, SASA. Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke papers, GRG 52/32/25, SASA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Dalleburra people who had worked for her father. Now she met an Aboriginal man who appeared to be self-taught and who rivalled

her in his original use of English, with oxymoronic phrases such as ‘the law of England has outlawed us’ and ‘this land of cultivated savagery’. Mary was entranced by the expression of these sophisticated

insights. Here was living evidence of the possibilities of her vision for Aboriginal Australians.

She learned that he was taken from his mother as a tiny child and

she extemporised to Travers Buxton:

I have an idea that he may be almost the last survivor of the strong, numerous and intellectually advanced Kamilaroi group that inhabited New England in northern New South Wales; a great number of this tribe was wiped out in the Myall Creek Massacre in the 40s. I went to some pains to explain to Mr Douglas Jones that Fernando suffers from no obsessions or delusions, that his statements are cold fact.28

By June that year she seems to have accepted her own supposition,

writing to an old friend William Lees, editor of Queensland Country

Life, that she had met a remarkable man who was ‘the last survivor of one of the New South Wales tribes’. She told his story with rapture: He had been taken from his tribe as a small child so he does not remember his mother, but he told me that ‘the thought of his mother was the guiding star of his life’. He worked for a time as an engine driver near Sydney. Then something occurred, there was a dispersal, and the wrong-doers were let off. This man had been a witness and it was a great blow to him and also a great disillusion. He forthwith left Australia, and for between forty and fifty years he has made it his mission to proclaim the sufferings of his race though the world, beginning with the East where he has travelled extensively. He has the most 28

Bennett to Buxton, 9 April 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/21.

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M . M . Bennett

extraordinary tenacity of purpose and devotion to his people; he adores children; and he is very responsive to any kindness; and he is very proud and will not take any help, but earns his living as he goes along. For a long time he worked for a firm in Italy as an acetylene welder – he has taught himself all he knows, and this includes many languages and a very fluent vigorous pure English which is an extraordinary compound of the Bible and political writings such as Sir Charles Dilke’s. If I had not seen him, I do not think I could have believed such a thing.29

Fernando and his story became an inspiration to Mary. She saw

him as the embodiment of all that was possible for Aboriginal Australians, rather than as a complex individual.

Another person who influenced her at this time was Annie Lock,

a middle-aged missionary with the United Aborigines Mission, with

a life story very different to Fernando’s. She came across Lock in her newspaper reading as she sought to find the details of what had

happened at Coniston. She read her version of events concerning the murders of men and women near Alice Springs in 1928, and as had

happened when she met Fernando she seemed to be inspired by this woman’s life story.30 Annie Lock was sometimes referred to as Sister,

as many women missionaries were, because, although she was not a 29

30

Bennett to William Lees, 18 June 1929, Q572.9901/B, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (hereafter SLNSW). See Paisley, The Lone Protestor, p. 3, for an account of Fernando’s life and for her comment on Bennett’s surmising regarding Fernando’s history. Mary read accounts of the killings in central Australia in the North Queensland Register, 12 and 19 November 1928, South Australian Register, 18 January 1929, Herald (Melbourne), 20 December 1928, The West Australian, 9 November 1928, Northern Standard, 9 November 1928, Northern Territory Times, 9 November 1928. See Catherine Bishop, “She Has the Native Interests Too Much at Heart”: Annie Lock’s Experiences as a Single, White, Female Missionary to Aborigines, 19301937’ in Evangelists of Empire? Missionaries in Colonial History, eds Amanda Barry, Joanna Cruickshank, Andrew Brown-May and Patricia Grimshaw, Melbourne, University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre, 2008; Catherine Bishop, ‘“A woman Missionary living among naked blacks”: Annie Lock, 1876-1943’, MA Thesis, Australian National University, 1991.

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trained nurse, she ministered to the sick and the dying. She was a

relatively uneducated woman who seemed to find it difficult to get on with col­leagues. After moving from Western Australia where

she was well known, she worked alone in the desert, depending on donations to keep herself alive and to support her ministering

activities.31 Athol McGregor, a missionary who befriended Lock, heard her version of events when he found her out of rations at

Harding Soak, a remote waterhole some 160 kilometres north-

west of Alice Springs tending a small group of hungry and sick Aboriginal people. He was determined that the world should know about the killing raids led by Constable Murray between 15 August

and 24 September 1928. McGregor ensured that the trial, set for 7

November in Darwin, was covered by journalists. Two men, Padygar

and Arkirka, were accused of the murder of Fred Brookes. The trial was a shambles. At lunch time on the first day, two members of the jury ignored the instructions to have no contact with others. This led to a new jury being empanelled. The Walpiri witness, speaking through an interpreter, changed some of the details of his story and it appeared that the men had been charged under a South Australian

Act when the offences occurred in the Northern Territory. Before he dismissed the case the judge asked Constable Murray how many he had killed. Journalist John Cribben recreated the scene: ‘Seventeen, Your Honour’. There was a long silence in the court. The judge had rested his head on his hand, his face turned away from Murray. Then he spoke.

31

See Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000, Fremantle Centre Press, Fremantle, 2000, pp. 253-58.

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M . M . Bennett

‘You mowed them down wholesale!’32

Mary read of these events in the Australian newspapers covering

the trial and soon learned of the inquiry which Prime Minister

Bruce agreed to establish under pressure from missionaries such as Athol McGregor and organisations such as the Association for

the Protection of Native Races backed by the Presbyterian Church. Mr A. H. O’Kelly, a police magistrate from Cairns, Queensland,

presided. Police Inspector P. A. Giles from Oodnadatta in South

Australia was the second Board of Enquiry member and the third, and most surprising appointment because he was Constable Murray’s superior, was J. C. Cawood who was the Chief Government Resi­dent and Police Commissioner for Central Australia.33 Annie Lock and

Athol McGregor went to Darwin to give evidence.

The Finding of the Board of Enquiry dated 7 February 1929

was astonishing and shocking to Mary and to other activists who had been awaiting it. The Board was unanimous in finding that in

three different episodes the shooting was justified. Ten reasons were

advanced for the Aboriginals’ actions in attacking white men and spearing cattle. The second was ‘unattached Missionaries wandering from place to place, having no previous knowledge of blacks and their

customs and preaching a doctrine of equality’. The sixth was even more pointed: ‘a woman Missionary living among naked blacks thus lowering their respect for the whites’.34 Annie Lock, who had been 32 33 34

John Cribben, The Killing Times: The Coniston Massacre 1928, Fontana/Collins, Sydney, 1984, p. 114. This interchange was reported in The Northern Territory Times, 9 November 1928. Chief Government Resident was the name of the most senior administrative post in central Australia. ‘Central Australia: Findings of the Board of Enquiry concerning the killing of natives in Central Australia by Police Parties and others, and concerning other matters’, 18 January, in Cribbin, The Killing Times, p. 155.

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singlehandedly assisting the group at Harding Soak, was par­tially blamed for the deaths which the report argued were not reprisal kill-

ings, stating that ‘there was not a scintilla of evidence’ for this. The

final statement of the report was that there was ‘no evidence of any starvation of blacks in Central Australia’. On the contrary, the report

concluded that ‘there is evidence of ample native food and water’. This starkly contradicted administrator Cawood’s own published annual reports of a widespread and severe drought and the consequent starvation of Walpiri people.35 Mary described the Enquiry as ‘a

judicial fraud, not justice’.36 She was outraged at the attack on Lock in

the report and in subsequent newspaper reports. She told her friend and fellow advocate for Aboriginal justice, Constance Cooke:

Do you know I have an idea of joining the British Common­ wealth League and bringing up the attack on Sister Lock and its implications for a pronouncement by them. Do you think it is a silly idea? … But do tell me what are Sister Lock’s work, age, character? Is it correct for me to assume that she is a devoted missionary of about fifty years of age who has put in twenty-five years in a hot climate, privation and loneliness, caring for black and half-caste children in connection with the Methodist Mission? As this public attack has been made on Sister Lock it is necessary that she should be vindicated both for her own sake and because it is also a vindication of the aborigines. You see that the Commonwealth in accepting, that is, in passing this report, is impeaching Sister Lock and ought to be liable for an apology. A private person would be liable. Anyway it is up to us to vindicate her if her character deserves to be vindicated.37 35 36 37

Bill Wilson and Justin O’Brien, ‘“To infuse an universal terror”: A Reappraisal of the Coniston Killings’, Aboriginal History, vol. 27, 2003, p. 73. Bennett to Buxton, 18 March 1929, ASAPS, Brit Emp s22, G374. Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke papers, GRG 52/32/25, SASA.

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As with her meeting with Fernando, Mary appears swept up with

an emotional, uncritical enthusiasm. She asks for details about Lock, but is drawn along by her own assumptions to create a roman­t ic,

idealised version of a heroic woman, alone and despised, caring for neglected Aboriginal children.

Annie Lock, who had been a missionary with the inter­denom­

inational Australian Aborigines Mission (later called the United Aborigines Mission) since 1903, was one of the people responsible

for publicising the killings at Coniston, forcing the official enquiry.

When she wrote to her, Mary expressed the view that police officers should not hold positions as Protectors of Aborigines. Lock’s reply

drew attention to the widespread abuse of Aboriginal girls. She told Mary that the white men ‘round them up like bullocks and take

young girls away, keep them one week, and sometimes send them back and sometimes kill them’.38 Lock argued that good, clean-living police were needed if the Northern Territory’s Aboriginals Ordi­nance

regarding Aboriginal women was to be enforced. Her eight page

letter, rivalling Mary’s own lengthy ones, detailed accounts of girls and women being abused by white men, some of whom were police

officers, officially their protectors. ‘The problem up here’, Annie wrote, ‘is the children’:

If we could get a piece of country and get the children and train them while they are young and at the same time teach them useful trades, the girls to sew, cook, wash and clean, the boys to be horsemen, cowboys, shearers and trades like making up wood and tin cans and iron work, and to be useful at gardening and general work about a home, they would need good firm kind persons to train them and not spoil them or make too much fuss of them. The only education they need is to read and 38

Annie Lock to Bennett, August 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/23.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

write and do arithmetic, so they may know the value of money and how to get change.39

Two ideas here – the importance of land and education – would

become the platforms on which Mary built her vision of what was needed to assist Aboriginal people. She would develop a more

sophisticated approach to education than Lock’s limited vocational training but she embraced her view of the importance of land. Mary

saw Annie Lock as a brave, resourceful woman, working alone to help central Australian Aboriginal people, who were caught between

drought and the white man and his cattle. She may have had a more

nuanced approach if she knew that Lock had favoured the separating of children from their mothers in her earlier work near Perth.40 Again we see Mary’s tendency to idealise those people whom she

admires. She is attracted to Lock almost as a romantic figure taking

on, single-handedly, those abusing their power, and being maligned as a consequence.

The frontier which Mary knew during her adolescent Queensland

years had shifted. Land and habitat continued to be lost to the tribes,

Aboriginal women continued to be abused in central and northern Australia as in Queensland, but Mary was aware of how she could

be silenced if she drew attention to Sister Lock without knowing

all the facts of the case. While Mary was so engaged in research and writing and soon public speaking, Annie Lock’s contribution

represented an alternative possible future to being a city activist. Mary was sometimes depressed and felt she was engaged in fighting a losing battle but she gained inspiration from Anthony Fernando 39 40

Lock to Bennett, p. 7. See Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 253-58.

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M . M . Bennett

and Annie Lock and looked to the British Commonwealth League as a possible forum to express her views and gather support.41

British Commonwealth League Conference 1929 The British Commonwealth League held its 5th annual conference

on 5–6 June 1929. The League had been conceived and established by women in the suffrage movement to ‘promote equality of liberties, status and opportunities between women and men, and to encourage

mutual understanding throughout the Commonwealth’.42 Its main aim was to support women of any ethnicity in other dominions

and colonies to get the vote. Mary was accepted as a speaker for the 1929 conference. It was her public introduction to Australian and English feminists. Almost certainly it was her first speech on

Aboriginal affairs to a large audience. For members of organisations

such as the Australian Federation of Women Voters, the Women’s Service Guilds of Western Australia and the Women’s Non-Party

Association of South Australia, it was their introduction to Mary Bennett. She presented as an educated English woman with the

accent and poise of her class. She was tall, of erect bearing, and well but conservatively dressed. Observant listeners would notice her

direct gaze and an intensity of expression in her eyes. Her decision to criticise the Australian Government to Australian women who were

abroad was a brave one, but perhaps, as an Englishwoman, she had a limited awareness of the danger ahead.

The Australian contingent made up the bulk of the audience.

Mary spoke on ‘The Condition of the Aborigines of Australia under 41 42

Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, GRG 52/32/25, SASA. ‘British Commonwealth League’, The Women’s Library, http://calarchive. londonmet.ac.uk/ accessed September 2014.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

the Federal Government’ for about three quarters of an hour. She

later described this talk as a most difficult task, most likely referring more to its delivery and reception than to its preparation.43 It was an

opportunity for her to bring together her ideas about why Australian

government policies concerning Aboriginal people, some of which she acknowledged were well intentioned, did not seem to be working.

It was a rather rambling, though forthright, presentation which drew on her analysis of the report by John Bleakley, Chief Protector of

Aborigines in Queensland, to enquire into ‘the status and condition of

Aboriginals, including half-castes’ in central and northern Australia. She also drew attention to the killing of thirty-one (this number cov­

ered more than one episode) Aboriginal men and women in central Australia in 1928. She referred to her relationships with Aboriginal people, conscious, no doubt, that this would deflect the criticism that

she could expect if she did not make clear her Australian connections. She told her female audience:

I should be unworthy of my aboriginal women friends if I let such a calumny pass [that Aboriginal women have no ‘sense of chastity’] and there are many white men and women who hold my view. I have known black women who had the strictest morality; it was innate in them and also inculcated by their code; they had not been ‘civilised’ though they copied all that they approved in our ways.44

She explained the judicial failure of the O’Kelly Inquiry into the

killings in central Australia by drawing attention to the composition of the board which consisted of three police officers, one of whom 43 44

Bennett to Lees, 18 June 1929, Q572.9901/B, SLNSW. M. M. Bennett, ‘The Condition of the Aborigines of Australia under the Federal Government’, Q572.9901/B, SLNSW.

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M . M . Bennett

was Murray’s superior officer and whom Mary described as effectively ‘ judge as well as defendant’. She argued that the evidence of

Aboriginal people was inadmissible in courts of law and noted that the Sydney-based Association for the Protection of the Native Races, having regard for this prejudicial exclusion, had asked that a non-

official person who knew the local language be appointed to the

board, but that the request had been refused. She told her audience

of the findings of the enquiry: the police were exonerated, all the shootings were found to be justified and one of the reasons given for

Aboriginal attacks on cattle and white men was ‘a woman missionary living among naked blacks thus lowering their respect for the whites’.

She did what she could to vindicate Annie Lock, while noting the similarities between the killings at Coniston in central Australia and

those at Forrest River in the Kimberley two years earlier, when again no convictions were made.45

Mary also drew on these events to illustrate her argument that

police officers, upholding the law for the benefit of pastoralists, could not also fulfil their responsibilities as protectors of Aboriginal

people. She explained that all the police in the Northern Territory were ‘protectors of Aboriginals’. She told her audience that the missionary Annie Lock was in Darwin when Constable Murray brought in Padygar and Arkirka on the charge of killing Brookes.

Lock was there to seek medical attention for two Aboriginal girls for whom she had been caring. Murray attempted to take the girls from

her, as their legal guardian (because they were Aboriginal and he

was a Protector). He had the right to do so, despite Lock’s care and 45

Bennett, ‘The Condition of the Aborigines of Australia under the Federal Government’, SLNSW.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

love for the two children over some time, but their fearful screams

as they clung to Sister Lock drew public attention to his attempt and he withdrew.46

Perhaps the most confronting part of Mary’s delivery was her

direct, for the times, public discussion of white men’s sexual use of Aboriginal women. She relayed Bleakley’s graphic images of

‘motor-car loads of men from townships or construction camps, “bent on ‘gin-sprees”’, explaining to her audience that this meant ‘drink and prostitution orgies’. She spoke of white pastoralists who

did not acknowledge their mixed-descent children, unless they want­ ed to use them as cheap labour. Again quoting Bleakley she spoke

of another white man who boasted of having a fresh black woman every week.47

The audience would have included Australian women with family

in the pastoral industry. These direct allegations of abuse probably contributed to the hostility which Mary sensed coming from the Aus­ tralian contingent. She later suggested that the Australian women

seemed to equate her criticisms with a lack of patriotism and com­ plained to Travers Buxton that the Secretary of the British Com­ mon­wealth League, Miss Chave Collisson, an Australian, objected

to her criticising the federal government.48 The realities of activist

politics – the sensitivities, the competing priorities, the implied questioning of her credentials – were becoming clearer. The need to

work within an organisation and develop working relationships with

other organisations was essential. Her passionate dedication to the 46 47 48

Lock to Bennett, August 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/23. Bennett, ‘The Condition of the Aborigines of Australia under the Federal Government’, SLNSW. Buxton to Cooke, 7 June 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, G374.

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M . M . Bennett

plight of Aboriginal people was not in question, but the process of considering what future path she might take probably started in the aftermath of this experience.

She had extended her network to include influential individuals

such as Professor Gilbert Murray, Greek scholar, humanist and a foun­dation chair of the League of Nations; Colonel Genders of the

Aborigines Protection League in Adelaide; and Reverend Charles

Lefroy, a member of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society who had lived and worked in Western Australia and advo-

cated for Aboriginal people. She had written letters to newspapers

but they had not been published. By the end of March 1929, she confessed to Constance Cooke that, although she had been in correspondence with a number of people, she had not been able to effect anything.49 Mary had first met Constance in London in 1927 when

she had introduced Mary to the ASAPS. She was just a year younger than Mary and as a member of the South Australian Women’s Non-Party Association had steered that group to take up the cause

of Aboriginal people.50 The two women became friends as well as

political allies.

A few months after the British Commonwealth League conference,

Mary expressed her frustration to Buxton: ‘I think life is intolerable if one must stand idly by while helpless natives and poor children are

done to death in various ways and I will work one way or another while I have breath’.51 49 50 51

Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, GRG52/32/25, SASA. See Margaret Macilwain, Cooke, Constance Mary Ternent (1882–1967), ADB. http://adb.edu.au/biography/coooke-constance-mary-ternent-12855/text23211, accessed June 2012. Bennett to Buxton, 19 November 1929. ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/23.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being When Mary was not attending meetings, writing letters and extend­ ing her activist network, she was researching for the book which

would be published in July 1930 as The Australian Aboriginal as a

Human Being. In a sense this research began when she added the chapter ‘What to do about the Blacks today’ to Christison of Lammer­ moor in 1927. That additional chapter had nothing to do with her fa-

ther’s life but reflected her growing outrage at what was happening to Aboriginal people in Australia. The Australian Aboriginal as a Human

Being was her attempt to influence public opinion, to strengthen

campaigning for a more humane approach to the original inhabitants of the land. A reading of it gives us insights, not only into Mary’s

thinking in the late 1920s about Aboriginal people and their place

in Australian society, but also into her emotional life at a time of significant change after the death of her husband.

The added phrase of the title, ‘as a human being’, indicated a radi-

cal approach to writing about Aboriginal people at this time. It dis-

tinguished the purpose of the book from the work of anthropologists interested in studying ‘one of the lowest types of culture available for study’ before ‘the rapid and inevitable diminution of their numbers’.52 Racial hierarchy, as evident in this statement, the notion of

the Aboriginal race being doomed, and the view that the study of

traditional Aboriginal societies would throw light on ‘the mysteries of classical times whose origin had only been a matter of conjec­

ture’, underpinned anthropological investigation at the time Mary was 52

Extract from Minutes of General Meeting of the Second Pan-Pacific Congress, Sydney, September 1923, A518, N806/1/1, Part 1, NAA, cited in Geoffrey Gray, A Cautious Silence: The politics ofAustralian Anthropology, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2007, p. 7.

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M . M . Bennett

researching.53 Two decades earlier, her father had expressed the view

that ‘once the squatter with his flocks and herds drove the aboriginal horde from their own water, they were doomed’.54 The anthropolo-

gist Baldwin Spencer had maintained in 1921 that in any encounter between races ‘the weaker and less cultured would certainly be exterminated by the stronger and more highly cultured’. Alfred Howitt,

to whom Robert Christison had contributed information about the Dalleburra, also maintained that ‘in all parts of Australia the native

race is doomed to destruction sooner or later; contact with the white race is fatal’.55 These dominant ideas were very much a part of the cul-

ture and as such appeared to have influenced Mary’s thinking. She wrote of the Aboriginal ‘child race’, appearing to be unaware of the condescension of the phrase.

Mary did not, however, share the sense of pessimistic inevitabil-

ity that her father and these anthropologists expressed. Instead she supported the approach taken by the Adelaide-based Aborigines’ Protection League of which her friend Constance Cooke was the

vice-president. Colonel Charles Genders, the honorary secretary, was

the driving force behind a petition to the Federal Parliament that Aboriginal tribes ‘still with their tribal governments’ should be al-

lotted land ‘in perpetuity, and that they shall be allowed to govern

it with the assistance of a government resident and teachers and that no white person be allowed into the territory without a permit’.56 53

54 55 56

A. W. Howitt, Address by the President (of section G, Anthropology, Report of the Third Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science), cited in McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p. 36. See this work for a study of this theory and its expression at the time that Bennett was researching for The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being. Robert Christison, ‘The Aborigines’, unpub., written between 1900 and 1910, Christison family papers, TR 1867, series 4, item 172, SLQ. See McGregor, Imagined Destinies, pp. 53-54. Cited in M. M. Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 129.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

She was motivated by the notion of the moral responsibility incum-

bent on the dominant European population whose actions continued to lead to the destruction of the original hunter-gatherer societies. Mary knew that Aboriginal social groups would have to adapt to the inevitability of sharing with the invading culture, but she believed,

as did the Aborigines’ Protection League members, that a period of

isolation from the worst of the white man’s culture may give them the

necessary time to begin to develop some adaptive strategies, such as learning how to manage herd animals.

A statement by Dr Ramsay Smith, physician, anthropologist

and member of the Aborigines’ Protection League, provided the

organising principle for what Mary has to say in her book. In an entry for the Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia for 1909, Smith had written:

The problem of what to do with the race, the most interesting at present on earth, and the least deserving to be exterminated by us, and the most wronged at our hands, is not a difficult one to solve, were a solution really desired.57

Mary took the phrases of this statement as chapter headings in order to deal with past and present Aboriginal societies and to make a proposal for future policy.

She had told Travers Buxton that ‘the mass of people … without

some sharp educating are incapable of understanding justice in dealing

with their own child race’, again displaying a seemingly unconscious condescension.58 She explained that ‘the vitiated atmosphere’ which

Australians had breathed for nearly a hundred and fifty years meant 57 58

Dr Ramsay Smith, Commonwealth Year Book, 1909. Bennett to Buxton, 30 Jan 1929, Cooke papers, GRG52/32/25, State Records of South Australia Adelaide; the term ‘the child race was commonly used at the time. See Baldwin Spencer in McGregor, Imagined Destinies, pp. 74-75.

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M . M . Bennett

that people did not understand ‘the enormities which we sanction

so cheerfully’.59 She set herself the task of promoting the growth

of understanding of Aboriginal people and societies, as humans, with the full range of human characteristics, from their intelligent adaptation to their environments to evidence of what she saw as the Christian virtues of generosity, patience, loyalty and selflessness.

In the first chapter ‘The Most Interesting Race at Present on

Earth’, the reader is introduced to a society which, the author tells us, developed as a result of adaptation to an environment which included

animals which could not be domesticated and plants which could not be cultivated. Aboriginal people solved material difficulties, we

are told, by spiritual means, practising temperance to take no more food than is necessary, generosity to share with the less successful hunters and respect for boundaries so as not to trespass on the

hunting grounds of others. This chapter drew on her reading of

anthropologists – Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer, Professor Radcliffe-

Brown, Dr Ramsay Smith, Dr John Gilruth, Reverend Dr Elkin and Alfred Howitt – with occasional references to the observations of

her father. She wrote about social organisation, including initiation rites, marriage classifications and ceremonies. She gave example of the poetry of Aboriginal languages as well as commenting on

the precision and plasticity of their grammars. All is explained in human terms, drawing out the similarities with other cultures where

customs develop to create order and ensure that meaning and values are preserved. One example will suffice to demonstrate this point.

Mary described trading which had taken place over thousands

of years. Markets were held along the trade routes on the Cooper 59

Bennett to Buxton, 20 October 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, G374.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Creek and centres such as Kopperamanna, for which she provides the etymology to illustrate that it was a meeting place, a coming

together. Here netted bags, string tassels, ochre, stone, feathers and wooden weapons were bartered but this was not all. These ‘markets

of Australia’, ‘one of the most romantic chapters in social geography’,

were places where songs and dances were also exchanged. 60 High

praise for Mary to describe something as romantic; she had begun her father’s biography wondering why we neglected ‘the romantic history of our own time’. Now, in her second book, she used the

adjective to describe the Aboriginal trading culture which was ended

by those other romantic heroes, pioneers such as her father who she had written about, who blazed tracks and sunk wells and ‘built up

our country’.61 She seems unaware of these inherently contradictory visions: her romanticising the traditional trading practices of Aborig­

inal social groups which were smashed by the romantic pioneer ‘men of our own race’. Perhaps her imaginative field had now shifted,

moved back in time to a pre-European society? Perhaps she had

been so taken over by her imaginative reconstruction of this world that she was unaware of contradictions.

‘Which of these … was neighbour? … And he said, He that

shewed mercy’ is the New Testament quotation which prefaces the second chapter, ‘The Least Deserving to be Exterminated by Us’.62

Mary uses it to illustrate the part played by a sense of Christian responsibility in her advocacy on behalf of Aboriginal people. Draw­ ing on the journals of explorers such as Charles Sturt and Edward

Eyre and her father, she shares anecdotes from different places and 60 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 24. 61 Bennett, Christison, p. 13. 62 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 34.

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M . M . Bennett

times which illustrate the courage, compassion, generosity and kind­ li­ness of different Aboriginal individuals. She tells her readers:

We could learn much from ‘our’ Australian natives, who are not only fauna, ‘specimens’ of ‘the most interesting race at present on earth,’ not only our best allies, ‘the least deserving to be exterminated by us,’ but SPIRIT FORCE WHICH WE LOSE AT OUR PERIL. [her capitals]

She doesn’t explain what she means by this but invites ‘Scouts and

Guides to stand up for our oppressed natives … so that in years to come our own scouts’ “corobberies” may recall, not humiliation, but obligations honoured and restitution made’.63 She seems to be trying

to broaden the European-Australian culture to encourage acceptance of obligations to Aboriginal Australians.

Chapters 3 to 6 take the phrase ‘The most wronged at our hands’ as

titles. They detail the ‘war of extermination’ in Queensland, massacres in various parts of the country, Aboriginal people dispossessed, out­ lawed and under a system ‘analogous to slavery’. Mary invokes inter­ national treaties and conventions, which Australia does not honour,

and provides numerous examples of Aboriginal Australians who are not protected by Australian law. The last of these, Chapter 6, subtitled ‘The Aboriginal Woman in the Federal Territories’, concentrates on women and girls.

A quote from the Old Testament book ‘Lamentations’ sets the

moral atmosphere. After the destruction of Jerusalem, Jeremias la-

ments the miseries of his people: ‘Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sor-

row, which is done unto me’.64 Her own lament was that Aboriginal 63 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 52. 64 ‘The Lamentations of Jeremais’, 1:12, Old Testament, quoted in Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 112.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

women and girls were treated inhumanely, forced into servitude. As

in Chapter 2, she appeals to a Christian sense of responsibility in her readers. She focuses on the ‘half-caste dump, called a “home”

at Kahlin Beach, Darwin’ to illustrate her argument. Here young

women were not given their own secure sleeping quarters. Women had been sent to Darwin to work as domestics, having to leave their husbands behind. Girls were sent out to work as servants from the

age of fourteen, separated from family and friends. Mary concluded that the Aboriginal Compound at Kahlin existed to supply the white people with cheap labour.65 She encouraged her readers to try to put themselves in the shoes of these women:

To legislate for them, we ought to understand their position – an impossibility. For how can anyone imagine what it would be like to be disowned by the father, with the mother depraved by abuse, to grow up without natural affections, without the love of the family in childhood, without the wholesome discipline of the public school – or the tribe – to strengthen adolescence for responsibility? Then, at an impressionable age, to be put out in service with aliens? The only remedy is for them to be given back what they have lost – human ties. They need fellowship, and they will get it only among the mother’s people, the Aboriginal tribes, or, if these no longer exist, among other half-castes in Missions which do hold up an ideal of love and service. They need their homes, their families, and not to be interfered with.66

She might have been speaking of Jane, disowned by her father, her mother described as an opium addict. It is hard to imagine Mary

writing this in 1930 without having an image of the little girl whom

65 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, pp. 118-21. 66 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 120.

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M . M . Bennett

the Christison family had sent back to Queensland when she was only five and when Mary was nineteen.

The invitation to the reader, to put themselves into the position of

another human being who happens to be an Aboriginal, the strength

of her imagination, her calling on the reader to recognise common human experience: these characteristics distinguish Mary Bennett’s

writing from that of anthropologists and government report writers. Through Constance Cooke and Charles Genders of the Aborigines’ Protection League of South Australia, Mary was in contact with a

growing humanitarian movement in Australia focused on securing public recognition of Aboriginal people and their consequent entitle­ ments. She was not alone in these views but as far as I know her

book was unusual in presenting these ideas to a general audience at this time. Anthropologists did not write with this purpose; they

were concerned rather to describe objectively what they observed. The only other published author treating Aboriginal people as people

at this time was Western Australian novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, whose Coonardoo concerned a white man in the north-

west of Australia who had a sexual relationship with an Aboriginal

woman.67 George Robertson of Angus and Robertson was initially reluctant to publish this book on a topic which was taboo in polite

Perth society, while acknowledging it would sell well. Mary had already shown in her Commonwealth League address that she did

not resile from this difficult subject. She would try every avenue in the struggle for justice for Aboriginal women and girls. She refused

to blame those she saw as the victims. She threw out a challenge to

her feminist readers: ‘Faced with the suffering of our fellow women, 67

Katharine Susannah Prichard, Coonardoo, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1929.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

with the suffering of children – is it beyond a woman’s wit to find a way of helping them? Or is feminism a failure?’68

The final chapter of the book, ‘The Problem of what to do with

the Race … is not a Difficult One to Solve, were a Solution really

Desired’, was Mary’s opportunity to suggest an honourable direction. She again invited the reader to imaginatively place him or herself

in the shoes of the dispossessed native who loses land to cattle and

cannot trespass on neighbours. She called for a land settlement so that Aboriginal people could be secure ‘in the possession of their

tribal territories and encouraged to adapt to new needs all that is best in their traditions under their own leaders’. The imaginative

reconstruction of different people’s experience of loss and uprooting from their land led to the argument that it:

… becomes our duty to cherish all that is good in the arts and customs, the social organisation and moral code which the natives already possess, and to enlist their interest and cooperation in the development of what is still their country.69

She remonstrates as she ends the book that it is ‘the business

of each one of us IF THROUGH US OFFENCES COME [her capitals] … to establish peace by establishing justice’.70 A Christian sense of duty and responsibility infuse the book, as her drawing on scripture at the beginning of three chapters suggests.

The dedication of The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being is

to ‘My Childhood’s Friends, The Australian Aboriginals’. Mary was

a writer and used the apostrophe judiciously. It was not dedicated to Aboriginal childhood friends of her own age – she didn’t have 68 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 127. 69 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, pp 120, 138. 70 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 142.

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M . M . Bennett

any – but to an older generation: Barney, her father’s loyal worker; Wyma who she remembered from her early childhood; and Mickey and Mary, also trusted Lammermoor workers.71

Mary was on the verge of puberty when she had first visited

Lammermoor in the winter of 1893. At this time the workforce included white stockmen, a Chinese gardener, a Malay cook, a Ceylon­ ese house servant and perhaps a dozen Dalleburra stockmen and two

Dalleburra housemaids. Most of the Dalleburra were from the gen-

eration who had first contact with Christison in 1863, with perhaps three or four people from the younger generation born in the late

1860s or early 1870s and so adults when Mary and her siblings first

arrived at Lammermoor Station.72 Mary’s comment that they had ‘blacks and stockmen to spoil them’ indicates that the ‘childhood’s

friends’ were adults.73 Two prepubescent English girls in their pretty dresses asking questions and eager to learn and their seven year old little brother would no doubt have been a diversion for these stock workers from the tedium of station life.

In a footnote in The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being Mary

wrote: ‘I specify the Dalleburra because I grew up among them’.

When one reviewer commented that she had overlooked the violence faced by the squatters on the frontier, Mary again asserted ‘I grew 71

Helen Roberts, Mary Bennett’s sister, also drew on some of the same stories of the older Dalleburra generation told by their father, in her unpublished novel, ‘Like the Pelican’, Add MS57043, British Library. 72 See Smith and Bolton (eds), Bowly, Letters 1873–78, photograph, no. 18 of the Dalleburra residents at Lammermoor, 1874; Beddoe, Memories of Eighty Years, Chapter 11, for a description of the staff at the time of Beddoe’s visit in 1885, and Bennett, ‘Notes on the Dalleburra Tribe of Northern Queensland’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. LV11, 1927, July– December 1927, pp. 400-15; Bennett, Christison, p. 228. Together these sources allow an estimate of the adults and children on the station in 1893 to be made. 73 Bennett, Christison, p. 207.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

up among the aborigines and know them as steady workers amenable

to reason. They get little justice’.74 Three years earlier, in a published article for the Royal Anthropological Institute, she had been more specific, writing ‘I was living on the station (between 1893 and

1898)’. This is the only place where she detailed the time she spent at Lammermoor, but even here she does not mention that the visits took

place only in winter.75 This distortion of her childhood story began

as a defence when she felt criticised. She felt the need to establish credentials based on close personal knowledge from childhood but it

was misleading. Perhaps it was also wishful thinking. This version

of events was never questioned in her lifetime, although she would

later be criticised for exaggerating the truth in other situations in order to strengthen her arguments. It has also been generally accepted by historians.

One reviewer of The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being drew

attention to the author’s determination to regard the Aborigines as ‘entirely without natural vice’.76 Mary had romanticised traditional Aboriginal society of which she had no direct experience based on

her recall of ‘the faithful Dalleburra workers’ who ‘will make any effort for people whom they are fond of ’.77 The elderly Dalleburra

were individuals with their own personalities whom she had known and valued; the only other Aboriginal man she knew was Fernando

with whom she was so impressed when she met him in 1929. She had no personal knowledge of the situation in which Aboriginal people 74 75 76 77

‘Author Defends Blacks “Unholy alliance against them” Replies to Bishop’, Register News Pictorial, (Adelaide, SA) July 1930, p. 5. Bennett, ‘Notes on the Dalleburra Tribe’, p. 414. ‘Nature’s Gentleman’, The West Australian, 30 August 1930. Bennett, ‘Notes on the Dalleburra Tribe’, pp. 411-12.

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M . M . Bennett

found themselves in Australia in 1930, but in characterising them as

people with the full range of positive human qualities which could be

seen in men and women in other societies she hoped to influence the views of ‘the mass of people’ who needed ‘sharp educating’.78 She was not writing from her experience; this would come later.

The decision to go to Australia Mary would most probably not have considered going to Australia

were it not for the death of her husband Charles. She felt keenly the loss of his emotional support and his role as a sounding board for her

ideas. She wished that her Adelaide friend, Constance Cooke, could be in London to, as she put it, ‘instruct counsel’.79 While she was

busy writing letters to people she judged to be influential, she was without close activist friends who shared her concern. After Charles’ death she had no close family ties to keep her in London. She had

concluded her presentation to the British Commonwealth League in 1929 with a singular exhortation:

I beg members of Women’s Associations, which are doing such good work, to inform themselves, and go to the fringes of settlements and examine things on the spot. Then they will change the old evil system for a humane system and equity.80

Her audience was probably bemused. She was perhaps thinking out loud about what she might do herself.

The paucity of information was, Mary recognised, a handicap

in her campaign to educate the public about the conditions of life 78 79 80

Bennett to Buxton, 30 January 1929, Cooke papers, GRG52/32/23, SASA. Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke papers, GRG52/32/25, SASA. Bennett, ‘The Condition of the Aborigines of Australia under the Federal Government’, Q572.9901/B, SLNSW.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

for Aboriginal people in Australia.81 She depended on reports of inquiries such as the Bleakley Report, of the experiences of other

people such as Annie Lock and on inadequate newspaper coverage.

Going to ‘the fringes of settlements’ she knew would provide the firsthand information which she needed to make her case convincingly. The Australian Aboriginal as A Human Being relied on the work

and observations of others. She began to see that she needed direct experience in order to convince.

Mary understood that ‘“the more merciful minority” is powerless

without the support of the masses’. She saw that it was the work

of people in cities to gain that support, work that she was engaged in through her letter writing, speaking, advocacy and attempts

to write to the newspapers, but she was beginning to realise that her sense of urgency was, at times, counterproductive in this work. She sought advice from Travers Buxton and agreed with him that

the length of her letters and the mass of enclosures may have been off-putting. ‘And you are right’, she concurred, ‘about propaganda alarming the papers’.82 This was an intellectual realisation but it was difficult for her to stop including material when she knew that people

needed information to help them understand why the issue was

urgent. She continued to bombard her correspondents, with Buxton

telling another committee member, ‘I have a great amount of material which Mrs Bennett pours in upon us from time to time’.83 The all-

male committee of the Anti-Slavery Society most probably found her

fervour and her work ethic slightly threatening to their established 81 82 83

Bennett to Buxton, 18 March 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, G374; Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke papers, GRG52/32/25, SASA. Bennett to Buxton, 7 September 1928, ASS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/21. Buxton to Stoker, 9 October 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, G374.

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M . M . Bennett

ways of conducting business. She did finally succeed in getting

her letter ‘A Reproach to Australia’ published in the Manchester

Guardian in September 1929, after Buxton had put in a strong word of support for her.84

Mary’s friend Doris Beckh would later describe her as ‘a white

hot flame’. 85 She burned with a singleness of mind which, in her

dealings with the committee of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, didn’t always help her cause. Though she knew

that the Society’s brief was worldwide and that it was engaged in campaigns in fifteen or more other countries apart from Australia, she continued her attempts to focus its attention on reforming the

situation in Australia. In December 1928 she accepted an invitation to attend the January committee meeting of the Society but the

invitation was not reissued the following year, with the committee being chary of her enthusiasm. ‘She is so full of, and keen on her

subject that I feel she would take up a good deal of time – more than we ought to give to one particular item of the Agenda’, the secretary wrote to another committee member.86 Her ardour meant that she was not suited to committee work, the systematic working

through the agenda, the passing of motions and the efforts to see them realised.

Mary was able to gather evidence and develop a case for change

but she seemed, as yet, to lack a political awareness of the processes involved in patiently and methodically working to implement them. 84 85 86

Buxton to Miss Izard, Manchester Guardian, 3 June 1929, MSS Brit Emp s22, G374; Manchester Guardian, Friday 13 September 1929, p. 217. Doris Beckh to Ada Bromham, 26 May 1962, Mary Montgomerie Bennett and Ada Bromham papers, MN2958, ACC 8303A, SLWA. Travers Buxton to Lefroy, 31 December 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/25.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

One example of this was her tenacious research work concerning payment of Aboriginal workers. By writing to the official secretary at Australia House she learned that £1,491.14.4d had been paid into

the Northern Territory Aboriginal Trust Fund for the year 1928–29.

Using information on amounts paid to Aboriginal workers cited in

the Bleakley Report and the numbers of Aboriginal workers noted in the Commonwealth Year Book she extrapolated that ‘it is reasonable to infer that only about 287 working natives were paid for their work and

that about 2000 working natives were not’.87 She read the Covenant

of the League of Nations, of which Australia was a signatory, and noted that Article 23 stated, in part, that ‘Members of the League: (a) will endeavour to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labour for men, women and children …’ and ‘(b) undertake to

secure just treatment of the native inhabitants of territories under their control’. She also drew attention to Article 5 of the League of Nations Slavery Convention (which Australia had not signed at

this time) which stated that ‘recourse to compulsory or forced labour

may have grave consequences’ and that the parties ‘undertake, each in respect of the territories placed under its sovereignty, jurisdiction, protection, suzerainty or tutelage, to take all necessary measures to prevent compulsory or forced labour from developing into conditions

analogous to slavery’.88 Mary argued that Australia, in not paying

Aboriginal pastoral workers, was in breach of its obligations under the Covenant of the League of Nations.

Using these findings to correct a labour injustice was far more

difficult than making the argument. She contacted anti-slavery 87 88

Official Secretary, The Commonwealth of Australia, Australia House, to Bennett, 30 April 1930, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/25. Slavery Convention, signed at Geneva on 25 September 1926, www.ohchr.org/ Documents/ProfessionalInterest/slavery.pdf

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M . M . Bennett

campaigner and journalist Henry Nevinson about the issue but he seemed not to take it up. She sent a letter from Australia House

with information about the Northern Territory Trust Fund and other evidence from government reports to the International Labour

Office which was holding a conference on forced labour, inviting them to use it.89 Realising that an organisation rather than an in­ dividual would be better placed to pursue the matter, she con­

tacted Travers Buxton in an uncharacteristically terse note asking

‘Can you not bring the matter under the notice of your Committee with a view to doing something?’90 Finally she spoke publicly at the British Commonwealth League conference in June 1930 about the

question of unpaid Aboriginal labour, gaining some publicity with the Manchester Guardian headlining ‘Slave Conditions in Australia,

Allegations at Women’s Conference: the Aborigines’.91 Attentiongrabbing headlines may have made some readers pay attention to the argument but Mary was frustrated at how difficult it was to actually effect change in Australia.

Images of women, children and men suffering because of current

policies and practices and the callous disregard of those on the

frontier whose cattle drained the waterholes during the drought

seemed to haunt Mary. By May 1930 she had begun to make prep­

arations to leave England for Australia.92 Her second book was in production, she had presented at conferences, written letters to news­papers (one of which had been published in the Manchester 89 90 91 92

Bennett to Chief of the Native Labour Section at the International Labour Office, Geneva, 7 May 1930, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/25. Bennett to Buxton, 7 May 1930, ASAPS papers. Manchester Guardian, 20 June 1930. Bennett to Shoolbred and Co, 26 May 1930, re despatch of furniture, Mission to Seamen papers, U/DMS/1/59, Hull History Centre, Hull, United Kingdom.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Guardian) and produced solid research: so much effort expended for

what she regarded as disappointingly small results. Edith Jones, who

Mary had met at the 1929 British Empire League conference, and her husband Reverend John Jones had just returned to England after

years of missionary work in Australia. John had been the General Secretary of the Australian Board of Missions and the couple had

spent years working in the mission field in Australia. John put Mary in contact with the then Bishop of North-Western Australia who

agreed to Mary coming to work at the Forrest River Mission in an honorary capacity as ‘a matron and handicraft instructor’.93 The

position would provide her with the opportunity to make a direct contribution to Aboriginal people’s lives while at the same time

gaining an understanding of the situation of Aboriginal people in the north.

Before she left England Mary passed on to Travers Buxton a number

of suggestions as to how the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection

Society might work with the British Commonwealth League and some key matters which she hoped would be pursued. She had made

some strong friendships among like-minded women, notably Edith

Jones who was born in London but had lived and worked for many years in Australia on Church of England missions. Edith’s address at the 1930 British Commonwealth League led that body to form

a Native Section to gather information on the disadvantages of

native women particularly. Mary expressed to Buxton a hope that the Commonwealth League and his Society would collaborate and

‘greatly forward the humanising of our impact on the Aboriginals’. She made three suggestions for the Society to engage Prime Minister 93

Edith Jones to Amy Brown, 16 Feb 1931, Citizens’ Education Fellowship papers, MS9212/3653/1 (a); ABM Review, 15 February 1931.

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M . M . Bennett

Scullin when he came to London for the Imperial Conference. She wished them to ask for:

1. A definite native policy, with inviolable extensive sanc­ tuar­ies, Arnheim [sic] Land for one, and the extension of the Cen­tral Australian Reserve northward so as to in­ clude country still inhabited by primitive tribes and as yet unalienated … 2. The revising of ordinances and regulations affecting the natives, for many of these ordinances and regulations and much of the practice, are not only contrary to the law of the realm, being ultra vires, but, what is worse, they are contrary to the spirit of justice. 3. Payment of all native workers to be defined and made in cash (certainly in part) and the present violation of the Truck Acts to be made to cease.94

It would be many years before all of these goals were realised. The

Arnhem Land reserve was declared in 1931 but the regulations in Western Australia would become even more controlling in the following years and it would be decades before Aboriginal workers were paid fair wages.

She was leaving the frustration of her driven London activism.

She needed first-hand knowledge, and was far from the people with

whom she wished to be engaged and to learn from. She explained to Buxton:

As I am going to work on a Mission, the Forrest River Mission I hope, it will be necessary for me to keep silence, but I should like to correspond with your society regarding the conditions I find. But remembering what happened to the Rev. Mr Gribble, 94

The Truck Acts refer to legislation which outlaws truck systems, which are also known as ‘company store’ systems, commonly leading to debt bondage. ‘Ultra vires’, beyond the powers. Bennett to Buxton, 6 August 1930, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/25.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

and the adverse and even hostile attitude of the settlers to Miss Lock, and indeed to any inconvenient witnesses, you will understand that I do not want to mention my activities outside my own friends and the committees of Societies like yours which are friendly to the natives.95

The distance she would travel was much more than the physical

distance of 13,000 miles. She was moving from a principled position

which seemed incontrovertible to her, to the confusion of a land occupied by two vastly different peoples who, on the whole, neither understood nor liked each other. A statement she made in a policy she wrote before she left illustrates her principled stand and also her idealism:

No nation can remain free that tolerates discrimination. We cannot have free citizens and slaves. The solution is for each race to live as citizens in its own community until such time as the disparity shall have been bridged, by one race giving up its extreme competitiveness and the other race giving up its extreme communalism, and by educational advance.96

Her criticism of the ‘extreme competitiveness’ of white Australian

society and the hope, expressed in a ‘policy’, that it might be tempered suggested that she had not at this time been able to appreciate that

the competitiveness she deplored was the same quality that had

made her father so successful. As a result of his success she had an income for life: she never had to join this competition for resources.

She seemed to have been unaware of how difficult it would be to change the cultural attitudes of colonists, perhaps especially when the financial effects of the Great Depression were hurting individuals 95 96

Bennett to Buxton, 6 August 1930. ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/25. ‘A Native Policy for Australia (By a Member of the Aborigines’ Protection League)’, Rischbieth papers, MS2004/12/217, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA).

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M . M . Bennett

and communities. Competitive attitudes expressed through Western

capitalism were inimical to Aboriginal communal attitudes of sharing which had stood traditional societies in good stead in the past.

The daughter of a successful Queensland squatter, she returned to

Australia thirty years after she had left as a girl, hoping to challenge the mindsets of the next generation of squatters who were no doubt as

keen as her father had been to profit from the land and were battling low prices during the Depression. She hoped also to work with the

original possessors of the land, to assist them to find a new way

of life without having to sacrifice their own values. She knew that

Aboriginal people had to be provided with educational opportunities so that they could at some time earn a living in the mainstream but

she did not believe that this had to be at the expense of their cultural and social lives.

– 16 5 –

The Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia

Map 5: South-west and west coast of Western Australia

Cha pte r 6

L E A R N I NG A BOU T W E S T ER N AU S T R A L I A ‘My eyes open and my mouth shut’ Quite the worst thing that I saw in the north was the attitude of the average white men to native women – the attitude not of mean whites, but of the overwhelming majority of white men. It is so much the accepted thing in the north for white men to abuse native women that it can be described as the custom of the country, and the few who are not guilty condone it in others. Mary Bennett to Bessie Rischbieth, 11 December 1931

Mary disembarked at the Fremantle Docks on 6 October 1930, a warm

spring day. She was a first class passenger whose occupation was listed as cloth weaver and, not surprisingly, her luggage included looms and spinning wheels. Her public position was that she was in Australia to

teach Aboriginal women to spin and weave so that they would be able to support themselves. Ruby Rich, a fellow activist in London who

Mary had met in the late 1920s, recalled some decades later that Mary took weaving lessons in London before she left and that she had told Ruby that the craft education was a cover she intended to use to get

on to reserves and mission stations and involve Aboriginal residents

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

in a struggle for legal and economic rights.1 Whether this was so or

not, the role of craft teacher gave Mary a credible persona from which position she could research missions, camps, and pastoral stations.

Mary told the Women’s Service Guilds (WSG), who welcomed her to Perth, that she was there to study the conditions of the Australian Aborigines in the West.2

She had left behind the frustrations of activism in London where

she felt so far away from the human suffering which tore at her heart. As a social idealist she believed in the possibilities of life and was

prepared to work to achieve them. She was in Australia to make a

contribution, but first she needed to understand the situation which she was wishing to ameliorate.

Through her presentations at British Commonwealth League (BCL)

conferences Mary had become known to Bessie Rischbieth, president

of the WSG and co-founder with Chave Collinson of the BCL.

Rischbieth, a confident, strong minded social reformist, was politically

astute. Like Mary Bennett she was a widow with independent means. She had founded the Australian Federation of Women Voters, she was

the vice-president of the BCL and the position of Aboriginal people

across Australia was one of her many social concerns.3 Rischbieth introduced Mary to another Guild member, Marjorie King, who told

her about a mission at Gnowangerup, south-east of Perth. Mary had made contact with A. O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, 1

2 3

Inwards Passenger List – Mongolia, 6 October 1930, series K269/3, NAA; State Executive Minutes, Women’s Service Guilds papers, October 1930, NAA, 1945A/5; Heather Radi to Jim Gibbney, 11 November 1977, ‘Mary Montgomerie Bennett’, Australian Dictionary of Biography files, ANU. ‘Women of Note’, The Dawn, 17 December 1930, p. 6. See Carly Millar, ‘Bessie Rischbieth: A Biography’, PhD thesis, Monash University, for Rischbieth’s life and personality, 2008.

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L earning about W estern Australia

to gain his permission to visit missions and Aboriginal reserves in Western Australia as a voluntary worker. She reported that a

condition of her being allowed to work among the Aboriginal people

in the north was that she did not publish anything while she was there, but before she went north she travelled south. She would see what the conditions of life were for Aboriginal communities in the longer settled districts first.4

In late October Mary caught the train to the wheat-belt town of

Gnowangerup, 355 kilometres south-east of Perth, with her bulky luggage of loom and spinning wheels. Here, in 1926, Hope and Hedley Wright had established a mission on government reserve land on behalf of the Australian Aborigines Mission, using scrap

metal and any other available building material to erect the first buildings. Hope had been a nurse at nearby Carrolup and the couple were known fondly as Sister and Brother Wright by the local

Aboriginal people. The area south-east of Perth, developed for agri­

culture since the mid-1850s, had a sizable mixed-race population with the Aborigines Department reporting in 1929 that ‘at least

500 half-caste children’ were receiving no training whatsoever.5 They were excluded from schools because of objections raised by

the parents of white children, and in these Depression years the Aborigines Department budget did not stretch to cover the educa­

tion of children. Meanwhile the Depression took its toll on the people of mixed-descent in the south with unemployment growing.6 4 5 6

Bennett to Buxton, 6 December 1930, ASAPS, MSS Brit Emp s22, D2/22. Bennett to Buxton, 6 December 1930, citing page 3 of ‘The Report of the Aboriginal Department of Western Australia’ for 1929, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp, D2/22. Bennett to Buxton, 6 December 1930.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

For some weeks Mary worked here teaching spinning and weaving

and gathering what she described as ‘first-hand knowledge of the position with regard to natives and half-castes in the south west’.7

This distinction between Aboriginal people of the full descent and those with some European heritage was commonly made at this time

by those with an interest in policy regarding Aboriginal welfare and by Aboriginal and mixed descent people themselves.8 Chief Protector Neville considered that society had a greater obligation towards the children of mixed parentage than to Aboriginal children of the full descent. He wished to control the upbringing of the former by

separating them from their parents and as a result clashed with the Wrights who permitted the children on their reserve to live with their parents in their own camps.9

For Mary, the Gnowangerup Mission, which was the only school

providing education for Aboriginal children in the south, was an

entirely new experience in that the children were mostly of mixed descent. Her experience of Lammermoor as an adolescent was of

the first generation of elderly Dalleburra people who had met the invading whites. Now, as she got to know the children of mixed

descent parents, her negative preconceptions about mixed race people were challenged.

While the school and the mission received no government grant,

Neville recognised the work of the Wrights as valuable and appointed 7 8

9

Bennett to Buxton, 6 December 1930. See, for example, ‘The Half Castes of Broome submission to the Moseley Royal Commission’ at Broome, 1934, Document 2.9 in Marilyn Lake and Katie Holmes (eds), Freedom Bound 11: Documents on Women in Modern Australia, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1995, p. 62. Anna Haebich, For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900–1940, University of West Australia Press, Nedlands, Perth, 1988, p. 243; see Pat Jacobs, Mister Neville: A Biography, Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle, 1990, for Neville’s views on this subject.

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L earning about W estern Australia

Hedley Wright as an honorary Protector of Aborigines. The Western Australian Government provided a small dam and galvanised iron for

the school room. The building of the people’s dwellings, the school,

and a one-person ‘hospital’ made of kerosene tins folded together, were erected by Hedley and the Aboriginal men on the mission.

Mary described her experiences at Gnowangerup as valuable and inspiring. She wrote euphorically to Bessie Rischbieth:

This place is a perfect romance. The way the missionaries, Mr and Mrs Wright, have built up a place out of nothing, as it were, little more than petrol tins and sacking and galvanised iron, is simply marvellous and the greatest credit to them. They are a fine couple and I admire Mrs Wright so much.10

The Wrights provided a positive model of a couple who cared about the Aboriginal people they were with and treated them with respect.

Mary’s spirits were lifted by the Gnowangerup experience. Moreover

the young ones softened her earlier fixed views against children of mixed descent. The children, she wrote:

… are as bright and intelligent and pretty as could be found anywhere but their attendance at school varies with the amount of work offering for their parents in the neighbourhood. For, owing to the smallness of the reserve – five and a half acres – the poorness of the soil and the lack of water, it is impossible for the natives to grow their own food; (some have tried). They are thus deprived of opportunity to live in a settled community of their own where they could be self-supporting and have the inspiration of homes and ordered family life. Our land greed condemns them to destitution and vagrancy and our callousness condemns them to illiteracy.11 10 11

Bennett to Rischbieth, 9 November 1930, Rischbieth papers, MS2004/12/281, NLA. Bennett to Rischbieth, 9 November 1930.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

She saw the deprivation suffered by those who lost their traditional

lands as a pattern which could be related to the dominant race’s

resentment of the subject race’s community life. She held that a ‘bitter persecuting feeling against the race that has been dispossessed

triumphs, and nowhere more than in Australia’. The Gnowangerup

illustration of this was that the Aboriginal Reserve adjoined the Gnowangerup rubbish depot. All the good land had been taken up for farms, leaving the Aboriginal people with a strip of sand and poison plants. ‘This is a violation of the Treaty of Versailles’, she told Travers Buxton, ‘whereby the signatory nations promise to act justly by indigenous people’.12

On the basis of her experience at Gnowangerup she came to some

conclusions. Adequate reserves of cultivable land and water were the first basic necessity and she argued that the Western Australian

Government should grant land for such reserves. Excellent teachers

were required. The two races should live apart until the dispossessed people could meet the dominant race on an equal footing. These

were ideas she had already expressed in The Australian Aboriginal

as a Human Being but now she had the advantage of first-hand experience to support them. She added that of course, for those Aboriginal people who have made a transition into the settler world,

full citizenship rights should be granted. The main difficulty to

the implementation of such principles was ‘the general hostility to any attempt to improve things for the natives’, she told Rischbieth,

adding: ‘As a nation, we are willing the natives to die’. 13 She was be­

ginning to realise the extent of the re-education necessary to change 12 13

Bennett to Rischbieth, 9 November 1930; Bennett to Buxton, 6 December 1930. Bennett to Rischbieth, 9 November 1930.

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L earning about W estern Australia

the hostility in the white population of Western Australia towards Aboriginal people.

On her return to Perth in late November, Mary began her campaign

to educate the settler population. She addressed the Women’s Service

Guilds, calling for a constructive policy to alleviate the suffering of people who during the Depression were finding it almost impossible

to get work. The Dawn, the monthly journal of the Guilds, reported

on this ‘pleasant informal luncheon’. Mary was on her journey north when the issue came out so she would have missed reading the report, with its telling final sentence:

Everyone interested in the race which is fast dying out, will follow Mrs Bennett’s work, and perhaps in time something will be done to preserve them, and our obligations to the Aboriginals will be fulfilled.14

The dying race myth was still current in 1930’s Perth and the refer-

ences to preservation sounds as if fruit rather than people were being

discussed. Mary might not have been surprised though; she had reported to Travers Buxton of the London Anti-Slavery and Aborigines

Protection Society simply that the audience was not interested.15 Apathy existed in Perth, just as she had found it in London.

By December 1930 Mary was on board the coastal steamer

MV  Koolinda travelling north to the wild, rugged beauty of the

Kimberley, land of huge tides. She spent the next year working with, talking to and observing attitudes towards Aboriginal people.

She worked for eight months at Forrest River, the Anglican-run

establishment where, only five years earlier, she had learned of super­

intendent Reverend Ernest Gribble’s publicising of the shooting 14 15

‘Women of Note’, The Dawn, Perth, 17 December 1930, p. 6. Bennett to Buxton, 6 December 1930.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

and burning of Aboriginal people which was later referred to as the Forrest River massacre. She also visited the school at Broome which

the sisters of St John of God ran for children of mixed descent and she spoke with Aboriginal prisoners in the Broome gaol. In Broome

she met the anthropologist Ralph Piddington who was on a research trip for the Rockefeller Foundation and would later cause a furore in

the Perth press with allegations of slavery in the north. She visited

the government feeding station at La Grange, just south of Broome. She admired Moola Bulla, the government-run Aboriginal pastor­ al training farm, and visited the nearby government settlement of

Munja.16 But it was at Kunmunya Mission that she encountered a ‘thor­oughly sound progressive native policy’.17 She was again filled with hope and optimism by her experience there.

Kunmunya Mission was established on the land of the Worrora

people in 1912. Reverend Bob Love had been at Port George IV, the former name of the mission, in 1915 where his interest in the Worrora people and their language began. After war service and theo­logical training he had returned in 1927 with his new wife

Blanche to run the mission. Bob was a linguist and within two years he had sufficient command of the language to translate the gospel of St Mark into Worrora. He encouraged the maintenance of those as-

pects of Worrora tribal life which were compatible with Christianity. He aimed to give the people a new religious faith and an introduc­tion

to modern technology which Love believed would make them happier, healthier and better able to survive the impact of contact with

white people. Like Gnowangerup, Kunmunya provided an optimistic 16 17

Bennett to Cooke, 2 November 1931, Constance Cooke papers, GRG 52/32/52, SASA. Bennett to Cooke, 2 November 1931.

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L earning about W estern Australia

image of a possible future. Mary outlined what she considered to be the basis of its success:

First, the Superintendent is married to a good woman and they have three beautiful children, the importance of this being that the natives have in their midst an example of family life which shows them that they can become Christians and ‘civilised’ without violating the sentiment of the family on which their whole racial culture is built up [her underlining]. I feel very strongly that the head of every native or half-caste mission ought to be married, both for the ‘positive’ reason that the sen­ ti­ment of the family is the foundation of native culture, and also for the ‘negative’ reason that celibates tend to be morally slovenly, or else narrow-minded and prejudiced against every idea other than their own.18

Experiencing small mission subcultures such as at Gnowangerup

and Kunmunya, where the missionaries were working sympathetic­

ally and intelligently with the people, inspired Mary to think deeply about the future for Aboriginal people across the country. Ralph

Piddington had suggested to her that the key was to find out what they lived for. After a year of observation Mary held that the ans­

wer was that they lived for the family. Moreover her experience at

Kunmunya confirmed her view that a respect for family was essential

for those assisting Aboriginal communities to find their way in the white man’s world. She contrasted the regimented girls’ dormitory at Forrest River Mission with the affirmation of family at Kunmunya

where children lived with their parents. She considered the tightly

regulated gender-segregated dormitories where children were separ­

ated from their families even more detrimental to Aboriginal than to white children ‘for it is so utterly alien to them’. She described 18

Bennett to Cooke, 2 November 1931.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

children at Forrest River being herded together, growing up rootless and full of recriminations in this system.19

The year in the north-west gave Mary the opportunity to test ideas

which she had expressed in The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being. She had written that it is ‘our duty to cherish all that is good

in the arts and customs, the social organisation and moral code

which the natives already possess, and to enlist their interest and

co-operation in the development of what is still their country’.20 At Kunmunya she saw ideas she had expressed translated into practice

and was impressed with Love’s intelligent approach to cultural main­ tenance and development.

She was particularly impressed with Bob Love’s acceptance of the

Worrora language and culture. He was a linguist and anthropologist as well as a minister of religion and consulted with the tribal chiefs in their language.21 Fluent in French and German, Mary admired

the linguistic abilities of the Worrora people, many of whom spoke

four languages. Reverend Love taught the children to read and write in the Worrora language as well as in English and encouraged the

people to keep their own names for their children when they chose to have them baptised.

On her return to Perth in December 1931 she again addressed the

Women’s Service Guilds. She began her address by diplomatically

congratulating Chief Protector Neville on the fine school which had

been established at Moola Bulla, the remote government Ab­orig­inal

cattle station in the East Kimberley near Hall’s Creek, but it was her 19

Mary Montgomerie Bennett, Address to Women’s Service Guilds, 11 December 1931, Rischbieth papers, MS2004/30, NLA; Bennett to Cooke, 2 November 1931. 20 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 138. 21 J. H. Love, ‘Love, James Robert Beattie’, ADB, vol. 10, MUP, 1986.

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L earning about W estern Australia

experiences at the even more remote Presbyterian mission, Kun­

munya, in the north-west Kimberley which provided ‘proof that an honourable Native policy is practicable’. She compared Kunmunya

to Lord Lugard’s administration of Nigeria. The contrast, however,

was that the British Government backed Lugard’s humane ad­min­ istration, while ‘Mr Love’s mission was privately funded’. The basis

of the Loves’ success was, she believed, their respect for the Aborig­

inal family. Whether the parents were living in their camps or were working natives living in houses, their children lived with them and learned tribal history and traditions, and tracking and hunting.

Mary quoted Bob Love as saying, ‘we shall not build up Christians by teaching people to despise their parents and laugh at them’.22

Mary spoke about the importance of land at Kunmunya. Every

stone and cave had associations with a mythical ancestry for the

Worrora, she told her listeners. Both traditional and new uses of land were employed at Kunmunya. The men were encouraged to

continue hunting on their land, and as well, where the land was

suitable, food was grown. She explained that people worked for

their food and if they were engaged in commercial activities such as getting dingo scalps and tortoiseshell they were paid the going rate. At the mission store they learned the value of goods which

they purchased.23 Reverend Love refused to send people away from their country to work, holding that their true work was to develop

their own territory for themselves. It was heartening and affirming

for Mary to see the principles she had earlier espoused being so effectively applied at Kunmunya. 22 23

M. Bennett, Address to Women’s Service Guilds, 11 December 1931, p. 1, Rischbieth papers, MS2004/30, NLA. Bennett, Address to Women’s Service Guilds.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

While her experience at Kunmunya had been uplifting, coming

to understand the white man’s culture in the north shocked her. She

came to realise how widespread was the white man’s use of Aboriginal women for sex. She told her audience:

It is so much the accepted thing in the north for white men to abuse native women that it can be described as the custom of the country, and the few who are not guilty condone it in others. It is bad enough that white men should hold pagan ideas about native women; it is too horrible that white women should come to acquiesce. How can we expect anything else than worldwide disastrous conditions? They are only the logical result of selfishness pushed to its conclusion.24

The work to reform Australian society, Mary argued, to change ‘the

custom of the country’ in the north, had to go hand in hand with the education of Aboriginal people in order for them to be accepted in settler society. One was no use without the other, she believed.

At both the 1929 and 1930 British Commonwealth League con­

ferences Mary had spoken about the abuse of Aboriginal women,

quoting Bleakley and Annie Lock on the situation in the Northern

Territory. Now she had seen for herself that the abuse was endemic. Without the support of public opinion this situation would not change, Mary told her Perth audience, referring to a delegate at

an International Labour Organization conference who had argued that ‘full recognition in thought and in policy of the central place of

women is in no sense simply in the interests of womanhood, but of the whole human race’.25 She ended her address asking the women: Will you affirm the right of the aboriginal woman to the sanc­ tity of her person and ask for definite reforms for her protection 24 25

Bennett, Address to Women’s Service Guilds Bennett, Address to Women’s Service Guilds.

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L earning about W estern Australia

– two of these reforms should be the appointment of married protectors of high character and qualifications and of a doctor as a travelling protector. Will you ask for adequate territories for the natives and half-castes to develop for themselves?26

This would be Mary’s last public opportunity to directly influ-

ence the women of Perth for some time, as she was going to Mount

Margaret Mission, 900 kilometres to the north-east of Perth. She outlined her suggested Aboriginal policy. Two years earlier, in writ-

ing ‘A Native Policy for Australia’ she had made the case for separate development. Now she reiterated this argument more bluntly, describing the disparity between the races as being bridged ‘by the ab-

originals becoming more competitive and the whites becoming less selfish’. Segregation in territories wide enough to allow Aboriginal

development in the way she envisaged was necessary. She told the women:

The source of all the anomalies and injustices which distress settler Australians who wish to do justice and be proud of their country are neither more nor less than the UNCONTROLLED PROFIT MOTIVE [her capitals].27

The author of Christison of Lammermoor, who a few years earlier

had reacted to a reviewer’s description of her as a Tory by modifying

her criticisms of the 1891 striking shearers, no longer sounded at all like one. Now she was seeing the relationship between the domin­

ant, competitive ‘selfish’ settler Australians and Aboriginal people

as exploitative. She had approached Mr Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines, for permission to go to Mount Margaret. He attempted

to dissuade her with stories of the superintendent, Rod Schenk, being 26 27

Bennett, Address to Women’s Service Guilds. Bennett, Address to Women’s Service Guilds.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

hard to get on with but she went anyway.28 At Mount Margaret she would make a significant contribution to Aboriginal education

but her more fundamental concern about how to curb the settlers’ ‘uncontrolled profit motive’ remained. We wonder if, when she was writing or giving this speech, the young, penniless Robert Chris­

tison, whom she had brought to life in Christison of Lammermoor,

came into her mind. So well did he understand the profit motive

in his journey from poverty to wealth (compliments, in part, of the

Dalleburra people) that his children never had to learn how to make

money. She had written about his long, arduous struggle to succeed as a squatter but it was an experience far from her own.

28

Margaret Morgan, Mount Margaret: A Drop in a Bucket, Mission Publications of Australia, Lawson NSW, 1986, p. 136.

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Cha pte r 7

M R S BEN N E T T, T E ACH ER Mount Margaret Mission ‘It is frightful how often it has been said, in the last year, with hostility: “Oh, but if you are going to teach them, they won’t die out”!’ Mary Bennett to Charles Duguid, 7 October 1934

‘Our omission to educate them [Aboriginal children] is simply heinous. There is no doubt that they are no whit behind us in anything … The children have an immense capacity for idealism and love people like Joan of Arc and Booker Washington.’ Mary Bennett to Anton Vroland, 31 October 1936

Mary boarded the Eastern Goldfields train from Perth to Kalgoorlie, 600 kilometres to the east, on 22 December 1931.1 The mallee wheat farms soon gave way to the semi-arid desert and the mullock heaps,

markers of the mining frenzy of Southern Cross and surrounds. 1

Mary Bennett to Bessie Rischbieth, 1 February 1932, Rischbieth papers, MS2004/5/1623, NLA.

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

She arrived at Kalgoorlie, a railway hub with the longest platform

in Western Australia, where the train from Perth met the TransAustralian line of a different gauge, which took passengers across the desert to Port Augusta in South Australia and the Leonora line

which took miners to the goldfield towns north of Kalgoorlie. The

heatwave in which temperatures in the region had soared to 109 degrees Fahrenheit had been broken with a cool change.2 After

a night in one of the elaborate grand Victorian hotels built with gold money Mary boarded the train for Leonora. It was a journey

back in time. Broad Arrow, the first town to the north, had been

abandoned ten years or so earlier. At its peak it had been home to 15,000 residents. The town had had eight hotels, two breweries, a

hospital, a chemist, two banks, a post office and six grocery stores, but by the 1920s the gold had run out and it was a ghost town. The mulga scrub and the flat, expansive red earth of the landscape though

which the train travelled was broken by the scars of mining, rusting and broken machinery and the toppling brick chimneys of a former society. Roofless buildings and the skeletons of houses spoke of an earlier bustling time when gold had made the town.3

These mining towns, Mary knew, had mushroomed into existence

and then been abandoned all within her lifetime. In 1893, when she was twelve and newly arrived back in Queensland with her mother

and siblings, Paddy Hannan had discovered gold on the other side of the continent and the world of the Wongatha, whose country it was, changed forever.4 By 1896 when the railway from Perth finally 2 3 4

‘Notes on the Weather’, Kalgoorlie Miner, 22 December 1931. Geoffrey Blainey, The Golden Mile, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993, Chapters 1–3. Various forms of Wongatha are in use: Wongi or Wonkai, for example. I am using the spelling and form preferred by the Wongatha people themselves.

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M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

reached Kalgoorlie there were hundreds of men camping in tents, hessian lean-tos or iron sheds. Traditional crushing machines, iron boilers, mining shafts and the other paraphernalia of mining now

littered what had been the lands of the Wongatha. The discovery of gold had been disastrous for them, Mary later told the Anti-Slavery

and Aborigines Protection Society.5 She was entering a world which

had been changed even faster than had the world of the Dalleburra people when her father had arrived in 1864 on a tract of land that would become known as Lammermoor.

The neat, ordered, isolated village of Mount Margaret, 220 miles

north-east of Kalgoorlie, with the goats munching on the mulga scrub, must have been a strange but welcoming site after the long, hot

trip across the red earth, the grey saltbush and the abandoned mine sites under the cloudless blue sky. Ten years before Mary arrived,

Rod Schenk, a missionary from New South Wales, had come on his motorbike to the mining town of Laverton which was in drought.

Mines were closing down and the Wongatha people were coming

into the town begging for food. The local police officer’s reaction was to ride through the town with a stockwhip which he used on

those too slow to get out of his way. Auber Octavius Neville, the Western Australian Chief Protector, wrote about the metamorphosis experienced by the Wongatha people:

First came the prospector and the miner bringing in to his unfettered existence a taste of a rude civilisation to which he soon adapted himself. Next the towns springing up taught him something of the delights and evils of an unaccustomed social system to which he rapidly succumbed. Then when the mining industry began to wane, he became cast upon the waters of 5

Digest of Mary Bennett’s letters, Citizens’ Education Fellowship, MS9212/3653/1, undated, 1930s, SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

adversity, lacking the stamina to stand alone, his rigid tribal system disorganised and disrupted.6

Rod Schenk saw the need for land where the Wongatha could

settle, as they were rejected by the white mining communities. Their hunger was palpable. He applied for a lease on the Mount

Margaret common, bought 400 goats, began clearing and selling

sandal­wood, and set out to attract the local people to his new idea. The following year he married Mysie Johnston and, using their own resources and calling on friends and their network, together

the Schenks developed their lease into what had become a small community by the time Mary Bennett arrived. There were boys’ and girls’ dormitories and bathrooms, cottages for mission staff and

for married Aboriginal couples, a large children’s dining room and

a schoolroom. There was a blacksmith’s shop, water tanks, a well

and a windmill (as water was scarce and precious) a fowl house and a goat yard and plans for further development. Most of the material for these buildings had been purchased by government tender

from buildings no longer used in the nearby abandoned town of Morgans.7

Mary was aware of the legacy of bitterness felt by the remnant

Won­gatha population of these now deserted goldfields, but was buoyed up by a sense of privilege and a feeling of joy at once again

being in the company of Aboriginal women whom she recalled as

most lovable people. ‘I cannot tell you how much I am looking

forward again to spinning and weaving’, she enthused to Bessie 6 7

AON, ‘Old Mining Scenes’, The Westralian, November 1930, also in The West Australian, 6 January 1931, p. 9. H. P. Smith (ed.), The First Ten Years of Mt. Margaret Mission, Keswick Book Depot, Melbourne, n.d.

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M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

Rischbieth.8 By March she was even more buoyant, writing that she had been invited to stay for six months to continue this work. She had already established the spinning with the women, building on

their traditional methods, and now they were learning to weave. As at Gnowangerup and Kunmunya, Mary arrived with a spinning

wheel and a loom and soon ordered more. She told Bessie Rischbieth rapturously:

Ever since I have been here I have been longing for you to see this place, and the department of the work which particularly appeals to me – an Australian women’s work for native women. It is grand, beautiful! An inspiration!9

She compared Mount Margaret favourably to Kunmunya but

pointed out that while the Loves’ mission was to ‘the practically wild

and uncontaminated natives’, the Schenks’ is to ‘the broken and em­

bittered remnants of tribes on deserted goldfields, and the half-caste waifs’.10 She wrote with an ardent respect and admiration about the

three couples she had met at missions – the Wrights at Gnowangerup, the Loves at Kunmunya and the Schenks at Mount Margaret. In each case she particularly noted and commented on her admiration for the women. About Mysie Schenk she wrote:

The work to which Mr Schenk brought his beautiful, gifted young wife, a Melbourne girl, ten years ago, was work of reclamation. He had described it to her in all its grimness, and her answer was to equip herself by learning raffia work at the Arts and Crafts in Melbourne: in her practical view she would save the women simply by giving them the chance of choosing good. She taught 8 9 10

Bennett to Rischbieth, 19 December 1931, Rischbieth papers, MS2004/30, NLA. Bennett to Rischbieth, 19 December 1931. Bennett to Rischbieth, 6 March 1932.

– 18 7 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

them to do this beautiful work, so they had the joy of creating, and every morning she paid them for that morning’s work.11

The unstated alternative to the craft work, ‘choosing good’, was

the prostitution of Aboriginal women to white men. Mary would initially broaden the women’s skill base when she introduced spin­ ning and the weaving of angora wool from the Mount Margaret goats. Perhaps Mary was contrasting Mysie Schenk to the wife of another pioneer, a generation earlier, her mother, who did not work alongside her husband for more than a few months at a time.

While she sometimes referred to her father in her letters, once she

had completed Christison of Lammermoor she never mentioned her mother in anything she wrote.

Schoolteacher Rod Schenk and Mary Bennett, both strong personalities with strong

views, hit it off from the start according to Schenk’s daughter.12

They were of one mind when it came to the human rights of Aboriginal people, although they were lone voices on the Eastern

Goldfields in the 1930s, so when Mary proposed to Rod that she stay on as the schoolteacher he accepted. She never formally joined the

United Aborigines Mission staff, perhaps because she had her own

independent means and did not rely on the financial contributions from mission supporters as the missionaries did. One of her former

pupils, Dora Cotterill, described her as ‘a loner’ who kept to herself

and did not have much to do with the male staff of the mission.13 She 11 Bennett to Rischbieth, 6 March 1932. 12 Morgan, Mt Margaret, p. 138. 13 ‘The U. A. Missionary staff ’, The United Aborigines Messenger, 1 April 1933, 1 December 1937, p. 2; Dora Cotterill to Sue Taffe, 15 February 2014.

– 18 8 –

M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

handed responsibility for spinning and weaving over to Mrs Schenk and another missionary in 1932 and by the end of that year was

preparing teaching materials for the children’s school program with energy and enthusiasm. The school at Morgans had closed down and the building had been purchased, dismantled and re-erected at Mount Margaret Mission before Mary arrived.

Education in the desert had its limitations. Mary described the

school and its surrounds to Anton Vroland, an educator from Victoria with whom she corresponded:

Now the things that we see from the school are stony hills and stunted mulga trees, no grass, the flock of goats going out or coming in, a dry creek bed, indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape, a low tree which is the highest for miles around with the bell hanging from it, the wood heap, the store, the missionaries’ houses, the native couples’ houses on the hill that forms our near skyline, the well and pumping plant in the middle of the settlement, the freelite electric light engine, the children’s dining room, the girls’ dormitory (largest building on the mission), the boys’ dormitory some way off, (next largest) and round about the wurlies of camp natives who have called in on their hunting round.14

No tall trees, no lakes or rivers, few birds apart from some parrots

and sandpipers after rain, which were followed by hawks, meant it

was a challenge for a teacher to introduce the idea of more fertile environments. So when Rod Schenk took the children on an excursion to Perth in January 1936 it was a wonderful experience for Mary’s

students as well as being a boon for her. They ‘had never seen a tall tree or a river or more water than a galvanized iron tank will hold’, Mary explained, ‘so you can imagine their marvel and delight at the 14

Bennett to Vroland, 27 June 1936, Vroland papers, MS3991, folder 24, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

gum trees and the kookaburras (none here) and the view from the

Darling scarp over the Swan Valley to the sea’. She explained that as a teacher it meant ‘I shan’t have to rack my wits in school how to get ideas about these things to them’.15

Although untrained and inexperienced, never having attended

school herself as a child, Mrs Bennett (as she was to her students, even

sixty years later) was an outstandingly successful teacher. A ‘school’ had commenced five years earlier but those lessons were nearly all

Scripture-based, designed to help ‘in bringing the natives to Christ’.16

Mary instead was driven by the image of educated Aboriginal people

such as Fernando whom she had met in London, who could con-

fidently negotiate their way in the white man’s world. Education would concentrate on literacy and numeracy; it would follow the curriculum laid down for other Western Australian children. The Mount

Margaret school was not recognised by the Education De­partment which did not have responsibility for the education of Aboriginal children. An application to the Education Department to buy the

correspondence courses which were produced for white children in remote locations was rejected so Mary had to rely on hand-me-down course notes and instructions from Mrs Schenk who, as the mother of

white children, was eligible to receive these courses. Pencils, crayons and papers were purchased by Mary, supplement­ed by donations as there was no government support for teaching materials.

Having been educated by governesses, Mary would quiz the

other staff members about their memories of the experience of school as she sought to establish a learning environment conducive 15 16

Bennett to Olive Pink, 15 February 1936, Pink papers, MS2368/6, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (hereafter AIATSIS), Canberra. Smith (ed.), The First Ten Years, p. 29.

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M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

to success.17 She subscribed to journals such as Child Education and the Practical Infant Teacher series to learn about teaching practice

and she developed educational strategies ahead of her time such as

engaging the advanced students to be teachers to the less advanced and devising activities whereby children learned by doing, especially

through play. She read of Maria Montessori’s approach to education and incorporated some key ideas, such as Montessori’s stress on the development of the child’s initiative and natural abilities through practical play.

The schoolroom was a large, airy room with long benches and

seats at which the children sat. A visitor would notice the clean white shirts of the boys and the pretty dresses of the girls and underneath the benches pairs of little bare feet and wriggling toes. There was

a thirty-foot-long blackboard, often with pictures of animals and fruits pinned to it and the names written alongside. The day began at 8.45 a.m. with the children singing ‘God Save the King’ and through

the day each of four levels received between an hour and an hour and

a half of instruction. Each class started with a child out the front

leading the class with a prayer but after this formality our visitor might observe a child standing up on the bench or climbing a ladder.

Classes were activity based. One pupil would write an instruction on the blackboard such as ‘climb the ladder and jump off the ladder’.

This pupil would then choose another pupil to enact the instruction. Meanwhile at the back of the room some of the tribal adults, parents of the students, watched and had their first lesson in literacy as they

realised the link between the chalk marks on the blackboard and the children’s actions. Mary rewarded industriousness with the prize of 17

Notes from Geoffrey Bolton interview of Mysie Schenk, n.d. but likely 1977, ADB Archives, Noel Butlin Archives, ANU.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

an orange, a precious piece of fruit in the desert far from where they could grow.18

Education was for all regardless of caste or age but this was an

approach which the Chief Protector did not support. Former students

recall that when the Chief Protector came to inspect the mission,

those of the full descent were told to go out bush for the day.19 In

his view education was only for the people of mixed descent who

would, through marriage and training, eventually merge into the mainstream. Through her decade at Mount Margaret the battle in­

tensified between Bennett and Schenk and Chief Protector Neville over the issue of to whom education should be offered. For Schenk and Mary Bennett it was anyone who sought it; for Neville education was a priority for people of partial Aboriginal descent.

Auber Octavius Neville had been the Chief Protector of Aborigines

since 1915, during which time there was rapid increase in the partdescent population. It was this group of people, detribalised and in his view having lost the most valuable attributes of the original culture and adopted the worst attributes of Western culture, who

were most in need of education. He saw his responsibility as providing

training for the girls to enter society as domestics and the boys as farm workers. In his view training required separation of these

partial descent children from their mothers and in the longer term Neville saw them as biologically assimilating with the European-

Australian population, thus solving ‘the half-caste problem’. While

Neville aspired to have schools available for Aboriginal children, his 18 19

R. S. Schenk, The Educability of the Native, Service Printing Company, [1936?]: ‘Stories from Mrs Canning (Matron Leonora Hospital)’, supplied to the author by May O’Brien, 2008. Oral communication, Jessie Evans, 19 May 2008, Kalgoorlie.

– 19 2 –

M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

limited budget, which was decreased during the Depression years of

the early 1930s, did not allow this with the exception of the poorly run, vermin-ridden Moore River Settlement, north of Perth, which

provided only elementary education. This meant that part-descent children placed on government settlements such as Moola Bulla

received no education. In practice, the only opportunities to learn for such children took place on missions. The priority for Neville’s department was always education for part-descent children. Mount Margaret, as a mission school, made no such distinction between the

children, and consequently the tensions between Neville and Mount Margaret staff escalated through the 1930s.20

Responsibility for the education of forty or so students of various

ages grouped according to their level of achievement into four levels was initially Mary Bennett’s alone, though sometimes a mis­sion­ary

assisted her. She also trained the older children to take teaching sessions with younger ones, an activity which was of edu­ca­tional benefit

to both groups. Lesson time was broken up into enjoy­able activities to

develop reading, writing and arithmetic. Story­telling was valued and the children were encouraged to give talks to break down the intense shy self-consciousness, especially of some of the girls. Mrs Bennett

insisted on proper English. She saw pidgin English as a tool of the colonisers to keep the people in a subservient position and would not

allow it to be spoken. The children could speak their mother tongue in the schoolyard, but pidgin was frowned on.

While the teaching techniques came from Mary’s research, the

underlying educational philosophy developed from her experiences the previous year. She wrote that she had never experienced anything 20

A. O. Neville, ‘Report of Evidence, Moseley Royal Commission’, 12–13 March 1934, Acc 2922, State Archives of Western Australia; Jacobs, Mister Neville.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

so awful as her year in the Kimberley.21 The abuse of Ab­orig­inal women which she had described as the custom of the country, and

the prostitution of these women by Aboriginal men who offered them to white men, brought home to her the need for education

– not to suit the needs of the pastoralist for cheap labour but to

develop the potential of each individual. Sadie Canning MBE,

one of Mary’s successful pupils who would later be the Matron at Leonora Hos­pit­a l, described Mrs Bennett’s teaching as being in

all areas: academic, social, spiritual and physical.22 Another former student, Dora Cotterill, who would train and work as a kindergar-

ten teacher, explained that ‘she always made us feel that we were just as good as others’. Amongst themselves the children called her ‘Kapali’, grandmother.23

Mary described the children as having an immense capacity for

idealism. A number of her former pupils, speaking to me sixty years after they were at Mount Margaret, still recalled the stories of the

lives of successful African Americans such as Booker T. Washington

and Dr Kwegier Aggrey which ‘dear Mrs Bennett’ recounted to the class. One pupil, Gladys Vincent, who would later become a trained

school­teacher herself, wrote a letter to Dr Washington Carver, scien­

tist, educator and inventor. The school was abuzz with excite­ment

when his letter in reply to Gladys arrived. Mrs Bennett had it framed and hung up in the school, to stimulate the imagination and en­ cour­age confidence in her pupils.24 ‘How I long to find a Sir Philip Sidney, a Booker Washington, an Aggrey, among my pupils’, Mary 21 22 23 24

Bennett to Charles Duguid, 7 October 1934, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA. ‘Stories from Mrs Canning’. Dora Cotterill to the author, 4 April 2012. Cotterill to the author.

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M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

wrote to Anton Vroland.25 An idealist herself, she was the perfect person to develop this capacity in her young impressionable pupils.

From December 1934 school exhibition nights were held regularly

at Mount Margaret Mission. The children prepared for these nights for months under Mrs Bennett’s guidance. The walls of the classroom

were decorated with examples of the children’s work: stories and essays in beautiful cursive script, colourful drawings of birds and animals, even of ships which the children would never have seen.

Spun and woven garments made by the girls and woodwork and meccano creations made by the boys were also displayed. The children proudly showed their parents their work, and the parents, although

not able to read the stories and poems on display, saw the pride and the achievements of their offspring. They, too, were being introduced to the white man’s way, which had overtaken theirs, rupturing a way

of life which had been passed down to them for so many generations. Most of the parents knew Mrs Bennett who had assisted them when they had come to her with their problems. She reported that the

parents took the greatest interest in their children’s progress and were setting more value on education.26 Some had stood at the back of

the classroom watching the children enacting sentences. This was a radically different experience for them of settler society, after the brutality of the mining camps.

Mary was educating the children so that they could confidently

take their place in European-Australian society on an equal footing with whites. Importantly, at Mount Margaret the children were not

separated from their parents, who had access to them and took them 25 26

Bennett to Vroland, 31 October 1936, Vroland papers, MS3991, box 3, folder 24, NLA. United Aborigines Mission Mount Margaret Station annual report for year ending 30 June 1938.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

bush for weekends. On the exhibition nights it was the children’s turn to introduce their parents to what they had learned. Parents who had come in shyly from their bush camps were served cakes, sausage

rolls and sandwiches by their children who had been preparing for this day. They had been schooled in Western etiquette and offered serviettes and plates to parents bewildered by this foreign world. One

of Mary’s former pupils told me that you got into trouble if you confus­ ed the butter knife with the cheese knife.27 Informal lessons continued

on the weekends when Mrs Bennet took the girls in small groups into her small mission house to teach them how to sew and to cook.28

The writings which give us the greatest insight into Mrs Bennett,

teacher at Mount Margaret Mission from 1932 to 1942, come from three sources: Teaching the Aborigines: Data from Mount Margaret

Mission which takes the form of an extended photographic essay

which she published in 1935; a correspondence from 1936 to 1939 with Melbourne educationist Anton Vroland who also reported on his visit to Mount Margaret in 1939, and Mary’s detailed annual

reports from 1933 to 1942 of student progress which provided the evidence she needed of Aboriginal success in the Western edu­ca­ tion system.

Teaching the Aborigines In her fourth year at Mount Margaret Mission school Mary wrote

Teaching the Aborigines. She acknowledged in the Foreword that the mission started and was maintained by faith. Mount Margaret Mission

was ‘a faith mission’ in that it encouraged its missionaries to trust in God to provide the necessary resources. Such missionaries were said to 27 28

Violet Graham in conversation with the author, 19 May 2008, Kalgoorlie, WA. Dimple Sullivan in conversation with the author, 16 May 2008, Laverton, WA.

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M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

‘live by faith’, but although Mary worked within this culture she did not

rely on faith to finance her work; she used her own financial resources to develop the school. She did not join the United Aborigines Mission,

perhaps wishing to maintain the independence which she needed as an activist taking on the Western Australian Government.

The adage ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ applies to this

work: fifty photographs with captions introduce the reader in a some­times quite startling way to the complex difficulties faced at Mount Margaret Mission in the work to educate children and adults

for roles in the Australian society and economy. The most power-

fully succinct is a pair of photographs: the one on the top half of the page is of nine smiling prepubescent Aboriginal girls sitting crosslegged in their white dresses; the other below, of three mature men

standing in assertive poses legs apart and hands on hips. The caption between the photographs reads ‘BRIDES and BRIDEGROOMS’. Under the photo of the men is written ‘The old men assign the female infants at birth – half-whites as well as full-blood Aboriginals

– to each other as supernumerary wives’. This was not an original

juxtaposition; Schenk had used it in The First Ten Years of Mount

Margaret Mission in 1933. It was one customary behaviour which Mount Margaret set out to break, seeing it as utterly detrimental to the girls and women.29

Teaching the Aborigines also emphasised the value of Christian

marriage because ‘the woman is freed from the “property status” and stands as an individual human soul making her life’s adjust-

ments and choosing her life’s partner’.30 For these reasons Mary 29

M. M. Bennett, Teaching the Aborigines: Data from Mt Margaret Mission, WA, 1935, p. 29;see also Smith (ed.), The First Ten Years, pp. 54-55. 30 Bennett, Teaching the Aborigines, pp. 28-29.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

and Rod and Mysie Schenk encouraged Christian marriage but Mary would not have shared Schenk’s fundamentalist views that

all Aboriginal custom and belief could be described as ‘works of darkness’. She accepted traditional customs unless they interfered with a person’s human rights, thus traditional bartering of women

and polygamy were anathema to her because they reduced women to chattel status.

Another sequence of photographs begins with a photo of four

teenage girls posed shyly standing together with their chests painted in white clay and pieces of material worn sarong-style as skirts. The caption is ‘Native girls in white men’s camps’. Under it is a

photo of Mrs Schenk teaching raffia work to Aboriginal women with the caption ‘Industries: Mrs Schenk teaching native women and girls to earn their living by working for money’. Four further

photos are of articles made for sale by the women and of the sewing, weaving and spinning industries established at Mount Margaret.

These two photographic sequences introduce two interlinked social situations faced by Aboriginal women which Mary saw as utterly destructive and worked to counteract for the rest of her life: the

first was polygamy and the taking of child brides by Aboriginal men who believed they had a right to them; the second was the

prostitution of Aboriginal women by Aboriginal men to white men. The photographic essays introduced these two destructive situations in the educational context. If women could earn a living through their industry, and if through education the girls were given the

confidence to withstand the pressure to be handed over to old men

to whom they were betrothed in infancy, then the Mount Margaret School had provided a valuable service. ‘Not one of these girls’, Mary

wrote, ‘but has been set free only after a long, tough mental fight’. – 19 8 –

M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

Threats of death and spearing to the mothers of these girls if they did not relinquish their children were common.31

Most of the photographs in Teaching the Aborigines are of the chil­

dren actively demonstrating Mary’s progressive educational think-

ing. We see children taking the role of teacher to the class. We see the element of play, and thus engagement, present in all the activities. School is very much learning by doing at Mount Margaret. The

authorial voice of the social critic comes through in comments about

land, where she contrasts the squatter complaining that he can’t make a living on less than hundreds of thousands of acres (did she think about her own father?) while only 200 acres is the size of the Mount

Margaret Reserve. She reiterates the argument she had made prev­

iously, that ‘our natives’ should be able to ‘develop what is morally

their country as well as ours’, using capitals to ensure that the reader can see that this is important:

AT LEAST FIFTY NATIVE TERRITORIES ARE NEED­ED IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA, EQUIT­A BLY SPACED THROUGHOUT THE STATE, IN THE NATIVES’ OWN DISTRICTS. 32

Mary understood the psychological barriers to education and

was well read in the current debates concerning the possibilities of Aboriginal adaptation to a sedentary life. In 1929 S. D. Porteus,

Professor of Racial Psychology at the University of Hawaii, had conducted tests which were purportedly ‘culture free’ on Aboriginal people in the Kimberley. While concluding that the people were not unintelligent in relation to their environment, he questioned their 31 Bennett, Teaching the Aborigines, p. 29. 32 Bennett, Teaching the Aborigines, p. 36.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

‘ethnic capacity’ to adapt to European society.33 Mary rejected such suggestions. The last four pages of Teaching the Aborigines is an essay

titled ‘Intelligence Tests and Colour Bar’ where Mary provided evi-

dence of Aboriginal intelligence and educability and argued that the ‘COLOUR BAR, which white Australia erects against the na-

tive race, with murderous effect’ is the barrier to Aboriginal students’ success. This was a very necessary argument at a time when, under an

amendment to the Education Act, white parents could – and did –

effectively demand that Aboriginal students at their children’s school be removed by arguing that their ‘presence is injurious to the health,

welfare and morality of other children’.34 She wrote in detail about the damage done to individual psyches as a result of this ‘colour bar’

as it was then called, giving as an example the colonists’ use of

pidgin English when by means of talking ‘pidgin’ the ‘white men and women outback transfer their lurking consciousness of inferiority to the native people they are exterminating’.

She cited Winifred Holtby, an English feminist and novelist who,

writing about racial discrimination in government policy, made the point that:

Those who are interested in questions of modern educational reform will remember with what care the modern schoolteacher tries to eradicate in pupils any sense of inferiority. BUT WE ARE DOING DELIBERATELY BY THE COLOUR BAR JUST WHAT TEACHERS HAVE BEEN TOLD THEY MUST NOT DO. [her capitals]

So, Mary concluded, quoting this time Elsie Johnson, a prominent

black American educator, ‘to a race naturally sunny comes the twilight 33 Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens, p. 93. 34 Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens, p. 165.

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M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

of self-doubt and a sense of personal inferiority’. Through the final paragraphs her own pain at the injustices she sees is palpable:

In Western Australia, for thousands of our dear lads and girls there are neither the final school years of happy achievement nor the preceding years of healthful striving against the terrible consequences of hostile white environment – there is simply no school at all! ‘They sit in darkness when it is not night’. An extreme example of harmful influence – but a very common one – is the injurious effect on the Aboriginal child of living with her mother in a white man’s camp, and this can only be avoided by ADEQUATE INVIOLABLE NATIVE TERRITORIES. It is all in vain to talk of tests that may, or may not be tests, while we ignore the battleground that is every human soul. [her capitals]

The booklet displays the depth of her engagement with the people

with whom she is working and the breadth of her own reading which included educationists in Africa, America and Britain. She shows

an understanding of the psychological barriers to effective learning and a passionate commitment to combating the attitudes of the

parents of white children, the pastoralists and the politicians who kept Aboriginal people subjugated. She ended, as she so often ended speeches and writings, with an invitation to the reader:

Will you come into the arena, and learn what ‘grace and truth’ there are in our Aboriginal people, and what frightful, unnecessary, artificial bars are keeping their spirits in prison? WHO WILL COME?35 [her capitals]

Educationist, Anton Vroland, began corresponding with Mary

Bennett in 1936. Her letters to him are a second source of insights

into her educational philosophy and practice. Vroland first became 35 Bennett, Teaching the Aborigines, p. 67

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

interested in Aboriginal education through his teaching in Victorian country towns. He was a member of the Victorian Aboriginal Group

(VAG), a Melbourne body set up in 1930 ‘to promote Aboriginal

welfare wherever possible, and to help to form a public conscience upon the question’. Through the 1930s the VAG provided material

support for the Mount Margaret School including such innovations

as a printing press to start a school newspaper and a film projector.36

Mary recognised the projector as ‘a powerful new weapon or tool in education’ which needs a new technique. Open to new ideas and

possibilities she envisaged the possibility of the children writing their own film scripts.

When he began corresponding with Mary about education Vroland

was close to retirement from classroom teaching but had put his rev­

o­lu­tion­ary ideas into print. He produced teaching materials to assist teachers and over a number of years sent pastels, a set of biog­

raphies, illustrated books, amongst other gifts for her pupils.37 He

was an exponent of the ideas of learning through discovery and learning through play. With very little professional stimulation at Mount

Margaret, as there was usually only one untrained assistant, this cor-

respondence about teaching techniques, as well as the principles and philosophies behind them, was a boon to her.

Professional isolation and doubts about her work plagued Mary.

At one time she confessed: ‘I certainly have splendid material in these children. On the other hand it is appalling how little I have 36 37

The Victorian Aboriginal Group, fourth, ninth and eleventh annual reports, 1933, 1938, 1940, Citizens’ Education Fellowship (Victorian Aboriginal Group), MS9212/3653, SLV. Austral Grammars was a series of graded texts which made use of Australian examples and applied the inductive method to language development. See H. J. Lawry, ‘Anton Vroland: His Life and Work’, M Ed thesis, Monash University, 1981.

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M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

given them’. She writes of her need for fresh ideas.38 She asked .

Vroland’s advice on how to mark the children’s work, explaining that her strategy in marking was ‘to get more pace out of them’ as ‘they look to see where they are each week’.39 We see in these letters a

dedicated and thoughtful teacher who recognised the value of team games, established a choir, and worked tirelessly using a range of

methods to encourage confidence and combat extreme shyness in the girls. After visiting Mount Margaret in 1937 Vroland praised

Mary’s work, noting her vision, skill and energy to overcome great

difficulties. He feared, however, that while ‘quite extraordinary prog­ ress had been made due to great enthusiasm and energy applied with much judgement … the pace Mrs Bennett has set herself is one that cannot be kept up indefinitely’.40

Mary recognised that her pupils needed to learn to speak and write

the English language properly. She wrote about her battle against

pidgin English which white people outside the mission used with

Aboriginal people with what she calls ‘fatal consequences’.41 She valued Aboriginal languages, learning the names of native trees from an old man and marvelling at the children’s linguistic powers, but

explained to Vroland that the stumbling block for her in learning

their language was ‘the inflections which seem to have been knocked to bits by forty years of white settlement’.42 When she was earlier working on her father’s biography and an article for the Journal of the

Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, her interest in 38 39 40 41 42

Bennett to Anton Vroland, 28 March 1937, Vroland papers, MS 3991, folder 24, NLA. Bennett to Vroland, 29 Nov 1936, Vroland papers, MS 3991, folder 24, NLA. Anton Vroland, ‘A Visit to Mount Margaret School’, n.d, but 1937, Vroland papers, MS 3991, box 11, added 13 December 1986, NLA. Bennett to Vroland, 27 June 1937, Vroland papers MS3991/4/30, NLA. Bennett to Vroland, 18 April 1937, Vroland papers, MS 3991, folder 24, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Aboriginal languages was evident. In 1930, when working with the Loves at Kunmunya, she wrote with enthusiasm about Bob Love’s translation work in the Worrora language. She later recalled with

delight that when she gave Aboriginal children Activity Reading to help them with their English ‘on their own initiative they began

to translate into their own language the English sentences which I had made, and when I printed their “wong-gai” sentences on cards

and they recognised their own language reduced to writing their

excitement and delight knew no bounds.43 According to Professor Elkin, Rod Schenk refused to allow his staff to learn the local

language and Elkin surmised that this may have had a negative influence on Mary learning the Wongatha language.44

Regular testing and reporting of results provided the essential

evidence that Aboriginal children could succeed in the Western education system just as well as white children. Student numbers increased from forty in 1933 to sixty in 1939. By 1937 students sat

the Western Australian Department of Education examinations halfyearly and annually in standards one to four. The best received full

marks for most of the tests and the majority passed all the tests, with students excelling at arithmetic. Mary reminded readers of her report that her students were studying in a foreign language. She also

contrasted their shorter learning periods – no more than two hours of tuition a day – with their comparatively privileged white brothers and sisters whose tuition covered a full school day.

The Mount Margaret Mission School reports provide the data Mary

needed to prove her students’ competence. They would routinely 43 44

Bennett to Henry Wardlaw, 22 September 1951, Council for Aboriginal Rights papers (hereafter CAR), MS12913/4/6, SLV. Elkin to Gibbney, 27 September 1977, ‘Mary Montgomerie Bennett’, ADB Archives, ANU.

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M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

include the statement: ‘The correspondence papers are not supplied by

the Government, but were obtained from a friend whose children had finished with them’.45 Students whose education was not supported

by the Western Australian Government, whose lessons were for an hour or two a day, and who were learning in a language which was not their mother tongue, were succeeding, despite these obstacles,

due to the skill and dedication of their teacher, Mrs Bennett, with the practical support of groups such as the Victorian Aboriginal Group

in Melbourne. One of her former pupils told me that ‘Mrs Bennett gave us the best education she could possibly imagine’.46

When Mary sat down to write her report for the board of the

United Aborigines Mission in June 1940, her ninth year at Mount Margaret, she did not hold back. The report has the usual details of attendances and examination results at all levels but it also argued

the case for compulsory, free education for Aboriginal children as was the case for other children. Mary gave examples of children of

mixed descent who were removed from school by their parents to look after younger children. ‘Nothing except legal compulsion’, she

argued, ‘will make some of the derelict men and women respect the children’s right to education’. She continued:

And seeing that quite considerable numbers of white parents would not send their children to school but that they would incur imprisonment for default, one is left with the unpleasant conviction that Western Australia certainly seems to condone illiteracy and vagabondage in her great and growing native pop­ ulation by withholding legislation for providing and enforcing the protection of education. 45 46

United Aborigines’ Mission Mt Margaret Station Annual Report for year ending 30 June 1938, given to the author by May O’Brien. Violet Graham in conversation with the author, Kalgoorlie, 19 May 2008.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

It is not fair that teachers with the vision – which the Government has not – to help these children, should be frustrated again and again. Teachers spend their vitality unstintingly to help these children towards maintaining themselves in a civilised manner, and adjusting themselves with dignity in what is their native land twice over, and it is not fair that their work should be undone merely because the Legislature refuses that protection to native education which white education could not survive a day without.47

Her frustration over Western Australian Government legislation,

which meant that Aboriginal parents could take their children out of school whenever they wanted to, is understandable. She asked for

the same safeguards which protected other Australian children to

be applied to Aboriginal children. Her sense of the injustice of this situation was deeply felt.

Mrs Bennett was the teacher at Mount Margaret Mission from

1932 to 1942, until she was sixty. Her teaching by day energised her and strengthened her sense of purpose for the relentless work

of reforming society which she conducted by night. Signing herself

M. M. Bennett, she spent her evenings, after the school preparation for the next day was done, writing to those in her expanding activist

network in London, Geneva, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and elsewhere. She wrote to politicians, newspaper editors,

other activists and bureaucrats. Despite diabetic illness, which required

hospitalisation in Kalgoorlie a number of times through this decade, she campaigned from her small timber and galvanised iron cottage on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert. She was invited by Bessie Rischbieth to attend conferences in Turkey and London in 1934 47

United Aborigines’ Mission Mt Margaret Station Annual Report for year ending 30 June, 1940.

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M R S BE N N E T T, T E AC H E R

but replied that she couldn’t bear to leave her ‘beloved children’. She explained:

For I know I can help them, by God’s mercy, and it is such a privilege and source of consolation to me to know that I am doing even the smallest bit to lift them up and set them on their feet, and help them to be what all are potentially, the most magnificent citizens that any country could desire.48

Mary was consumed by her quest to educate Aboriginal children for a future in the white man’s world which had supplanted their grandparents’ world and to change, by whatever means were available,

the dominant culture she had seen expressed most viciously in the

north of Western Australia which did not accept Aboriginal people as human beings worthy of respect and a chance in life.

She was a reflective and imaginative teacher. She evaluated her

teaching strategies, always striving to find ways to stimulate her

pupils’ interests. Proficiency in English was essential if they were to negotiate the white world, but she recognised and supported the maintenance of their mother tongue. She opposed child betrothal and polygamy, arguing that Aboriginal girls should be free to choose their

life partners. Chief Protector Neville criticised her for inconsistency

in opposing such cultural practices while supporting others but her answer was always that if cultural practices contravened a person’s

rights as an individual (such as to choose a marriage partner) then they should be forfeited.

As an interdenominational Christian mission, Mount Margaret

provided education, the maintenance of family ties and the possibility

of a future within white society. Negotiation rather than fighting as a way of resolving disputes was encouraged. Christian marriage was 48

Bennett to Rischbieth, 16 November 1934.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

supported. Women were provided with skills for earning a living as

an alternative to being prostituted to white men. It was in Christian missions such as Schenk’s Mount Margaret and Love’s Kunmunya

that hope for a future for Aboriginal West Australians lay. The state government provided nothing but a rough and basic training for only a hundred or so children at this time.

Mary was sustained by her own Christianity, believing that it was

God’s will that she equip her pupils for an honourable and fulfilling future. Her ‘mission’ was to educate Aboriginal children so that they

could make their best possible contribution to society and would be able to lead fulfilling lives within the broader white community. She worked to assist them to reach their potential, providing not just traditional education in numeracy and literacy but the development of confidence and self-belief so that her students could imagine their futures and work towards achieving their goals. She wished to see

both boys and girls excel; children of both mixed and full descent.

Ultimately (although she would have liked it to be otherwise) the most successful pupils, if we are to measure by position achieved in the working world, were her female students who had white fathers and Aboriginal mothers. Sadie Corner became the matron

of Leonora Hospital; Dora Quinn, a kindergarten teacher; Gladys

Vincent, a primary school teacher; and May O’Brien, author and

Director of Education. These women all continued to play a part in

Mary’s future life as did many other men and women whom she had taught as children in her decade at Mount Margaret Mission.

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Cha pte r 8

C OM M I S SION ER MO SE L E Y A N D CH I EF PRO T E C T OR N EV I L L E I do most earnestly ask that the official smashing of native family life be stopped, and that native families may be permitted to live where they wish within the law. But no-one imagines that a home and education are due to the natives in what is, morally, their own country.’ Mary Bennett, Aborigines Royal Commission, 19 March 1934

Mount Margaret Mission, on the edge of the central desert, might seem like an unlikely place to begin a campaign to unsettle the

status quo, but it had real advantages. Mary was meeting women and their daughters as she taught spinning and introduced them

to the looms, and soon people started coming to her with their problems, some of them relating to their communications with the

Chief Protector, Mr Neville. She was new to teaching and threw

herself into learning her new profession with enthusiasm, but she

was not new to writing, with two books already published. She had

much to share about her year in the north of Western Australia

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

and she now had the confidence and experience to believe that her

words could break through the ignorance and complacency of Perth society with regard to the Aboriginal people displaced through pas­

tor­alism. She began with a letter to the editor of the ABM Review,

the official organ of the Australian Board of Missions of the then

Church of England with its headquarters in Sydney. Since 1930, headlines in the Western Australian press had commented on Mary’s allegations even before reporters knew who she was. ‘The aborigines are under a system analogous to slavery’ writes Mr M. M. Bennett,

author of Christison of Lammermoor in The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being.1

Allegations of slavery in relation to the treatment of Aboriginal

people by Western Australian pastoralists were not new. Thirty years earlier Western Australia had been described as a slave state in the

letters pages of The Times. 2 Walter Malcolmson, who had worked on pastoral stations all over the country, described the indenturing

of Aboriginal labour in the west in these terms. He quoted the Bishop of Perth as telling the Governor of Western Australia that

the indenture system was a form of slavery. More recently, Mary’s friend and activist colleague Edith Jones had told a Melbourne

conference in 1929 that if ‘a woman, whether white or black, has not the control of her body she is a slave’.3 Ralph Piddington, an

anthropologist whom Mary had met during her investigations in the Kimberley, was reported in January 1932 as saying that ‘native 1 2 3

‘System of Slavery: Unpaid Native Labour’, Daily News, 2 July 1930. Walter Malcolmson, ‘The People of Australia and the Aborigines’, The Times, 8 April 1904, p. 9. Edith Jones, Conference of Representatives of Missions, Societies, and Associations Interested in the Welfare of Aboriginals to Consider the Report and Recommendations Submitted to the Commonwealth Government by J. W. Bleakley, Melbourne, 12 April 1929, Rischbieth papers, MS2004/12/506, NLA.

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COMMISSIONER MOSELY & CHIEF PROTECTOR NEV ILLE

slavery is in operation, that there is wholesale trafficking in native

women by whites, and that aborigines are frequently murdered and

flogged’.4 Even Chief Protector Neville had been known to privately

describe the situation of Aboriginal women in the north as a system

of semi-slavery.5 Mary, however, was persistent in her criticisms,

varying the angle, reminding readers of Australia’s obligations under international conventions such as the League of Nation’s Slavery

Convention and increasingly focusing on sexual abuse of Aboriginal

women. And most importantly, after her first, furious but unsuccessful

attempts at writing to the press in London in 1928, she had learned

how to turn a phrase to get journalistic attention. And attention was needed as the group she was trying to assist – Aboriginal women,

children and men – with almost no access to Western education, were effectively voiceless in Western Australia.

When she had some time aside from planning lessons and gather­

ing teaching materials for her new classes at Mount Margaret Mis­

sion, Mary began work on an article based on her year in the north.

Power in Western Australia was, she knew, firmly in the hands of Anglo-Australian men. They had total control of the state parliament. They were the pastoralists developing the north who formed

a powerful lobby. They were the magistrates and the police officers from whose ranks came most of the Protectors of Aborigines in the state. Moreover, in the north, where there were few white women,

the pastoralists and the police understood and supported each other.

The police held incompatible roles as local Aboriginal protectors of those who had lost their hunting lands to pastoralists and as the 4 5

‘Australia’s Duty to the Aborigines’ The Sun News-Pictorial, 16 January 1932; ‘Slave Conditions in Australia: Allegations at Women’s Conference’, Manchester Guardian, 20 June, 1930. A. O. Neville to Trethgowan, n.d., but 1927, cited in Jacobs, Mister Neville, p. 132.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

prosecutors of the same Aboriginal men accused of stealing those pastoralists’ sheep.

At the other end of the power spectrum were pre-pubescent

Aboriginal girls and their mothers, vulnerable, unprotected victims of men. Within their own societies where polygamy was practised

they were without rights, being promised to older men at birth or soon after, and seen by their husbands as property. With the spread of sheep and cattle taking over the precious water sources and affecting traditional food supplies, Aboriginal men traded their young wives

to pastoralists and to their white station hands for sexual services in exchange for food and tobacco. The wider Australian society and legal

system offered no protection to these young women. Cohabitation with Aboriginal women was a crime for white men but it was almost

impossible to prove with the Aboriginal woman’s word not being

accepted in court. Mary had been shocked to realise how widespread the sexual abuse was and how even those who were not perpetrators

covered for and defended those men who were abusing sometimes very

young girls. She hoped that her publicity might awaken the society from apathy so that support could be gathered for change. She hoped

that women’s organisations such as the Women’s Service Guilds of

Perth, to which she had been introduced by Bessie Rischbieth, might be relied upon to help.

Building pressure Mary’s lengthy letter to the ABM Review soon found a wider aud­

ience in The West Australian under the heading ‘Whites and Natives: Allegations of Slavery’. She held that the trafficking in women was

a result of dispossession following the loss of hunting grounds and labour exploitation. She wrote:

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COMMISSIONER MOSELY & CHIEF PROTECTOR NEV ILLE

I have just returned from a year’s investigations in the Kimberleys where, as in other parts of Western Australia and the Federal Territory – women have neither human rights not protection if they are natives or half-castes – slavery is in operation and there is white slave traffic in black women. The destruction of the natives is caused by the white settlers dispossessing them of their land and by the settlers commercialising for their own advantage the native patriarchal system which, while exhibiting among the wild natives many good elements, has the defects of other man-made systems in that it is unjust to the women and children, treating them as property. Commercialised, it is wholly evil.6

She argued that reserves were inadequate and that native workers

were unpaid and that as a result ‘the native women are the chief

sufferers’ when the white men bartered with the black men for sexual use of their surplus wives. Polygamy was based on the old men bespeaking girls before they were born. Mary believed that if

Aboriginal girls were protected by the law of the land ‘there would

not be nearly so many half-castes because there would be no plurality of wives to barter’. Reverend Sexton, president of the Adelaidebased Aborigines’ Friends Association, was another who argued that

traditional practice of the old men taking young women as extra wives was a partial reason for the growth in the mixed race population.7

The growth in the mixed race population was of concern to Perth

society but how it came to be was not publicly spoken about. Now Mrs M. M. Bennett, described as an authoress and a cultured 6

M. M. Bennett, letter to the editor, ABM Review [Australian Board of Missions], April 15 1932; ‘Whites and Natives: Allegations of Slavery’, The West Australian, 17 May 1932, p. 12. ‘White slavery’ was a term used to describe the coercing and drugging of women and girls into prostitution. The Mann Act of 1910, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act, was an attempt in Illinois to prosecute men engaged in these activities. See The Free Dictionary, www.legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary. com, accessed 14 April 2015. 7 McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p. 133.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

English lady, defied the conventions. She called the sexual bartering

of women by Aboriginal men to white men ‘the custom of the country’ in the Kimberley.

Mary’s allegations caused a furore in the pages of The West Austral­

ian. Two respondents blamed white women for being unprepared to go north. One writer referred to wife trading as common in Aboriginal

societies and suggested that the women voluntarily went with white

men as a desirable alternative. A long-time Kimberley resident who claimed to know every station from Broome to Wave Hill wrote that ‘the allegation of slavery on the Kimberleys was absurd’. He depicted

‘well-dressed and well fed gins … and piccaninnies running about fat and shiny’.8 The Chief Protector provided a careful and measured

bureau­cratic response, agreeing that ‘breaches of certain sections of the Act in regard to co-habitation with the native women do some-

times occur’ but assuring the public, rather unconvincingly, that the department exercises ‘continual vigilance so far as the law permits’.

His own gathering of statistical data, however, presented him with the evidence of the steady growth of the part-Aboriginal population.9

Despite their different emphases, the writers acknowledged the pastoralists’ sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women.

In a further article for the ABM Review published in October

1932, Mary was even more direct, pointing the finger and ascribing

blame. She wrote, ‘Polygamy is encouraged by the white settlers and protected by the administration’. She argued that for ‘black and halfcaste girls in areas where the whole of the natives’ land has been taken 8 9

See letters to the editor, The West Australian, 17 May-25 June 1932. A. O. Neville, ‘Whites and Natives. Mission Allegations: A Government Denial’, The West Australian, 19 May 1932; see Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens, Appendix 1. The part-Aboriginal population in 1920 was 2,100; in 1930 it was 3,500; in 1940 it was 4800.

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for sheep and cattle, peanuts, prospecting, and beachcombing’ there is no excuse for imposing ‘a commercialised neo-patriarchy with its

concomitant “white slavery”’. She asked for ‘equal justice under the law…and that women shall no longer be treated as “property” because

they are of the native race’.10 Again she was not alone in making these criticisms. Dr Walker, who had surveyed Aboriginal health in the late 1920s, observed that it is ‘the usual thing for a man living out

back to have sexual relations with aboriginal women’. On the basis of his fieldwork he concluded that ‘there is every reason to believe that

gonorrhoea is more or less universal among the native population of the Kimberleys’.11 It was Mary’s preparedness, however, to publicly

lay the blame at the feet of the Western Australian administration,

whose responsibility it was to support the Aboriginal population of

the state, and her direct criticism of northern pastoralists that drove the issue into the light.

Although she didn’t attend the British Commonwealth League

con­ference in June 1933, Mary appointed a proxy to represent her

views. Her friend Mrs Ruby Rich read Mary’s paper ‘The Aborig­inal Mother in Western Australia’ to the League conference in London.

The focus was the Western Australian Aborigines’ Department. Mary argued that Aboriginal people were being slowly starved when

they were deprived of their land. Aboriginal women were prop­er­ty

and became merchandise as men bartered them for flour and tobacco. Expectant Aboriginal women were refused entry to hospitals and children were refused entry to school. She wrote about the terrible effects on mixed descent children growing up with a mother who was 10 11

M. M. Bennett, letter to the editor, ABM Review, 20 October 1932, pp 124-125 Dr Walker, Evidence presented to the Moseley Royal Commission, Citizens’ Education Fellowship (Victorian Aboriginal Group), MS 9212/3655/1(f), SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

being hunted by police so that her children could be taken away to

the remote government settlement. She asked women’s societies to act in support of these hunted Aboriginal women. From afar, Mary

asked ‘women of goodwill’, as she had in The Australian Aboriginal as

a Human Being, to press for definite reforms to protect Aboriginal girls and women from demoralisation at the hands of white men. A resolution was put and agreed to that:

The British Commonwealth League in Conference assembled appeals to all women’s societies in Australia to combine in bringing to the notice of the governments concerned some conditions akin to slavery under which detribalised aboriginals and aboriginal half-castes still live. Such conditions include: • • •

Infant betrothal. Lending of wives by husbands to either black or white men in exchange for material gain. Forced marriage, sometimes of young Christian girls, to polygamous husbands.12

This resolution, and assertions made at this conference, made head-

lines in Australian and English newspapers. In Perth readers were told of ‘Allegations of Slavery’. Headlines such as ‘Treatment of

Blacks: Slavery Denied’ and ‘Natives are Virtually Slaves’ kept the issue alive. Reports in The West Australian, The Daily News, other Australian and London newspapers such as the Manchester Daily and The Mail put the Western Australian Government under pressure.13 12

13

British Commonwealth League, ‘Report of Ninth Annual Conference’, 13–15 June 1933, p. 10, Rischbieth papers MS2004/7/283, NLA; see also, for example, ‘Aborigines Killed by Police. Grave Charges by Missionaries’, The Sun, Sydney, 18 June 1933, p. 1. ‘Whites’ Treatment of Aborigines: Urgent Need for protection of Females’, The West Australian, 4 July 1933, p. 1; Daily News, 17, 20, 24 June 1933; ‘Our Aborigines: Grave Allegations in London’, Sunday Mail, 18 June 1933, p. 1.

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By August 1933 the Western Australian Parliament was concerned

about its reputation abroad. ‘There can be no doubt’, Premier Frank

Wise told the Assembly, ‘that in the newspapers of the Empire definite statements have been made derogatory to the people of this State and to the administration’.14 He referred to 150 references in newspapers

to the conditions of Aborigines in Western Australia during the past

two months. Mary was still not a publicly recognised figure. Aubrey Coverley, member for the Kimberley, told the parliament that he

had a press cutting which referred to a ‘Mrs W. W. Bennett, wife of a Western Australian missionary’.15 The Daily News, which three years earlier had described the author of The Australian Aboriginal as

a Human Being as a Mr Bennett, now had her gender right but not her name or marital status.

In September the Western Australian Government decided on a

royal commission to investigate the conditions of Western Australian Aboriginal people. The announcement of the commission in itself

must have seemed like a victory of sorts for Mary Bennett and the

women’s organisations such as the Women’s Service Guilds which had been so vocal in drawing attention to conditions ‘akin to slavery’

which existed in the north of the state. Those who had followed the

debate in the Western Australian Parliament may have had reason

to be less than optimistic about a positive outcome. Aubrey Coverley had moved that a royal commission be established to investigate in

part ‘allegations which have appeared in the press since the first day of 1930, related to ill-treatment of aboriginals in Western Australia’.

His motivation was clearly less about ameliorating the conditions for 14 15

Western Australian Hansard, Legislative Assembly 30 August 1933, p. 651. ‘White Treatment of Aborigines’, Daily News, 17 June 1933; Mr Coverley (Kimberley), Legislative Assembly, 30 August 1933, West Australian Parliamentary Debates, p. 640.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Aboriginal people than it was about clearing the reputation of his constituents. He had remarked:

If Mr Neville is as sincere in his desire to have something done for the Aborigines as I am to have the names of residents of the North cleared from stigma, he will agree to this proposed investigation.16

With the announcement of the royal commission, women’s or­

gan­isa­tions which had been drawing public attention to the sad plight of Aboriginal women for some years applied pressure. Bessie

Rischbieth, who had been so instrumental in bringing organisations together under the Australian Federation of Women Voters, now

drew on her networks to attempt to influence the formation of the commission. A letter from eleven organisations, nine of them women’s societies, presented a case to the minister for the appointment of at least one woman on the proposed royal commission. They sent

the same letter to The Sunday Times setting out the case for this suggestion. The solution to the ‘half-caste problem’, they wrote,

‘undoubtedly rests with the aboriginal woman, and psychologically

it is only women who can measure up the needs of the native women who are the key to the position’. The letter argued for the gathering of

evidence and the bringing of a balanced judgment which represents

the claims of women as well as men.17 They were not successful in

this request but, undeterred, the Women’s Service Guild and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union began preparing their cases to go before the commission.

16 17

West Australian Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 30 August 1933, p. 647. ‘Treatment of Aborigines: Women Seek Representation on Commission’, The Sunday Times, 8 October 1933, p. 4.

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In the months leading up to the commission hearings, Mary sought

to educate the community. She wrote to newspapers, sent school work from her pupils to be displayed in a Perth shop window and spoke at

a reception organised jointly in her honour by the Women’s Service Guilds of Western Australia and the Women’s Christian Temperance

Union. Mary believed that if she could puncture the ignorance of the

community and humanise Aboriginal people, showing her pupils as attractive, lively children, pressure for reform would build.

Mary drew attention to a legal system which was biased, a labour

system which was exploitative and the absence of an education system for Aboriginal children. A short letter to the editor drew atten-

tion to the need to abolish the death penalty in cases where a white man had killed an Aboriginal man because, as she argued, ‘so long as the death sentence remains the penalty for murder, white people

will never be convicted for murders of natives’. To Bessie Rischbieth she was more blunt, explaining that ‘the white jury men are truly

peers of one side only’ who may themselves one day need acquittal from the white man standing in the dock.18 On labour conditions she

supported the claim of slavery or serfdom to Mirror readers by point-

ing out that Aboriginal people have been deprived of their land and the water and food which sustained them and must accept employment ‘ON ANY TERMS [her capitals] that the white man pleases

to give’. She told readers that £2 is the cost of a permit to employ ‘a

specified lump number of aborigines and half-castes, that there is no requirement to pay wages and no supervision’. The editor of the

Mirror publicly conceded at the end of this article that ‘the system of 18

M. M. Bennett, ‘Protect the Blacks’, Daily News, 16 October 1933, p. 7; Bennett to Rischbieth, 20 September 1933, Bessie Rischbieth papers, MS2004/12/50, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

employment is all wrong, and the Act should be amended in the light of modern conditions.19

In displaying Mount Margaret pupils’ school work, Mary employed

the positive strategy of demonstrating what Aboriginal children

could achieve. An article about the exhibition emphasised the crucial role of missions:

All these children would be underfed, untaught and uncared for were it not for the mission. The environment in which white civilisation allows these children to grow up is all wrong. The natives and half-castes are intrinsically as fine a people as could be found anywhere – splendid material for citizenship which Australians cannot afford to neglect or destroy.20

Mary utterly rejected notions which were still held in the wider

community that there were genetic impediments to Aboriginal adap-

tation to the white man’s world. Apart from her work to educate and awaken the consciences of the community she was also considering

how she would present her statement to the Royal Commissioner. She had a wealth of accounts of suffering, abuse and mistreatment to draw upon. Her relationships with Aboriginal people at Gnowangerup in the south, the Kimberley in the north and the Eastern Goldfields had shown the breadth of the problems.

The Women’s Service Guilds of Western Australia and the Women’s

Christian Temperance Union held a joint reception on 13 Decem­

ber 1933 in Mary’s honour. She spoke with her usual passion about the deplorable conditions of life for Aboriginal women through­out the country and the ignorance of white Australians about these con­ 19 20

M. M. Bennett, ‘There Are No Slaves in W.A. But What of the Niggers?’, Mirror, 20 January 1934, p. 10. ‘Aborigines and Half-castes: Exhibition of School Work’, The West Australian, 17 November 1933, p. 13.

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ditions. She referred to travellers getting a glimpse of the situation on

the Great Western railway line but, she explained, they did not realise

that the conditions they observed prevailed across the country. Mary was driven to get information to white women about the disabilities under which their Aboriginal sisters lived. This was the potential value of these women’s organisations. She implored their members: If white women only knew the facts, they would not tolerate what is going on for one moment. There are enough women here to rouse the whole of Western Australia and I make an earnest appeal to you all to do something to improve the appalling lot of aboriginal women.21

Like Coleridge’s mariner she had to tell her tale. She had to

believe that her words could convey what she had learned from the Aboriginal women who had come to her at Mount Margaret asking

for help of one kind or another. The common element was that their suffering was in one way or another caused by a man, either white or Aboriginal. If she could convey their pain to the feminists of Perth, convince them of the situation, then perhaps these women would spread the word. It proved to be a thin hope.

Mary Bennett at the Moseley Royal Commission hearings On Monday 19 March 1934 Mary arrived at Parliament House in

Perth prepared to give her testimony. She had spent much time or­

ganising her thoughts, considering how to argue her case, gathering

evidence to be tabled. Her testimony over the next two days provides the most sustained expression by her of the situation which had 21

‘Aboriginal Women: Appeal for Better Conditions’, The West Australian, 14 December 1933, p. 20.

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come to consume her. By this time, three and a half years after she had arrived in Western Australia, she had an appreciation of how

the pastoral industry operated across the country. She told Henry Moseley ‘the natives must take employment on the terms of the

settler – their feudal lord – or starve. They are serfs, adscripti glebae, to be used and used up.’ (‘Adscripti glebae’ described a class of Roman

slaves who were attached in perpetuity to, and transferred with, the

land they cultivated.) ‘All the stations of Australia originally were built up by dispossessed, compulsory, unpaid, native labour’, Mary

told Moseley, ‘and the process may still be seen going on all over the outback of Western Australia today’.22 This definitive and deliberate

generalisation indicates her realisation that these were the conditions on her father’s property at Lammermoor in 1893 when she visited for the first time. She acknowledged that some station owners were

kindly, but she was clear about where power lay. She quoted a squatter

who told her: ‘I feed them well. I treat them well. If they don’t work I

tell them to go. But’, Mary told Moseley, ‘they have no-where else to

go’.23 She knew that this was also the position of Wyma and Freddie and the other Dalleburra people on Lammermoor. Christison had been a kindly, but firm, station owner.

Mary brought an international perspective to the situation of unfree

Aboriginal people in her lengthy testimony. She cited Governor-

General Isaac Isaacs’ definition of slavery as ‘the deprivation of all kinds of property, including a man’s property in himself ’ to Moseley.

She drew Moseley’s attention to comments by Sir Hubert Mur­ ray, Lieutenant-Governor of Papua and New Guinea, in which he 22 23

Mary Bennett, Aborigines Royal Commission, Monday 19 March 1934, p. 258, AN537, Acc 2922, State Record Office of Western Australia (hereafter SROWA). Mary Bennett, Aborigines Royal Commission, 19 March 1934, p. 258.

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described the Commonwealth’s indenture system in that country as ‘akin to slavery’. She referred to the Temporary Slavery Commission of the League of Nations which was set up in 1926 which stated

that ‘Forms of direct and indirect compulsion, the primary object of which is to force natives into private employment, are abuses’. Her

arguments had an intellectual basis in the postwar debates as the new

League of Nations sought to create a freer world. She contrasted these statements from eminent lawyers and magistrates with accounts in Western Australia taken from government records of forced labour

and kidnapping of Aboriginal people.24 And she drew on the actual cases brought to her by those desperate for help.

Mary’s drawing on the experiences of some thirty people expressed

a confidence that if only these stories could be heard by Moseley she would be able to make the case for reform of both laws and practices.

Rod Schenk described Mary as giving hours of her time when she was at Mount Margaret, listening to the troubles of Aboriginal people and

making ‘great sacrifices trying to help them’.25 Henry Moseley would

not have been aware of this. Mary’s accounts of people’s lives illustrated the damaging effects of polygamy, the bartering of excess wives, the consequences of splitting the family, the hunting of children by police

and blatant disregard for Aboriginal life. For Moseley, listening to the alien-sounding Aboriginal names and the stories illustrating their difficult, often chaotic lives, it must have been like an entry into another world, perhaps one into which he didn’t wish to enter too far.

One account was of Lulu, a young woman of eighteen who was

one of two wives of an elderly native working at Whitecliffe station, 24 25

Mary Bennett, Aborigines Royal Commission, 19 March 1934, pp. 256–258. Rod Schenk to Francis Bray, 21 January 1938, Department of Native Welfare, cons 993, 1932/0166, SROWA.

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north-east of Mount Margaret. In February 1933 Lulu was bitten by a snake when she was rabbiting. The station manager tied ligatures on to her arm, one above her right wrist and the other above her elbow

but neglected to remove them and the next day the young woman

was in agony. A mixed-descent couple who owned a car asked the manager for petrol to drive Lulu to the hospital at Laverton but when

they arrived the matron was out on a case. By the time she saw Lulu the ligatures had been on for thirty hours. The matron removed them and treated the arm but the damage had been done. Mary explained that the Laverton police then rang Mount Margaret Mission. Lulu

had initially refused to go to the police station because the previous constable, who was on holiday at the time, had a reputation for

taking and sexually using Aboriginal women. Lulu consented to

come to Mount Margaret and Mary took her on the night train to Kalgoorlie Hospital. Mary learned that there was no chance of saving Lulu’s arm; the only option was amputation. Mary told the Royal

Commissioner, ‘I dreaded telling Lulu, but she showed wonderful

courage. She shed never a tear for herself, but many for her little girl, aged two years’. Through the trauma, Lulu’s milk had dried up, and

the mother feared for her child’s life. Mary reminded Moseley that if such a thing happened to a white girl there would be compensation, and as readers we suspect that the station manager would not have

neglected to remove the tourniquet if he saw the victim as one of his own people. Mary’s engagement with Lulu had the qualities of

a family relationship, one which would be sustained through future decades. She did everything she could to help this young woman

who was more concerned about losing her milk than about losing her arm.

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Another family she spoke about was Lily Quinn and her daughter

Dora, who, like Lulu, would remain connected to Mary during future decades. Mary told Moseley:

A shy, gentle half-caste girl was taken by a squatter and they had three children. Afterwards Lily Quinn, as she was called, and the three children were sent away to the Gov­ern­ment insti­ tution. The poor girl escaped with her children more than once, but they were always captured and brought back. At last she was given permission to return to her own country and keep the youngest child on condition that she married a half-caste man who applied for her. They were married and returned to her country, and [she] placed her little girl in the mission home there [Mount Margaret], and as they often camp there they see as much of the child as white people see of their children. Many a time when I went into the raffia room I used to see Lily sitting there working with her little girl nestling beside her; but the two elder children are condemned to grow up away from their mother. Many of these poor children are parted from their mothers, who are the only ones who do really love them, and their hearts are starved for want of love, but first for years they suffer the misery of hunted animals, always running away from the police in the hope of hiding in the country which they know, among their own people, but always in fear that at any moment they may be torn away, never to see them again. They are captured at all ages, as infants in arms, perhaps not until they are grown up; they are not safe until they are dead.26

Moseley did not seem particularly engaged in listening to Mary’s

lengthy testimony, interrupting Mary just twice, once to caution

her about using the names of white men whom she alleged abused

Aboriginal women as it might be ‘merely hearsay’ and a second time 26

Mary Bennett, Aborigines Royal Commission, 19 March 1934, AN537, Acc 2922, SROWA, pp. 227-28

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

to quiz her on her source when she referred to a native population in Western Australia between 20,000 and 30,000.27

On the second day that she gave evidence, Mary was interrogated

by both Chief Protector Neville and Commissioner Moseley. The questioning had the tone of a cross-examination in which both men

attempted to point out what they saw as inconsistences in Mary’s argument, highlighting statements that could not be verified and drawing attention to her judgmental opinions, such as that the De­ part­ment of Native Affairs was the oppressor of the natives. Neville rejected Mary’s view that Lulu was badly treated when she had to

lose her arm, pointing out that the government had paid her med­ical

costs. Neville did not share Mary’s sympathy for the young woman who was clearly not treated with consideration at the time of the accident, with the station manager neglecting to remove the liga­tures

or drive her to hospital. Nor did Neville know that Mary had stayed in Kalgoorlie for some weeks so that she could visit Lulu daily and help her to adjust to a one-armed existence.28

Neville’s view of Lily Quinn’s experiences highlighted the gap

between the stressed bureaucrat unable to resolve the range of prob­

lems facing his many Aboriginal charges and the woman who was personally involved with the plight of Lily and her daughter Dora.

Neville referred to Lily as having three half-caste, illegitimate chil­

dren and asked Mary ‘Do you think it is right to allow a woman like that to run about the bush with sandalwood cutters, or do you

think it was wise to take her from the bush?’ To Mary, Lily was ‘a

shy, gentle half-caste girl’ who was ‘taken by a squatter’. In answer

to Neville’s question she replied: ‘That is the point. There should be 27 28

Aborigines Royal Commission, Monday 19 March 1934. Annie Lock to Constance Cooke, 26 June 1933, Cooke papers, GRG52/32/63, SASA.

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plenty of communities in this country where she should be able to go to’. Neville pointed out that she had not answered the question, to

which she replied: ‘She should not be allowed to be at the whim of anyone to be picked up like a dog, but should be able to live with her community’. Her answer overlooked the fact that Lily’s community

was most likely no longer fully functional due to violent confronta­tion, loss of land and disease.

Neville put to Mary, ‘You are something of an idealist, and wish

to bring about an ideal system all at once’.29 Through Mary’s evidence

can be seen her visionary, almost utopian view of how life might be different for Aboriginal Australians. Pastoral occupation of people’s land had left them landless. She argued that fifty reserves were needed in Western Australia, equitably spaced through the different tribal

districts and protected from ‘unscrupulous whites’. Here families could remain together. Superintendents should be married men with

spiritual vision. Labour should be attracted not forced, undesirable customs such as polygamy should be discouraged and young couples should be encouraged to build their own cottages when ready to marry. Mary insisted that Lulu should have been compensated and

we are left, in reading the transcript of this conversation, to think how

difficult this would be in practice. Lulu was an Aboriginal woman

living on a remote cattle station with no experience of money or banks or the Western economy. Low government budgets for Aboriginal

welfare which were progressively cut during the Depression years, apathetic community attitudes and the unlikelihood of enough

land being resumed to cater for the seventy of more tribal groups

in Western Australia in their own tribal territories made this vision 29

Mary Bennett, Aborigines Royal Commission, Tuesday 20 March 1934, Royal Commissions Transcript of Evidence, AN 537, SROWA, p. 229.

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seem quite unrealisable.30 Mary had never had to consider costs and

competing demands on the state treasury. Besides, we suspect that her pastoralist father would have found it very difficult to part with any of the land he had acquired over forty years if asked to sacrifice any of it for an Aboriginal reserve.

When asked by the Royal Commissioner what experience she had

had with Aboriginal people so that he could appraise her evidence, Mary gave her by now stock answer: ‘I grew up amongst natives on

my father’s cattle station in Queensland. I have known then ever

since I was a baby’.31 She had told variants of this account a number of

times by now. She was an upright law-abiding citizen who would not deliberately deceive a royal commission, but this was a distortion of

the facts. Wyma came to Tenterfield when Mary was three and a half

and looked after the Christison children for two years. Mary did not visit Lammermoor until she was almost twelve. Either she felt the need to strengthen her case for personal experience with Aboriginal people or she had blurred the boundaries between life as it was and how she wished it had been. Perhaps it was a bit of both.

Response to the Moseley Report, 1935 The months between giving testimony and the publication of Moseley’s report were a time for cautious optimism. Mary stayed

in Perth, addressing the Claremont and Swanbourne Women’s

Service Guilds and reviewing the contributions made by women’s

organisations to the commission. Seven activist women had given 30 31

Expenditure of the Aborigines Department dropped from £69,464 in 1930 to £56,430 in 1931. It did not reach pre-Depression levels of expenditure until 1936, See Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens, Appendix 111. Mary Bennett, Aborigines Royal Commission, Transcript of evidence, AN 537, p. 313, SROWA.

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evidence: Mary; May Vallance and Ethel Joyner representing the

Women’s Service Guilds; Ada Bromham and Jessie Reid appearing for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; and Bessie Rischbieth,

the president of the Australian Federation of Women Voters. Mrs Nesbitt-Landon, president of the Women’s Service Guilds of Western

Australia, also gave evidence as an employment broker who assisted young Aboriginal women to find work. In total twenty-seven women

gave evidence and this number included five Aboriginal women. Women’s voices were being heard when in former Western Australian royal commissions into the treatment of Aboriginal people they had been almost entirely silent.32 Mary enthused that it was ‘a matter for

joy that so many have done so well that there is not space to record

the work of all’.33 Little did she know that this was the high point of the support she would receive from Western Australian women’s organisations in her campaigns on behalf of Aboriginal people.

In January 1935, after the happy Christmas celebrations and the

New Year’s Day holiday cricket games and picnic at Mount Margaret, Mary received a copy of Henry Moseley’s report. There were some points on which they agreed. He wrote that the condition of native

women was deplorable. He opposed the separation of mothers and

children unless the mothers were irretrievably dissolute. He opposed Chief Protector Neville’s idea of attempting to manipulate Aboriginal marriage choices in order to ‘breed out the colour’. But as she read on,

her earlier flickering hope faded. She began to realise that he would

32

33

No women testified at the 1904 Walter Roth ‘Royal Commission on the Condition of the Natives’; one Aboriginal woman testified at the 1927 George Wood ‘Royal Commission of Inquiry into the alleged Killing and Burning of Aborigines in East Kimberley and into Police Methods when Effecting Arrests’. Bennett to Rischbieth, 19 May 1934, Rischbieth papers, MS 2004/12/81, NLA.

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not be making any radical recommendations. By the time she reached the end of the report Mary was seething with anger. She read:

The ‘Allegations of Slavery,’ appearing in the West Australian on the 17th May, 1932, were made by Mrs M. M. Bennett, who appeared as a witness before the Commission. They were in keeping with the many general statements of this nature made by this witness, and really provided nothing specific into which I could inquire. Her views were apparently sent to London, and discussed at a conference of the British Commonwealth League. The newspaper report (Daily News, 17-6-33) appears under a heading in very large type, ‘Natives are Virtually Slaves’. It is much to be regretted that people from this State should send information of this kind to London to be discussed there by organisations, the members of which have little or no knowledge of the aboriginal natives of this country. If the authorities of this state are not alive to the conditions as they actually exist, greater good could be accomplished by people who protest that they have the interests of the natives at heart by bringing the matter under the notice of such authorities.34

Mary’s accounts of Lulu losing her arm, of Lily Quinn who had

to be grateful that she was permitted to have one of her daughters,

Dora, with her at Mount Margaret, of Wommun, a child wife who

was killed by her Aboriginal husband but reported by a white man as dying of pneumonia, of her students damaged by the trauma of being

hunted by police – all of these accounts and others were reduced in the report to ‘nothing specific into which I could inquire’. Moseley made no explanation as to why he could not enquire into the events detailed in a hundred pages of Mary Bennet’s evidence. He conceded that he was ‘not going to be so foolish as to suggest that isolated 34

H. D. Moseley, Report of the Royal Commissioner appointed to Investigate, Report, and Advise upon matters in relation to the Condition and Treatment of Aborigines, Perth, Government Printer, 1935, p. 22.

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cases of cruelty to natives do not exist’, he acknowledged that in the north sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women exist ‘to a degree which is as amazing as it is undesirable’, yet not

one of his twenty-six recommendations made any reference to the

deplorable conditions of women’s lives to which he had alluded. We can understand the degree of Mary’s fury, and dismay.35

Historian Geoffrey Bolton has described Mary Bennett’s crusading

at this time as ‘from every point of view a forlorn hope’. The bringing down of the Moseley Report certainly dashed her hopes, at least

temporarily. Mary lashed out at Moseley and Perth newspapers for

suppressing her evidence. The women’s organisations which she had

lauded the previous year she now described as ‘too smug and too selfseeking’ to attempt ‘to reform the condition of Aboriginal and half-

caste women in Australia’.36 She sought new supporters, this time in England.

Mary approached Dr Harold Moody, Afro-English president of

the British civil rights organisation The League of Coloured Peoples,

which had been established in 1931 with the goal of achieving rights

for African people in Britain. In August 1935 Mary asked Moody that: The League of Nations intervene in Australia to investigate con­ di­tions that are a blot on humanity and that the British Empire be required to end the monstrous injustice which must in­ evitably bring great disaster if condonation and wilful ignorance continue. The natives of Australia have been robbed of their land and of their women, and slavery exists in substance. The race has been officially placed at the disposal of the police who assign them to whom they please to work without wages, for ‘fodder and harness’. They are denied the substance of a fair 35 Moseley, Report of the Royal Commissioner, p. 22. 36 Bennett to Harris, 20 October 1935, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp, s22, G378.

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trial in our courts of law and are denied education. Only a race of exceptional vitality and nobility of character could have survived so long the criminal exploitation by white men. 37

Her letter was published in Keys, the official journal of the League

of Coloured People and reported in The West Australian.

The Western Australian Government rose to the challenge. She

had played into their hands by misrepresenting the evidence of Doctor Webster of Wyndham who had appeared before the com­

mission. In speaking about the Kimberley area in the north-west of the state he had asserted ‘that the majority of white men in this

country habitually live with native women’.38 Mary quoted Webster without clarifying that the comment referred to the Kimberley, not the whole of Australia.

Assistant Minister W. H. Kitson criticised her in the Perth news­

papers. He wrote that ‘the natives in Western Australia have not been

robbed of their women, though some native women have preferred to

consort with white men’. He described as unfair and untrue Mary’s assertion that the police assigned Aboriginal people to service with­

out wages and he castigated her for quoting Dr Webster without explaining that the doctor was referring specifically to one district in the north of Western Australia, thus giving a false impression.39

Mary felt under attack. She wrote a reply to The West Australian but

they did not publish it, leaving her feeling unsupported and unfairly

treated. She poured out her feelings to Sir John Harris of the Anti-

Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society in London, describing the 37 38 39

‘Treatment of Aborigines: League Intervention Sought’, The West Australian, 17 August 1935. Dr V. H. Webster, Aborigines Royal Commission, p. 73, ‘Treatment of Aborigines: League Intervention Sought’, The West Australian, 17 August 1935. The West Australian, 23 August 1935, p. 19; ‘Not Robbed of Women: Treatment of Natives. Charge Refuted’, Daily News, 22 August 1935, p. 7.

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situation as a conspiracy of silence. She was trying to get humane

conditions for ‘the most wickedly maligned and oppressed people in the world today’. She wrote of the greed of vested interests, ‘the corruption and camouflage’ of the federal and state governments,

of her protests suppressed. She wrote that there were ‘a very very few noble women like Mrs Ternent Cooke and Mrs Vallance, Miss Bromham Mrs Bryce, Miss Baillie and a few others who are doing all that individuals can do’.40

Bessie Rischbeth was not among the noble few, having with-

drawn from Mary’s passionate advocacy for Aboriginal women, claiming that the Aboriginal women who gave evidence before the

commis­sion had not supported Mary’s charges. Chief Protector Neville had been more than a witness to the commission. He also

provided the Commissioner with an evaluation of the quality of other people’s evidence. He had discredited the Aboriginal witnesses, taking issue with Ada Bromham’s claim that money was

withheld from working Aboriginal girls and dismissing the con-

cerns of female witnesses with ‘there has been a great deal of nonsense talked about the de­part­ment taking the children away from their mothers’. Neville also dis­credited Mary by asserting to

Moseley: ‘I understand that Mrs Bennett and certain others have

been looking around Perth to find natives willing to say what Mrs Bennett and her friends wished them to say. The result is that these

witnesses have perjured themselves’.41 It is difficult from a distance of eighty years to know where the truth lay. Certainly the wit-

nesses who spoke about Moore River Settlement were in agreement that the food was inadequate, badly cooked and monotonous and 40 41

Bennett to Harris, 20 October 1935, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp, s22, G378. A. O. Neville, Aborigines Royal Commission, Tuesday 20 March 1934, Royal Commissions Transcript of Evidence, AN537, SROWA, pp. 642-44.

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that people were punished for misdemeanours by being locked in

‘the boob’ a galvanised iron shed with barbed wire across the ceiling, for up to two weeks. Overall the Aboriginal concerns seemed

to be about police arbitrarily moving them away from their home

camp, conditions at Moore River, and in some cases a desire for a certificate of exemption to release them from the controls of the Aborigines Act. Mary was probably right in suggesting that it was

Aboriginal evidence about ‘the boob’, the informal prison at Moore River, which contributed to Moseley’s statement that a fortnight’s incarceration in this poorly ventilated shed with a sand floor was ‘barbarous treatment and the place should be pulled down’.42

Most galling for Mary was Bessie Rischbieth’s statement, despite

her not being present at the time, that the Aboriginal witnesses did

not support her charges. It signalled (and Mary understood the signs) Rischbieth’s withdrawal from Mary’s campaigns. Rischbieth, like

her colleague Chave Collinson in the British Commonwealth League who had frowned on Mary’s 1929 League conference presentation, did not approve of Mary’s public shaming of Australia internation­ally

with regard to its treatment of its Indigenous people.43 Moseley’s ex-

pression of the same sentiment and his dismissive approach to Mary’s

evidence seemed to be the catalyst which led Rischbieth to withdraw from her passionate, single-minded erstwhile colleague. Mary told Harris, ‘I will seek help wherever I can get it’.44

Mary’s response to events at the 1936 conference of the Australian

Federation of Women Voters displays the acrimony between her and the president, Bessie Rischbieth. Constance Cooke had called 42 Moseley, Report of the Royal Commissioner, p. 12, Perth, 1935. 43 Millar, ‘Bessie Rischbieth: A Biography’, p. 238. 44 Bennett to Harris, 20 October 1935, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp, s22, G378.

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for recognition of Aboriginal women’s equality of status and rights.

President Rischbieth opposed the move. Cooke’s action led Mary to describe her as ‘My darling Mrs Ternent Cooke’ in a letter to Edith

Jones in London. Bessie Rischbieth, in contrast, was ‘a real rotter’. Mary predicted, from her high moral ground:

What Mrs Rischbieth is going to find is that her worldly self­ ish­ness is not going to get her anywhere except an impasse. She has been such a beast to two different friends of mine who have taken up work for the natives, and she does try to keep the native out of sight on every possible occasion, though she is much too cunning to show this in front of people like myself who have no other interests except these despised and rejected ones.45

She saw people as either with her or against her; on the side of ‘the despised and rejected ones’ or against them. It was a characteristic which didn’t always help her cause.

Battle for control of Aboriginal lives: Mt Margaret versus Mr Neville The most concrete result of the Moseley Royal Commission Report

was the passage of the 1936 Aborigines Amendment Act, also known as the Native Administration Act. The battle for control of the lives

of ‘the natives’, as Aboriginal people were now formally described,

began in earnest. As Commissioner of Native Affairs, his new title,

Neville gained extensive control over a larger group of people. ‘Native’ meant ‘any person of the full blood descended from the original inhabitants of Australia’. The 1936 Act deleted all references to ‘half-

castes’ in the 1905 Act. Those previously deemed ‘half-castes’ are by 45

Bennett to Jones, 5 December 1936, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp s22./G78. A part of this letter was attached to a letter from Jones to John Harris.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

implication now called ‘natives’. The term ‘quadroon’ is introduced to describe people ‘only one-fourth of the original full blood’. ‘Quad­

roons’ in the Act are not described as ‘natives’ but exceptions to the definition make it possible for those in this category to be reclass­ified as ‘native’ at the Minister’s or a magistrate’s discretion.

Effectively the Commissioner could decide which people of Ab­

orig­inal descent would be defined as ‘native’ under the Act. The new legislation also made the Commissioner the legal guardian of

all ‘native’ children until they reached the age of twenty-one. The

Commission­er could control the property or earnings of ‘native’

people. Sexual intercourse between a ‘native’ and another person

was an offence. It was an offence to entice or persuade a ‘native’ to leave ‘any lawful service’.

Neville sought to further increase his power through a set of 156

proposed regulations under the Act which detailed particular aspects of Aboriginal people’s lives and also sought to exert greater control

over missions and missionaries. From 1937 to 1939 the battle between Commissioner Neville and W. H. Kitson, minister in charge of the

Department of Native Welfare, and the missionaries led by Rod Schenk, superintendent of Mount Margaret Mission and its teacher, Mary Bennett, intensified, becoming bitter, attacking and personal.

Both camps – the Department of Native Welfare and the mis­

sion­aries – used the media to persuade the public that their approach

to assisting the Aboriginal people of Western Australia was morally and practically superior to the other. Mary used her pen as a weapon in what became a public ideological tussle. Neville had the support

of his minister who had described Mary’s letter to Harold Moody as ‘a campaign of misrepresentation’ but Mary’s response was a series of articles about Aboriginal women and their chattel status published in – 236 –

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The Ladder, the journal of the Australian Aborigines’ Amelioration

Association, a Perth-based body which formed in 1936. She was not silenced.

The first article drew on a letter concerning ‘Marriage Customs in

Kenya’ by Florence Underwood to the Manchester Guardian. Mary

quoted extensively as Underwood pointed out that at a Women’s Freedom League Conference in London in 1935 two resolutions were unanimously passed. The first was that ‘a woman, whatever her race,

is not a chattel to be sold by her father or alleged proprietor to a polygamist or anyone else’. The second argued that ‘every woman must

be a free agent to choose her own partner in life, despite any contract

entered into in her name by any other person; and that widows shall not be inherited by their husbands’ heirs’.46 As the issue of women’s

status was to be considered by the League of Nations, Mary drew readers’ attention to an incident reported in The West Australian

concerning a twelve-year-old Aboriginal girl: she had refused the

advances of her promised elderly suitor and as a consequence had to face and dodge the warrior’s spears while missionaries watched

helpless. The chattel status of Aboriginal women, Mary explained in

the following two articles, worsened with a tribe’s loss of land and consequent starvation. The girls and women were traded to the white

men for food and clothes. Prostitution was a direct result of land loss, she argued.47

Accusations and counter-accusations, privately, and later publicly,

flew back and forth between Mount Margaret and the Commiss­ ioner of Native Affairs. Neville attempted to silence Mary, while 46 47

M. M. Bennett, ‘Women as Chattels: Barbarous Treatment’, Part 1, The Ladder, May 1936, pp. 10-12. Bennett, ‘Women as Chattels’, Part 2, The Ladder, October 1936.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

she predicted that the proposed new regulations would attempt to

‘scoop Aboriginal earnings’. ‘Mrs Bennett, being a member of your

staff, must be considered as being under your direction’, Neville wrote to Schenk. Neville acknowledged that ‘she is undoubtedly giving her life to the cause of the natives’ and it seems a pity that ‘by means of publishing inaccuracies she seeks to publicly condemn those who are trying to do, maybe in another way, just what she herself

is attempting’.48 Mary countered in a letter to Buxton, Honorary

Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, accusing Neville of making an ‘UNTRUE COMMENT’ (her capitals) on the sanitation of Mount Margaret Mission. Typhoid, common on the goldfields, had broken out. Mary sent the sanitation inspector’s report to Buxton

as evidence that Schenk had done everything in his power to limit the spread of the disease, telling him, ‘Mr Neville does not know anything about sanitation’. She continued to write to newspapers,

presenting readers with information about how colonised peoples

were treated in other countries. In the Belgian Congo, she explained, a commission for the protection of the natives has been appointed in contrast to one commissioner who held the power in West­ern Australia.49 Her faith in the knowledge and experience of miss­ ionaries was contradicted in a response to the editor of The West

Australian by a former resident magistrate in New Guinea who

claimed that in his experience some missionaries were unable to understand the native mind. He concluded his letter by pointing out that ‘a Commissioner directly responsible to his Minister or to 48 49

Neville to Schenk, 1 March 1936, Department of Native Welfare, cons 993, 1932/0166, SROWA. M. M. Bennett, ‘Control of Aborigines’, The West Australian, 4 November 1936, p. 8.

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Parliament can surely be trusted to give full effect to the body and the spirit of the Act. It would be an insult to both the Minister and

the Commissioner to think otherwise’.50 Mary did not share his faith in the body and spirit of the Act, nor in the Commissioner.

In a letter to Sir John Harris of the Anti-Slavery Society, Mary

wrote of the ‘infamous conditions here in which thousands of lovely

aboriginal and half-caste children are growing up, without a chance

or a hope or possibility even of living a clean normal life’. These children were educable she assured Harris:

BUT white snobbery is rampant and is determined on crushing the aborigines. They call it ‘dying out’ but it is ‘killing out’. The land of the natives is all taken up in this half continent, and they are dying because of insufficient food, their rations are admittedly (also deliberately) insufficient, and they are denied education to earn a living and adjust themselves to the new conditions which have been imposed upon them. The women are compelled to live a life of vice to obtain food for themselves and their husbands. There are white men’s camps everywhere, and natives are rationed in towns and along the Trans Line, but insufficiently rationed so as to compel them to eke out their living as they can, their darker hue proclaims them fair game for anyone, but in Western Australia certainly NOTHING has been effected to give the native sufficient rations or teaching during the transition period, but for the simple reason that the majority of the whites do not want a transition period but the disappearance of the natives. The whole world will be poorer and incomplete without this most gifted and wickedly abused race. And our only hope is in a stirring of conscience from England.51

50 51

J. P. Hennelly, ‘Control of Aborigines’, The West Australian, 7 November 1936, p. 21. Bennett to Harris, 7 March 1937, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp, s22, G378.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Her letter simmers with rage at the injustice she saw meted out to

people she held in high regard. She expressed a sense of apocalyptic despair to Harris, predicting dire consequences:

If the present wicked immoral traffic continues, is allowed to continue, then Australia cannot last, and it will be definitely to the good for Australia to disappear. NOWHERE is a nat­ ive race more evilly treated, more shamelessly oppressed, and nowhere is Herodism more rampant and unabashed than in Western Australia.52

This biblical allusion to the slaying of the innocents seemed to

her deserved when she read the report of the conference of state and Commonwealth Aboriginal welfare authorities which was

held in April 1937. This was the first such conference held where state administrators across Australia could share their views on Aboriginal affairs. Neville had proposed a policy of absorption of the

Aboriginal population into the white population which was accepted as a resolution that:

… this conference believes that the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end.53

Neville had explained to the other representatives, all male, that: Our policy is to send them [girls of mixed descent] out into the white community, and if a girl comes back pregnant our rule is to keep her for two years. The child is then taken away from the mother and sometimes never sees her again. Thus these children 52 53

Bennett to Harris, 7 March 1937. Mary was referring to King Herod’s order for the killing of all male children under the age of two years in Bethlehem. Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, Canberra, 1937.

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grow up as whites, knowing nothing of their own environment. At the expiration of the period of two years the mother goes back into service so it really does not matter if she has half a dozen children.54

The children may still be alive, unlike those sacrificed to Herod’s

edict, but they would grow up without the sustenance of their family. She described the conference as ‘a gentlemen’s agreement for the

condonation of prostitution’, despite the fact that the new legislation

in Western Australia made it an offence for a white man to have sexual intercourse with a ‘coloured girl’.55 She was appalled at Neville’s dismissing the maternal feelings in the young women to whom he

was referring or of the social and psychological value of a mother bringing up her child. The relationship between Mr Neville and Mrs Bennett seemed now to be past the possibility of reconciliation.

In January 1938, on her way to Sydney to support the Aboriginal

Day of Mourning, Mary told an Adelaide journalist: ‘I believe

that the aim in Western Australia and the Northern Territory is

to let the aborigines die out as quickly as possible’. She had been in correspondence with Bill Ferguson and the Yorta Yorta leader,

William Cooper, the Aboriginal organisers of this planned protest

which would give an Aboriginal viewpoint on the 150th anniversary

of the arrival of Captain Arthur Phillip and the first fleet. While in Adelaide she spoke to a joint meeting of the Women’s Chris­

tian Temperance Union and the Women’s Non-Party Association organised by her friend, Mrs Constance Cooke. On 9 January the Adelaide Advertiser reported on Mary’s provocative assertion. She

provided instances of unreasonable treatment of Aboriginal people 54 55

Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities. Aborigines Act Amendment Act 1936, Western Australia, section 43.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

by the Western Australian Government including the withholding

of money earned and arbitrary refusals of permission for Aboriginal people to marry.56

The Western Australian Department of Native Affairs responded

by asking Mary for specific instances to support her charges and sending a copy of their letter to her to the newspapers. ‘Mission

Station Gets a Please Explain’, the Daily News reported. Mary

replied in kind, sending a copy of her seven page letter detailing eight cases concerning Neville’s refusal to grant permission to mixed descent people wishing to marry. She included an account of Bobby

Floyd, a young man who committed suicide. The Daily News sen­ sationalised the Bobby Floyd case which it headlined as ‘Half-Caste

Suicides When Not Allowed to Marry’.57 It is instructive to consider

the two different interpretations – Bennett’s and Neville’s – of the facts of this case.

Bobby Floyd was a 22-year-old mixed-descent man from the

Eastern Goldfields who wished to marry his mixed-descent girlfriend

who lived in the south. He committed suicide in 1936. The evidence at the inquest was that he killed himself because he believed that he

was not allowed to marry her. Bobby’s employer said that he was of

good character and a good worker, and a young woman who knew Bobby’s girlfriend said that she was very much in love with him and was waiting for Bobby to come south. Mary saw the case as

evidence of a ‘hopeless dependence’ drilled into Aboriginal people by the Department of Native Affairs.58 Neville’s position was that 56 57 58

‘“Let Natives Die” Policy Alleged’, Advertiser, Adelaide, 10 January 1938, p. 16. Bennett to Commissioner of Native Affairs, 14 February 1938, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA; ‘Half-Caste Suicides When Not Allowed to Marry’, The Daily News, 19 February 1938, p. 3. Bennett to Neville, 14 February 1938, Department of Native Affairs, cons 993, 1932/0166, SROWA.

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permission to marry was never sought, nor was it necessary. Mary had written that Bobby knew that if he ran away from his employer

he could be sent back by the department or police. Neville said this

was nonsense. Mary was concerned to understand the mentality of the young man who had given in to despair; Neville was concerned to point out that the young man was misinformed. Schenk wrote to

Neville reminding him that he had been present at the inquest and knew what was said, defending Mary’s interpretation of events.59

The public disagreement over the interpretation of Bobby Floyd’s

suicide sounded what was almost a declaration of war against the

missions, Rod Schenk and Mary Bennett of Mount Margaret in particular. Neville pressured Schenk to discipline or censor Mary’s writing. Schenk not only defended Mary’s freedom of expression

but wrote that he could not deny her statements. He extolled her

contribution as an educator, adding that it would ‘only bring greater shame on the cause if it be known that I brought pressure to silence

the voice of our lady workers who are fighting for the liberty of our dark sisters’. He pointed out reasonably that those who had been refused permission to marry had a right to know why. 60 Neville

wrote threateningly to Mary: ‘In the event of further publication of misstatements no doubt we shall know how to act’.61 He privately

described Mary’s statements as ‘so utterly outrageous, contrary to

fact, and almost fanatical. The wrongs of the natives’, he said, ‘were an obsession with her, and when I last endeavoured to discuss the

subject with her at Mount Margaret I found it impossible to do 59 60 61

Rod Schenk to A. O. Neville, 7 March 1938, Department of Native Affairs, cons 993, 1932/0166, SROWA. Rod Schenk to A. O. Neville, 7 March 1938, Department of Native Affairs, cons 993, 1932/0166, SROWA. Neville to Bennett, 28 February 1938, Department of Native Affairs cons 993, 1932/0166, SROWA.

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so’.62 He did not choose, however, to further respond publicly to her specific accusations concerning the power of the Commissioner of

Native Affairs. Aboriginal people now could not marry without his permission, and under the Native Administration Act regulations the Commissioner could direct that a specified portion of an Aboriginal

person’s wages, ‘not exceeding up to 75 percent of the total shall be paid to him in trust … by the employer to the Commissioner’. Neville

did not wish to draw any further attention to these increased powers

which would be even stronger when the 156 regulations under the Act, which he had been instrumental in framing, passed through the parliament.63

A further reason for missionary outrage was section 68 of the pro-

posed regulations under the Act. It required missions and missionaries

to be licenced by the Commissioner. Mary refused to apply for regis-

tration, instead ensuring that these ‘enslaving regulations’, as she called them, were known about outside the state. She sent information to

her east coast contacts in the Association for the Protection of Native Races and the Australian Aborigines League. William Morley and William Cooper from these respective organisations wrote in disap-

proval to the Chief Secretary.64 And the victims of Neville’s increased power continued to seek her out. She investigated a case in which half of the money that a white father left to his part-Aboriginal daughter

62 63 64

Neville to The Hon. Chief Secretary, 21 February 1938, Department of Native Affairs, cons 993, 1932/0166, SROWA. Aborigines Act, Amendment Act 1936, Western Australia, section 42; Native Administration Regulations, 1938, regulation 85. Morley to Bennett, 10 August 1938, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA; William Cooper to Chief Secretary Kitson, 30 December 1938, in Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2004, p. 112.

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was paid to the Commissioner of Native Affairs.65 She told her supporters of another case of an Aboriginal man, Douglas Munmurie,

who had a reputation as a good worker, who was arrested when he left his job because of the low pay. When he was under police custody, without having been charged, he jumped from a moving train in order

to return to his home and young wife. The Department continued to

send him away from home to work, deceiving him into believing that he had to go where he was told.66 Such incidents which were reported to Mary by the people who sought her help strengthened her point

that departmental authoritarianism stripped not only people’s rights

but their own sense of agency. The new Act and its 156 regulations tightened the paternalistic screws.

*** Through this decade, Mary was emotionally engaged with a number

of Aboriginal people as individual human beings. She was teach-

ing their children, an experience which she described as joyful and

a privilege. She helped the adults when they came to her with their problems. When challenged by the Commissioner of Native Affairs

to defend her charge of unreasonable treatment of Aboriginal people by the Western Australian Government, she had drawn on the sad

accounts brought to her by people she knew and cared about whose

lives were interfered with when the new Act was enforced. She would later observe that ‘you cannot defend exploited people without sharing 65 66

‘Facts Concerning the Estate of the Late A. C. Ashwin’, Citizens’ Education Foundation, MS9212/3655/1(b) 7 November 1938, SLV. ‘Douglas Munmurie’, 7 November 1938, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA.

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their griefs’.67 She was appalled that ‘mother love and filial love alike come under the ban of Departmental disapproval’ when Jack Quinn,

Lily’s adult son who was taken from her when he was young, was

refused permission to stay at Mount Margaret Mission to help his mother.68 Mary was prepared to go to gaol rather than agree with

what she called Neville’s ‘artificial crimes’, such as marrying without written permission from him. She illustrated his dictatorial att­

itude by recounting his telling of a woman who he reluctantly agreed could marry, ‘You are still in my power, you know’. 69 In the public

furore over the regulations Neville was routinely characterised as a dictator by his many detractors. Mary was appalled at his controlling

behaviour, telling William Morley that ‘there has been nothing but

trouble and disgrace for Western Australia since Mr Neville has been in charge of native affairs’.70

Intellectually, she might be described as a feminist during the first

half of the 1930s but it was a pragmatic attachment to this cause. During these years she had appealed to feminists to assist in the work

of making known world-wide the dire position in which Aboriginal

women, especially in the north-west of Western Australia, found themselves. As historian Marilyn Lake has observed, when Mary

appeared before the Moseley Commission in 1934 the influence of feminism was at its height but when the chill descended on her

relationship with Bessie Rischbieth, the powerful leader of the Women’s Service Guilds and the Australian Federation of Women 67 68 69 70

Bennett to Shirley Andrews, 30 June 1960, CAR, MS12913/8/7, SLV. Bennett to Morley, 26 February 1939, Association for the Protection of Native Races, Acc No 1/131, S55, series 7, University of Sydney Archives (hereafter USA). Bennett to Neville, 14 February 1938, p. 5, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA. Bennett to Morley, 6 February 1939, Association for the Protection of Native Races, Acc No 1/131, S55, series 7, USA.

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Voters, she no longer called directly on feminists to support her causes.71 Mary did not take up the cause of other girls and women; it was Aboriginal girls and women – as well as men – who concerned her. She saw the value of the Women’s Service Guilds in Perth,

of the Australian Federation of Women Voters and of the British Commonwealth League in broadcasting her concerns, but when these

bodies were no longer useful she had no qualms about abandoning them. She did, however, remain a member of the Women’s Christian

Temperance Union and her friend and colleague in that body, Ada Bromham supported her campaigns for the rest of Mary’s life.

The tendency to exaggerate or misrepresent harmed Mary’s cred-

ibility with her critics in the 1930s. As we know, Mary was angry

at Bessie Rischbieth’s assertion that Mary’s Aboriginal witnesses did not support her charges. Mary’s misquoting of Dr Webster to imply that his criticism of white men’s abuse of Aboriginal women

in the Kimberley was Australia-wide strengthened the case against

her and we know that she told the royal commission that she grew

up among the natives on her father’s property, although at the time others did not know that this was a distortion. In August 1934 she

wrote to her friend Dr Charles Duguid ‘I will not say one word that I cannot fully substantiate’, telling him that she is revising her evidence before the royal commission. In a long letter she uses the

word ‘evidence’ nine times, telling Duguid that ‘evidence must be detailed to have any weight’.72 She was perhaps burnt by the allega-

tions against her and may have had some awareness of her tendency

to sometimes skew the facts of a case in her passionate eagerness to 71 72

Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The history of Australian Feminism, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999, p. 128. M. M. Bennett to Charles Duguid, 3 August 1934, Duguid papers, MS 5068, series 11, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

show the wrong of a situation, so upset was she by the power given to Commissioner Neville to override the rights of individuals.

Neville’s control of people’s lives with regard to their choice of

marriage partner, place of work and access to their earnings was abhorrent to her. Mary’s educated pupils would not be able to

make their way with dignity into the settlers’ world. She looked

to Geneva to provide ethical leadership through the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization. She had re­

minded Commissioner Neville of the American Declaration of

Inde­pendence which held that all men are created equal and that ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ were inalienable rights.73 Mary upheld the right of all children to education, despite Neville’s

insistence that Mount Margaret only provide education for the mixed descent children. Her philosophical position, as she told

Neville at the royal commission hearings when he accused her of idealism, was ‘I wish to treat other people like human beings. I do not put it higher than that’.74

Mary’s uncompromising stance was both a strength and a weakness.

There ‘ought not be any discrimination against race, sex or colour’, she told Olive Pink, but ‘the Children’s Charter of Geneva ought to be applied to ALL’. Her opposition to discrimination in any form and her support for recognition of Aboriginal women’s equality

show her principled position. At the same time her judgmental comments, such as telling Olive Pink that the majority of women were ‘so wickedly callous and self-complacent in the presence of the 73

Bennett to Neville, 14 February 1938, p. 5, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA. 74 Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens, p. 190; Bennett, Royal Commission hearing, 20 March 1934, AN537, Acc 2922, p. 299, SROWA.

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terrible wrongs which they condone to the women and children of a

defenceless race’, led some people, who might have become allies, to withdraw from her zealotry.75

75

Bennett to Pink, 12 September 1937, Olive Pink papers, MS2368, F (a)(2) 4, AIATSIS, Canberra.

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Cha pte r 9

DI SI L LU SION M EN T … in Western Australia certainly NOTHING has been effected to give the natives sufficient rations or teaching during the transition period, for the simple reason that the majority of the whites do not want a transition period, but the disappearance of the natives. Mary Bennett to John Harris, Secretary, Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, 7 March 1937

Through the 1930s, as her reputation for assisting Aboriginal people

had spread through the Goldfields region, Mary had met many who shared their stories of suffering, often at the hands of the State. In

November 1939, after twenty months of debate, the regulations under the Aborigines Act Amendment Act (also known as The Native Ad­

min­istration Act) of 1936 finally passed through the Western Austra­

lian Parliament. Neville, now with the new title of Com­missioner

for Native Affairs, could control the lives of any Western Australian

citizens who had at least one Aboriginal grandparent. Events in Western Australia over the next two years led Mary to question the

efficacy of her work as both an educator and an activist as she came to realise how the new powers of the Commissioner for Native Affairs

D isillusionment

could make progress for her pupils in the world outside the mission extremely difficult.

Worn down by her work, she became more prone to diabetic inci-

dents. Her pupils, especially the older girls, became adept at recognising the signs of hypoglycaemia and would run to get Matron Murray

to come and assist Mary. Despite Matron Murray’s care Mary was hospitalised twice in 1940 when the matron was concerned about her state.1 Mary’s life at Mount Margaret had been consumed by

teaching, assisting those who came to her for advice, and activism as she sought to influence the Western Australian Government and its bureaucracy. The pressure had been relentless and, though she still

loved teaching and believed in her pupils, her faith in their future was severely undermined by a series of events which demonstrated

the power of the new legislation and its thrust. The regulations under

the Act detailed the various ways that Aboriginal people’s lives – marriage, work, access to their own earnings and education – could be

controlled by the Commissioner. Mary’s vision for the people she loved faltered as she scrutinised the potential effects of these new powers. Education might not be enough.

Western Australia, late 1930s, early 1940s In a letter to the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society

(ASAPS) in late 1938, John Willcock, the Premier of Western Australia, defended the Native Administration Act of 1936 and the 156 regulations under it while simultaneously asserting that well-

meaning but misguided Western Australian correspondents had 1

Admission records, Mary Montgomerie Bennett, Kalgoorlie Hospital, Regional Health Information Co- ordinator, Western Australia Country Health Services – Goldfields; Margaret Morgan, Mt Margaret: A Drop in a Bucket, p. 256.

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misinterpreted the Act to the Society. After a month in Kalgoorlie Hospital under observation for treatment for her diabetes Mary wrote

to Sir John Harris, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. She wished to correct what she described as ‘grave misstatements’ in Willcock’s letter, which had been published in full in The Anti-Slavery Reporter

and Aborigines’ Friend, and which promoted his government’s approach to native affairs as kindly in intent.2

Mary had sent copies of the new legislation and the regulations

under the Act to the Anti-Slavery Society. From the remote Mount

Margaret Mission this was no mean feat. She had to know when she

could order them from the government printer, place and pay for the order, receive the copies and then get to the Laverton post office, twenty kilometres down the road, to send them to London and to

her other activist contacts. The Society had written to Willcock, expressing its concern over his government’s increased powers over

Aboriginal people. Specifically the Society pointed to the power to take any child of mixed descent away from its mother, the power to

forbid marriages and the power to compel those classed as ‘native’ to accept any kind of employment. It also drew attention to the fact

that the new Act ‘does not purport to provide very much for their positive benefit and uplift’ such as education.3 Willcock defended

the new powers such as over Aboriginal marriages, assuring his

critics that these regulations ‘are either copied from those which

have been in force for many years, are in force in respect of our own white children, or taken from Regulations governing native matters 2 3

John Willcock to John Harris, Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, 7 August 1939, in Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, October 1939, pp. 115-19. John Harris to Premier of Western Australia, John Willcock, 12 June 1939, in AntiSlavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, July 1939, pp. 60-61.

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D isillusionment

in the Eastern States, chiefly Queensland’.4 To demonstrate that the

new Act provided positive benefit to Aboriginal people, Willcock

explained that the administration of the estates of deceased natives would be transferred to the Commission of Native Affairs because the Curator of Intestate Estates could not recognise tribal wives who

were not married according to the laws of the State. This matter, he told the Society, had been ‘entirely corrected in the natives favour’.5

Mary’s understanding of how the new legislation was applied,

however, came from those who had sought her assistance. She saw the

potential financial gain for the Department of Native Affairs under the new regulations. One example which she shared with Sir John

Harris concerned a white man who had left money to his Aboriginal

wife and their children. He died before the new Act was passed. The Curator of Intestate Estates paid half of the money due to the

beneficiaries. After some time had elapsed without the remainder being paid, two of the beneficiaries Bill Ashwin and Trilby Cooper

asked Mount Margaret Mission staff to help them to access the remainder due to them. By this time the Act had been passed and

they learned that the remainder of the money due to them had been

paid to the Commissioner of Native Affairs. The Department of Native Affairs argued that it had lain unclaimed for three years so it

was forfeited. The department had benefited from this bureaucratic sleight of hand while the children of the deceased man were deprived of their full inheritance.6

A more lucrative source of much needed funds was delivered

by regulation 85, Mary explained to Sir John Harris, which was 4 5 6

Willcock to Harris, Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, 7 August 1939, p. 116. Willcock to Harris, 7 August 1939. Bennett to John Harris, 13 January 1940, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp, s18, G379.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

copied from Queensland legislation. The regulation stated that: ‘The Commissioner may direct that the wages or part of the wages

of any native shall be paid to him in trust for such native, in any manner he may think fit, and the wages shall be paid by the employer accordingly’.7 The public position of the Commissioner of Native Affairs was that it was only trainees whose money was kept in trust,

but the law allowed a proportion of any Aboriginal workers’ wages to

be paid into a trust account where it could be invested. By 1944 the money from five hundred and sixty saving accounts of Aboriginal people was invested. The amount in the coffers of the Department

of Native Affairs was fifty per cent more than before passage of the regulations in 1939.8

Mary drew the Society’s attention to a gap between the purported

intent of the law and its implementation. In his letter to the Anti-

Slavery Society, the Premier took credit for introducing legislation so that Aboriginal wives could not be compelled to give evidence

against their husbands. Mary, however, told Harris of a case in Broome where police and the resident magistrate ignored this law

and compelled ‘a bush woman, knowing no word of English, to give the evidence they required against her husband, Maloora, for

killing a white man, ‘a “dogger” who persistently interfered with the native women’. Section 12 of the Act infringed habeas corpus,

she reminded Sir John Harris, with imprisonment without trial for

Aboriginal people being permitted. In the detailed footnotes in this letter Mary told further stories of people she knew who had suffered 7 8

Government Gazette of Western Australia, no. 52, 1 November 1938, p. 1,852. Departmental expenditure in 1939 was $109,000. In 1944 it was $150, 890. See Appendix III, P. Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens, p. 274. The Western Australian Stolen Wages Taskforce, Reconciling the Past: Government Control of Aboriginal Monies in Western Australia, 1905–1972, 2008, concluded that: ‘Many, but not all, who had their lives controlled under the Aborigines Act had their money controlled’ (p. 23).

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as a result of the Native Administration Act of 1936: of her friend,

Douglas Munmurrie, who was captured and transported to another

region when he left a job where he believed he was underpaid. She told Harris with her now customary emphasis: ‘THE NEW ACT

AND REGULATIONS MAKE STATUTORY SERFDOM

COMPLETE’.9 Certainly there was a gap between the ‘kindly’

intentions which Premier Willcock ascribed to his government and the experiences of individuals such as Bill Ashwin and Trilby

Cooper. They were fortunate in having white people to advocate for them, even though in this case they were not successful in

receiving the monies left to them by their father. There were many

others, however, without the skills or the support to challenge the department’s taking of their wages or inheritances.

Evidence of the department having used its power to advance

its assimilationist policy rather than to assist children in need was

provided by those who came to Mary for help. Willcock wrote that in practice it has never been the custom to take children from their

parents unless sick, neglected, or for some other wholly good reason. Mary, however, knew of a case which contradicted this assertion. She told Harris:

The Commissioner asks power to take neglected children from undesirable surroundings, and then uses this power to take wellcared for native children from their parents. One mother who is in good service was allowed by her employers to have her little girl aged nine (and born in wedlock) living with her. She looked well after the child and sent her to the State school, but the department has taken the child. In the same district are native 9

Her capitals. Bennett to John Harris, 13 January 1940, ASAPS, MSS Brit Emp, s18, G379. See Kate Auty, Black Glass: Western Australian Courts of Native Affairs 1936–1954, Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle, 2005 for more on the administration’s responses to Bennett’s criticisms of the law’s treatment of Aboriginal offenders.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

children living in immoral conditions, and the Commissioner went to see them, but he did not remove them. Clean, well-cared for children can easily be placed in employ­ ment, and their wages can be collected by the department. Filthy, uncared for children cannot be placed.10

She accused the department of not acting in the interests of

individual, neglected children. Rather, the practice of taking children whom Commissioner Neville judged to be assimilable into the

mainstream community would provide him with the evidence that

people of mixed heritage could make this transition successfully. Neville’s ‘long-range plan’ was for ‘the ultimate absorption into our own race of the whole of the existing Australian native race’.11 The

Department of Native Affairs had the power under the Act to ‘take any child from its mother at any stage of its life’ so that the child could

be trained and ‘may become absorbed into the general community’.

The children of mixed descent who showed ‘signs of fitness’ for this

policy were removed from their mothers as Mary described to Harris. Frank Bray, Neville’s successor, continued this practice.12

Mary ensured that sympathetic organisations within Australia

understood what was happening in Western Australia. In February 1940 she travelled to Adelaide to address the members of the League

for the Protection and Advancement of Aboriginal and Half-caste

Women, led by her activist friend Phyllis Duguid, wife of Dr Charles Duguid. Her account of the new powers of the Commissioner of

Native Affairs to take children from their mothers, take wages from Aboriginal workers, take legacies left to Aboriginal children, declare people with twenty-five per cent Aboriginal heritage to 10 Bennett to Harris, 13 January 1940. 11 A. O. Neville, Australia’s Coloured Minority, Sydney, c.1942, p. 27. 12 Neville, Australia’s Coloured Minority.

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D isillusionment

be natives under the Act, and imprison people without trial was

supported with the examples of the many who had come to her for help. She explained that missionaries had stood between natives and departmental oppression but now the department had the power under section 68 of the regulations to require those, such as her,

working in a native institution, to be licenced. She told her audience that she had not registered for a licence. Her address was delivered

with a heartfelt moral indignation. She realised that under the new

Act even the children she had educated with care and love for over a decade could be controlled by the Commissioner. They could be sent

to work anywhere and at anything. They could be denied access to their wages. They would have to seek permission to marry. Education would not necessarily guarantee them the rights of the citizen under

this new regime. This realisation was deeply demoralising for her, having worked so hard and for so long to educate Aboriginal children to be good and capable citizens of Australia.13

An event in 1941 further hardened her attitude towards the

Native Affairs administration. About a mile and a half from Mount Margaret Mission there was a camp of Aboriginal people whom Mary described as ‘bush natives’, who wandered about from place

to place. She described an occasion when they were camped near the mission during ‘a time of drought entailing great hardship and the children were practically starving’. According to Rod Schenk the

parents of these hungry children were happy for the mission to take their children in and feed and educate them, so at the beginning of the school year Mary began working with the children, aged 13

Minutes of executive meeting of the League for the Protection and Advancement of Aboriginal and Half-caste Women, 15 February 1940, Adelaide, Aborigines Advancement League, SRG250 series 1-3/3, State Library of South Australia.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

between five and nine. She described them as ‘thin and weedy and inert … and they looked dazed and blank’. Over the months as they benefited from good food and ‘the comradeship of adventuring

together in new skills and games’ they began responding to Mary’s skilful teaching.14 They were of the full descent and so not considered by the Department of Native Affairs to be eligible for education.

In July 1941 a formal letter arrived from Commissioner Bray

drawing Schenk’s attention to regulation 55(A): ‘No ward of the Commissioner shall be admitted to any native institution without the consent of the Commissioner’. This began a battle over the future

of these eight children. Bray, who became acting Commissioner when Neville retired, refused to allow the children to remain at the

mission and in Mary’s class. Suspicious of Schenk’s fundamentalist Christianity, he objected to ‘the separation of the children of tribal

families for the purpose of Christianity or education’. Bray had opposed Schenk’s expansionist missionary plans and had opened a

ration station at Cosmo Newbery, about ninety kilometres north-east of Mount Margaret, in an attempt to attract Aboriginal people away

from Mount Margaret Mission.15 Bray considered that education was ‘certainly not necessary nor desirable for tribal or uncivilised natives’.

Instead, training as domestics or pastoral workers was provided at Cosmo Newbery.16 Mary countered that the Goldfields Aboriginal

families in question were not living tribally, having been in contact

with ‘civilisation’ for nearly fifty years. She also pointed out that the Commissioner’s preference for them to remain together and continue 14

Mary Bennett to Emil Nulsen, MLA, 28 May 1942, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA. 15 Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens, pp. 138-39, 184. 16 Frank Bray to Rod Schenk, 16 July 1941, Duguid papers, MS5068 series 11, NLA.

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living their tribal lives was unrealistic given that the 1934 Land Act

prohibited their hunting on any enclosed land.17

With a teacher’s dedication and engagement with each individual

pupil, Mary observed the progress of her new pupils through the year, noted their aptitudes and interests and built on their strengths.

She saw them developing confidence. She encouraged their drawings

and the ‘helpless, hopeless lot who had arrived in February, hungry

and listless were by the end of the year writing, reading, adding and subtracting’. In December Bray told Schenk that he regretted that he was not able to approve ‘the admission of the full-blood children

listed in your letter of 24th July last’. Mary questioned Bray’s objection

that the children were separated from their parents, asserting that the children were no different to white children in a boarding school,

going with their parents when it was school holidays, but under the

Act Bray had the power to order them off the mission. She had no intention of meekly applying, as she was required, for a licence to continue her teaching work. She was disgusted and deeply saddened

by the Commissioner’s decision, after her year of careful nurturing

of children whom she knew no longer had any future living tribally in the desert.

Did her future lie in England or Australia? Mary still thought

of herself as an Englishwoman but the people she cared most about

in the world were in Australia. Was the education of Aboriginal children or writing to puncture preconceived assumptions about

Aboriginal inability to adapt more urgent? Could she continue to do both? How would the fact that she now seemed to be perceived as an enemy of the Native Affairs Department affect her ability to 17

Bennett to Nulsen, 28 May 1942, Duguid papers MS5068, series 11, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

influence the state? As she approached her sixtieth birthday in July 1941 and Londoners steeled themselves for the German bombing

raids, the certainties which had kept her going were shaken. She had been operating on the assumption that educated Aboriginal people

would be accepted in Western Australian society but events had

shown her the implacable negative preconceptions about them still

current in the community. If only she could convey to the wider population the evidence of Aboriginal potential which she had gath­ ered from her teaching at Mount Margaret Mission.

Through the winter of 1941, after the teaching day was over Mary

listened to the broadcasts of the German bombing of London. Her thoughts were drawn back to her home and her London friends as she heard the war news and Churchill’s speeches as he sought to

bring Britons together to defeat Hitler. The onslaught suffered by Londoners during the continuous nightly raids was very real to her.

She had walked these streets. She recognised the buildings in the daily reports of damage. She also read about Western Australian women who were going ‘home’ to help with the war effort. Bessie

Rischbieth, with whom she had worked closely before a falling out after the Moseley Royal Commission, was sending back accounts of her activities in the East End of London after bombing raids. She

described rows and rows of homes wrecked by bombs, people wheeling their babies along the street, with prams and pillow cases filled

with their remaining possessions. ‘These people were simply heroic’,

Rischbieth wrote. She described hundreds of men, women and chil-

dren queued up to enter the shelters for the night, people huddled

together after pegging out their claim by placing a rug and cushions on the floor, people coming in at all hours of the night and the tragic

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stories of those who had lost family members to the bombs.18 As 1941 came to a close Mary read reports of hits to St Paul’s Cathedral,

Buckingham Palace and the Chamber of the House of Commons:

emblems of all that she valued in her British heritage. Disgusted at Bray’s rejection of her work when he described missions as ‘mere

preaching and trading posts’, her thoughts turned to England. She resolved to return to play her part in the war effort.

On 15 May 1942 Mary boarded the SS Nestor to return home to

England.19 For some, after a decade of unrelenting work and recent

ill-health, a month of relaxing shipboard inactivity may have been appealing. For Mary it was an opportunity for reading, thinking and writing about what she was leaving behind. She wrote a six-page

letter to Emil Nulsen, her local member and the Minister for Justice at the time, on the question of Aboriginal education. As the ship

neared England Mary made a plea to Nulsen, who had expressed his admiration of her work at Mount Margaret. She described the remarkable advances made by her pupils despite limited classroom time. When she left Mount Margaret she was teaching sixty children between the ages of six and sixteen spread over seven classes. Children

had only between one and two hours of classes per day and yet, for four years running, her pupils had won prizes in a national essay competition which was held for Aboriginal pupils. Mary argued that: Education is absolutely necessary to form habits of attentiveness and precision and reliability, to enable people to understand orders 18 19

See, for example, ‘Women’s Realm: London Stands Firm. Impressions from Mrs Rischbieth’, The West Australian, 21 December, p. 13, and articles throughout the war in The West Australian and the Kalgoorlie Miner. Passenger list – Outgoing Passengers, Fremantle, SS Nestor, 15 May 1942, NAA, Perth Office.

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and carry them out; and there is no finer human material than the native children now going to waste in Western Australia.20

She told Nulsen than after years of her requesting inspection,

Inspector Telford of the Education Department had finally visited

her school in 1941. He had commended her on the high standard she

was demanding and getting from her pupils. If the opportunities that her pupils had were extended throughout the state the same results could be attained, she assured Nulsen.21

The purpose of her letter was to draw Nulsen’s attention to the

Department of Native Affairs’ plan to end the educational oppor­

tunities of the eight Aboriginal children whom Mary had taught in 1941. She put the case to him and to others for education for all

Aboriginal children, not just those of mixed descent which the department thought were the only ones worth educating. She fore­

saw a future, not far off, where a tribal, nomadic life would not be possible. Already the 1934 Land Act meant that Aboriginal hunters could no longer enter pastoral leases which had been fenced. Bray

chose to overlook this reality in his insistence that the Mount

Margaret children should join their parents in a nomadic, tribal life, even though these adults had been in contact with white society for a number of decades.

Mary set out the case to Nulsen for Aboriginal children’s right to

an education to allow them to pursue an occupation that interested them, giving the examples of her former pupils: Sadie Corner,

preparing to be a nurse, and Gladys Vincent, a teacher. Instead the government’s position was that education for Aboriginal girls was 20 21

Bennett to Nulsen, 28 May 1942, p. 1, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA. Bennett to Nulsen, 28 May 1942.

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D isillusionment

training for domestic service and for boys training for pastoral work. Mary cited a report by anthropologists Birdsell and Tindale, who

had spent ten days at Mount Margaret in 1939, in which they argued that Aboriginal education should be a responsibility of the Education Department. They recognised that Aboriginal education ‘required the finding and maintaining of adequately equipped teachers in properly

supported schools’, arguments which Mary had been making for some years. Education should be more than training for servitude. As she signed off in her letter to Nulsen, Mary wrote:

As we hope to win the war against Nazism, so we must get rid of our Nazi complex that withholds education from full-blood Aboriginals. I earnestly ask you to make free and comspulsory education a reality for every child in Western Australia ir­ respective of race, creed, or economic condition. 22

There is no evidence that Nulsen replied to this letter.

Like William Cooper, the Yorta Yorta Victorian activist with

whom she was in correspondence, who had led a deputation to the

German consulate protesting the persecution of Jews, Mary saw analogies between German and Australian race-based policies and the danger that they posed.23 Her vision of a first-class education

for all was at odds with the Department of Native Affairs, which seemed to see its responsibility as providing cheap labour for the pastoral industry, especially during the war years when there was a labour shortage.

22 23

Bennett to Nulsen, 28 May 1942, p. 6. ‘Deputation Not Admitted’, 7 December 1938, The Argus, in Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, p. 108.

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Saddling up for a muster, Lammermoor, 1874. This was the homestead built by Robert Christison in the 1860s of all local materials. Note pole uprights and bark roof. This photograph, and the following two, were taken by Charles Bowly, a young Englishman who worked for Robert Christison as a jackaroo in 1874 before be­ coming a grazier himself. He had become an accomplished photographer before he sailed for Australia in September 1873. Courtesy James Cook University Archives.

Lammermoor Station, 1874. Charles Bowly took this photo of people whom he called the Powlaburries. Robert Christison’s spelling of their name for themselves was ‘Dalleburra’. The current spelling of the name for the people who lived on the lands which Robert Christison leased is ‘Yirandali’. Bowly wrote: ‘R. C. placed them in position. I should think they had never been photographed before, and it is most astonishing how they seemed to comprehend at once what I was doing.’ Courtesy James Cook University Archives.

Mealtime at Lammermoor, 1874. Robert Christison is seated far right. Next to him, facing the camera, is his brother, Tom Christison. The Aboriginal man seated in front is most likely Barney, Christison’s trusted Dalleburra employee and cultural interpreter. The photo, once torn, has been reassembled. Courtesy James Cook University Archives.

While Robert Christison was estab­lish­ing his pastoral leases in north-west Queens­ land, his future wife, Mary Godsall, was launching her first career as an actress in the East End, London. Here she is as she appeared in The Fast Family in 1866. She worked as an actress in London theatres from 1864 to 1867. Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum Archives, London.

This studio photograph of Mrs Chris­ tison with children was taken at Ten­ ter­field, 1886, not long before she and the children sailed for England, leav­ing Robert Christison in Queens­land. Young Mary is 5, Helen is 3 and baby Robert is about 6 months old. Mary Bennett has inscribed the photo ‘Mary with daughters Helen (Lily) and Mary (Mimi)’, omitting mention of baby Robert (Roy). Courtesy John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.

Helen (13), seated, and Mimi (15), standing, on the banks of Towerhill Creek, 1896. This photograph and others, taken by Mrs Christison in 1896, illustrated an article about Lammermoor Station published in Dalgety’s Monthly Review, December 1896. Courtesy Fryer Library, University of Queensland.

Wyma (who looked after Mimi and her siblings at Ten­ ter­ field in 1885 and 1886) in the Lam­mer­moor kitchen gar­den, mid-1890s. She would be in her fifties at this time. Courtesy John Oxley Library, State Li­brary of Queensland.

Mrs Mary Christison, season ticket holder 1894–1895, Art Society of Tasmania. Sandy Bay, Hobart, was principal home to Mrs  Christison and the chil­dren from 1893–1898. Courtesy Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office.

Robert Christison, on board ship, looking back at the Queens­land coastline for the last time, 1910. Courtesy John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.

Mary Montgomerie Bennett, 1930, the year she left England for Western Australia. This is most likely a passport photo­ graph. Courtesy Elizabeth Roberts, Mary Bennett’s niece.

Mary Bennett teaching Aboriginal women to spin and weave, Mount Margaret Mission, 1932. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, Schenk Family Collection.

Mary Bennett teaching Bessie and Nardie to cook in her home at Mount Margaret Mission, 1934. This was a regular Saturday activity. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, Schenk Family Collection.

Dimple Dimboola, one of Mary Bennett’s students, teaching a younger class at Mount Margaret Mission, 1930s. This technique was of benefit to both the student-teacher and her pupils. Courtesy Mrs Dimple Sullivan.

Reg Johnston, Wallace Blow and Frank Goongoonjanoo Grey, Mount Margaret Mission schoolroom, 1930s. Mary Bennett cast Reg as Aggrey, the successful African educator, in a play she devised to help inspire the children. Reg became a pastor and built a church for his people at Leonora. Mary advocated for Reg’s mother, Adelaide, to manage her own pension when she came to live with Reg and his family after her husband died. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, Schenk Family Collection.

Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, Schenk Family Collection.

Staff of Mount Margaret Mission, 1940. Mary Bennett is seated in a dark dress third from left. As in other group photographs she is looking at a child, young Roderick Schenk, leaning against his mother. Superintendent of the Mission, Rod Schenk, is standing, far right.

Dora Quinn (later Cotterill) with her mother Lily Sullivan at Mount Margaret Mission, c 1946. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, Schenk Family Collection.

Gladys Vincent, Mary’s former pupil, now a teacher at Roelands Mission, facing her young students and Mary Bennett. Mary visited Roelands a number of times in 1947 to support her former pupil and publicise her success as a teacher of her own people. Courtesy Dora Cotterill.

Gladys Vincent, far left holding a toddler, and Mary Bennett, in hat, with children and other mission staff, Roelands Mission, 1947. Mary criticised the Roelands Board for under-utilising Gladys as a teacher. As well as teaching, Gladys had responsibility for nine children between the ages of 3 and 7. Mary wrote that ‘only a quarter of her day is spent in benefitting the children with her unique teaching gift’. Courtesy Dora Cotterill.

Aboriginal children from Kurrawang Mission boarding the school bus, 1954. Mary annotated this photo and sent it to her supporters as an illustration of how educational opportunities at the technical and high schools in Kalgoorlie could be made available to Aboriginal students. Courtesy State Library of Victoria, Council for Aboriginal Rights Papers.

In 1960 Mary Bennett took her Wongatha friends into Maxine Studios in Kalgoorlie to have professional photographs taken of them. These she sent to activists in London, Perth and Melbourne to engage their support. Here we see Mrs Lulu (Kowituku) Bilson with her grandchildren Beverley and Ron Noble. Mary first met Lulu as a young mother, after she was bitten by a snake when rabbiting. The station manager applied a tourniquet but neglected to take it off and, as a consequence, Lulu lost her arm. Mary was engaged with assisting three generations of Bilsons who had been ignored by the state. Courtesy State Library of Victoria, Council for Aboriginal Rights Papers.

Mary Bennett told Shirley Andrews that Alec Bilson, husband to Lulu, ‘worked all his life for white settlers, first as a police tracker, then as a station-hand’. His pension was granted after delays, just before his death. Courtesy State Library of Victoria, Council for Aboriginal Rights Papers.

‘Percy Maher (Wantan), Joyce Maher (Tapakari) with Bernadette (1½ years) and Roderick (3 months)’. Missing from the photo is Raymond, about whom Mary notes: ‘at 14 he went to work on a station.’ She also adds: ‘The second son died at Norseman Mission.’ Courtesy State Library of Victoria, Council for Aboriginal Rights Papers.

‘A station hand’s wife and young family. Tapakari (Joyce Maher) with Bernadette (1½ years) and Roderick (3 months). The low wages for Aborigines enables institutions to remove their children.’ Courtesy State Library of Victoria.

‘Norman Bilson (Walaru), Aborigine Station Hand, suffers from cataract but is still in request for his skilled work. W.A. 1961. Age 66 in 1960.’ Mary wrote to Shirley Andrews that she was sending ‘a beautiful, terrible photo … of a dear old man who had been fobbed off with rations and degrading hand-outs … instead of the age pension’. This was Norman Bilson, brother to Alec. These photographs were sent to Stan Davey of the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League in Victoria, to Jessie Street, to Shirley Andrews of the Council for Aboriginal Rights, to the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society in London and to Ada Bromham of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Courtesy State Library of Victoria, Council for Aboriginal Rights Papers.

Mary Bennett wrote letters, such as this one for Norman Bilson, as testimonials to the District Welfare Officer. The people in question were often born before Paddy Hannan discovered gold and consequently had no birth certificates. They had never been given an opportunity to gain a Western education. In this case the District Officer replied: ‘Norman Bilson is not yet old enough for the age pension’. Courtesy State Library of Victoria, Council for Aboriginal Rights Papers.

Of this couple Mary wrote: ‘Daisy Imari and Angel are a grand Aborigine couple who have always worked faithfully as station hands wherever work was to be found. Now that they are ageing it is difficult to get station work, so they take work in the bush and Angel cuts wood. It happens that they are not always paid and there is no redress.’ There were many Aboriginal people unable to find work in Kalgoorlie in the 1950s. Courtesy State Library of Victoria, Council for Aboriginal Rights Papers.

Shirley Andrews, Honorary Secretary of the Council for Aboriginal Rights, Victoria, 1950s. Mary Bennett sup­ plied information on conditions for Ab­orig­inal people in West­ern Aus­tra­ lia to Shirley who then publi­cised the situation in the Council’s Bulletin. Courtesy National Library of Aus­tralia, Shirley Andrews Papers.

Sadie Canning, Mary Bennett and Gladys Vincent, Kalgoorlie, 1955. Sadie and Gladys had been Mary’s pupils at Mount Margaret. Now Sadie was the Matron at Leonora Hospital and Gladys was on her way to Gnowangerup to become the Women’s Superintendent at the new Bible College. It is a mark of her pride in these two young women, who were as close to her as family, that Mary had this photograph taken. (Courtesy Schenck Family Collection, State Library of Western Australia.)

Portrait of Mary Bennett with her kelpie Faith, by Max Brown, pub­ lished to accompany an obituary in the October 1961 issue of Smoke Signals, the Aborigines Advancement League periodical. Courtesy Victorian Ab­origines Advance­ment League.

Mary Bennett to Dr Barry Christophers, 1960. This letter is used in the cover illustration. Courtesy Dr Barry Christophers.

Belonging, Identity, Commitment

Map 6: Eastern goldfields of Western Australia

Cha pte r 10

D OR A A N D GL A DY S Wartime London and a return to Australia I feel it is a call to return to the only work in which I am happy – teaching the responsive confiding Aboriginal children, who would otherwise have no teacher. But it is a great wrench to leave my “ain countree”. Mary Bennett to Charles Greenidge, Secretary, Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, on leaving England for Australia, 14 February 1947

Yes, by the mercy of God all doors are opening to me here … I do hope that I may have the great joy of seeing you here next year and asking you to meet the new good friends I have been making. Mary Bennett to Helen Baillie on plans to stay in England, 2 September 1950

I returned quite suddenly to Western Australia, arriving here on the 13th February [1951], having been offered a cancelled berth. Mary Bennett to Charles Greenidge on sudden change of plans and return to Australia

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Mary’s seventh decade was a time of sudden shifts back and forth, across the globe. Events of the late 1930s and early 1940s

in Western Australia weighed on her mind and she seemed to relive discriminatory and unjust episodes which she related again and again. Her decade at Mount Margaret, the longest time she

had ever stayed in one place (the only other period of equivalent

stability being her years at Great Amwell in Hertfordshire when she was writing Christison of Lammermoor) was followed by a return

to London in 1942. In 1947 she went back to Australia, but three years later she returned to England for a further year. She described

England as home and herself as an Englishwoman, and yet when she was there her focus was still the Aboriginal people of Australia

and the systemic injustices they continued to face. She read the Australian newspapers. She eagerly sought information from her

Australian correspondents. She kept trying to influence Australian

governments regarding Aboriginal policy and she learned about the difficult lives of her successful pupils, such as Dora Quinn and Gladys Vincent.

Wartime London Mary arrived in London in June 1942 to see the rubbled scars of

the Blitz everywhere. The bombing of Pearl Harbor in the previous December had finally pushed the United States of America into the

war and American soldiers along with soldiers in the uniforms of twenty different nations, including Australia, could be seen in the

streets. Still incensed at the injustices to her new pupils, who had been ordered off Mount Margaret Mission, she told Charles and Phyllis Duguid rather grimly: ‘I have come home to do war work: – 2 68 –

D ora and G ladys

and war work I am doing’.1 In one of her characteristically long

letters she made no further mention, however, of her contribution to the war effort. In her extant correspondence from the war years, which is slight, we learn nothing about this work. She was, however,

still intensely engaged with the conditions of life for the Western Australian Aboriginal people whom she had left behind. She wrote to a number of people expressing her disgust and anger at the

Commissioner ordering the children, under regulation 55 of the Act, to leave Mount Margaret.2 She emphasised:

THE POINT IS THAT THE ABORIGINE CHILDREN WHOM THE DEPARTMENT ORDERED TO BE PUT OUT OF MOUNT MARGARET ARE NOT TRIBAL, FOR THEY MAY NO LONGER SEEK THEIR LIV­ ING AS THEIR PEOPLE HAVE DONE FROM TIME IM­MEM­ORIAL; THEY ARE DETRIBALISED; AND THEY CANNOT EARN A LIVING UNLESS THEY ARE EDU­CATED; AND THE MISSION IS THE ONLY PLACE WHERE EDUCATION IS AVAILABLE FOR THEM.3

Mary seemed haunted by the expulsion of these children. Over the

next five years she continued to write to individuals and organisations

in England and Australia telling people what had happened. She did

learn from Schenk that at some time in 1943, after a legal challenge, the Department of Native Affairs relented and allowed the mission

to keep most of the children, but Mary did not add this fact to the 1 2 3

Bennett to Charles Duguid, 18 February 1943, Duguid papers, MS 5068, series 11, NLA. Regulation 55: ‘No ward of the Commissioner shall be admitted to any native institution without the consent of the Commissioner’. Government Gazette of Western Australia, no. 52, 1 November 1938. Mary Bennett to Charles Duguid, 18 February 1943, Duguid papers, MS 5068, series 11, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

account that she continued to tell.4 It was yet another example of her preparedness to sometimes be selective with the evidence in order to support her cause.

It was not just the new students who had suffered. Mary soon

learned that children she had taught for a decade, wards of the State,

were in jeopardy. Dora Quinn, the daughter of Lily, whose plight Mary had put before Henry Moseley eight years earlier (when Lily

lost custody of two of her children) had been Mary’s pupil. She was a clever girl who had won national prizes for her essays and

had assisted Mary with teaching in the classroom. When she was sixteen the mission found a post for her as a domestic servant in

Laverton, a mining town east of Mount Margaret. Dora was very

happy there. The couple who employed her had two small children

and Dora was treated as a member of the family. One morning in August 1942, however, a police officer, under instructions from the Department of Native Affairs, came to the house and ordered Dora

to be ready to catch the train that night. Dora’s current employer was upset but could do nothing as Dora was a ward of the department.

Dora travelled to Perth and was taken to ‘a place where girls stayed, waiting to be farmed out to whoever wanted “a slave”’.5 After a week

or two a position came up for her at Greenmount, on the edge of the Darling scarp, east of Perth.

The elderly woman who employed Dora offered her a room but

it was where the family dog slept and Dora refused it. The only

alternate accommodation was a windowless garage which could

not be locked, distant from the house and near the road where the 4 5

Rod Schenk to the editor, The West Australian, 8 November 1944, Duguid papers, MS5068 series 11, NLA. Dora Cotterill to the author, 27 August 2015.

– 270 –

D ora and G ladys

soldiers from a nearby barracks would march by each morning. As

well, despite being numerate and not a gambler, Dora’s earnings, apart from five shillings a week, were taken by the department. Her

employer, who had a daughter in the army and a foster daughter at

high school, spoke to Dora only to give orders about the work. Dora rose at six o’clock in the morning, prepared breakfast, and worked

through the day chopping wood, washing, cleaning and cooking. She

recalls that the family ate in style with a little bell to tingle if they

wanted anything. Dora ate her meals alone in the kitchen. After the evening meal she cleared and washed up and put away the dishes,

then she crept into her garage up by the road with a hurricane light. After growing up with her mother, her teacher Mrs Bennett, and her

friends in the warm, structured Mount Margaret environment, Dora was lonely and isolated.

Dora’s only outside contact at this time was her brother Jack, a

student at the Perth Bible College, to whom she wrote. Jack ap-

proached Robert Powell, a former China Inland missionary, member of the Perth-based Australian Aborigines’ Amelioration As­soci­ation (commonly known as the Four As), and a good friend of Mary’s.

Representations were made to the Commissioner of Native Affairs asking permission for Dora to join her brother at the Bible Institute. Commissioner Frank Bray refused, saying ‘the girl has had too much religion, let her go out and find her own feet and when she is

twenty-one let her please herself ’.6 A solicitor, engaged on Dora’s behalf, argued that while she was ‘a quadroon’ she was not living with Aboriginal people and so was not a ‘native’ under the Act. Finally

free to leave her lonely placing, Dora boarded with Robert Powell 6

Robert Powell, ‘Extracts from a letter’, 7 August 1942, Association for the Protection of Native Races (hereafter APNR), Acc No 1/131, S5, series 7, USA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

and his wife while arrangements were made for her to join the Perth Bible Institute. Here Dora could continue her education. She was

considering becoming a missionary as well as wishing to study to be a teacher.7

Dora’s unhappy experience of work as a domestic in the world

outside the mission fuelled the prejudices of both sides in the debate

over Aboriginal people making their way in white Australian society. The missionaries saw the department’s insensitive response to this

young woman’s lonely, alienating experience of work as evidence of its inhumanity and failure to ensure that Aboriginal Australians had

a fair start in the difficult transition to a role within the dominant society. The Department of Native Affairs saw the training and provision of Aboriginal domestic servants to the pastoral industry as ‘one of the most successful features of the Department’s admin­ istration’.8 Commissioner Bray had shown a particular interest in

supporting the needs of industry in wartime over the needs of in­

div­id­uals under his wardship and wished to maintain control of Aboriginal employment placements.9

Ignoring the fact that Mount Margaret Mission had already

placed Dora as a domestic servant, Bray asserted that the main reason that the mission opposed the placing of its female students

in domestic employment was that they wished to retain them for 7

8 9

Cotterill to the author, 27 August 2015; Robert Powell, ‘Extracts from a letter’, 27 August 1942, APNR, Acc No. 1/131, S55; Geoffrey Parsons, Black Chattels: The Story of the Australian Aborigines, National Council for Civil Liberties, London, 1946, pp. 31-32. There are some variations in the account of Dora’s experiences. I have taken her own version as most likely to be the correct one where there are differences. Bray to Amy Brown, 1 December 1943, Citizens’ Education Fellowship, MS 9212/3653/1(b), SLV. Memorandum, ‘Unemployed Natives Utilisation of Services during War’, Bray to Coverley, March 1942, AN1/7, Acc 993/4/42, SROWA; see also Robert A. Hall, Black Diggers, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1997, Chapters 2, 5 and 7.

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D ora and G ladys

mission activities.10 At this time, however, missionaries presented the only real alternative to the government’s view of educating mixed

descent children to become domestics or station-hands. The Bible

College offered a more stimulating future path for Dora. In contrast to the Department’s limited pragmatic provision of workers for the

pastoral industry, Mary’s view of her responsibility as a teacher had been to assist each child to reach his or her potential. She had held up to Dora and her other pupils African leaders such as James Kwegyir

Aggrey, a Ghanaian educationist who was appointed gov­ernor of

the Crown Colony Gold Coast. They could succeed in the same way, Mary assured her pupils.

Bray’s description of the process of Dora ‘finding her own feet’

demonstrates the ideological rift between missionaries and native affairs bureaucrats in Perth during the war years. As the daughter

of a mother of mixed descent Dora was a ward of the Commissioner of Native Affairs and would remain so until she turned 21. She did

not have the educational qualifications at that stage of her life to train as a kindergarten teacher at a teachers’ college but she was

able to do more than clean other people’s houses. Dora had no

right under the Act to her own earnings despite being literate and numerate and unlikely to misuse money. Dora’s choices in practical

terms were the position to which she had been assigned with its harsh, inhumane treatment which Bray considered would toughen

her up, or the more humane supportive environment of the Bible Institute. Bray’s ‘the girl has had too much religion’ indicated his

bias, but the reality at this time in Perth was that missions and religious bodies such as the Perth Bible Institute were the only real 10

Bray to Brown, 1 December 1943, Citizens’ Education Fellowship (Victorian Aboriginal Group), MS 9212/3653/1(b), SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

alternative to the department’s cheap domestic labour option as practised on Dora.

The hegemony of the northern pastoralists, supported by police

and the Department of Native Affairs was still very much in place

during the war. Commissioner Bray played his part in ensuring the continuation of an Aboriginal labour force. He explained to

the Minister for the North-West that he had taken steps ‘to secure the co-operation of the Police Authorities in forcing all natives

into employment’. This was at odds with Premier Willcock’s pro­

nouncements to the Anti-Slavery Society that ‘the department does not and cannot compel an Aboriginal person to accept employ­

ment’. Here was another gap between policy and practice which

Mary knew about through the life experiences which people shared

with her. Bray admitted that the practice amounted to forced labour but he justified the move in view of ‘the national crisis which faces

us’. Confident in his overruling of democratic procedure, he boasted to Coverley, the Minister for the North-West:

Elsewhere, except in Germany, I doubt whether methods such as these have been adopted in dealing with the forced labour of natives, and I am pleased to say that our instructions have already had a good effect in that our workable natives are now mostly employed.11

Despite Nazi Germany being Australia’s foe, Bray was prepared to justify this undemocratic practice by drawing a favourable

comparison between German and Australian methods of forced labour. 11

‘Unemployed Natives Utilisation of Services During the War’, Native Affairs, AN 1/7, Acc 993 4/42, SROWA; see Christine Choo, Mission Girls: Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia 1900–1950, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, Western Australia, 2001, p. 248.

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D ora and G ladys

In London, and back in contact with the Anti-Slavery and

Aborigines Protection Society (ASAPS), Mary hoped that the

Society would broadcast her concerns about the non-education of most of the Aboriginal children of Western Australia. Nulsen had

not replied to her letter and her hope now was that the Society, which had supported her work in the late 1920s before she had

left to go to Australia, would ensure that the dismal story of the use of young Aboriginal people as fodder for the Western

Australian pastoral industry was told. She addressed the Australian subcommittee of ASAPS in January 1943. Her old friend and fellow

advocate Edith Jones, who, with her husband Reverend John Jones, had lived and worked on Queensland Aboriginal missions, was a member of the Australian subcommittee as was Bessie Rischbieth

with whom she had earlier worked closely in Western Australia. While the subcommittee was interested in Mary’s account of the situation with regard to education, they were more interested in

her providing evidence of the non-payment of wages to Aboriginal

workers. She left the meeting with a brief to return to the next meeting with details about non-payment of wages to Aboriginal workers.

Mary returned to the May 1943 subcommittee meeting with

comparative information about what was happening in Western

Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland regarding wages to Aboriginal workers. The members listened to her account. She told them that:

A strong, intelligent and industrious race has, since the coming of the white man, been reduced to a mendicant and subject remnant, apart from the small minority who have been educated by Christian missions or by governments. – 275 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

‘But’, she warned her audience, no doubt thinking of Dora’s

recent experience, ‘even educated aborigines are liable to the same disabilities as the nomad tribes’ as a result of the Acts and regulations

which govern Aboriginal lives. Mary described the history of the

employment of Aboriginal people in Australia as falling into two

phases. The first was when governments leased Aboriginal hunting grounds to pastoralists and licensed pastoralists to employ them.

Only a certain number of the tribal group would be required, but if the pastoralist fed his workers’ dependents he would be exempted

from paying wages. This she described as the truck system ‘which always leaves the poor the worst of the bargain’.12 The second phase is when Aboriginal labour comes into competition with white labour.

Under a licence or permit system money is paid to the government and rations are supplied to the Aboriginal workers. She summarised

these two phases by describing the first as ‘the exclusion of the Aborigines from their own way of life by our expropriation of their

hunting grounds’ and the second as ‘the exclusion of the Aborigines from our way of life by our expropriation of their wages’.13

While the regulations governing Aboriginal employment varied in

each jurisdiction, the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australian laws all featured a trust fund which held a proportion

of the workers’ wages. Mary argued that as Aboriginal labour was essential for the pastoral industry, education and the full payment

of just wages were the twin goals towards which governments 12

13

M. M. Bennett, ‘Australian Aboriginal Workers in Federal Territory and the States of Queensland and Western Australia’, n.d., Rischbieth papers, M2004, series 12, NLA. The truck system refers to a situation in which employees are paid in commodities; it refers to a closed economic system in which workers have little or no opportunity to choose other work arrangements. Bennett, ‘Australian Aboriginal Workers in Federal Territory and the States of Queensland and Western Australia’, p. 1.

– 276 –

D ora and G ladys

should be working. She held that ‘the government’s motive, which

is alleged to be the protection of natives, requires to be thoroughly explored by a body of disinterested authorities’. She asked, rather hopefully, that such a body be immediately appointed by the federal

government in cooperation with the states. The full committee of the ASAPS decided to send Mary’s five-page memorandum to Prime

Minister Curtin with a request that the Commonwealth consider a national approach. The memorandum was also sent to thirty Australian organisations and individuals asking them to support the

Society’s representations.14 As with her earlier letter to Emil Nulsen

concerning education, there was, disappointingly, no reply from the Prime Minister’s office.

‘I do not forget my lovable, responsive Aboriginal pupils, and how

cruelly they are excluded from a chance to earn their living’, Mary wrote to Charles and Phyllis Duguid.15 Teaching had been for her

the most valued and positive activity of her life. Like all committed

teachers she gave of herself and had felt the need, after a decade of teaching with almost no collegial opportunities, for professional stimulation. Despite the accolades she had received for her teaching

from educationist Anton Vroland, support offered from the schools’

inspector, and her authorship of two books, she felt inadequate to the task. Mary hoped to undertake a teacher training course in London.

In June 1944 she sat examinations to qualify her to matriculate so that

she could apply for admission at the University of London. She was placed in the second division in English, elementary mathematics, French, English literature, geography and English history. But teacher14 15

Minutes 26 May 1943, ASAPS papers, MSS Brit Emp. S20/E2/22, Oxford. Bennett to Charles and Phyllis Duguid, 15 February 1943, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA.

– 27 7 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

training in Britain towards the end of the war years was in a state of

flux. A new Education Act was passed soon after Mary’s matriculation

results came out, with the aim of unifying and streamlining the diverse training institutions. In anticipation of the school leaving age being raised, an emergency training scheme was set up aimed particularly at

ex-services people.16 In the competition for places a sixty-three-yearold woman from Australia may not have been high on the list. Or Mary may have changed her mind about pursuing this avenue. All we do know is that she did not enrol at the University of London.17

Through the war years in London Mary wrote, but, unlike her

driven and efficient writing in 1929 which had become The Australian

Aboriginal as a Human Being, these writings remained as drafts. In them we see a researcher who regularly read both Commonwealth and

state Hansards, had access to a clipping service of Australian papers on Aboriginal issues and had brought to England her own archive of material which she had collected over more than two decades. But

unlike her earlier life in London, this time she also brought with her the experiences of Aboriginal people, hurt by government policies.

These, such as the account of Douglas Munmurie being forced into work and jumping from a moving train to return to his wife when

being transported out of the area for police work, she related again and again. They remained to her as vivid as when she had first heard

them. Letters from Robert Powell, her retired missionary friend, Charles and Phyllis Duguid from Adelaide, and her pupil Gladys Vincent, who wrote regularly to her during the London years, kept

Mary up to date on Australian news. She felt almost a maternal bond 16 17

www.history.ac.uk/history/teacher ‘training-up to the 1960s’.doc, accessed 7 October 2015. Research undertaken by Geoffrey Bolton and Jim Gibbney for entry on Mary Montgomerie Bennett for ADB entry on her, ANU Archives.

– 278 –

D ora and G ladys

with Gladys and the other young women such as Dora Quinn who had such a lonely experience in her first job and Sadie Corner who

wanted to be a nurse. These lives Mary had made possible through the provision of a good education, the extra lessons on the weekend

and her inspiring stories of Aggrey, Washington Carver and others

who became leaders of their people. Letters from Australia kept alive in Mary an intense awareness of individual struggle as people’s

lives were controlled and limited by the State. Communicating these

human stories which were so close to her, within the broader task of developing an argument for a more imaginative, less punitive

approach to Aboriginal people who were, theoretically at least, Australian citizens, must had seemed almost overwhelming. These

writings – ‘Natives and Food’, ‘Liberty to Marry Partner of Choice’, ‘Detention without Trial’, ‘No Freedom of Contract for Natives’, as well as comparative studies of banishment without charge or trial and

the issue of Aboriginal wives being required in some circumstances

to give evidence against husbands – show her deep concern for what was happening in Australia and especially in Western Australia.18

Postwar possibilities ‘That all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from

fear and want’ was the inspiring message from the Atlantic Charter as Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt set

goals for a freer and fairer postwar world. Mary’s fellow activist Phyllis Duguid took up the challenge on behalf of Aboriginal

Australians, reminding readers that as Australia looked to its

responsibilities towards Papua New Guinea and Melanesia there 18

Charles Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

was an ignored minority within our borders. ‘For 150 years there has been a steady decline in numbers of the original inhabitants in this

country. Extermination is not too strong a word as a little research

into historical records will show’.19 In London Mary recognised

that the time was apt to publicise her thoughts on Australian racebased policies. A friend who was on the British Council for Civil Liberties put her in contact with journalist Geoffrey Parsons. Mary

made available to him reports, newspaper cuttings and parliamentary debates to assist Parsons in writing about the denial of civil liberties to Aboriginal people. She also shared her personal experiences with him and praised this ‘brilliant young writer, who served with the RAF

in the Far East during the war’ for his ability to relate policy to lives.20

Parsons set the tone of this fifty-five page booklet with two

prefatory quotations. Dr Evatt, leader of the Australian delegation to the Paris conference, wrote that:

One of the purposes of the United Nations is to achieve international co-operation in promoting and encouraging not only respect for, but observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction of race, sex, language or religion.

He counterposed this quotation with a comment by Dr A. Grenfell

Price:

Because of the treatment of its Native population Australia has become recognised by countries as the most backward and meanest of the English-speaking countries.21 19 20 21

Phyllis Duguid, ‘Atlantic Charter and the Aborigines’, The Dawn (Women’s Service Guilds paper), 19 April 1944, p. 4. Mary Bennett to Jean Devanny, 23 December 1946, Jean Devanny Archive, JD/ PP/9, James Cook University Archives (hereafter JCU), Queensland. Cited in Parsons, Black Chattels: The Story of the Australian Aborigines, British Council of Civil Liberties, London, 1946.

– 280 –

D ora and G ladys

His account of conditions in Australia was heavily reliant on material supplied by Mary. He retold the account of the children of

full descent beginning their education at Mount Margaret but he provided a broader picture of Mary’s involvement with the people

and awareness of their experiences at the hands of the police. He quoted Mary verbatim:

On the twenty-first of September, 1936, two Aboriginal men whom I know came to tell me of their experience, which was so surprising that I wrote it down as they told it to me. They were camping with about fifty other natives three miles north of Laverton, and hunting. On Saturday, the twelfth of September, a party of pastoralists and police came with guns, rushed into the camp and made the Natives hold their hands up while they shot their dogs. Then they made the Natives scalp the dogs. The police burnt the Natives’ blankets, broke their hunting implements, and told them to move into the Laverton common paddock. There were many Native children in the camp at the time of the shooting. A dog when shot fell on Rachel, a little girl of six, but my Native friend told me that in reply to another Native’s request to the police to be careful, the constable replied, ‘It doesn’t matter if I do shoot a kid. It can’t be helped’.22

Parsons used this account to explain the position of people driven

from their hunting grounds, impoverished and then rounded up to

be controlled. We know from Mary’s unpublished papers that the

children in this group were the ones whom she later took in to begin

teaching in 1941 and that the baby sister of Rachel, the little girl on whom the dog fell, suffered a disorder of the central nervous system,

known at the time as Saint Vitus’ Dance, as a result of this trauma. Mary’s close acquaintance with cultural conflict enabled her to 22 Parsons, Black Chattels, p. 15; Mary Bennett to Charles and Phyllis Duguid, 15 February 1943, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA; Mary Bennett, ‘Natives and Food, n.d, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

understand the origins of conditions like Rachel’s. Through Parson’s

Black Chattels at least she was able to see both her research materials

and her personal experiences brought together by an experienced journalist. Work without wages, lack of education, the loss of their children to the state, inhumane working conditions and a loss of civil

liberties – these life experiences for Aboriginal people in Australia

were set out by Parsons and supported in the main from Mary’s ample research materials: royal commission reports, newspaper articles, material from Hansard and more.

Back in postwar Australia there were signs of a growing openness to

new ideas. A strike on May Day 1946 by Aboriginal pastoral workers

in the Pilbara intensified and popularised opposition to Western Australia’s draconian Native Administration Act. The Communist

Party of Australia, unions, leftist sympathisers and religious leaders

joined forces to form the Committee for Defence of Native Rights in Perth. When news of the strike broke in London the Anti-Slavery

Society turned to Mary, who was by this time a member of the Australian subcommittee of the Society, for information and advice.

She told the Society that Dr Jolly, the chairman of the Committee for Defence of Native Rights, was ‘a man of status, served in the war

against Japan, is now a doctor in a very busy industrial district where he is much beloved by the people’.23 She kept the Society informed about the case against Don McLeod, the white man who facilitated

the strike who was accused of breaching section 39 of the Native

Administration Act. Under this section it was an offence for a non-

native to visit a native camp without permission. Mary explained that the Aboriginal workers had invited McLeod to a meeting and that 23

Bennett to Charles Roberts, chairman, Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, ASS, MSS Brit Emp s22, G953a/4, Oxford University.

– 2 82 –

D ora and G ladys

the department had refused rations to the strikers in a bid to push

them back to the pastoral stations. She provided information to the Society while, uncharacteristically, keeping her views on this matter

to herself, apart from praising the people engaged in support. She

wrote to McLeod expressing her support, as a member of the AntiSlavery Society in London, for the striking Aboriginal workers.24

Mary’s support for the strike was, however, reported in some detail

in the Western Australian Communist Party of Australia newspaper Workers’ Star. The paper quoted at length Mary’s letter to Dr Jolly as

she expressed hope that ‘the Trade Unions will now take the matter up and go through with it’. She was quoted as telling Jolly:

The thing is to sweep all these atrocious serf conditions away now. Of course the Native and Aboriginal Departments are Labour Bureaus with powers of Hitler and authority to collect the wages of the natives whom they assign.25

We know from Frank Bray’s private boast to his minister that Mary was closer to the truth in this statement than public utterances from the Western Australian Government.

The Aboriginal pastoral workers’ strike marked the beginning of

the effective politicisation of Aboriginal affairs in Australia when unions, the Communist Party of Australia and other left wing bodies

energetically supported the striking Aboriginal pastoral workers.

Previous to the strike, support for Mary Bennett’s work came more from individuals and organisations motivated by a Christian humanitarianism. Bodies such as the Victorian Aboriginal Group 24

25

Max Brown, Black Eureka, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1976, p. 134. See also Don McLeod, How the West Was Lost: The Native Question in the Development of Western Australia, Port Hedland, D. W. McLeod, 1984; Michael Hess, ‘Black and Red: The Pilbara Pastoral Workers’ Strike 1946’, Aboriginal History,18, 1994, pp. 65-83. ‘Native Rights: London Backing’, Workers’ Star, 2 August 1946. Thanks to Jan Richardson for pointing out this article to me.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

and its secretary Amy Brown supported Mary’s work at Mount Margaret but were chary about being forthright in criticising Aus­

tralian governments. Now, as Mary saw trade unions and the left generally appearing to take more interest in the rights of Aboriginal workers, she turned to these new allies, sometimes losing supporters, such as Amy Brown.

Christmas 1946 saw Mary still in London, writing to Jean Devanny,

Queensland writer and communist, and assuring her that she would

be at her current address for the next six months.26 In January,

however, she applied for a cancelled berth to return to Australia. Perhaps news from her former pupil, Gladys, that she was starting in her first teaching position at Roelands Mission in the rolling hills of the south-west near Bunbury, was an incentive to return. Mary wrote

to Greenidge, secretary of the ASAPS, explaining that she only got the call from the shipping company four days before the ship left on 7 February and felt that:

… it was a call to return to the only work in which I am happy – teaching the responsive, confiding Aboriginal children, who would, otherwise, have no teacher. But it is a great wrench to leave ‘my ain countree’ and it is sad to have to leave in such a hurry that I had to go without seeing many dear friends again. I am discarding all plans. I trust God to show me what work I am to do, and to place me where I am to work’.27

Mary’s sense of mission, her conviction that God wanted her to

work for justice for Aboriginal people, was strongly felt. She was a Christian, with a purpose in life, but was not a conventional missionary. According to a former pupil she was a loner at Mount 26 27

Bennett to Devanny, 23 December 1946, JD/PP/9, JCU, Queensland. Bennett to Greenidge, 14 February 1947, ASS, MSS Brit Emp s22, G953a/4, Oxford.

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D ora and G ladys

Margaret who kept to herself.28 We do know that she was prepared to work with others who were committed to the Aboriginal cause regardless of their religious or political affiliations.

Western Australia, late 1940s Among the 1,500 passengers on the Asturias which berthed at

Fremantle on 6 March 1947 were migrants coming to Australia to

start a new life and Australian residents returning after the war. Dark clouds threatened rain as the crowds gathered on the wharf

to meet friends and relatives. Mrs Mary Montgomerie Bennett,

occupation given as teacher and age as 65 years, didn’t really fit either

category. She was not migrating to start a new life, and she thought of England as her country so she was not really returning home either.29

Mary scanned the hundreds of upturned, excited faces on Victoria

Quay looking for the two young women – former pupils – who she

had not seen for six years. She was overjoyed to spot the smiling face of Dora Quinn, now a secondary student in Perth, and the bubbly

exuberance of Gladys Vincent, who was a qualified kindergarten teacher. Mary pictured Dora as the shy little girl clinging to her

mother Lily who Mary was teaching to spin and weave at Mount Margaret after having had her older two children taken from her by the State.30 Now she looked like a confident young woman.

Supporting and assisting her two former pupils became Mary’s

raison d’être over the next two years. Gladys Vincent had been the first baby to be born at Mount Margaret Mission. Mary had heard 28 29 30

Cotterill to Taffe, 27 July 2015. ‘Many Passengers: Arrival of Asturias’, The West Australian, 7 March 1947, p. 18; Passenger arrivals for Asturias, NAA, Perth Office. Bennett to Greenidge, 8 March 1947, ASAPS, MSS Brit Emp s22, G953a/4, Oxford.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

the stories of her almost being choked to death at birth.31 Whenever

she saw Gladys, Mary was conscious of how fortunate they were to have her. Being back in time to see Gladys open her school at

Roelands Mission in the wheat-belt country south-east of Perth

was a special experience for Mary. Here was her former pupil now teaching her own people, with the skills to assist them to find their

way in life.32 Because Gladys was a missionary as well as a teacher,

however, she had responsibility for looking after nine children in her mission house as well as teaching kindergarten classes. There were

eighty-five children on the mission and Gladys’ ‘family’ comprised one three year old, three four year olds, two six year olds and three

seven year olds. Gladys was twenty-three years old. Mary made a

number of visits to Roelands to support her former student and was impressed with her methods, and planning, as we would expect as

Gladys was using the techniques she learned from her own teacher and mentor, Mrs Bennett.

The Mission Council, however, were in Mary’s view exploiting

their hard-working, gifted, young teacher. Mary drew the Mission Council’s attention to Gladys’ pupils’ success at the state tests despite

the fact that she was also caring for her nine children when she left the classroom:

… like a mother, giving each one a bath every night, and toothbrush drill and doing their hair, hearing their prayers and praying with them, and tucking them up at night; getting them up in the morning, hearing their prayers and attending to all their hygiene drills, preparing them for meals and school through the day; washing their clothes and bedclothes, ironing, mending, making, etc, etc, etc. 31 Morgan, Drop in a Bucket, p. 66. 32 Personal communication with Gladys Tapim (nee Vincent), 26 May 2008.

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D ora and G ladys

Thus it comes about that ONLY ONE QUARTER OF MISS VINCENT’S DAY IS SPENT IN BENEFITING THE CHILDREN WITH HER UNIQUE TEACHING GIFT. A difference between Miss Vincent’s work, and work for a family, is that in a family of nine children some children are old enough to help, whereas the children whom Miss Vincent cares for are too small to help and need constant attention.33

Mary drew on her old network, the Women’ Service Guilds and its

spokesperson Bessie Rischbieth, to promote and publicise the success of her former pupil.

News of a ‘survey of native affairs’ to be conducted by Magistrate

F.  E.  A.  Bateman brought Mary back to Perth from Roelands

where she sought support from the Women’s Service Guilds for the submission she intended to make to Bateman. A rapprochement with Bessie Rischbieth led Mary to provide her with a copy of the evidence

which she would present to Bateman as well as materials concerning

the Indian position in South Africa. As always she sought to broaden other activists’ understanding of the negative effects of colonialism.34

Western Australian historian Neville Green has argued that in

deciding on the Bateman survey the government was reacting to a

view that their protection policy was out of step with international agreements for Indigenous people, but Bateman’s recommendations, which were tabled in June 1948, concentrated on tweaking the existing

Act to create a register of employers of Aboriginal workers, collect maintenance from white fathers of Aboriginal children and allow a

right of appeal to be instigated for Aboriginal applicants under the 33 34

Bennett to Roelands Mission Council, 3 June 1948, Duguid papers, MS 5068, series 11, NLA; Bennett to Secretary, Women’s Service Guilds, Perth, 14 September 1948, Rischbieth papers, MS2004/12/135, NLA. Bennett to Rischbieth, April and May 1948, Rischbieth papers, MS 2004/30, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Natives Citizens’ Rights Act. Mary would have been pleased to see her

argument that Aboriginal de facto partners have the same rights as

spouses accepted, but she had no expectations for greater educational opportunities for Aboriginal people, telling Phyllis and Charles

Duguid that Bateman was influenced by ‘Mr Neville’s wholly vitiated views about exterminating the full-bloods, letting them die out, and

breeding out the mixed race people’. According to Green, Bateman, unlike Mary Bennett, could not imagine Aboriginal people in any occupation apart from a trade or domestic work.35

Dora Quinn, the young woman who had had the alienating

experience of work on the farm outside Perth, was also hoping

to become a teacher. She boarded in Perth with Robert Powell

and his wife, who had helped her earlier. The Powells also offered

accommodation to Mary, and Dora acknowledged that ‘dear Mrs Bennett was a gifted teacher and a great help when I was studying for my Junior Certificate’.36 By the end of 1948 Gladys was established as a teacher at Roelands, (and being exploited as Mary pointed out), Dora

was through her exams and Sadie Corner (who had been preparing

for nurse training by assisting Matron Murray at Mount Margaret) was about to travel to Melbourne to begin her nursing studies. Like a

mother whose children were grown Mary wrote to her friend Charles Duguid ‘I shall be free’ as she explored her next move.37

Ernabella, the South Australian desert mission established by

Duguid, had long been of interest to Mary. On the eastern edge 35

36 37

F. E. A. Bateman, Survey of Native Affairs, Perth, 4 June 1948; Neville Green, ‘Royal Commissions and Inquiries, Indigenous’, in Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard (eds), Historical Encyclopaedia of Western Australia, UWAP, Crawley, 2009, pp. 78082; Bennett to Duguid, 4 July 1948, MS5068, series 11, NLA. Cotterill to Taffe, 27 July 2015. Bennett to Duguid, 4 July 1948, MS5068, series 11, NLA.

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of the Central Aborigines Reserve, Ernabella Station was a sheep

property situated in an area where ‘doggers’, white men who traded in dingo scalps, paid the Pitjantjatjara people in flour and sugar

before selling each scalp for more than seven shillings each to the

South Australian Government. Observing that the doggers all had

Aboriginal women, Duguid knew it was too late to isolate the people from European influence but he hoped that the establishment of a

reserve would deter the doggers. Mary would have been particularly interested in the role played by Bob Love whom she had first met when she spent time in 1931 at Kunmunya Mission which she had

enthusiastically describing as having ‘a thoroughly sound progressive native policy’.38

In 1937 Love had been asked to survey the area and write a

proposal for a mission. He wrote of the creeks timbered with gum

and the flats with mulga, and a vegetable garden which could

be extended. More than half of the property was rugged hilly country, good hunting grounds where people would be encouraged to maintain their food gathering skills. Love rejected ideas of stocking the Central Aboriginal Reserve, expressing the view that it would

be devastating to the country. Already large areas had been eaten

bare by rabbits which had become a staple food for the Pitjantjatjara. They were, however, destroying the grasses and other seed bearing

plants on which the people had traditionally depended. Love envisaged a mission in which the Presbyterian Church would work cooperatively with the government and the University of Adelaide.

This was a point of difference with Mount Margaret Mission where the superintendent and the Commissioner for Native Affairs were at 38

Bennett to Cooke, 2 November 1931, Constance Cooke papers, GRG52/32/52, SASA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

loggerheads and where anthropologists were treated with suspicion

when showing an interest in tribal practices which the missions were trying to discourage.39

Love had learned to speak the Worrora language when he was

at Kunmunya in the Kimberley and began learning Pitjantjatjara when he took up the position as superintendent at Ernabella in 1941. He argued that ‘the missionary must be an anthropologist and a

linguist, if he is going to be any good in these reserves’.40 Mary was

interested in Duguid’s proposal that at Ernabella the children would learn in their mother tongue with ‘the missionaries learning the language of the natives and getting to understand their side of the

clash of culture as well as ours’.41 At Mount Margaret during Mary’s

time there Schenk had forbidden members of his staff to learn the people’s language.42 Although she was publicly loyal to Schenk she did not agree with this ruling so she would have been interested in

seeing Ernabella where there was a more progressive, less prejudicial approach to language.

With Duguid’s encouragement she contacted the superintendent

and arranged to visit in December 1948. That year a measles epidemic

had swept through Ernabella where about 220 people were nursed 39 40

41 42

J. R. B. Love, ‘Report on Ernabella Mission’, August 1937, Appendix 1, in Winifred Hilliard, The People in Between: The Pintjantjatjara People of Ernabella, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1968. Rod Schenk, Prayer Letter, 3 September 1924, cited in Ian Duckham, ‘Visionary, Vassal or Vandal? Rod Schenk – Missionary: A Case Study in Western Desert Missions’, in Limina, vol. 6, 2000, p. 49; J. R. B. Love, ‘Report on Ernabella Mission’, August 1937, Appendix 1, in Hilliard, The People in Between. Rani Kerin, Doctor Do Good: Charles Duguid and Aboriginal Advancement, 1930s–1970s, Australian Scholarly Press, North Melbourne, 2011. A. P. Elkin, cited in John E. Stanton, ‘Mount Margaret: Missionaries and the Aftermath’, in T. and D. B. Rose (eds), Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions, Australian Association for the Study of Religions, South Australia, 1988.

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D ora and G ladys

and over twenty people had died. Mary wrote with enthusiasm about

‘how wonderful it will be to see a mission to the unspoilt natives’

and to hear ‘of the wonderful battle from which the mission has just emerged against that terrible epidemic’.43 She wrote to Matron

Murray at Mount Margaret and to the Warburton Mission to

warn them of the possibility of the disease being carried west.

‘We ought to know what is happening and what measures the Commonwealth and South Australian Governments are taking to

help the Missions to combat the epidemic and complications’, she told the Women’s Service Guilds.44

As with her earlier initial visits to missions, Mary arrived with

a loom and plans to teach spinning and weaving. Working with the older women, she built on their traditional spinning skills with

human hair, assisting them to adapt their technique to wool. In the heat of summer, Mary later recalled, ‘with perspiration pouring off

our faces, arms and legs, we sat in the then new school building setting up and weaving scarves on the very primitive loom’.45 About forty women were involved in spinning and ten girls took up rug-

making and weaving. Her knowledge of traditional Aboriginal culture, as well as her expertise in spinning and weaving, was

invaluable in establishing a new industry at Ernabella. Was she considering applying to stay and teach? The last teacher had left in 1947 and the position was vacant. Mary was 67. She had come

back to Australia suddenly, with a trust in God to show her what work she should do. She was also aware of the fact that there was a 43 44 45

Bennett to Duguid 4 July 1948, Duguid papers, MS 5068, series 11, NLA. Mary Bennett, Report on the measles epidemic, n.d but June 1948, Rischbieth papers, MS2004/12/125, NLA. Letter from Bennett, cited in Hilliard, The People in Between, p. 172.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

teaching vacancy at Canarvon but she did not apply for it.46 Instead,

on 13 December 1949 she again boarded ship bound for London.47

London again, 1950 Dora Cotterill, nee Quinn, has lived on the Eastern Goldfields,

the land of her Wongatha people, all her life. She was brought up at Mount Margaret, worked at Warburton Mission, and lived at Laverton for many years. Her life experience was in such contrast to

that of her teacher whom she observed never seemed to want to settle in one place for a long time.48 Mary wrote and spoke often about the importance to Aboriginal people to be in their own land; such a

contrast to her own life experience, always on the move, travelling, staying with friends, never establishing her own home.

The Western Australian Native Affairs Administration put some

effort into discrediting Mary’s critique of their policies. Amy Brown,

long-time secretary of the Victorian Aboriginal Group, had been a supporter of Mary’s educational program at Mount Margaret. Now she was questioning Mary’s work to Commissioner Bray, even sending him one of Mary’s letters (for which he thanked her) in 1943 over the

children of full descent whom she was told she could not teach. Bray

had described Mary as ‘a critic of official Native Administration … similar in type to a Member of the Opposition in Parliament’.49 Amy Brown, influenced by A. O. Neville who was now an active member

46 47 48 49

Bennett to Duguid, 4 July 1948, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA. Passenger List – Outgoing Passengers, Otranto, departing Fremantle 13 December 1949, NAA,Perth Office. Cotterill to Taffe, 15 February 2014. Bray to Leeper, 3 March 1944, Citizens’ Education Fellowship (Victorian Aboriginal Group), MS9212/3653/1(b), SLV.

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D ora and G ladys

of the Victorian Aboriginal Group, had begun to question Mary’s version of events.

In September 1950 from West Ealing, London, where she was

staying with her friend Mrs Marsh, Mary wrote a long, enthusiastic letter to her friend, Victorian activist Helen Baillie, announcing the publication of her eight page pamphlet, Hunt and Die, published by the Anti-Slavery Society. It set out her own vision for the future for

those Aboriginal people still living according to their tribal ways and her exposure of a prevalent view put thirteen years earlier at the 1937 conference of Commonwealth and state Aboriginal authorities that

the continuation of a laissez-faire approach to Aboriginal people of the full descent ‘would probably lead to their extinction within 50 years’. She asked Helen Baillie to get copies of the pamphlet to ‘Mr Ferguson, Mr Onus, Doug Nicholls and other Aborigines who really care for their people’.50

Hunt and Die argued that, for tribes living in the desert, drought

meant death by starvation. She explained that infanticide was a

necessity when people were living traditionally when a mother

already had an infant. Two babies would mean that in the desert they would not reach the meeting place at the end of a day. Despite this necessary practice, she wrote that Aboriginal women love their

children as much as white women love theirs and if their children are taken from them ‘they die of grief ’. Mary presented what she, and some others such as Charles Duguid, saw as a moral question

which Australia had to face: Aboriginal desert dwellers hunting traditionally and dying during drought while there was a glut of food in the south of the country. 50

Bennett to Baillie 2 September 1950, Christophers papers, MS 7992, add-on, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

She recalled a picnic in the Musgrave Ranges when she had been

at Ernabella the year before, with about twenty tribal children. While the whites in the party paddled in a rock hole, the children

covered twelve and a half miles following tracks and returning exhausted with just five or six small lizards. This experience

had persuaded her that, with encroachment by whites into these marginal hunting lands, there was no longer a future for a life sustained by hunting.51

Hunt and Die condemned Aboriginal affairs administrators through

their own words. Mary quoted from the 1937 inter-governmental conference. Commissioner Neville from Western Australia had told

his counterparts from other states and territories that ‘the Aboriginal problem’ would eventually solve itself. He explained: ‘There are a

great many full-blooded Aborigines in Western Australia living their own natural lives. They are not, for the most part, getting enough

food.’ Professor Cleland of the South Australian Advisory Com­

mit­tee argued that ‘I cannot imagine the Musgrave Aborigines, left

as they are, increasing beyond their present numbers … It would

be much more economical to leave them in their present tribal conditions’. Dr Cook, Chief Protector in the Northern Territory, believed that if ‘we leave them alone they will die out and we shall

have no problem’.52 A minority position put by Chief Protector

Bleakley from Queensland was the position which Mary took:

They have no chance whatever in competition with white races … In our view it is absolutely impracticable to expect these

51

M. M. Bennett, Hunt and Die, Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, London, 1950, p. 4. 52 Bennett, Hunt and Die, pp. 6-7.

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D ora and G ladys

people to come into a white community without technical equipment.53

Mary concluded her pamphlet by asking: ‘Why should the Aborigines not be taught to earn their living in the more profitable ways –

herding, gardening and other industries – and hunt only of their own volition, not because they are starved into it?’54

The publication of Hunt and Die and contact with like-minded

activists in London who were working for the rights of colonised people in Africa and India seemed to energise her. She met Michael

Scott, author of Shadow Over Africa, who was both a source of ideas and inspiration. An Anglican priest who, like Mary, had

been described as a fanatic by his enemies, Scott worked in South

Africa campaigning for a just solution as the dogma of apartheid grew in popularity as a way of managing ‘the race problem’. Mary

listened to him speak and was struck by his concern for nomadic peoples. Although he was speaking about Africa she felt certain that his thinking applied equally to Australia. She was impressed

with a scheme developed by a committee supporting Scott’s work for providing nutritious food for Africans.55

As well as meeting Michael Scott and Geoffrey Parsons she was

in contact with a broad network of people whose work in Africa and

India was relevant to her own thinking about the responsibilities

of colonising nations to those whose social structures had been destabilised. Reginald Bridgeman and Michael Carrick of the Overseas Subcommittee of the National Council for Civil Liberties, both of whom had written about India, Mr Joseph-Mitchell who 53 Cited in Bennett, Hunt and Die, p. 8. 54 Bennett, Hunt and Die, p. 9. 55 Bennett to Baillie, 2 September 1950, Christophers papers, MS7992, add-on, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

was interested in Aboriginal education and had been working with

a Norwegian ethnologist, and Australians with whom she renewed acquaintance such as Florence Rutter and Ernest Bryce and his wife,

members of the Sydney-based Association for the Protection of Native Races, all stimulated Mary’s thinking. Letters she wrote

late in 1950 give a sense of optimism and connection with like-

minded people.56 Through 1950 she had maintained the services of the newspaper clipping business, keeping abreast of Aboriginal

news across the country such as moves in Kalgoorlie to prohibit

Aboriginal people from coming within a ten-mile radius of the town. She had used her time in London to write, to expose the cynicism and inherent racist attitudes expressed by some of the state administrators towards Aboriginal people.

Events in Australia disturbed Mary. She had told her Melbourne-

based friend, Helen Baillie, that she looked forward to seeing her in London in 1951 but she was worried about the Commonwealth Government’s plans to build a road from Alice Springs to Laverton

through the Central Aboriginal Reserve in preparation for the joint British–Australian atomic weapons testing station in what was

generally believed to be uninhabited, waterless desert.57 She was still

physically in London, but socially, emotionally and intellectually she was engaged with Dora, Gladys and the Aboriginal people of the Eastern Goldfields. Their reality – and the injustices they continued to face – seemed to be an irresistible pull.

As in 1947, she made another sudden decision to return to Aus­

tralia. She enquired about the possibility of a cancelled berth and, 56 57

Bennett to Baillie, 2 September 1950, Christophers papers. See, for example, newspaper articles, Kalgoorlie Miner, 2 May to 10 August 1950, CAR, MS12913, box 4, SLV; Bennett to Baillie, 2 September 1950, Christophers papers MS7992, add-on, NLA.

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D ora and G ladys

when she was offered one, took it. She was sad at not being able to say goodbye to English friends such as Dorothy Shipman and Doris Beckh, who both shared Mary’s passion for justice for Aboriginal

Australians. Both would remain in contact with her through the following years. Dorothy was a chemist whom Mary described as

being ‘in the very forefront of progress’, having a clear brain and a

charming personality, which she used to influence English public opinion. Mary would send her Tindale’s tribal map of Australia when

Dorothy requested it as a part of her own educative purpose. Doris

Beckh had known Mary since her days at Amwell in Hertfordshire where she was living with her husband Charles and writing her

father’s biography. Doris knew of Mary’s attachment to her Mount

Margaret pupils, especially Dora Quinn and Gladys Vincent who were now both teachers. She described Mary as ‘the bravest woman

I have ever met’, a person of ‘utter unselfishness’.58 Mary would

continue to send information to Doris about the campaigns in

which she was involved, such as her opposition to the poisoning of waterholes in Western Australia as a method of controlling the kangaroo population. Those people who were still hunting, being illiterate, would be unable to read the warning signs.

As was the case four years earlier, she wrote that she regarded the

opportunity of the cancelled berth as God leading her ‘to return to

my work here’.59 She was drawn away from her sense of belonging to

England by a stronger sense of responsibility to a people whom she remembered as having made her childhood happy. 58 59

Doris Beckh to Ada Bromham, 13 and 26 May 1962, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc8303A//2, SLWA. Bennett to Greenidge, 26 February 1951, ASAPS, MSS Brit Emp, s22, G953a/4, Oxford.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Through these London years we observe a woman who was so

committed to her cause that she again distorted the evidence to strengthen her argument. So horrified was she by Commissioner

Bray’s attempt to rip the children of full descent from their Mount Margaret classes that she failed to acknowledge that, in the end, after the court appeal, the children were allowed to stay at Mount

Margaret. We might wonder, too, about her correspondence with Jean Devanny, who was not shy about her membership of the Communist

Party of Australia. Was Mary as naïve as she made out about the growing politicisation of Aboriginal affairs in Cold War Australia?

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Cha pte r 11

FA M I L I E S Peter Pontara and Human Rights for Aborigines Splitting the family can be as deadly as splitting an atom. Mary Bennett to Shirley Andrews, 27 March 1954

If I and my aborigine children could change places, they have my opportunities and I have their restrictions, what I should see would be a mental and spiritual eye-opene. Mary Bennett to Shirley Andrews, 28 April 1954

Mary disembarked at Fremantle wharf in February 1951. This, her

eleventh trip between England and Australia, would be her last. The Commonwealth Government’s plans to build a military road from

Alice Springs to Laverton to serve the needs of those working on

the rocket range project concerned her. The road would go through the Central Aboriginal Reserve.1 Might this news have been a factor in her sudden decision to return to Australia early in 1951? During

her decade at Mount Margaret she had become close to the desertdwelling people and was clearly upset at yet another incursion into 1

Bennett to Helen Baillie, 2 September 1950, Christophers papers, MS7992, add-on, NLA.

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

their fragile and demanding desert world. Many, but not all, had come in to the towns; no-one knew how many people were still living a hunter-gatherer life in the desert which was to become a testing station for the new atomic weapons.

Mary’s ideas about the importance of education, the sanctity of

the family and the need for positive, creative support for Aboriginal people as they became more engaged with mainstream society drove her. When she was in London, letters from Gladys Vincent, her

former pupil, now a teacher herself, had kept her in touch with the

Wongatha people. Memories of her most rewarding experiences drew her back to Western Australia, to its eastern goldfields where

these children, now adults, were having their own families in a

shadow world invisible to most of white Australia. They belonged

neither in their past hunter-gathering society nor in the regulationridden white one which had replaced it and which sought to con­

trol them. These Wongatha people, whose land had become mining

country, she would describe as ‘my families’, so engaged would she become in their daily struggle for life.

With her own biological family on the east coast of Australia, she

still had no contact. She had not seen her sister Helen since she left

England with their mother after the armistice in 1919. Mary had

also lost contact with her brother Robert (Roy as he was known in

the family), and had not met his wife Thelma. Helen and Stewart

Roberts’ daughters, Rosemary and Elizabeth, were the only members of the younger generation in the Christison family and yet Mary,

while she vehemently defended the Aboriginal family and wrote passionately about the importance of family life, had never met, nor even written to her nieces who by this time were adults.

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FA M I L I E S

Australia, early 1950s Mary arrived back in Australia at a time when there were some signs

of hope for those advocating for a better deal for Aboriginal people in Western Australia. In 1948 Stanley Guise Middleton had arrived to take up his appointment as Commissioner of Native Affairs.

With anthropological training and experience in New Guinea, he

brought a new sense of purpose to the task of assisting Aboriginal Western Australians towards inclusion in Australian society with ‘reasonable equality in all facets of community life’.2 In his attempts to implement this policy approach he was faced with opposition from the old guard in the department, hostility from the police who were

no longer favoured as ‘Aboriginal protectors’ and public indifference.

He recognised, as did Mary, that reforms for Aboriginal people could only be substantial when the racial prejudice of the public was less pervasive.

In the Pilbara Don McLeod had assisted Clancy McKenna and

other Aboriginal leaders to set up their own mining operation fol­

lowing the 1946 strike. An Aboriginal community was now able to make a living without having to work for white pastoral managers.

This was a promising, new departure which gave confidence to the Pilbara people who had been involved in the strike. It provided inspiration to white activists in Perth who had formed themselves

into a Committee for the Defence of Native Rights, and further

afield for activists in other parts of Australia and London who were supporting the Pilbara group’s efforts at economic independence.3 2 3

Cited in Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens, p. 241. See Jan Richardson, ‘“They Couldn’t Break Me”: Don McLeod, Champion for Aboriginal Justice in the Pilbara’, PhD thesis, Monash University, 2017, for more on McLeod; and Anne Scrimgeour, ‘“To Make It Brilliantly Apparent to the People of

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

The appointment of Paul Hasluck as Minister for Territories

signalled a purpose within the federal government to more seriously

address the position of Aboriginal Territorians. Hasluck had worked as a journalist in Perth, travelling with the Moseley Royal Com­

mission in 1934. He was the author of Black Australians, a study of

the relationship between Aboriginal people and settlers during

the first decades of contact in the west and was eager to develop an Aboriginal policy which might apply across the country if he could

persuade his state counterparts to accept his ideas. To this end he

convened a meeting of state and territory ministers responsible for Aboriginal welfare in September 1951 and secured the acceptance of a new approach which became known as ‘assimilation’. He reported: Assimilation means, in practical terms, that in the course of time, it is expected that all persons of aboriginal blood or mixed blood in Australia will live like white Australians do.4

Mary gave provisional approval to this approach, explaining

that assimilation ‘is like grafting and will not prosper unless the heath and vigour of the stock are maintained. Personal contact of parents and children is essential – the first necessity’.5 If the Western Australian authorities gave greater priority to Aboriginal education,

that would be to the good – so long as family life was not sacrificed in pursuit of the assimilation goal.

4

5

Australia”: The Pilbara Cooperative Movement and the Campaign for Aboriginal Civil Rights in the 1950s’, Journal of Australian Studies 40, no. 1, 2016, pp. 91-103, for the development of Aboriginal companies and co-operatives in the Pilbara. Paul Hasluck, ‘Report on the Native Welfare Conference’ held in Canberra, September 1951, in Sharman Stone (ed.), Aborigines in White Australia: A documentary History of the Attitudes Affecting Official Policy and the Australian Aborigines, 1697–1973, Heinemann Educational Books, London, 1974, p. 196. Bennett to Bromham, 1 November 1955, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN 2958, Acc 8383A/9, SLWA.

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FA M I L I E S

An incident in the same year of Mary’s return received public at-

tention. In 1951 an Aboriginal strike over wages and living condi-

tions at Berrimah Compound in Darwin led to the creation of a new body in Melbourne, the Council for Aboriginal Rights. This strike

was supported by the North Australian Workers’ Union (NAWU).

The Northern Territory Department of Native Affairs used its power under the Northern Territory’s Aboriginals Ordinance to exile Fred

Waters, the Aboriginal strike leader (whom the authorities regarded

as a trouble maker), to Haasts Bluff, 1,200 miles from his Darwin home. In publicising this injustice – Waters had not been charged

with any crime – the president of the NAWU, Murray Norris, travelled to Melbourne to address the All-Australian Trade Union

Congress. He spoke about the economic exploitation of Aboriginal

workers in the cattle industry, bringing the issue to the notice of unionists. Those following the issue in the southern presses came

to understand that the deeply held principle of habeas corpus which

protected citizens against detention unless they had been charged with an offence, did not apply to Aboriginal Territorians. Following

Murray Norris’ address, a public meeting was called in Melbourne to discuss ways to address this and other injustices.

From this meeting the Victorian Council for Aboriginal Rights,

was formed. This new organisation, guided by the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, planned to ‘conduct and

organise the widest possible support for a campaign to obtain just­ice

and humane treatment for all Australian aborigines’.6 It was a new

approach for such a body to consider the Aboriginal question broadly, outside its state borders. At this time Aboriginal affairs was a matter 6

Draft Constitution, Council for Aboriginal Rights, CAR, MS12913/9/6, SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

for state jurisdictions. Federal responsibility for Aboriginal people was limited to federal territories: the Australian Capital Territory

and the Northern Territory. Just a month after this body had been set up the inaugural honorary secretary, Henry Wardlaw, received

a letter from Mary. Her Melbourne-based activist friend Helen Baillie had alerted her to the new Council’s existence and Mary

had joined immediately.7 She explained to Wardlaw that ‘there was a very fine body here which did useful work till it was white-anted by

an enemy getting in’. She was referring to the Australian Aborigines’

Amelioration Association and ‘the enemy’ was Perth business­man

Albany Bell, whose work in supporting Roelands Farm Mission Mary

disapproved of.8 This was the beginning of a long association with the Council for Aboriginal Rights, especially after Shirley Andrews succeeded Wardlaw in the position in 1952.

Back in Perth and staying with friends Mary turned her attention

to Amy Brown’s criticism of her pamphlet Hunt and Die which had

been forwarded to her from the London Anti-Slavery Society. Brown, the long-time secretary of the Victorian Aboriginal Group, had

been very supportive of Mary’s educational work at Mount Mar­garet.

A new committee member, retired Commissioner for Aboriginal Affairs in Western Australia, A. O. Neville, took issue with Mary’s use of the term ‘impressment’ when describing Aboriginal labour in

the armed forces. That Aboriginal men were coerced into working

for the army during the war, we know to be so from Commissioner 7

8

Bennett to Wardlaw, 29 June 1951, CAR, MS12913/1/1, SLV; Helen Baillie to Mary Bennett, 30 May 1951, ASAPS, MSS Brit Emp s22, G953a/4; see Sue Taffe, ‘The Council for Aboriginal Rights (Victoria)’, Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, ANU, http://adb.anu.edu.au/essay/8/text29426/, originally published 11 April 2014, for more on this organisation. Bennett to Wardlaw, 16 July 1951, CAR, MS12913/1/1, SLV.

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FA M I L I E S

Bray’s private admission, but Neville was offended by Mary’s asser-

tion. The Victorian Aboriginal Group also took issue with Mary’s argu­ment that there was ‘a movement amongst the white people’ de-

signed to force Aboriginal people to hunt for a living.9 Amy Brown advised Mary to ‘bring herself up-to-date in matters concerning the aborig­ines throughout Australia’.10 Mary was more up to date than

Brown was. Even five years later the Eastern Goldfields District

Officer privately described ‘an unemployable surplus of labour’ on the Gold­fields. He added in his log book that the plan was ‘to provide

rations only to old and infirm. Get the fit to hunt’, but he admitted ‘apart from east of Cosmo-Newbery and in the Mulga Queen area [it is] doubtful that people could survive by traditional means’.11

Mary’s ten page footnoted rebuttal of the Victorian Aboriginal

Group’s criticisms was longer than her original pamphlet. She mis­

quoted Brown at one point. It may not have been a conscious er-

ror, but it was the sort of thing for which she was often criticised. Brown had written that ‘thousands of natives are now working within the white community, and more and more are being trained at government institutions and Missions for a like purpose’. Mary

responded: ‘You say that “thousands of Natives are being trained at Government institutions and Missions”. I should like to know

…’ and she listed thirteen questions asking where these educational institutions were, how many people were being taught and the nature

of the teaching program. The shift of ‘thousands’ from one phrase

to the next may have been an error on her part. Her confrontational 9 10 11

Amy Brown to the Anti-Slavery Society, n.d., Citizens’ Education Fellowship, MS9212/3653/1(e), SLV. Mary Bennett, Hunt and Die, ASAPS, London, 1950. District Officer’s Inspection – Eastern Goldfields subdistrict, B McLarty, 1955, cons 993, item 40, SROWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

style, however, led her critics to withdraw from her intensity. Frank

Bray had earlier told Amy Brown that Mary had ‘a persistent and lifelong critical attitude towards the Government’.12 It was a fair comment.

Education remained, in Mary’s view, essential given that the tra-

ditional hunter-gatherer way of life (even for the small number who

might be pursuing it) was at an end. A couple of weeks after she had disembarked she wrote a piece for The West Australian on Aboriginal education, arguing that there was an ‘urgent need for an Aboriginal

College including kindergarten, junior, secondary, technical and

teacher-training schools, where Aboriginal pupils would have the joy of adventuring together in new skills without losing contact with

their own people’. Anticipating rebuttal of this proposal, she argued that if Australia could give £8,000,000 for development in Malaya

and £90,000 for scholarships to Asiatics it could duplicate these sums for Aboriginal students in their own country.13

The strange case of Peter Pontara In July 1951 Mary accepted a teaching position in a desert mission even more remote that Mount Margaret. The Australian Aborigines

Evangelical Mission, a breakaway group from the United Aborigines Mission which had established Mount Margaret, had opened a

mission in 1949 on Madura station, an abandoned pastoral lease on

the edge of the Nullarbor Plain. By the time Mary was investigating

the possibility of teaching again, the mission had relocated further west, to Cundeelee, forty kilometres from Zanthus, a remote railway 12 13

Frank Bray to Brown, 8 October 1943, Citizens’ Education Fellowship (Victorian Aboriginal Group), MS9212/3653/1(b), SLV. ‘Aboriginal Education’, The West Australian, 10 March 1951, p. 16.

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FA M I L I E S

siding for the Transcontinental Railway which was more than 200 kilometres east of Kalgoorlie. It was not an ideal place for a mission.

Water had to be trucked in from Zanthus but the Western Australian Government was happy to approve it, hoping that its existence would

decrease the number of Aboriginal beggars running next to the train

with outstretched hands when it slowed at Zanthus. As Cundeelee was a government rationing point it was also planned to draw indigent

Aboriginal people away from Kalgoorlie where, during an influenza epidemic, white residents had described the Aboriginal population as a ‘reservoir of infection’.14

Mary confided in Henry Wardlaw: ‘It is the sufferings of the

people you see that burn your conscience’, adding:

It does make you wonder what these friendly responsive little mites could achieve if only they were allowed to maintain their kinship and humanity, the sense of touch, the sense of a vigorous community seeking good for all.

She warned Wardlaw, who was new to the politics of Aboriginal

affairs, about ‘Mr Neville … a fountain from which sweet water and bitter water proceed, the sweet water for people of importance

but bitterness capable of dementing the unfortunate natives at his

disposal and taking away every remaining shred of dignity by the Regulations’.15

Cundeelee staff were, in Mary’s initial estimation, ‘very fine

Canadian missionaries’; this opinion would later change. They re­

port­ed her arrival to Commissioner Middleton, commenting on her success in teaching the children’.16 Unlike Mount Margaret, which 14 15 16

Cited in Bennett to Andrews, 8 September 1954, p. 2, CAR, MS12913/4/6, SLV. Bennett to Wardlaw, 22 September 1951, CAR, MS 12913/4/6, SLV. E. J. Telfer to S. G. Middleton, 13 November 1951, ‘Cundeelee Native Mission’, cons 993, series 2030, 0795/1951, SROWA; Bennett to Wardlaw, 22 September

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

was well established when Mary had arrived there, Cundeelee with

sixty-five Aboriginal residents was at an early stage of development.

Mary taught children who had come in from the desert with their parents and had only a word or two of English.

In mid-1953, two years after Mary began work there, the mission

was disrupted when a rather public sexual liaison between the

super­intendent’s wife and another missionary led to two missionaries resigning. Arguing that open infidelity between mission staff meant that it was not ‘fair or reasonable to demand a higher standard from

the natives than from the white missionaries’, two days later Mary also resigned.17

She left the mission with the image of one of her pupils etched on

her mind. Peter Pontara was a boy of about ten years old, whom she had been teaching for two years and described as ‘the finest brain in the neighbourhood’.18 Unlike the other children, he did not have family members at the mission. According to Mary his parents came

from a tribe towards whom the local people were hostile and, once they had found food and safety for Peter at the mission, they left to find somewhere to live where they would feel accepted, planning

to return for their son once they had found such a place. Peter’s situation would come to symbolise for her what she saw as wrong

with the Western Australian Department of Native Administration. It did not respect the Aboriginal family and was prepared to separate parents and children without taking account of the damage of such

an approach but it maintained publicly that children ‘are not taken from parents excepting by Children’s Court orders, under the same 17 18

1951, CAR, MS 12913/4/6, SLV. Mary Bennett, ‘Cundeelee Mission, Western Australia’, 11 August 1953, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN 2958, Acc 8383A, SLWA. Bennett to Andrews, 10 October 1953, CAR, MS12913/4/6, SLV.

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FA M I L I E S

circumstances and procedure as obtain in the case of abandoned or neglected white children’.19 Mary would show the flaws in the Administration’s stated policy.

In September 1953 Mary was back in Perth, staying with Mrs

Dobie, a friend who had been on the staff at the Perth Bible Institute when Dora Quinn had enrolled after her traumatic work placement.

Having been the only teacher at Cundeelee, she was feeling the

weight of her decision to leave. But before she left she had wrung a promise from the field director of the mission that he would

arrange for the Education Department to run a bus the twenty-six miles from Cundeelee to Zanthus so the children could continue

their education in the public school there. This promise provided

some temporary relief for Mary’s conscience. Her movement about Perth, boarding with various members of the mission community,

mirrored her unsettled state of mind. She was anxious, worried and concerned about the Cundeelee children, writing ‘one suffers

more than one cares to think’.20 She could not forget her promising

student, Peter Pontara, who had shown himself to be so good at

arithmetic and who had an independent mind and a desire to solve problems himself.

In October Mary wrote an impassioned letter to Shirley Andrews,

the new honorary secretary of the Council for Aboriginal Rights in Melbourne, about Peter, trying to interest her in the boy’s future.

It was a heartfelt letter expressing pain and anxiety and is worthy of close attention. She wrote of ‘the burden of a heavy anxiety’. In

discussing Peter’s potential with the superintendent of the Mission, 19 20

Stanley Guise Middleton to the Secretary, Anti-Slavery Society, London, 9 July 1956, cons 1733, 56784-007, SROWA. Bennett to Andrews, 10 October 1953, CAR, MS12913/4/6, SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Mr Stewart, Mary alleged that the superintendent had told her of his

desire to take Peter to Canada. Mary described to Shirley her two

years of misery ‘imagining this desert child developing TB in the raw climate of Western Canada or the arctic cold of eastern Canada,

in a ghastly loneliness, and mocked at whenever he went out because

he was different’. She explained to Shirley that Mr Stewart had given up the idea of taking Peter to Canada but Mary’s continued anxiety led her to ask the Mission Board for an assurance that Peter

would not be taken out of his country. She wrote that Mr Stewart later denied that he had ever made such a suggestion and that the

Board had angrily accused her of ‘plotting a frame-up against the Superintendent’. Mary denied this. ‘I am telling you my experience’, she explained to Shirley,

because it is the sort of thing that keeps on coming up again, and when it comes up again I may not be here, so I want you to have all the facts, and I do pray you to protect our children – I feel you will – against deportation to an alien climate just to gratify somebody’s greed or vanity and ‘property’ in another’s soul.21

The level of anxiety which this letter expressed about a threat

which Mary accepted as no longer existing is as puzzling as is Mary’s

writing about her sense of guilt. She recalled one of her students who had been nearly choked to death as a baby by her mother. This

had happened before Mary’s arrival at Mount Margaret; she had had nothing to do with this event and yet twenty-five years later, when she saw Gladys Vincent, now a successful teacher herself, Mary

described the feeling of guilt as ‘a load’.22 Now she wrote that she 21 22

Bennett to Andrews, 10 October 1953. Bennett to Greenidge, ASAPS Brit Emp s22 G953a/2.

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FA M I L I E S

suffered two years of misery imagining a desert child in the cold of Canada when she had been told he would not be going there.

As we know, fifty years earlier another Aboriginal child in Mary’s

life had faced the real possibility of life away from her adoptive

family in the cold of Canada. During the summer of 1900 when

Mary was ill with unexplained headaches and vision problems, Mrs

Christison, who had changed her mind about keeping Jane, was exploring the possibility of Jane going to a Canadian Home.23 The

Christisons, keen to be relieved of further responsibility for Jane, appeared not to have considered the possible effect of their decision to abandon Jane on their own children, especially Mary, a highly

sensitive, imaginative young woman. Perhaps the mention of Canada as a possibility for Peter resurrected buried memories of her mother’s Canadian Home solution for Jane and the veil of silence which had been cast over Jane’s fostering and disappearance two years later.

Mary had not met Shirley Andrews face to face when she poured

out her anxious concerns about Peter but she knew her through her writings. A biochemist, Shirley worked at the Royal Park psychiatric

hospital in Melbourne. She had been raised by her grandmother so

her single mother could work. When she was in secondary school she had boarded at St Michael’s, an Anglican school with strict

nuns who, according to Shirley, did not like children.24 Her mother had died when she was a young woman and Shirley developed as

an independent, self-reliant person with a strongly developed social conscience. She had joined the Communist Party of Australia, 23 24

Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 28 and 31 May 1900, Christison family papers, TR1867, items 32 and 35, SLQ. See Sue Taffe, ‘Shirley Andrews: An Architect of the National Aboriginal Civil Rights Movement, 1952–1968’, History Australia, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, for more on Shirley Andrews’ activism.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

believing that socialism was the way to a more just society. Shirley had experienced discrimination against women when she was a

science student in a predominantly male cohort at Melbourne Uni­ versity in the 1930s, later attributing to this experience her empathy

with Aboriginal people, the butt of racial discrimination in Aus­

tralian society. Shirley put her skills as an analytical thinker to good use in her new role, gathering and collating data from all over

Aus­tralia and using it to ask confronting questions of bureaucrats

and politicians. She was not easily deterred from her purpose, one bureaucrat complaining irritably about ‘the copious correspondence emanating from a body of amateurs which has its headquarters in a

state whose native population is almost extinct’.25 Such insults only strengthened Shirley’s resolve.

Thirty-four years Shirley’s senior, Mary praised her younger friend,

describing her as a ‘very brave girl to take up the cause of defenceless

Aborigines’.26 Mary regularly provided information about Aboriginal

conditions of life in Western Australia to the Council for Aboriginal Rights which Shirley used in the Council’s quarterly Bulletin which

she had begun producing in April 1953. Despite their different life experiences they respected each other and Mary trusted Shirley

as a person of integrity. Unaware of Shirley’s membership of the

Communist Party, Mary once told her ‘I have found Communists

(the real ones) are as cruel and unjust and soulless as vested interests and privileged people in power’.27 (Mary was probably also unaware that her Queensland correspondent Jean Devanny was also a member

of the party as was Barry Christophers, the President of the Council 25 26 27

McLarty to Andrews, cited in Andrews to Hegney, 19 June 1954, CAR, MS12913/1/11, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 10 November 1954, CAR, MS12913/4/6, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 20 February 1955, CAR, MS12913/4/7, SLV.

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FA M I L I E S

for Aboriginal Rights with whom she would also develop a strong activist friendship.) Shirley probably also kept her atheism to herself in

communicating with Mary who was sustained by her Anglican faith,

though she confessed to Shirley ‘I disagree on so many things and

very much over the taking of Aboriginal wages in Queensland which the Church in Queensland found acceptable’. Both women, despite

their memberships of political party or church, were independent thinkers, especially on issues relating to Aboriginal Australians.28

Mary attempted to gain an interview with Commissioner Middle­

ton about Peter Pontara to state Peter’s right to live with his parents while attending a mission school. She began to see herself as being at war with the Department of Native Welfare and the mission authorities as she fought on Peter’s behalf. Increasingly the language of conflict featured in her writing. She wrote that ‘the enemy’ (meaning

the staff of the Department of Native Affairs) was ‘totally unscrupu-

lous’. Pastoralists who were influential in Western Australian politics were ‘bitter enemies’. When she sent material to the Anti-Slavery

Society, she hoped ‘these papers will provide you with some ammunition’. The Department of Native Welfare resented her meddling in

what they regarded as solely their affairs and would not listen to her valid concerns. She needed to reconsider her tactics.29

In March 1954 Mary began her campaign concerning ‘the case of

Peter Pontara’. She set out her account of what had happened. Dur­

ing a severe drought John Tjantjiga and his wife Fanny Baninya from the Warburton Ranges had brought their son who was about nine years old to Cundeelee Mission as the family was facing starvation. 28 29

Bennett to Andrews, 20 February 1955, CAR papers, MS12913/4/7, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 16 April 1955, 15 November 1959, CAR, MS12913/ box 4; Bennett to Fox-Pitt 15 April 1956, ASS Brit Emp s22 G953a/2.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

The local tribes at Cundeelee were hostile to the newcomers so the

parents had left their son with the missionaries while they went to look for a home. They found one at Kurrawang Mission, near

Kalgoorlie, a hundred miles west and John returned for their son. The superintendent of Cundeelee mission refused to let Peter go with his father. Baninya did not come because she had been threatened by a woman from a menacing tribe when the couple were first at Cundeelee. So the parents could not live in this hostile environment

and the Cundeelee superintendent would not allow Peter to leave with his father.

Mary explained, furthermore, that the children at Kurrawang

Mission, where Peter’s parents were living, were catching the bus

which went past the mission to attend schools in Kalgoorlie. Peter

could be near his father and mother and have the opportunity of the

best schooling in the district – ‘which he deserves’ because ‘he had proved himself as an able student’. Mary concluded her case:

There is no case for parting Peter from his parents, who are perfectly good parents and perfectly willing for him to attend school at Kalgoorlie, who ask only for their child to live in the same mission where they live, instead of in a mission which they cannot visit because the local tribe is hostile to the parents’ tribe and extends this hostility to the son. Peter was never neglected by his parents, and he was never a delinquent child, he is not restored to his parents only because he is a native child, and his perfectly well-behaved father and mother have no opportunity to state their case and get their child back. [her underlining]30

‘Peter’s case’, Mary wrote to Shirley, ‘is in direct contradiction to

the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states in article twelve “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with 30

Mary Bennett, ‘The Case of Peter Pontara’, 13 March 1954, CR, MS12913/4/6, SLV.

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FA M I L I E S

his privacy, family, home”’. She sent ‘The Case of Peter Pontara’ to her activist contacts in London and around Australia asking for

their support. She pointed out that under section 8 of the Western Australian Native Administration Act the Commissioner of Native

Welfare was ‘the legal guardian of every native child’. She further explained:

The result to the desert Aborigines of being under this law and not knowing English, is that they lose their Human Rights: for State Departments deal with the native community IN THE MASS, but human beings suffer INDIVIDUALLY. They suffer the oppression and frustration of discriminatory laws which infringe more than one Human Right, and they suffer their personal tragedies, of which Peter’s case is an example. [her capitals]31

This analysis highlights the difference between Mary’s responses

to the suffering of individuals whose human rights were not respect­

ed and that of a public servant or a politician seeking to establish policies and practices which would help the department respond as cheaply and efficiently as possible to the needs of people making the

transition from their earlier society to the now dominant one. Mary

insisted that Peter should be able to gain an education, like any white Australian child, without sacrificing family life with his parents.

Potential allies were deserting her. The Women’s Service Guilds

expressed faith that the Commissioner would do what was right

for the child; the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society referred the matter to the Western Australian Agent-General and

seemed to accept, disingenuously, despite knowing that Peter’s parents were illiterate, that they had not made an ‘official appeal for him to 31

Bennett to Andrews, 27 March 1954, CAR, MS12913/4/6, SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

be transferred to another school’.32 Mary wrote to Paul Hasluck, the Minister for Territories, but he politely pointed out that the matter

was not within his jurisdiction. A further trouble, she told Shirley

Andrews, was that ‘none of the missionaries will help me. Mr Stewart

has intimidated them all, and the junior Native Department officials

also’. She admitted to being ‘confused with all the puzzles’ but began to see the issue as ‘a bigger thing than the liquidation or survival of one family. Tjantjiga and Baninya and their son Peter Pontara stand

for the Aborigines of the Australian Desert in their last desperate effort to live’. ‘We must be most careful’, she told her friend and

supporter Ada Bromhham, ‘to deal out some sledge hammer facts

that are perfectly incontrovertible … so that the enemy cannot twist them or charge us with saying anything that we do not prove’.33 Mary,

by this stage of her life, was aware that questionable evidence would damage her cause. She did not, however, admit that Peter himself appeared to be content enough with his present circumstances.

While Ada Bromham of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union

wrote up the Pontara story for her association’s journal, the White

Ribbon Signal, and Charles Duguid spoke about the case in a talk in Perth, it was only the Council for Aboriginal Rights in Melbourne

which took up the issue with energy and determination. Shirley Andrews wrote to William Hegney, Minister for Native Welfare in

Western Australia; Reverend Sopher, President of the Cundeelee

Mission Board; and Ross McLarty, Central District Aboriginal

Welfare Officer a number of times. McLarty would not accept Mary’s statement that Peter’s parents had asked for their son to be 32 33

Bennett to Andrews, 4 May 1954; Anti-Slavery Society to Mary Bennett, 4 June 1954, CAR, MS12913/1/10, SLV. Bennett to Bromham, 17 May 1956, MN2958, Acc 8383A, SLWA.

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FA M I L I E S

returned to them. There was no ‘concrete evidence’ for this he told Andrews, by which he presumably meant no letter on file from the parents who could not write.

The Administration’s public position was now that, although it

had the legislative power to remove Aboriginal children from their parents under section 8 of the Native Administration Act, it no longer used this power. McLarty told Andrews that when Peter was asked specifically whether he wished to leave Cundeelee to go with his

parents to Kurrawang his reply had been ‘No. I like it here. They

can come and see me’.34 After a concerted campaign of letter writing Shirley admitted to Mary that the Council could do no more. As

both women knew, because Peter was a ward of the Commissioner

under Western Australian law, his parents had no rights as parents, not because their child was neglected but because he was Aboriginal. Shirley pointed out, however, the difference in tone in the letters

that both women had received from Cundeelee and the Department of Native Welfare. These correspondents told Shirley that she was

misinformed, but they did not argue the facts with Mary, instead trying ‘to tactfully slide over the whole affair’ as Shirley put it.35

As well as her concern about the destruction of the Aboriginal

family, Mary identified a further injustice in the Peter Pontara

case. She had learned through her attentive reading of Western

Australian Hansard that the superintendent at Cundeelee was trying to secure apprenticeships in the mines for two boys, one of whom

was almost certainly Peter, who at this time would only have been about thirteen.36 Not only was the family torn apart, but now the 34 35 36

Ross McLarty to Shirley Andrews, 13 May 1954, CAR, MS12913/1/9, SLV. Andrews to Bennett, 21 May 1954, CAR, MS12913/1/9, SLV. Western Australian Hansard, Part 1, no. 20, first session 1953, p. 2,780.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Mission superintendent was promoting child labour in the mines

for Peter. She decided to go to Kalgoorlie to see Peter’s father, John

Tjantjiga. In November she boarded the trans-Australian train. She

had no definite plans beyond gaining an understanding of what the possibilities of life were for Aboriginal families such as Peter’s on the Eastern Goldfields.

Kalgoorlie, 1950s, Human Rights for Aborigines Residents of the mining town of Kalgoorlie could not close their eyes to the question of where Aborigines fitted into white Australia. It was a frontier town where a disintegrating tribal desert culture met

a modern industrial culture with its mines and its ideas of progress.

In 1950 some residents had tried to solve the problem of indigent

Aboriginal groups wandering their streets begging by writing to the Native Affairs Department requesting that Kalgoorlie ‘be made a

prohibited area within a ten mile radius for natives’.37 The request was rejected but the tension and unease between the white people in houses and the Aboriginal people on shelterless, windy reserves with

few amenities continued. The main Kalgoorlie Aboriginal Reserve is horrible, Mary told her friend, Ada Bromham, ‘a half-caste family is

always taking drink there, and the women are always having their heads broken’. Mary described Kalgoorlie as ‘a wicked place’, where ‘young people take the old people’s rations’ and bakers are told they

are not to offer yesterdays’ bread to the hungry, nor butchers to offer meat offcuts.38 It was a society which had not found a solution to the

influx of tribal people who years earlier had been living in the desert. 37 38

Kalgoorlie Miner, 3 June 1950. Bennett to Bromham, 13 March 1956, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN 2958, Acc 8383A/9, SLWA.

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FA M I L I E S

Rations were not given to young people, who were encouraged to find work, but there was almost no work for untrained people and, apart from the few with experience on pastoral stations, most Aboriginal people had not received any training of any kind.

People and personal relationships as well as principles informed

Mary’s political activism. Hearing of the experiences of others was

often a catalyst to action, heightened by her empathetic, imaginative ability to put herself into another’s shoes. ‘If I and my [Mary in­serts ‘aborigine’ before ‘children’ as a clarifying afterthought] children could change places, they have my opportunities and I have their

restriction, what I should see would be a mental and spiritual eye opener’, she once explained.39 This was a source of strength, as she would fight for individuals because she was committed to them, as well as because of the principles in which she believed. It was also

the cause of ongoing suffering for her when she was unable to help good people whose families she had sometimes known for decades

and who had been ignored by the State. Bowie was ‘the dearly loved

daughter’ of Lulu whom Mary had brought to Kalgoorlie Hospital in

1933 with a gangrenous arm when the station manager had failed to remove a tourniquet. In 1954 Mary met Bowie in a Kalgoorlie street.

Bowie, with a rag around her arm, was carrying her own baby and begging. Mary suggested that she go to the hospital but the baby was naked. She hadn’t washed its clothes. ‘But where’, Mary asked,

‘could she wash them? Was there any place except Paddy Hannan’s

memorial water bag effigy in Kalgoorlie? a public drinking place? Would she be allowed to wash the baby’s clothes there? And where

would she dry them? On her person? It was hot enough’.40 Poverty, 39 40

Bennett to Andrews, 28 October 1954, CAR, MS12913/4/6, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 30 November 1954, CAR MS12913, box 4, SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

hunger, lack of housing, no education, few prospects of work – the

problems were immense for those Mary saw as victims whose rights were not protected by Western Australian law.

She visited Peter’s father, Tjantjiga, who was in Kalgoorlie hos-

pital with a burned back. She learned that an Aboriginal man had

stolen his wife, Baninya, when he was off hunting. Tjantjiga had set off to track them but one night rolled into his fire and burnt his back, near Menzies, eighty-one miles north of Kalgoorlie. Tjantjiga

had set off to walk to Kalgoorlie and had been found on the road by police four weeks later with infection setting in. She described

Tjantjiga as a broken man who called ‘Peter’ and ‘Cundeelee’ and, despite the language barrier, shared with her his distress at losing his son. ‘I am very anxious about this family’, Mary wrote to Shirley.

‘There is another son Jack, Peter’s elder brother, who cannot read

and write because he has not been taught – a good stockman. His spirit is not yet broken’.41

By January 1955 Mary had decided to rent a small timber cottage in

Forrest Street, on the edge of the town. Living in Kalgoorlie allowed

her to ‘sit where they sit’, as she put it, understand how things looked from the perspective of an Aboriginal person. She also wanted to

‘set out the true position of Peter’ for, as she explained to Shirley Andrews, ‘segregation is extermination whether or not officials deny it and I condone this crime if I do not try to fight it to a finish’. Her

goal was to see Peter reunited with his family at Kurrawang Mission

near Kalgoorlie where he could access education and eventually earn

a living. This would not be possible at Cundeelee where dogging and pulling sandalwood were the only occupations available to 41

Mary Bennett, Human Rights for Australian Aborigines: How Can They Learn Without a Teacher?, ‘Truth’ and ‘Sportsman’ Ltd, Brisbane, 1957; Bennett to Andrews, 27 November 1954, CAR, MS12913/4/6, SLV.

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FA M I L I E S

Aboriginal men.42 Education, she knew, was not enough; people had to be given the opportunity of work once they were trained.

She became more deeply involved in the circumstances of Peter’s

family. Mary wrote a longer version of ‘The Case of Peter Pontara’ but its detailed analysis of sections of Acts and extracts from parliamentary

debates made it difficult to read and it was of limited public value. In April 1955 at a church service in Kalgoorlie she met Peter, for

the first time since she had left Cundeelee two years earlier. She

told Shirley that she shook hands with him but that he ‘immediately drifted away inconsequently’. ‘Thinking it over afterwards’, she

explained to Shirley, ‘I realise that he could do nothing else, seeing

he has to avoid trouble’. He had been so much a part of her thinking and writing over the past eighteen months that she seemed unable to realise that Peter, still living at Cundeelee, probably knew nothing

of Mary’s actions on his behalf. By this time she was more closely engaged with helping Peter’s father, telling Shirley Andrews, ‘I had a

good father so I must help other fathers’.43 She considered using the

rest of her savings to taking action in court, fantasising that maybe

‘a hard fighter like Dr Evatt could be induced to take habeas corpus action on behalf of Peter’s father’ but she was persuaded that this line of action would fail and would bankrupt her.44

The story of Peter and his family’s predicament illustrated what

happened when the human rights of individuals were not respected. Peter’s story became in her words ‘the coping stone’ for Mary’s last

piece of published writing. In the winter of 1955 she set up the 42 43 44

Bennett to Andrews, 28 January 1955, CAR, MS 12913/4/7, SLV. Dogging refers to trapping and trading in dingo scalps. Bennett to Andrews, 16 April 1955, CAR, MS12913/4/7, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 16 April 1955. Herbert Vere Evatt, an eminent lawyer, was leader of the Australian Labor Party Opposition at this time.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Australian Aborigines, Fundamental Human Rights Trust Fund, dedicated primarily for the purpose of publishing, selling and dis­ trib­uting a book which she envisaged writing to be called ‘The

Aus­tralian Aborigines, Fundamental Human Rights’. Mary made a payment of 650 pounds to the trust fund to be drawn on by her old

friend Ada Bromham of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who would effectively be critic and encourager, editor, designer, agent

and distributor of what would become Human Rights for Aborigines:

How Can They Learn Without a Teacher? This work was a natural progression from her book The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being published in 1930 and the booklet Teaching the Aborigines which

she wrote when she was at Mount Margaret. The former set out to show Aboriginal society in all of its full and complex humanity. The

latter provided evidence of her success as a teacher and thus of the possibility of Aboriginal people being able to make the transition to

modern Australian society. Now she demonstrated that the society

which they would inevitably join did not necessarily respect their rights despite Australia having ratified the Universal Declaration of

Human Rights. Laws in state jurisdictions restricted these rights. Her task, as she saw it, was to show the Australian public how such laws damaged people’s lives. She had many examples to draw upon

but, recognising the challenge, wrote to her friend Ada Bromham ‘I have got a thing that’s too difficult for me but I can’t let go. I’ll do the best I can and then send it to you’.45

Mary drew on her extensive thirty-year-old archival library, stored

in cardboard boxes always ready to be packed up for the next move, be it London, Perth or Kalgoorlie. It included reports, Hansards, 45

Mary Bennett to Ada Bromham, 14 September 1956, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8303A, SLWA.

– 32 2 –

FA M I L I E S

letters, newspaper articles, research, newsletters from various activist

organisations and much else. She also drew on her own person­

al experience as she worked steadily through 1956. She was now seventy-five, often giddy and with high blood pressure and other

diabetes-related health problems. She did nothing except work at the

book and ‘give an early meal to hungry Aborigines who can’t find work and don’t get rations’.46 In November 1956 she wrote to Ada, ‘my

very dear Friend, here is the end at last’, parcelling the last chapter up and posting it to Ada in Brisbane who was ready to begin editing

the manuscript.47 It wasn’t the end but the two women would work together over the next year preparing it for publication.

This work would demonstrate the various ways that Australian

governments failed to honour the Declaration of Human Rights with

regard to Aboriginal Australians. Each chapter of this sixty-page booklet ends with the citation of one of the articles of the Declara­

tion which the previous pages have shown to be broken in various

ways with regard to Aboriginal Australians. So Article 3: ‘Everyone

has the right to life, liberty and the security of the person’, comes

after an abridged history of the settlement of the country involving shooting parties and ‘rewards offered for the heads of inoffensive natives’ and ‘tribes driven from the areas where game abounded’.48

In the chapter titled ‘The Significance of the Aboriginal Family’

Mary set out Peter’s story. She wrote about the family as ‘the first university where learning was apprenticeship for life’. As she was writing she recalled her own family life, immensely enriched by

Wyma, ‘my darling old black nurse’ who ‘was a marvellous actress 46 Bennett to Bromham, 12 August 1956, MN2958, Acc 8303A, SLWA. 47 Bennett to Bromham, 8 November 1956, MN2958, Acc 8303A, SLWA. 48 Bennett, Human Rights, p. 5.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

and used to keep us entranced’.49 She had been such an important

part of Mary’s education and had introduced the Christison children

to a joyousness in learning which was so refreshingly different to the English-style classroom. Mary retold her father’s story of a little

Dalleburra boy who trapped a bee and fastened a bit of down to its

body in order to track it back to the hive so he could collect the honey. Her memories were about more than nostalgia however. She wrote: Australian Aborigines grew up in these conditions and won the admiration of the white men who lived with them; yet we robbed them of their land and their living resources together, and denied and destroyed their culture, without providing education to enable them to support themselves and their families and bring them into a different civilisation.50

This is as close as she ever got to articulating a recognition that her father was responsible for the losses of the Dalleburra people; that he was not exempt from criticism.

In Human Rights for Australian Aborigines she told Peter’s family

story, beginning at Yapu Kiti in the Blackstone Range near the bor­ ders of Western and South Australia and the Northern Territory. A

severe drought led Tjantjiga to bring his wife and two sons in to the white people’s settlement at Cundeelee. Here the missionaries

renamed the newcomers: Tjantjiga became John, his wife Baninya,

Fanny, the older son King-tjin became Bob Crowley, sometimes called Laughing Jack, and the younger son Pontara was named Peter Jamison. Mary explained the tribal hostilities between the family

and the local Aboriginal people which led to the parents leaving

their younger son while they sought another place to live. As we know, the superintendent refused to relinquish Peter when Tjantjiga 49 Bennett to Andrews, 27 November 1955, CAR, MS12913/box 4. SLV. 50 Bennett, Human Rights, p. 34.

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FA M I L I E S

returned for him. Mary explained to her readers that under section 8 of the Native Administration Act Aboriginal children were under the

guardianship of the Commissioner of Native Affairs. There was no appeal mechanism which the parents could call upon. Peter was not withheld from his parents because they were neglectful parents, but because he was Aboriginal.

Mary gave a further example of official contempt for family ties.

The Commissioner of Native Affairs planned to use his powers to

separate parents and children in the Warburton Ranges, taking

children, without the consent of their parents, to the mission at Cosmo Newbery. She had earlier explained the background to this decision. The Central Aboriginal Reserve which was still a hunting

ground for some nomadic groups was now compromised with a

rocket range established to test atomic weapons. Two hundred and fifty thousand acres had been ceded to the Commonwealth to establish a weather station at Sladen Water to support the atomic testing. A further four million acres were made available for mining.

‘There is evidently no question of the Minister giving the parents the right to object to the enforced separation from their children’,

Mary told her readers, before quoting Article 12 of the Declaration: ‘No-one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home’.51

Mary invited Shirley Andrews to contribute a chapter on ‘the

future’. In this eleven-page addendum Shirley set out the arguments

for fairer pay and working conditions in the pastoral industry where

the Aboriginal station worker had long been referred to as the ‘backbone’ of the grazing industry in the Northern Territory and the

Kimberley. She wrote about the need for Aboriginal adult education, 51 Bennett, Human Rights, pp. 40-41.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

assistance to tribal people making the transition to industrial society,

and greater federal responsibility Australia-wide in Aboriginal affairs. Most importantly Andrews critiqued the policy of assimilation put forward by the federal government in which a minority people are ‘just absorbed and swallowed up by the larger group’. She argued

for a policy of integration of two equal and friendly groups, ‘one the

original inhabitants of Australia with their background and culture rooted deeply in this country, and the other, the larger group of new inhabitants, the descendants of migrants from many European countries’. Shirley wrote of:

This duty and responsibility because our national prosperity is entirely based on the natural resources in the land that our ancestors stole from these people. We would be merely paying a long overdue debt, if as we advocate, Government money should be spent on providing special facilities to make up for those denied in the past.52

Ada Bromhan was convinced that the sooner Mary’s book was

in circulation the greater would be its importance to ‘the whole Aborigines question’. She argued that ‘only an enlightened public

opinion can force governments to deal justly with them’.53 Human

Rights for Aborigines was in circulation by September 1957 when criticism of Australian governments’ treatment of its Aboriginal ‘citizens’ was building and activists Australia-wide were organising.

‘The psychological moment’ In 1956 two initiatives, which had their origins partly in concern about the effects of the British–Australian joint atomic testing program in 52 53

Shirley Andrews, ‘The Future’, in Bennett, Human Rights, p. 59. Bromham to Bennett, n.d., but late 1956 or early 1957, MN2958, Acc 8303A, SLWA.

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FA M I L I E S

the Central Australian Desert, together created the conditions for

social reform. The first, in the Western Australian Parliament, was a powerful speech by Bill Grayden MLA on 26 September, the

day before the first atomic explosion at Maralinga, South Australia, calling for an inquiry to investigate the conditions of life of people

living tribally in the Laverton–Warburton Ranges area. As an avid Hansard reader, Mary was overjoyed to hear Grayden expressing sen­ timents which were dear to her heart. He vehemently rejected the

splitting of the Aboriginal family and he drew attention to seven

articles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights being

broken in the proposed treatment of the Warburton Ranges people who were affected by the rocket range project. She read, with a feeling

of hope, of the decision by the Western Australian Parliament in September 1956 to appoint a select committee to inquire into the

health and welfare of the Warburton Ranges–Laverton Aborigines.

Finally, the plight of the desert people such as Peter’s family was being recognised. The inquiry would be led by Grayden who already

had experience in the central desert country and would report

back to the parliament in December with recommendations. She followed with interest the work of the committee and applauded its

recommendations, some of which she had been making herself for years – such as the need for a technical college in a centre such as

Kalgoorlie to train Aboriginal people for work that actually existed.54

This was the first Western Australian parliamentary investigation

to conclude that the State should accept full responsibility for the

welfare of all natives in the Warburton–Laverton area. Mary ordered 54

‘Report of the Select Committee appointed to inquire into Native Welfare Conditions in the Laverton Warburton Range Area’, presented by W. L. Grayden, 12 December 1956, First session of the twenty-second parliament, Government Printer, Perth, 1956.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

twelve copies of the report and began ‘planting them out’ to Shirley Andrews and other contacts in Australia and England, as was her

habit.55 By January 1957 Shirley was telling her with some excitement that the issue had broken in the east coast daily papers.56 The report

exposed a complete lack of official understanding of the position of those still living traditional lives and others, described as civilised,

who had had contact with missions. The place most highly favoured

by the local people for game and water was Sladen Water which had become the site for a Commonwealth weather station to support

the development of the Maralinga rocket range and was thus lost to the local hunters. The Warburton Ranges controversy, as the debate

over the conditions of life of the desert-dwelling people east of the Warburton Mission was called, shocked Australians when footage of

stick-limbed children with the distended bellies of malnutrition were shown on newsreels, in the newspapers and on the newly introduced medium of television.57

The second initiative, taken by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines

Protection Society, drew attention to Britain’s moral obligation to

Aboriginal Australians still living in an area where weapons testing

was taking place. The Society considering bringing Australia’s treat­

ment of its Aboriginal people to the attention of the United Nations. Questions were asked in the House of Commons about the obliga­ tions of the British Government given that the testing was of British

55 56 57

Bennett to Bromham, 28 October 1956, MN2958, Acc 8303A, SLWA. Andrews to Bennett, 16 January 1957, CAR, MS12913/2/6, SLV. See Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003, pp. 149-51, for a fuller account of this controversy; and Sue Taffe, Black and White Together FCAATSI: The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders 1958–1973, UQP, St Lucia, Brisbane, 2005, Chapter 2, for its role in the formation of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement.

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FA M I L I E S

weapons on Australian soil, but they were waved aside as being a matter for the domestic policy of the Australian Government.58

An Australian woman who was living in London, Lady Jessie

Street, described by Thomas Fox-Pitt, the secretary of the Anti-

Slavery Society, as ‘a champion of the aborigines and the New

Guinea people’, had joined the executive of the Society. Street had

been the only female adviser in Australia’s delegation to the United Nation’s conference on International Organisation in San Francisco

in 1945 and was well-known as an Australian feminist having cam­ paigned for a woman’s right to economic independence and been

active in a number of women’s organisations. She was energetic, the socially confident wife of Sir Kenneth Street, Chief Justice of New South Wales, and an effective political networker. The Society saw

her as an asset when considering the strategies they should employ in approaching the United Nations over the status and position of

Aboriginal Australians. When the Western Australian Government was informed by the Anti-Slavery Society of its tentative plans to raise the question of Australia’s treatment of its Aboriginal people in the United Nations, alarm bells rang in the Department of Native

Welfare. Who might be sending information to London? Rod

Schenk, former Mount Margaret superintendent, told Middleton

that ‘it is almost certain that Mrs Bennett of Kalgoorlie is the source of the Anti-Slavery report about the natives’. He added:

When at Mount Margaret Mrs Bennett constantly collected data and sent it to Anti-Slavery Society. Shortly afterwards the Western Australian Government would get a ‘please explain’ from Anti-Slavery. At that time the Australian Government 58

House of Commons Hansard, vol. 563, no. 42, Thursday 31 January 1957. CAR, MS12913/4/8, SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

needed a shake up, but Mrs B. still tries to stir up Anti-Slavery for no cause at all.59

Mary believed that ‘nothing is more certain to corrupt any mission

than such an unholy alliance with the Dept. for gain’.60 She would have seen Schenk’s comments in these terms had she heard them.

‘The enemy’ was not just the pastoralists and the Department of Native Welfare. Missionaries such as Rod Schenk, who now received

government subsidies for his work at Wongatha Training Farm, and

activists such as Amy Brown from the Victorian Aboriginal Group, had joined them.

Aware of the gap between policy and reality the Society decided

to develop a detailed questionnaire in order to gather accurate

information on ‘the actual facts of Aboriginal life as known to our correspondents among them and among their friends’.61 The information once gathered would strengthen the Society’s position in

requesting that ‘the conditions of the Aborigines of Australia should

be the subject of a report by the Sub-Committee on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Treatment of Minorities of the Commission

of Human Rights’. Jessie Street volunteered to implement the ques­ tionnaire in Australia.

These two events – publicity over the Warburton Ranges contro-

versy and Jessie Street coming to Australia to conduct a fact-finding

mission for the Anti-Slavery Society – produced what Street prescient-

ly described as ‘the psychological moment’ on which activists could

build. As we know, Mary was already in regular communication 59 60 61

File note, 29 July 1956, Schenk to Middleton, cons 1733, 56748-018, State Archives of Western Australia, Perth. Bennett to Andrews, 30 November 1954, CAR, MS12913, box 4, SLV. Thomas Fox-Pitt letter and memorandum regarding the conditions of Aborigines in Australia, October 1956, sent to interested Australian organisations, CAR, MS12913/2/6, SLV.

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FA M I L I E S

with Shirley Andrews from the Council for Aboriginal Rights,

her friends Charles and Phyllis Duguid from the South Australian Aborigines Advancement League and Ada Bromham of the Women’s

Christian Temperance Union. Now, a newly formed organisation, the

Victorian Aborigines Advancement League, led by Doug Nicholls (whom Mary had met in Sydney in 1938 when she had travelled

to support the Day of Mourning) and Stan Davey, provided fresh hope of an organised movement for change. Mary would continue

sending information east and to the Anti-Slavery Society in London. Jessie Street would visit Australia in 1957 and revitalise the conversation for the creation of a national advocacy body which could then

claim consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of

the United Nations. For those who had been working for change for so long there was a sense of the times being ripe for change. How

did Mary Bennett, more isolated in Kalgoorlie than her capital city counterparts, experience this time of hope?

Mary’s correspondence During her Kalgoorlie years Mary wrote hundreds of letters. We can

draw on these in trying to understand her thoughts and feelings, her diabetes-related problems and the strains of her relentless and com­

plex benevolent work with the Wongatha people. They are to poli-

ticians and bureaucrats, trade unionists and educators, occasionally

mission­aries, and to other activists. The bulk of this correspondence, however, is with two women, her old friend of similar years Ada

Bromham, who made her last book possible, and her newer, younger

activist friend Shirley Andrews, honorary secretary of the Council for Aboriginal Rights, to whom she looked to continue her work after she had gone. What is striking in reading these letters is the – 331 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

intensity of Mary’s dedication in trying to ameliorate the harsh condi-

tions of life for Aboriginal people on the Eastern Goldfields. She was relentless and single-minded and was able to assist individuals

in Kalgoorlie while also maintaining the broader struggle to reform

Australian society with people from various parts of the country and further afield.62

Mary’s letters reveal a person for whom her life’s work with and

for Aboriginal people is all-consuming. There is no relief from the sometimes intractable social, legal, physical and financial problems which beset some of her Wongatha friends. Ada Bromham, al­though a single woman, had a large extended family with nieces and nephews to amuse and engage her. Mary, as we know, had no contact with

her estranged family. Ada was concerned about Mary’s health and knew, as others did, how exhausted and unwell she became. ‘I am tired out’, Mary once confessed to her, ‘but hope to have a quiet time

and shall probably have no more visits allowed for a while. But they will come back if it suits them and wear me out’. Her ‘family’ were the Wongatha people of the Goldfields to whom she was endlessly giving.

Her younger friend, Shirley Andrews, had her work as a biochemist

and her leisure as an energetic folk dancer to provide some respite

from her commitment to social reform for Aboriginal people.63 Mary had trained as an artist and she had learned the piano as a child but there is no evidence that the visual arts or music provided any

recreational relief. She was a reader but as far as we can see all her readings related to her work. She would give people books to read, 62 63

These letters are mainly held in two collections: Mary Montgomerie Bennett and Ada Bromham, MN2958, Acc 8303A, SLWA and Council for Aboriginal Rights papers, MS12913 in the SLV. Taffe, ‘Shirley Andrews: An Architect of the National Aboriginal Civil Rights Movement’, pp. 153-76.

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FA M I L I E S

or if they were out of print, such as Ed Morel’s Black Man’s Burden,

a critique of the effect of colonialism in west Africa which she had

first read in the 1920s, she would urge people to locate them in a library. She would quote the Victorian poets, to whom she was

introduced as a child, in her writings and she was sustained by the psalms in her Christian faith, but there was no reading of novels as a pleasant pastime to provide temporary escape from her work. Shirley

Andrews, when asked what quality Mary Bennett conveyed to her in her Aboriginal reform work, summarised it as ‘a sense of urgency’.64

This sense came from Mary’s engagement with individuals. She knew that family separation when a boy, such as Peter was in his

early adolescence, would have negative consequences for the family, and it proved to be so.

Education and the possibility of appropriate employment while

remaining within the family group was the goal which she believed

should be pursued. She argued that the ‘rapid extinction of the Aborigines was due to the insecurity of the family’. Mary explained

to Shirley ‘the sufferings of the past year have taught me that children need ALL other children as much as, or more than, their teachers’. As she pointed out ‘they have to live with their own generation

more than with an older one’. This was her argument for Aboriginal

children attending the local state school. We ‘must demand NO segregation in education’. An integrated approach to education would help Aboriginal children communicate with white children and develop a confidence borne of interacting when they were young. Segregation, she described as ‘disintegration’.65 64 65

Bain Attwood interview of Shirley Andrews, 25 February 2000. Bennett to Andrews, 30 November 1954, 28 October 1954, CAR, MS12913, box 4, SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Although she had fought so hard for Peter to be transferred to

Kurrawang where his parents were living, the bureaucrats refused. By

1957, however, when Peter had been moved to Norseman Secondary School, the department was considering closing Cundeelee Mission and was in negotiations with Kurrawang Mission to move the children there. It was an illustration of her strongly-made point that state departments deal with people ‘in the mass’, but ‘human beings

suffer individually’ as did the members of this family who were split apart and lost to each other.

‘No education is worth the loss of a parent’, Mary wrote to Shirley,

adding that ‘All Peter’s family live in unnecessary, appalling loneliness created by rotten missionaries and “welfare” officials’.66 Her dedi­ cation to the sanctity of family was much more, however, than

sentiment. She had read the report to the World Health Organization ‘Maternal Care and Mental Health’ by Dr John Bowlby which

argued that the mental health of the developing child depended on the quality of parental care. Bowlby opposed institutionalisation of

children, arguing instead that family welfare organisations should take their services to the families in need rather than breaking them

up. She ensured that the Western Australian Government was aware of these research findings.67

As she became more deeply involved in the sufferings of individuals

and more passionate in their defence, she realised that her advocacy 66 67

Bennett to Andrews, 28 July 1957, Council for Aboriginal Rights, MS12913/4/8, SLV. John Bowlby, ‘Maternal Care and Mental Health’, prepared on behalf of the World Health Organization as a contribution to the United Nations programme for the welfare of homeless children, World Health Organization, Geneva, 1952; Mary M. Bennett, ‘Child Care through Improved Family Conditions’, Smoke Signals, August– September 1958, p. 3; Mary M. Bennett, evidence given to the Special Committee on Native Matters, Parliament House, Perth, 25 March 1958, Street papers, MS2683, series 10, box 29, NLA.

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FA M I L I E S

might make things worse for people such as the Bilson family whom she had known for decades. She confessed to Ada Bromham:

I feel like crying. This morning old Alec went off by the train to Mt Margaret where he is to be rationed, and Lulu his wife and Bowie his stepdaughter and Lulu’s brother, who is Alec’s brother-in-law saw him off and Bowie has gone back to Kurrawang where her daughter is, Beverley Joy, who presented the bouquet [to the Queen in 1954] and Lulu is staying in the camp by the Kalgoorlie Dam. And I am afraid to say a word to Mr Day [local native welfare district officer]. If he won’t hear the dear old man and poor Lulu, he will only be more obstinate with me.68

In May 1957 Mary was heartened by a visit from Jessie Street

in her Kalgoorlie home as a part of her survey of Australian policy

and practice in Aboriginal affairs. Although they knew each other through their writings it was the first time they had met. They had

much in common. Both were from Scottish pastoral families and were aware that their families’ wealth came from the dispossession of

the original occupants. As women of independent means both used

their money to support their causes. Both had been involved with

the British Commonwealth League and the Anti-Slavery Society. Eight years younger than Mary, Jessie was living in London in

the 1950s. Her visit was to investigate the conditions of life for Aboriginal people on the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia.

Mary had much to tell Jessie about controlling Western Australian

Aboriginal legislation and about the parlous conditions of life for the Wongatha people. Jessie expressed a respect and admiration for Mary’s work amongst them. 68

Bennett to Bromham, 13 March 1956, Mary Montgomerie Bennett and Ada Bromham, MN2958, Acc 8303A/2, SLWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Mary’s doggedness with regard to the Peter Pontara case was

about the principle of family being kept together, not about what the boy himself wanted. After she left Cundeelee she was not in contact

with Peter but increasingly, after she moved to Kalgoorlie, she was in contact with Tjantjiga or John as the missionaries renamed him. It was Tjantjiga’s suffering as a parent which affected her.

She was not able to reunite Peter’s fractured family but the visit

from Jessie Street and the Grayden report which was getting so much publicity gave her hope. Jessie’s plans to bring together those working for reform such as Mary’s activist correspondents – Shirley

Andrews in Melbourne, the Duguids in Adelaide, Ada Bromham

in Brisbane and Don McLeod in the Pilbara – as well as the new

organisations, the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship in Sydney and the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League, heralded new pos­ sibilities. Mary would perhaps no longer feel so alone in her quest for justice for Aboriginal people.

– 33 6 –

Cha pte r 12

T H E WONG AT H A PE OPL E OF K A L G O OR L I E You cannot defend exploited people without sharing their griefs. Mary Bennett to Shirley Andrews, 30 June 1960

At the back of beyond, behind the mulga curtain, anything can happen. Mary Bennett to Shirley Andrews, 12 May 1954

Mary’s Kalgoorlie years were characterised by a stressful tension. She was driven to ease the suffering of her Wongatha friends and just as

driven to work for long-term structural reform which would eventual­

ly help all Aboriginal people. She continued to live in Kalgoorlie although she longed to escape from the glare of the summer sun

which she had been told by her doctor was bad for her eyes, weakened as they were by the effects of diabetic illness. She held, however, that

Kalgoorlie kept her in touch with reality.1 Here she reconnected with 1

Bennett to Bromham, August 1958, Mary Montgomerie Bennett and Ada Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8303A/2, SLWA.

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

former Mount Margaret pupils. She met pastoral workers from the

north laid off over summer, and family groups newly arriving in from

the desert. In between helping them she attended conferences, and

wrote to politicians and newspapers to point out injustices. She still

thought of herself as an Englishwoman who was only temporarily in Kalgoorlie. Balancing the immediate needs of sometimes desperate

individuals whom she cared about with the complex work of trying to change an inhumane society took its toll.

Illness and hospitalisations punctuated these activities, disrupting

her thinking but never lessening her drive, although she complained about being slow to get things done. In the twelve months to

April 1959 she had six hospital admissions: for a diabetic coma,

haemorrhaging eyes, a diabetic ulcer, negative insulin reactions, a broken arm after a fall and rheumatism. Illness may have changed

the way a different person lived her life, but not Mary. She told Ada Bromham, after one episode of ill-health, that it was useful to have

these turns ‘to keep me from being too satisfied with my poor efforts’. Apart from her hospital records we know about these illnesses only through her confidences with her old friend, Ada.2

Her physical suffering, however, was not as great as her psychic

pain which she did share, purposefully, with her closest friends and fellow activists. To Stan Davey, the inaugural honorary secretary of

the new Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, she confided: ‘to my great distress I am tormented still by seeing good people

starved to death’. To Commander Fox-Pitt of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society she wrote, all in capitals to convey 2

Admission records for Ms Mary Montgomerie Bennett, WA Country Health Service – Goldfields, Government of Western Australia; Bennett to Bromham, 12 March 1959 and various 1958–1959, Bennett and Bromham papers, 1880–1891, MN2958, Acc 8303A/11, SLWA.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

her pain: ‘IT IS DREADFUL TO SEE THESE OLD PEOPLE; INCAPACITATED PEOPLE AND UNEMPLOYED WORK­

ERS SUFFERING HUNGER AND REFUSED RELIEF AND FALLING ILL THROUGH EXPOSURE AND LACK OF FOOD’.3

Her dedication to her Wongatha friends had more in common

with the com­mitment that most human beings have towards family members. She wrote about ‘my children’ and ‘my families’ and when we view her engagement with the many people she helped in these

terms we can begin to understand the stress of the balancing act she was engaged in: feeding people and then listening to their problems and helping them to see a way forward and after cleaning up and

doing the dishes returning to whatever her current writing project was to try to reform Australian society so that her friends could have

a dignified place in it, on their own terms.4 Working to help individuals fuelled her drive to continue pressing for full human rights

for Aboriginal Australians. This meant pressure on the legis­lators and writing and speaking to challenge prejudices and stereo­typical

thinking among the general public. It would have been a challenge for a healthy person let alone a woman in her seventies with debilitating health problems.

News of the old lady who wore her white hair in a bun and peered

intently through horn-rimmed glasses when she answered the knock on the front door spread through the Kalgoorlie Aboriginal camps. She was thin and frail and looked as if a puff of wind would blow 3 4

Bennett to Stan Davey, 19 April 1959, CAR, MS12913, box 4, SLV; Bennett to Commander Fox-Pitt, 19 May 1959, ASAPS, MSS Brit Emp s22, G953a/2. Bennett to Andrews, 10 October 1953 and 28 October 1954, CAR, MS12913, box 4, SLV; Mary Bennett to Bromham, 24 October 1958, Bromham and Bennett papers, MN2958, Acc 8303A/6, SLWA.

– 339 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

her over but her direct gaze conveyed a steel-like determination and

sense of purpose.5 The simple double-fronted timber house she rented at 83 Forrest Street was conveniently located just a couple of hun­dred

yards from Kalgoorlie Railway Station, where she would meet friends getting off the train, often after a stint in Fremantle Gaol. She had come to Kalgoorlie to try to understand the position of Peter and his

family and had stayed on, becoming more and more involved in a number of people’s lives.

Mary would answer the knock on the door with the question:

‘Have you had breakfast?’ If there was no answer she provided tea and bread, or meat and potatoes in the evening as she knew that hungry

people were not in a good position to describe their problems and work towards a solution.6 It was not uncommon for her to have six

people a day coming to her with problems of one kind or another. She

had taught many of those who came or their parents. She delighted in the accounts of her former pupils making their way successfully

in the broader society but most who came asked for assistance of one kind or another. The work for individuals was time-consuming and emotionally wearing. She helped people who were illiterate

make enquiries concerning eligibility for rations or pensions; she helped rehabilitate people after their release from Fremantle Gaol; she provided moral support for people facing committal hearings

in Kalgoorlie Courthouse; supported people’s requests for access to

their children; helped the unemployed with the almost impossible

task of finding work; provided money for train fares, meals for the hungry and beds for the homeless. 5 6

Personal communication, Barry Christophers, 14 July 2003, Ian Spalding, 2 May 2014. Bennett to J. O. Knight, secretary, WA Native Welfare Council, 17 April 1959, Bromham and Bennett papers, MN2958, Acc 8303A/6, SLWA.

– 340 –

T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

The eastern goldfields towns in the 1950s presented a case study

in the failure of the policy of earlier decades. Aboriginal people had flowed in to Laverton, Leonora and further south, Kalgoorlie, from the desert but there was little or no employment for them. Fifty Spinifex people from the Great Victoria Desert made first

contact with whites when they arrived at Cundeelee Mission in 1957.

There had been a long drought in the 1950s which was probably a contributing factor. The establishment of the British atomic testing

project at Maralinga may have been another. The drift was always towards Kalgoorlie. In the summer of 1959 thirty boys from Mount

Margaret Mission arrived in Kalgoorlie without work or money. Ac­

cording to the Native Welfare District Officer they had been ‘expelled’ for the summer ‘due to the lack of organisation of the leave rosters

or shortage of staff at the mission’. Others had come in from the distant Warburton Ranges. They swelled the numbers of Aboriginal

people in town to about 400. Many were there because of the dearth of station work at that time, others came to attend the funeral of a

clan member. People of the full descent had been refused education in earlier decades and the district officer’s method of dealing with

the immediate problem of many itinerant Aboriginal people in town was to issue free rail passes to get people out and back to areas where

they had been employed, regardless of whether there was any work for them when they got off the train.7

In the mid-1960s social scientist Charles Rowley’s assessment of

Kalgoorlie Aboriginal society matched Mary’s experience in the

previous decade. He quoted Commissioner Middleton referring

to ‘tacit non-acceptance of them on any terms of equality, no matter 7

Eastern Goldfields Sub District, Kalgoorlie, Journal, 29 July 1958, 23 January 1959, 30 January 1959, cons 993, item 1958/0173, SROWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

how well merited their case may be’.8 Rowley observed that ‘had

European migrants been similarly treated the result would have been a scandal’. He argued that the Aboriginal pastoral workers coming

into Kalgoorlie because of the shortage of work could be responded to in an imaginative or an ignorant way. The Town Clerk’s approach

was the latter, seeing only ‘uneducated itinerant bush natives who wandered through the town looking for food’. What was required,

according to Rowley, was engagement with Aboriginal leaders, but they had not emerged, and the clan-based nature of traditional society

made the emergence of new leaders difficult to achieve.9 Mary had

seen so much suffering, as people still waited to be assessed for old

age pensions, that any kind of objective analysis of the situation, such as Rowley set out, was not humanly possible. The many examples at her disposal showed cruelty or disdain in the broader community

and callousness or stalling techniques among the bureaucrats which

sometimes resulted in deaths. She told Ada Bromham ‘it is truly said

that the Aborigines are the most difficult people to help and it comes back to the inefficiency and dereliction of duty of most of the people

who set out to “help” them and do not know how to manage their own affairs’.10

The Department of Native Affairs told the public: ‘It is not nec­

essary for natives to beg for their food. They are all provided for either in Kalgoorlie or at missions in the district’.11 Periodically

the Kalgoorlie Miner ran articles about the problem of Aboriginal 8

S. G. Middleton, ‘A Host on the Highroad of History’, W. A. Teachers’ Journal, October 1961, p. 259, quoted in C. D. Rowley, The Remote Aborigines, ANU Press, 1970. This edition, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1972, p. 56. 9 Rowley, The Remote Aborigines, Chapter 3, ‘Aborigines at Kalgoorlie-Boulder’. 10 Bennett to Bromham, 10 April 1960, Ada Bromham and Mary Bennett papers, MN2958, Acc 8303A/10, SLWA. 11 ‘Department Pays Fares for 51 Stranded Natives’, The Kalgoorlie Miner, 10 April 1957.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

beggars.12 Aboriginal people had been allowed to travel free on goods trains between Kalgoorlie and the country to the north but in 1957 the department decided to police the train service ‘in order to stop the drift of natives to Kalgoorlie and thereby curtail the begging’.

Such superficial approaches to a serious social problem remind us of

Mary’s ‘hunt and die’ thesis which was so scorned by Neville and the

Victorian Aborigines’ Group. She had argued that people were being pushed back to a hunting way of life instead of being educated for

inclusion in the broader society. Refusing to give rations and giving people rail tickets to go back to where they had come from seemed to

be the extent of Departmental response to the influx of Aboriginal people into Kalgoorlie at this time. There was an attempt to set up

a local industry in making artefacts but that seemed to be plagued with difficulties such as how people could be paid after they had

finished making an item for sale and so the program came to a halt.13 Reductions in the departmental budget for the 1956–57 financial

year led to a decision to cut rations to adults under sixty years of age

‘except those who are totally and permanently incapacitated’, despite a recognition in the department that on the Eastern Goldfields

there were far more people seeking employment than there were jobs available.14

Departmental records, however, reveal an awareness of the

serious­ness of the unemployment crisis for Aboriginal people in

Kalgoorlie. In 1960 a district officer noted casually: ‘There is also, inevitably, some malnutrition in the lower age groups brought about 12 13 14

See, for example, Kalgoorlie Miner, 15 January 1957, 10 April 1957, 31 May 1960, 26 November 1960. Annual Report, Commissioner of Native Welfare, Western Australia, year ended 30 June 1959, p. 24, SROWA. Annual Report, Commissioner of Native Welfare, 1959.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

by the breadwinners’ inability to provide satisfactorily, due in turn to lack of regular employment’, while an earlier report describes the

begging in Kalgoorlie as ‘brazen and defiant’.15 As people who had come in from the desert did not have birth certificates, decisions

about eligibility regarding age and disability pensions were in the hands of the Department of Native Affairs’ district welfare officers.

‘Who made the Eastern Goldfields natives beggars?’ Mary asked Kalgoorlie Miner readers. And answered for them:

Surely it must have been we whites who robbed them of their land without giving them compensation, who robbed them of their children without giving them training for earning a living, and who have frustrated their every incentive to live.16

Mary also pointed out reasonably that for those who could only

work with their bodies any disability which reduced mobility or strength effectively incapacitated them. It wasn’t as if office work was an alternative for them if they couldn’t do farm work.

Through her knowledge of many Aboriginal families on the gold­

fields, Mary saw the flaws in the assimilation policy as it was imple­

mented under Commissioner Middleton. It focused on Aborig­inal ‘individuals and families who were prepared for and assisted to live

in the enveloping community’. They would be helped to surmount

difficulties and they would most likely be ‘scattered’ into the greater community. In the process of merging they would lose part of their separate identity.17 Most significantly, in Western Australia, while 15 16 17

Annual Report, District Officer, 1960, cons 993, item 66/58; Easter Goldfields Sub District Kalgoorlie Journal, 29 July 1958, cons 993, item 1958/0173, SROWA. M. M. Bennett, ‘Whites Made Natives into Beggars’, Kalgoorlie Miner, 26 November 1960. ‘Assimilation and Integration’, Smoke Signals, 1959, p. 5.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

more Aboriginal children were attending school than ever before, many were separated from their families in the process. 18

Such were the circumstances of Mary’s life in Kalgoorlie. Now

in her late seventies she often suffered from giddiness, and was wary about contacting the authorities. She was right to be wary.

Ross McLarty, District Officer, Central Region, made his response to Mary quite clear in a file note: ‘I am not impressed by any rec­ ommen­da­tion emanating from Mrs Bennett’.19 Mary described her

experience with McLarty over the Peter Pontara case as ‘frightful’

and she worried that she may do more harm than good in trying to see officials.20

Mary’s Wongatha friends As Mary became less inclined to travel, the life of Kalgoorlie and its outcasts occupied more of her consciousness. More than thirty years since she joined she was still writing to the Anti-Slavery and Ab-

origines Protection Society in London. She was in correspondence with newer friends such as Shirley Andrews and Barry Christophers

of the Council for Aboriginal Rights in Melbourne, and Stan Davey of the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League. She was in

regular contact with her old friend Ada Bromham, of the Women’s

Christian Temperance Union, who had moved back to Perth from Brisbane in 1959 to be with her extended family. 18 19 20

See Anna Haebich, ‘Nuclear, Suburban and Black: Middleton’s Vision of Assimilation for Nyungar Families’, in Tim Rowse (ed.), Contesting Assimilation, API Network, Perth, 2005, pp. 211-16. B. A. McLarty, 24 June 1959, ‘Native Matters. Eastern Goldfields’, EG-24-1, cons 993, SROWA. Mary Bennett to Ada Bromham, 31 March 1960, Mary Montgomerie Bennett and Ada Bromham papers, MN2958: ACC 8303A/18, SLWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Mary’s hallmark sense of urgency was now directed at the im-

mediate needs of her Wongatha friends, many of whom were elderly themselves. Their problems were varied, complex and interlinked; it

was no easy matter to work out how best to be of assistance. The Munmurie family, for example, whom she had known for decades, would come for dinner and discuss their family issues. Douglas

Munmurie was a friend whom she had admired since the 1930s when

he leapt from a moving train to return to his wife when he was being forcibly taken to Perth to work as a police tracker. Now he was in the grip of alcohol. She accompanied him to court when he was charged

with grievous bodily harm, ‘an act of which he has no recollection’. She told Doreen Trainor, who visited and supported Aboriginal prisoners in Fremantle Gaol, that Douglas had failed through drink but

she hoped that a long stay in prison would allow him ‘to become one of your very bright alcoholics-anonymous and write letters to his wife

and daughters’.21 Being locked up might provide the access to some

education which being free did not. As a man of full descent he had had no opportunity to be educated.

Mary was also bothered by Douglas’ wife Rosie’s parenting. Mary

had taught Rosie at Mount Margaret twenty years earlier and so was

particularly upset when she saw Rosie fail as a mother. Rosie had allowed two of her daughters who were in their early teens to visit

Kalgoorlie unaccompanied. They appeared on Mary’s doorstep hav-

ing spent a day and evening traipsing around Kalgoorlie and had

left their blankets somewhere. Mary was furious. She wrote a stern rebuke to her former pupil: ‘I am amazed and shocked that you al-

low your daughters to place themselves in such an invidious position 21

Bennett to Doreen Trainor, 28 March, 7 March, 1 February 1958, Doreen Trainor papers, MN2931, Acc 8342A, SLWA.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

– teaching them to sponge … I put your daughters on the train for

[home in] Coolgardie and it cost twelve shillings. I shall not do it

again’. She reminded Rosie of other women who had had their children taken from them because they failed to look after them.22

The plight of her elderly friends was of great concern to her.

Through no fault of their own they were illiterate so needed help to apply for an old-age pension. They were without birth certificates

and so were required to get statements from guarantors – white people who had known them decades earlier and were prepared to vouch for their being sixty-five. Even then a Native Welfare district

officer could make a unilateral pronouncement such as ‘Norman Bilson is not seventy years of age as stated by Mrs Bennett and is not yet old enough for the age pension’ and that could signal the

end of the matter.23 Alec, Norman’s brother, was ‘a grand old fellow, kind, honest, independent, a very faithful tribesman, faithful to his

employer, worked for him all the time, faithful to the police [who he

also worked for] and now destitute’.24 She began helping him and his wife Lulu, whom Mary had known since she lost her arm in the

1930s, to apply for old-age pensions. A year later, in June 1960, they

had still not heard about their applications. Lulu had married Alec in 1939 after her first husband died. Alec had been born into his

own culture before Paddy Hannan discovered gold in 1893, so with no birth certificate the first step was to establish age. She contacted

Mrs Tinetti, who had lived on a pastoral station north of Kalgoorlie, 22 23 24

Bennett to Rosie Munmurrie, 17 August 1960, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8303A/9, SLWA. District Officer for Native Welfare to Mary Bennett, 8 June 1960; Bennett to Bromham, n.d. but late 1960, Bennett and Bromham papers, 1880–1891, MN2958, Acc 8303A/12, SLWA. Bennett to Bromham, 12 May 1959, Bennett and Bromham papers, 1880–1891, MN2958, Acc 8303A/12, SLWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

who provided a testimonial: ‘I have known Old Alec over 45 (forty

five) years, and he was not a young man then’. Over the following

year Mary wrote on Alec’s behalf to the District Native Welfare

Officer (a number of times), to her local Western Australian member of parliament, Ted Evans, to the Director of Social Services (Perth), and to her supporters.25

In July 1960 she was excited to hear that Gordon Bryant, a fed-

eral Australian Labor Party parliamentarian, president of the Vic-

torian Aborigines Advancement League, and vice-president of the new Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, was coming to Kalgoorlie. She arranged for Alec and Lulu to come to her house to meet him and put their case, but as they all waited and waited

into the night, past the time when the train arrived, it was clear he was not coming. This was a great disappointment to Mary who had

hoped that through meeting these good, elderly people Bryant might be galvanised into taking up their cases.26 Mary speculated that when Alec had left Kalgoorlie and returned to his country, Kookynie, over

a hundred miles north of Kalgoorlie, he may have jeop­ardised his

pension application, allowing officials to rule him ineligible because of his ‘nomadic habits’.27 A year after the appli­cation was made, when still nothing had been heard, Mary wrote on behalf of Alec Bilson

and seven other old men to the Common­wealth Director of Social

Services to enquire about their applications. The director refused to give her information, citing the secrecy provisions of the Social

Services Act. Finally, late in 1960, Alec was granted a sickness benefit. 25 26 27

Statement by Mrs Tinetti, 21 July 1959, CAR, MS12913/8/7, SLV. Bennett to Bromham, 13 July 1959, Bennett and Bromham papers, 1880–1891, MN2958, Acc 8303A/12, SLWA. Bennett to Andrews, 30 June 1960, CAR, MS12913/8/7, SLV.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

He died a few weeks later. The final bureaucratic indignity was that

his death certificate stated that he was sixty-nine. It seems that the public servants were prepared to accept an estimate of age for a death

certificate but would quibble for years over the likely age of an old man who had put in twenty years of service to the Western Australian police as a tracker and more years working for the squatters.28

Alec’s death, after this long wait for a pension which might have made his last years of life easier, was very distressing for Mary.

Paddy McInnes, another of Mary’s friends, had a reputation as

the best drover in Western Australia but ‘he let the Department

take his family away in order that they might be fed’. The children

were separated and sent to different institutions.29 Mary tried to

help Paddy to apply for the old-age pension but he also lacked a birth certificate. She asked Rod Schenk for a testimonial regarding Paddy’s age. Separated from his wife and children Paddy became

anxious. Then he was struck on the head with an axe by a drunken Aboriginal man in the Kalgoorlie camp, became unwell and was

sent to Heathcote Mental Hospital and then transferred to Clare­ mont Mental Hospital. In July 1959 Mary reported to Ada: ‘Paddy

is dead, of a broken heart, after a month at Claremont. Now I have

to write to his chief tribal relatives, Reg Johnston and Tula (Doris)

Thomas. He was the most beautiful character and reminded me of my father’.30

28 29 30

Alec Bilson (Tribal name Kulbundja) died 30 November 1960 at the age of 69. Copy of Death Certificate supplied to the author by a member of the Bilson family. M. M. Bennett, ‘Statement on the conditions of the Aborigines on the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia’, n.d. but 1961, MN2958, Acc 8303A/11, SLWA; Bennett and Bromham papers. Bennett to Bromham, 21 April 1959, 15 May 1959, 6 July 1959, undated, Bromham and Bennett papers, MN2958, Acc 8303A/10, SLWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Australia had invented a ‘Double Moral Standard for its public

service’, Mary told Shirley Andrews.31 The departmental officer

would say: ‘A can have rations or B can have rations but they can’t

both have rations’. Mary explained, ‘A and B are both old men and it is as hard for one to starve as the other: they should both

be receiving the Commonwealth Old-Age Pension’. In the same letter written just before Jessie Street visited her in Kalgoorlie, Mary told Shirley of a starving woman and her infant of one month and

little son, and her brother and her uncle both out-of-work seasonal station workers. They ‘are now sitting on my verandah waiting to

be fed, as soon as I have finished this letter to you. The uncle is an aging man, a hunchback because he was thrown from a wild horse when he was a child, but very plucky and very willing. They have no

rations’.32 These experiences informed her public comments about the state of affairs for the four hundred or so Aboriginal people in

Kalgoorlie where the District Welfare Officer admitted that there

was little scope for employment and there was ‘no patent solution to this problem’.33

Her local supporters provided practical assistance while her

more distant activist friends provided ideas and moral support.

Mrs  Nazzari, her kindly neighbour, did the shopping and took Mary’s letters to the post office when she was too ill or unable to

walk because of neuritis. Wilf Douglas, the linguist and missionary

who had been working at Warburton Mission, helped her translate the Wongatha language for those she was assisting who had little 31 32 33

Bennett to Andrews, 18 May 1957, CAR, MS12913/4/8, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 18 May 1957. Annual Report, Commissioner of Native Welfare, Western Australia, year ended 30 June 1959, p. 24.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

English. Pastor Griffiths of the Kalgoorlie Church of Christ provided practical support and encouraged his congregation to sup-

port campaigns for Aboriginal civil rights. Her close associates Ada Bromham and Shirley Andrews she valued as ‘two splendid women who have helped me’.34 Charles and Phyllis Duguid in Adelaide,

Commander Fox-Pitt of the London Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society and her old English friend Dorothy Shipman

were also supportive and encouraging. She once apologised to Ada: ‘please forgive pencil as I write in bed – the only time left to me’.35

The experiences of Peter Pontara’s family helped Mary to under­

stand the complex difficulties faced by those who made the shift from a hunting and gathering life in the desert to life in Kalgoorlie.

She continued through the 1950s to work on writing the story of

Peter Pontara and the state’s refusal to relocate him to Kurrawang

where his parents were living. By 1958 Peter was living at the Church of Christ Mission at Norseman and attending the local second­ary

school.36 His father, mother and brother were in Kalgoorlie. Mary got to know the family, who came to see her as a friend. The parents

spoke little English. None of them could read or write. Their lives

were full of challenges. Tjantjiga injured his already damaged

eye when a wood chip flew into it when he was shaping wood to make artefacts to sell. Mary helped him to get medical attention at

Kalgoorlie hospital but was aghast when he was told by the Native Welfare District Officer on his discharge that if he wanted rations 34 35 36

Bennett to Commander Fox-Pitt, 3 October 1957, ASAPS, MSS Brit Emp s22, G953a/2. Bennett to Bromham, 4 February 1957, n.d. but January 1958, MN2958, Acc 8303A, SLWA. Bennett to Andrews, 12 May 1957, CAR, MS12913, box 4, SLV; Mr Knight, Secretary, WA Native Welfare Council Inc, 14 April 1959, Mary and Ada Bromham papers, MN 2958, Acc 8383A/6, SLWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

he had to leave Kurrawang Mission and go to the Kalgoorlie camp, a windswept slope with mullock dumps exposed to cold in winter and

heat in summer, where illegal grog trading took place. Tjantjiga needed nursing attention for his damaged eye but obeyed the officer’s

instructions and went to the Kalgoorlie camp with the result that his eye became infected again. Mary wrote asking his treating doctor

to intervene. The district officer could give no reason to Mary for

his arbitrary order that Tjantjga had to go to the Kalgoorlie camp for rations. Apart from health problems and the stopping of rations

Tjantjiga had ongoing domestic difficulties with his wife, who Mary described as ‘unstable and wilful’, and who periodically went off with another Aboriginal man, Mordu.

Bob Crowley (King-tjin), Peter’s brother, was a more difficult

person to help. At one time, so frustrated was Mary that she an­

nounced that she had resolved that she was not going to help him again, but, in the manner of a parent who cannot easily walk away,

she returned.37 Bob’s troubles stemmed from alcohol which led to

two stays in Fremantle gaol. Here, as was the case with the other eighty or so Aboriginal prisoners in gaol for mostly petty offences, he

had, as she pointed out, a good diet. Four months in Fremantle gaol provided nothing more than this: no trade training or basic literacy

was provided. Mary began a correspondence with Doreen Trainor, a volunteer welfare worker with Aboriginal prisoners, and learned that the Prison Welfare Board believed that Bob was ‘slightly mental’.

Mary disagreed, describing him rather as unstable like his mother and pointing out that due to the long drought in the Warburton ranges when Bob was an adolescent he missed out on training in his 37

Bennett to Trainor, 14 March 1958, Doreen Trainor papers, MN2931, Acc 8342A/4, SLWA.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

own culture, and during his time at Cundeelee he was untaught and treated as a figure of fun by the Cundeelee missionaries who gave

him the nickname ‘Laughing Jack’.38 She saw him as more sinned

against than sinning but asked Doreen Trainor if there was any psychiatric treatment for neglected and maladjusted persons like Bob

Crowley in Western Australia at present, adding (as she suspected the answer) ‘or is this only a fairy tale?’ Robbed of father, mother,

brother, people and culture, she knew that Bob Crowley was ‘only one casualty among many’.39

Telling the outside world about Kalgoorlie Opportunities to communicate these Kalgoorlie experiences came

up early in 1958. The conference to establish an Australia-wide advocacy group on Aboriginal matters which Jessie Street had

promoted came to fruition. In February 1958 Mary caught the train east to attend the Adelaide meeting, chaired by her friend

Dr Charles Duguid, at which the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement was formed. She attended on condition that she

could raise the plight of the Goldfields Aboriginal people to the meeting.40 Here, for the first time, she met face-to-face Shirley Andrews, with whom she had been corresponding since 1952. She met Barry Christophers, President of the Council for Aboriginal

Rights, Gordon Bryant MHR and Stan Davey of the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League. These ‘first rate Australians’ as 38 39 40

Bennett to Trainor, various letters, 1957–1959, Doreen Trainor papers, MN2931, Acc 8342A/4, SLWA. Bennett to Trainor, 7 March 1958, Doreen Trainor papers, MN2931, Acc 8342A/4, SLWA. Bennett to Bromham, n.d. but January 1958, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958: Acc 8303A, SLWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

she described them all became regular cor­re­spondents and supporters.41 Davey ensured that Mary could pub­l icise the gross injustice concerning old age pension applications in the pages of Smoke Signals, the Advancement League’s periodical.

Pastor Doug Nicholls whom Mary remembered from her atten-

dance at the Day of Mourning twenty years earlier was in attendance as were other Aboriginal representatives, Jeff Barnes, Bert

Groves and Bill Onus. Those present – there were twenty-eight people – knew of Mary’s work and showed their appreciation of her.

Ada Bromham later reported that Mary had a nice time at this ‘historic’ meeting.42 Mary told Jessie Street that ‘they drew up excellent

resolutions’.43 Five basic principles were established, the first being:

‘Equal cit­izen­ship rights with other Australian citizens for aborigines’. An adequate standard of living, equal pay for equal work, free

and compulsory education and the absolute retention of all remain-

ing native reserves, with native communal or individual ownership, were the others.44 The meeting resolved on an immediate campaign

to petition the Commonwealth Government to accept responsibility for Aboriginal affairs nationally. Mary began collecting signatures on the petition as soon as she got home. The Adelaide experience must have been most heartening for her. Here were people like Stan

Davey, ‘young and full of vigour and kindness’, who became the

inaugural general secretary of the new body. She had fresh hope for the future for her Kalgoorlie friends and for all Aboriginal 41 42 43 44

Bennett to Fox-Pitt, 14 March 1960, Street papers, MS2683/10/688, NLA. Bromham to Jessie Street, 7 March 1958, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958: ACC 8303A/13, SLWA; see Sue Taffe, Black and White Together, Chapter 1, for more on this meeting. Bennett to Jessie Street, 18 March 1958, Street papers, MS2683/10/470, NLA. Smoke Signals, Aborigines Advancement League, May 1958.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

Australians.45 Despite ill health and her own emotional pain, Mary

Montgomerie Bennett’s last years were productive. She never gave up.

News of a Special Committee on Native Matters sponsored by

the Western Australian Parliament took her to Perth the following month. One of 178 people who gave evidence, Mary set out to show

the relationship between lack of work and low pay and the destruc­

tion of Aboriginal family life and its dire consequences. She argued that casual labour in the pastoral industry, wide unemployment in

Kalgoorlie and the fact of Aboriginal exclusion from the Australian Workers’ Union meant that many Aborigines were condemned to suffer hunger. With an Aboriginal family unable to live on £5 a week,

the result was that ‘Aboriginal children are removed from devoted

parents and placed in institutions’. Mary’s particular contribution was to inform this committee of the work of John Bowlby, consultant

in mental health to the World Health Organization. She quoted him

as writing that ‘neither foster homes nor institutions can provide

children with the security and affection which they need; for the child they always have a makeshift quality’. She pointed out that even the

best institutions were always changing staff, and ‘the child inmates lose their bearings, there is no continuity for them, no security’.46 She ended her report:

To recapitulate: the initial error is the unfairly low wage for Aboriginal workers no matter how competent; the consequence 45 46

Bennett to Trainor, 7 March 1958, Doreen Trainor papers, MN2931, Acc 8342A/4, SLWA. Mary M Bennett, ‘The Special Committee on Native Matters. Evidence given by Mary M. Bennett, Parliament House, Perth, 25.3.1958’, in Street papers MS2683, series 10, box 29, NLA. The quote from Bowlby is from Child Care and the Growth of Love, Report to World Health Organization, 1951. (It was later published as a book with the same title.)

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

is grinding poverty, often starvation conditions which force them to allow their children to be taken from them into institutions in order that their children may be fed. Aborigines need what we need: •

Equal citizenship rights for Aborigines with other Aus­ tralian citizens. • Equal pay for equal work and the same industrial protection as other Australians. • Children not to be taken from parents or natural guardians ex­cept in accordance with existing Children’s Welfare legislation. • Improvement of the conditions of the family as recom­ mend­ed by Dr Bowlby in his Report to the World Health Organization 1951. … • Education to be the full responsibility of State Education Departments. • Free compulsory education for all children. • Adult education for vocations to earn a living. … • Co-operatives to be investigated and encouraged wherever possible.47

She concluded: ‘The Aborigines are an Australian responsibility.

Australia has accepted the principles laid down in the Human

Rights Charter of the United Nations. These are not applied to our Australian natives. It is necessary that the Federal Government

should supply more economic aid to the States to carry out this programme’.48

Mary succeeded in having her point about Bowlby’s research into

serious psychological disturbance following the removal of a child 47 48

Bennett, ‘The Special Committee on Native Matters’, pp. 3-4. Bennett, ‘The Special Committee on Native Matters’, pp. 3-4.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

from its mother at an early age noted in the committee’s report. The report agreed that even when they were voluntarily placed in

a Mission ‘children should not be cut off from contact with their parents’.49 Having this research noted at the official level was a

significant achievement. It showed a recognition that Aboriginal

children had the same emotional and psychological needs as white children when it came to healthy human development, even if there

was still a gap between rhetoric and reality, such as in the case of Peter Pontara. Bringing Bowlby’s research to the attention of the

policy-makers was yet another example of Mary’s ability to bring new ideas which were being discussed in international forums to the

attention of Australians who, because of their prejudicial attitudes and geographic isolation, might not have considered them relevant to Aboriginal policy-making.

In 1958 she also brought to Shirley Andrews’ attention Inter­

national Labour Organisation Convention 107 ‘concerning the pro­

tec­tion and integration of indigenous and other tribal and semi-tribal populations in independent countries’, which had been adopted in June 1957 but had not been ratified by Australia. This convention was the first attempt by an international body to codify the obligations

of signatories with respect to their indigenous populations. Shirley

read it with interest, realising its potential to shame Australia for ignor­ing an international convention. Mary’s knowledge of Bowlby’s research and this International Labour Organization convention

show us how connected she was to thinking in Europe at this time, despite her physical isolation. Ahead of others she saw the rele­vance of international conventions on race to the Australian situation. 49

Report of the Special Committee on Native Matters (with particular reference to adequate finance), presented to both Houses of Parliament, Perth, 27 June 1958.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Campaigning for social service benefits The second annual conference of the Western Australian Native Wel­fare Council held in January 1959 highlighted discrimination

in the provisions of social security benefits as a major discussion

point. Jessie Street, Ada Bromham and Mary Bennett were all in attendance. Mary spoke about the refusal of benefits and even of state rations to people in need. The conference referred Mary’s state­

ments to Middleton who denied them but without evidence to sup-

port his denial. State Direc­tor of Social Services, F. W. Humphries, ex­plained that his department was instructed to give benefits to Aborigines who were of good character and did not waste money;

were intelli­gent; and were good and willing workers. ‘Yet a group of

twenty-one people from Mowajum Mission who had been exempt-

ed from the Western Australian Act, were refused social security benefits because they were judged to be ‘not sufficiently advanced to receive pensions’.50

In February 1959 Mary made what would be her last interstate

trip, this time to Melbourne to attend the second conference of the

Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement. She was gratified to see that Shirley Andrews had organised the conference based on

the articles of Convention 107 ‘concerning the protection and inte­

gra­tion of indigenous and other tribal and semi-tribal populations in independent countries’. Mary spoke about conditions of em­ploy­ment and the need for social security benefits to be extended to Aborigines.51 50

51

Western Australian Native Welfare Council Incorp. Second Annual Conference, 3491A/45, SLWA; See John Chesterman, Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, 2005, p. 47, for a discussion of this case. Draft Agenda, Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement Conference, CAR, MS12913/10/4, SLV.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

Shirley had already started gathering data for the campaign in her methodical way. The Council resolved:

That a campaign for extension of social service benefits to all Aborigines be undertaken by the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement in the coming year.52

By July, as the Commonwealth Government continued quietly

removing evidence of discrimination from its statute books, Social

Services Minister, Hugh Roberton, announced the removal of race discrimination from the Social Services Act. Exclusions which limited the right of Aboriginal Australians to benefits would be repealed. These exclusions were replaced by section 137A:

An aboriginal native of Australia who follows a mode of life that is, in the opinion of the Director-General, nomadic or primitive is not entitled to a pension, allowance, endowment or benefit under this Act.53

Age, invalid and widows pensions and maternity allowances would now apply to Aboriginal people unless they were ‘nomadic’ or

‘primitive’. These terms, however, were not defined in the Act, and for the Aboriginal people of Kalgoorlie were interpreted by local state government officials often to the detriment of Aboriginal workers who were itinerant as they moved about, chasing work.

Prior to the passage of this amendment the Social Services Act ex­

cluded all those who were defined as ‘Aboriginal’ (and the definition

varied from state to state) from applying for old age and invalid pensions, widows pensions and the maternity allowance unless they had been exempted from their state Aboriginal protection legislation.

In Western Australia people with a quarter Aboriginal lineage came 52 53

Gordon Bryant papers, MS8256, box 182, NLA. Social Services Act 1959, Commonwealth of Australia.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

into the definition of Aboriginal and in 1959 less than six per cent of this population had exemption certificates. So with the passage of the amendment a Western Australian population of up to 17,000 people (including children) would be eligible to apply for these benefits if they could establish that they were not ‘primitive’ or ‘nomadic’.54

Definition of these terms was obviously going to be of key im­por­

tance. Anticipating this, the Council for Aboriginal Rights Bulletin

11, written by Shirley Andrews, drew attention to ‘nomadic’ being

interpreted ‘in an extraordinary manner in W.A. to include seasonal workers who travel around from one job to another and take their families with them’. Shirley quoted Mary Bennett:

The fact that Aborigines will take woodcutting jobs in the bush proves that they will put up with hardships and poor pay for the chance of earning a pittance to spend. Their wives accompany them and any small children. Their life is meagre, they are refused Child Endowment. The father carries the elder child who is about three years old and the mother carries the year old baby and any scraps of food that could serve for the children’s next meal. She is quite young but she is always hungry and tired; there is no baby carriage for her baby, but a smile from the tired mother as she points to a photograph of her little daughter who was chosen to present a bouquet to the Queen. While the two elder children of this family of four are allowed to have Child Endowment (paid direct to the mission station), the mother is refused Child Endowment for the younger children still with her because the faithful soul moves round with the father in his struggle for employment.55

The ‘tired mother’ was Bowie, the daughter of Lulu Bilson. Mary knew and understood the difficulties each generation faced and tried 54 55

See Annual Report, Commissioner of Native Welfare, Western Australia, year ended 30 June 1959. Bulletin 11, June 1929, CAR, MS 12913/5/4, SLV.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

to help white people see that lack of educational opportunities meant

little or no work which then resulted in children being taken from their mothers.

Applications for pensions were made through state native welfare

departments, whose task it was to assess eligibility. In Kalgoorlie the Native Welfare officer insisted that social service benefits were given

‘as a matter of grace’. Mary pointed out that workers had had their contributions to social service deducted from their payment for work done. She told Jessie Street:

It is not fair to disqualify them for illiteracy when they were refused education or for nomadism when they are no more nomadic now than white shearers who must travel in search of work, or for poverty when they have never been given the value of their work.56

As news of the impending changes to the Social Service Act

became known, more people visited Mary. In one week in March

she had thirty visitors asking for help of one kind or another. She had developed extensive files of fifty or so people who sought her

assistance. Two rooms of her house were lined with Weetie breakfast cereal boxes which rose half way to the ceiling, and here she filed

the details of the lives of the people she was assisting. After helping

them with applications, she sent follow-up letters to both state and federal bureaucrats telling Shirley Andrews ‘seven months is too

long to keep very old and very sick people waiting for their pensions especially in this cold comfortless winter’.57

56 57

Bennett to Street, 2 September 1959, Street papers, MS2683/10/630, NLA. Bromham to Andrews, 30 November 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8303A/2, SLWA, WA; Bennett to Andrews, 12 July 1960, CAR, MS12913/4/6, SLV.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Mary’s other preoccupations during these years were to campaign

for technical training, proper wages and decent working conditions

so that people could make the transition from hunter-gatherers to members of a modern industrial society. She battled illness, sadness,

depression and a sense of inadequacy as she sought to assist those who came to her.

Wages and working conditions In Australia in the 1950s Aboriginal pastoral workers were excluded

from the Pastoral Industry Award. In Queensland and the Northern

Territory rates of pay for Aboriginal workers were set by legisla­ tion, though they were lower than those paid to other workers. In

Western Australia, however, Aboriginal workers had no official rates

whatsoever. Employers made their own decisions about payment

and if they changed their minds about what they would pay there was no redress for Aboriginal workers, no union to contest on their

behalf. On the eastern goldfields of Western Australia the situation

was even more dire for Aboriginal workers. There was an oversupply of untaught, illiterate Aboriginal men looking for work in the

Kalgoorlie wood yards. Every day men would be turned away. One of Mary’s friends worked for a full day on the circular saw in such a

yard and asked for a pound but was given ten shillings and told not to come back the next day because it would be too hot.

Faced with the daily suffering of her friends Mary set out to see

what could be done to gain some justice for the individuals who vis-

ited her. She contacted Tom Dougherty, secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union. He described the treatment of Aboriginal workers

as ‘the nearest thing to slavery’ but pointed out that Aboriginal – 3 62 –

T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

workers were excluded from the 1956 Pastoral Industry Award which

meant that they were paid half rates or less for their work. She described the situation on the goldfields of Western Australia in The

Australian Worker: ‘competent workers paid as little as a pound a week plus keep, refusal of unemployment benefits and inadequate rations’. She explained to her readers:

They are the victims of an artificial vicious circle: they are so poorly paid because they cannot live like white men though they desire to do so; because they cannot afford to live like white men they are refused citizenship and, with citizenship, award rates of pay for the work they do and the Old Age Pension, Unemployment Pay and other social services.

She explained further that the smallness of the wage means that

people cannot save. The Aboriginal worker gets no holiday pay: ‘To call it a holiday when his work is finished is an untruth’. 58

In her submission to the 1959 Western Australian Native Welfare

Associations meeting, Mary drew on the principles of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement to propose that: ‘All Aborigines have a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, with

equal pay for equal work, and the same industrial protection with

Social Service Benefits as other Australians’. She spoke with passion about restitution: ‘to the needy and broken Aboriginal people of the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia … and the displaced Aboriginal tribes of the further desert’. She shared the experiences of those she knew, and ended:

There is no sadder sight than those fine desert people – unwanted, untaught, losing their civilisation that cares for people in our 58

Mary M. Bennett, ‘Black-Eye for White Aussies: Why Not New Deal for Aborigines? Slave Camp Poverty in W.A.’, The Australian Worker, 4 September 1957.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

civilisation that cares for property. David Unaipon saw the ma­ teri­alist civilisation of white people come to Aboriginal people so rapidly that they have not been able to come to terms with it. The Aborigine must not be left alone in the middle of white civilisation. That would be like leaving a white man alone in the middle of the bush.59

She wrote to members of parliament Kim Beazley and Gordon

Bryant just prior to the 1959 Australian Labor Party conference, reminding them that Aboriginal workers had no industrial protection,

most pastoral work was casual, and despite their paying taxes they were not eligible for social service benefits.

The international trade union movement was a further avenue of

hope for her. She wrote to C. H. Millard, director of the International

Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Geneva, but had to confess

to Shirley Andrews that ‘he returns the ball to us’. She had hoped for something more but Millard offered sympathy while pointing out that it was ‘a question of internal Australian legislation and

administration … outside the competence of an international trade union body such as ours’.60 Shirley Andrews wrote ‘Present Wages Rates and Working Conditions of Aboriginal Workers’ in the Coun­

cil for Aboriginal Rights Bulletin 13. She explained that Aboriginal

workers in Western Australia had no official pay rates whatsoever. Mary realised, however, that it would take time to bring Aboriginal

workers under Arbitration Court guidelines with regard to wages and working conditions. Besides, she knew that equal wages in the pastoral industry was no panacea. The problem was more complex. 59 60

Mary Bennett, West Australian Conference of Native Welfare Associations in Perth, 31 January 1959, Street papers, MS2683, series 10, box 29, NLA. Bennett to Millard, Director International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, 29 July 1960, CAR, MS12913/4/8, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 31 March 1961, CAR, MS12913/4/8, SLV.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

Co-operatives provide new hope Mary came to describe the policy of assimilation as ‘the imposition

of the “colonialist” economy of the dominant race on the robbed and ruined Aboriginal inhabitants who still survive’. She argued that the pastoralists used the Aboriginal workers as cheap labour while the

missionaries educated and converted and left their gathered souls with no real role in the economy.61

The social problems which had preoccupied her – the taking of

children from their mothers, inadequate education, few employ-

ment possibilities and lack of access to social service benefits – were inter­connected. People who had not been educated had little in the

way of employment opportunities, did not earn enough to keep their

families together, or else had to leave their families to take up work. As a consequence they lost their children to missions or other institutions, which then received the child endowment which had been

denied the Aboriginal parents because they were ‘nomadic’. As itinerant workers they had to move around. Children separated from

their families did not flourish. Mary saw the eighty-nine Aboriginal

prisoners in Fremantle Gaol (almost all there for minor offences,

many due to alcohol) as maladjusted due to being taken out of their families. 62

As she thought about how to resolve these problems she was

increasingly attracted to the co-operative movement. The approach seemed to offer a future on a people’s own terms. Reverend Alf

Clint, the Director of Co-operatives for the Anglican Australian 61 62

Bennett to Millard, 29 July 1960; MN2958, Acc 8303/6, SLWA. Bennett to Trainor correspondence 1957–1959, Doreen Trainor papers, MN2931, Acc 8342A/4, SLWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Board of Missions based in Sydney, had helped establish Aboriginal co-operatives at Lockhart River Mission in North East Cape York,

Queensland, Moa Island in the Torres Strait and at Cabbage Tree Island in New South Wales. Mary wrote to her friend Ada:

If I had any work left in me I should of course ask permission from Clint to take a course in his Co-op College with natives … I am so sorry I can see only three things: 1. Every right which we enjoy should be granted to the Aborig­ines of this land … because 2. If I or any friend of mine is unfairly dealt with, I or she immediately applies to my/her Member of Parliament, but the disenfranchised or unfranchised native has no members of Parliament and consequently is reduced to Chattel Stat­ us. This is Australia’s monstrous injustice all to keep cheap labour for the pastoralists … 3. The Aborigines were the first to have the vision of a Welfare State, but have had all initiatives taken from them and are being frustrated to death.63 [her underlining]

Just a month earlier she had gone as a witness to the Kalgoorlie

Town Hall to speak to the House of Representatives Select Com­

mit­tee on Voting Rights of Aborigines. She told the committee that she believed in Christian co-operatives and she argued that partici­ pa­tion in Australian society should be expected of Aboriginal people. She told the committee that we ought to say:

‘You are a man. You can work. You have pride in your work’. They do take a pride in their work and they ought to work for themselves, but they have been so pitiful really. Their responsibilities have been taken from them. I think that has

63

Mary Bennett to Ada Bromham, 4 August 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8303/6, SLWA.

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T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

been the most ghastly thing of all. They are not responsible for their children unless they put up a fight.64

Mary read everything she could find on the co-operative move­

ment. She learned about the Rochdale pioneers, the nineteenth century artisans whose vision of an improved social order led them

to form the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society. This was the beginning of the English co-operative movement which Alf Clint

was adapting to the needs of Aboriginal communities. She also read Kylie Tennant’s book, Treat Me So Gently, on the co-operative

movement at Lockhart. Co-operatives provided a new sense of hope for her.

Mary was writing to her local ALP member about her Goldfields

friends, she was sending information and seeking help from federal

Labor politicians Kim Beazley senior and Gordon Bryant and she was

writing to Millard, the director of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. She now saw the Left as more likely to be a

reforming force in Australian politics but, when Minister John Brady

proposed limitations to the Natives (Status as Citizens) Bill in 1959, she announced that she would not vote for an Act put forward ‘by a renegade Laborite such as Brady’. ‘I shall not vote’, she told Ada

Bromham. ‘I shall pay the fine’. 65 Pastoralists she now saw as the bitter enemies of Aboriginal people.

Mary Bennett has been depicted by scholars as both a feminist and

as ‘a left wing warrior’, but such categorising overlooks her singleminded concentration on the legal, social, political and economic 64 65

Mary Montgomerie Bennett, Report from the Select Committee on Voting Rights of Aborigines, Part 11 – Minutes of Evidence, Commonwealth of Australia, 1961, p. 229. Bennett to Bromham, 6 October 1958, Bennett and Bromham papers, Acc 8303A/15, SLWA.

– 3 67 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

position of Aboriginal Australians and her commitment to work for

justice on their behalf.66 Certainly she worked with feminists but

she showed no interest in feminist concerns which did not relate

to Aboriginal women. She voted for Labor when she was living in Kalgoorlie but she never expressed any views about Labor Party policy which did not impinge on Aboriginal Australians. 67 Her

politics was subservient to her primary purpose; a means to an end – improved quality of life and just laws for the people she loved.

Christian faith provided sustenance. New Testament injunctions

guided her behaviour, but Mary was critical of the institutional

church. She wrote ‘I hear the command – “feed my lambs” – and I will do it as far as I am able, namely in education’. She described her

journeys back to Australia in both 1947 and 1951 as God calling her to return to this responsibility, and she taught in mission schools

until she was seventy-three.68 This, however, did not constrain her in

criticising the church. She argued that the Christian church should speak out against conditions which prevent the Aboriginal fam-

ily from remaining together. She battled the Australian Board of Missions over inadequate payments to Aboriginal workers. ‘I know only too much about their bigoted, reactionary attitude’, she once

wrote, describing it, rather astonishingly, as ‘practical atheism, for 66

67 68

See, for example, Marilyn Lake, ‘Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 49, 1996, pp. 12-20; Fiona Paisley, ‘No Back Streets in the Bush: 1920s and 1930s Pro-Aboriginal White Women’s Activism and the Trans-Australian Railway’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 12, no. 25, 1997, pp. 119-34; Alison Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, Western Australia, 1915, p. 338. Bennett to Bromham, 6 October 1958, Bennett and Bromham papers, Acc 8303A, SLWA. Bennett to Brown, 3 November 1931, Citizens’ Education Fellowship, MS9212/3655/1, SLV; Bennett to Greenidge, 14 February 1947, 13 February 1951, ASAPS, MSS Brit Emp s22, G953a/4.

– 3 68 –

T he Wongatha people of K algoorlie

they say in effect, we can’t afford to be just; but God always gives

us means to do our duty if we sincerely desire to serve Him and our fellows’ (her underlining).69 She refused to work with the Board of Missions because of its attitude on wages. And while she counted missionaries – Robert Powell and Wilf Douglas – among her friends

she was furious when other missionaries said that the report of the West­ern Australian Select Committee into the health and welfare

of the Aboriginal people in the Laverton-Warburton Ranges area was exaggerated. ‘You can’t exaggerate a death’, she told Shirley

Andrews. ‘A person dies or does not die.’70 In her last years she told

Ada Bromham that Mount Margaret missionaries were ‘the most slovenly and unbusinesslike people’ she had ever known, and she described the Cundeelee missionaries as ‘incompetent American mis­

sion­aries’.71 Mary was forthright in her criticisms of those who did not share her own vision of justice for Aboriginal Australians.

This Kalgoorlie woman, who was physically distant from old

friends as well as newer activist friends and alienated from family, never thought of herself as an Australian although she cherished

her comforting memory of ‘growing up’ on Lammermoor station in Queensland. Her attachment to country was to England. She said that she didn’t want to stay in Kalgoorlie after she finished Peter’s case because her eyes were damaged by the summer heat and her vision became ‘blobby and indistinct’ but she also explained that her home

in Kalgoorlie enabled her to ‘experience reality, as distinguished from 69 70 71

Bennett to Brown, 3 November 1931, Victorian Aboriginal Group papers, MS2912/3653/1, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 24 March 1957, CAR, MS12913/4/8, SLV. Bennett to Bromham, 14 March 1960, Bennett and Bromham papers, Acc 8303A, SLWA; Bennett to Trainor, 14 May 1954, Doreen Trainor papers, Acc 8342/4, SLWA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

the vacuum which I abhor’.72 Despite her own alienation from country and kin, she wrote with passion and knowledge about the sanctity of family and connectedness to land for Aboriginal Australians.

Her work and relationships with Aboriginal people replaced these elemental connections which she recognised as basic needs in others: to family and to land.

72

Bennett to Bromham, 9 July 1958, August 1958, Bennett and Bromham papers, Acc 8303A/15, SLWA.

– 370 –

Cha pte r 13

F I N A L DAY S I feel it is a disgrace that in a modern and rapidly learning world Australians are so retrograde as to deny the vote to the original and only true … but dispossessed Australians. It is time we stopped alienating the whole world except South Africa by making our Aboriginal Australians STATELESS in their proper country. Only real democracies can survive. [her emphasis] Mary Bennett to the Select Committee on Voting Rights, Kalgoorlie, 5 June 1961

I can’t bear an empty life or being allowed only to fold washing of hospital things. It is so futile it kills me; and I have my own ideas of what I may and what I may not do, and Faith [her kelpie] is such a darling putting on her pretty little acts to cheer me when I am down. Mary Bennett to Ada Bromham, 2 January 1961

The annual Perth Native Welfare Conference was held in February

1961 but Mary did not attend. Her travelling days were over; she confided in Ada Bromham that she preferred her own home to any

other. She continued, however, to exert an influence by letter. Ada

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

observed, ‘What you are able to do through the post is amazing’, as Mary brought the plight of the Wongatha people of the Gold­fields to public notice as well as helping individuals and families. She

was heartened by Jim Beharell’s appointment as Native Welfare

Officer for the Goldfields as he brought a more enlightened atti­

tude, refusing to break up Aboriginal families without a court

order. Mary continued to advocate with him for those, such as Jacob Bilson, still waiting to have their applications for social service benefits processed.1

Neither did she attend the fourth conference of the Federal Council

for Aboriginal Advancement which was held in Brisbane in April

but she did prepare a statement on policy and practice in Western Australia to be included in the conference reports. She drew attention to the fact that the Western Australian Minister for Police was

also (in the present and most former governments) the Minister for Native Affairs – a modern variant on the police-protector who both

arrested and prosecuted an Aboriginal prisoner as well as having

some responsibility for defending him. She recounted the experience of ‘a friend of mine’ who was surrounded by plain-clothes policemen

who accused him of being drunk when he wasn’t and after assaulting him demanded bail. Mary’s friend paid £5 bail, then reported

the wrongful arrest but heard nothing more about it. Mary shared another story, of Snowy, to illustrate what was happening to Aboriginal pension applications. She described him as ‘a grand old fellow, small and thin, and active; a great leader but he appears to

have good arteries, so although he is certified 70 years of age by Mr Schenk’, Dr Ivanov, ‘the Commonwealth doctor for approving, 1

Bennett to Bromham, 2 January 1961, Bromham to Bennett, 16 February 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8383A/2, SLWA.

– 372 –

F inal days

or disapproving applicants for pensions, chooses to say there is no documentary evidence for Snowy’s age’.2 Her letters and reports

of the people who were daily coming to her door demonstrate the discrimination faced by those who lacked the cultural knowledge to defend themselves.

Assisting Wongatha friends In mid-1961 Mary took the case of Daisy and Tommy Edwards

to Mr Havlin, Australian Workers’ Union organiser at the near­

by town of Boulder. Daisy (Pithikari) Edwards asked Havlin to help her to apply for the pensioner’s wife allowance. Her husband

Tommy (Toomberanno) had lost a leg about thirty years earlier. Havlin succeeded in helping Daisy to get the allowance. This was a rare and valued win against the authorities.3 Mary Bennett was

seeking help for her Aboriginal friends from the very union which thirty years earlier she had described as tyrannical and cowardly for its role in the 1891 shearers’ strike. The ‘shocking imperial­ ist’, as she had described her younger self who wrote Christison

of Lammermoor, now praised the local Australian Workers Union

representatives who helped to secure a pensioner’s wife allowance for Pansy Tjinannu.4

Mary wrote to Shirley about another family situation. Reg

Johnston, ‘full blood Aborigine, works on the railways to support 2 3 4

Mary Bennett, ‘Western Australia: Native Policy and Practice’, statement prepared for the fourth National Aboriginal Conference (Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement), 183AA/55, SLWA. Bennett to Millard, 29 July 1960, CAR, MS12913/4/8, SLV. Bennett to Bromham, 3 September 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, Acc 8303A/15, SLWA; Bennett, ‘How Did Pansy Tjinanu Get Her Pension?’, statement to Select Committee on Voting Rights of Aborigines, Kalgoorlie, 1961, Charles Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

his large family’. Mary dictated a letter from Reg asking for Shirley’s

help. Reg’s mother, Adelaide, wanted to live with her son after her husband had died, however, the authorities refused to grant the pension to her directly after her changed circumstances. She had

been managing her own money but now was required to access it via a warrantee who would dole it out to her as he saw fit. Mary described Adelaide as ‘a very gracious person’, and told Shirley ‘It sounds silly for a woman of about 60 to ask permission from a welfare officer to live with her own son’.5

What her correspondents did not know was that Mary had

known these friends – Bill Wesley, Snowy, Daisy and Tommy, and

Reg and Adelaide Johnston for almost thirty years. Bill (short for Billarissa) Wesley, who worked as a fettler on the railways, was one of her star pupils. She recalled Billarissa’s success in 1941 winning the main essay prize in an Australia-wide competition for Aboriginal

students. ‘He was a lovely child … one of my very best pupils, good at everything’.6 Mary had met Tommy in the 1930s when he lost a leg after damaging treatment for a spear wound by a witchdoctor. With

one leg his hunting prowess was much diminished and he was found guilty of spearing a sheep. He was sent to Fremantle Gaol soon after

his wife had lost the child she was carrying as a result of the trauma. She had told his story in Teaching the Aborigines. Now both Daisy and Tommy were old and in need.

Snowy Barnes came to Mount Margaret as a young man and met

and married his wife Linda. The squatter for whom Snowy worked

regarded him as his property. Now Snowy, also old, but with no birth 5 6

Bennett to Andrews, 28 August 1961, CAR, MS12913/8/7, SLV. Bennett to Charles Duguid, 18 June 1961, Duguid papers, MS5068, series 11, NLA.

– 374 –

F inal days

certificate, was refused a pension. Reg Johnston had also been one of Mary’s pupils. He was one of the first recorded births at Mount Margaret. Mary had cast him in the lead role in a dramatisation

of Dr Aggrey’s life which she devised for the children in 1936. She used the story of Aggrey’s life from village boy to vice-principal of Achimota College in Ghana to inspire the children. Reg was now

the pastor at a church he had built and established at Leonora,

two hundred kilometres north of Kalgoorlie, and was a leader to his people. Mary’s advocacy for these and others was rooted in her

teaching of them as children or helping them in other ways such as assisting Lulu Bilson to manage with one arm after her rabbiting accident. They were her friends and as close as family to her. She

wanted more than anything to know that their lives now as elderly people might be secure.

In the midst of this difficult work Mary was encouraged to receive

The Noongar, the first issue of the journal of the Perth-based Associ­a­ tion for the Advancement of Coloured People. Ted Penny, the young

secretary of the organisation and one of the first trained Aboriginal teachers in Western Australia, had sent Mary multiple copies which

she distributed to friends ‘who are also a friend of your people’. She wrote in support, agreeing with the new body that assimilation

was annihilation. She agreed with them that when children were removed from their parents contact between them should be assured, and she encouraged the association to press for the improvements in the parents’ lives suggested by Dr Bowlby so that families could

remain intact. She wrote of her admiration for Aboriginal people and wished Ted Penny success with the new body.7 7

The Noongar, official organ of the Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, n.d, but May 1961; Bennett to Penny, 24 May 1961, Bennett and Bromham

– 375 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Now, in her eightieth year, she faced her own physical decline.

She was often tired; she had giddy spells and falls; she was slow. With Ada she shared her religious faith, expressing the comforting assurance that ‘we are “on the Lord’s side” and I feel now I must put

the burden on Him and acknowledge to Him my own ineptness. He will work and use us and we must trust Him to perform His justice

which is perfect’.8 Spiritually she was sustained by her beliefs but her vision of a just and inclusive society and her faith did not deflect her from her own responsibility while she had breath to seek justice.

In early September Mary sent to Shirley Andrews ‘a beautiful,

terrible photograph … of a dear old man who has been fobbed off with rations, degrading hand-outs … instead of the Age Pension’.

This was Norman Bilson.9 She also sent photographs of Adelaide

Johnston, Joyce Maher and her husband Percy and children, of Lulu and Alec Bilson and their grandchildren, and of Daisy and Angel

Imari. Over the past year she had been taking small family groups

into Kalgoorlie Photographic Studio for professional portraits. She had sent copies of the photographs to Ada Bromham, Jessie Street and the Anti-Slavery Society. Now she sent about a dozen such pho­

to­graphs to Shirley Andrews. About Adelaide Johnston she wrote, ‘she has a loving heart and cannot bear to be away from the 5 or 6

(I think 6) grandsons and two granddaughters (the children of Reg and Jen)’. Of Joyce Maher she wrote, ‘life has been too difficult. Her

husband drinks and I hoped she would stand firm against it, but life

8 9

papers, MN2958, Acc 8303A, SLWA; Sue Taffe interview with Ted Penny, 27 May 1997, Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders Oral History Project, AIATSIS. Bennett to Bromham, 2 January 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, Acc 8303A/2, SLWA. Bennett to Street, 2 September 1959, Street papers, MS2683, box 10, NLA.

– 376 –

F inal days

was too hard’. Of Alec Bilson she said, ‘he has worked all his life

for white settlers first as police tracker, then as station hand. His pension was granted in 1960 shortly before his death’. Reg Cable’s

photograph was accompanied with Mary’s comment ‘he has not been able to walk properly since Constable Hunter shot him in a “dispersal

of Aborigines”’. ‘Jim Brown (Wongka name Porta) was a station hand for forty years till disabled in a riding accident in 1959’.10 Daisy and Angel Imari ‘are a grand Aborigine couple who have always worked

faithfully as station hands wherever work was to be found. Now they are ageing it is difficult to get station work, so they take work in the

bush and Angel cuts wood. It happens that they are not always paid and there is no redress’.11 The photographs and the statements are an

expression of love and urgency expressed by one who senses that she has little time left.

‘I feel they would have a chance’, she told Shirley, ‘if Clint got

them employing themselves in their Co-operatives … With all best wishes for your able and wise and devoted work for our Aborigines’.12

At about the same time, Mary heard that a British Committee had backed Alf Clint’s work for Australian Aboriginal Co-operatives and she expressed her delight at this development to Ada Bromham.13

She had another fall on 2 September but when she felt able she

responded to a request from the Anti-Slavery Society for information,

and wrote to Jacquetta Hawkes, archaeologist and writer, who was married to author and social commentator J. B. Priestley. Hawkes was giving the Society’s annual address on Australian Aboriginal 10 11 12 13

Wongka, also Wongkai, Wangki and Wongi are shorted forms of Wongatha. Bennett to Andrews, 31 August 1961, CAR, MS12913/8/7, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 31 August 1961, CAR, MS12913/8/7, SLV. Copy of card from Alf Clint to Bennett forwarded to Bromham, 26 August 1961, CAR, MS12913, box 4, SLV.

– 37 7 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

conditions, and the Society’s secretary, Thomas Fox-Pitt, had asked Mary if she would provide information on the current situation for the speaker. Mary gathered material on Western Australia and

especially on the Eastern Goldfields and posted it off to Hawkes.14 It

was her last attempt at conveying to the world beyond Australia the injustices experienced by Aboriginal people.

On 16 September she was admitted to Kalgoorlie Hospital as

a diabetic patient. Not knowing that she was seriously ill, Shirley

had written thanking her friend ‘for those fine photographs’. She explained that they arrived just before a reception in Melbourne to welcome Joe McGinness from Cairns, the first Aboriginal president of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement.15

When she did learn of Mary’s hospitalisation Shirley contacted

Ada Bromham in Perth to let her know. Ada boarded the train, leaving the comfort of Perth for the dust and heat of Kalgoorlie in late September. There was no public transport to the hospital so,

although she was in her late seventies, Ada trudged the almost two miles to the Kalgoorlie District Hospital from Mary’s home each day to comfort her dying friend, who had lost the power of speech.16

In between hospital visits Ada began sorting papers under a naked

light bulb in Mary’s spartanly furnished house. Hundreds of cereal

boxes, which had contained the breakfasts of her kelpie Faith, formed Mary’s filing system. With the contents marked, they went halfway to the ceiling up the four walls of two rooms. There were, presumably, 14 15 16

Fox-Pitt to Bennett, 30 August 1961, Mary Bennett to Jacquetta Hawkes, 8 September 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8303, SLWA. Shirley Andrews to Mary Bennett, 22 September 1961, CAR, MS12913/8/7, SLV. Bromham to Street, 29 November 1961, Street papers, MS2683/10/762, NLA; Ada Bromham to Andrews, 30 November 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8303/2, SLWA.

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no family photographs on the stained and torn wallpapered surfaces

or in any of the papers through which Ada sorted. Jessie Street had been shocked at Mary’s very basic living conditions when she had visited in 1957.17

Shirley Andrews wrote to Mary and asked the hospital staff to

read her letter to their patient who was now very ill.18 Mary’s former pupil, Sadie Corner, now the competent and respected Matron of

Leonora Hospital, two hundred kilometres to the north, who had trained in Melbourne after being refused permission to study to

become a nurse in Western Australia, heard of Mary’s hospitalisation. Sadie passed the news on to Gladys Vincent who was now working

at Gnowangerup Bible College as a teacher, training Aboriginal adolescents. Gladys travelled to Kal­goorlie to be with her much loved mentor.19 Ada, Wilf Douglas, the Kalgoorlie-based missionary and linguist to whom Mary left her personal effects, Nellie Nazzari, her neighbour to whom she left her dog Faith, and Reverend Griffiths from the Uniting Church were the other regulars at her bedside.

Back at 83 Forrest Street, when she was not visiting the hospital,

Ada continued her sorting of Mary’s vast archive. Shirley Andrews

had asked her to look for unpublished materials and information about Mary’s early life as the Council for Aboriginal Rights wished

to publish a tribute to Mary.20 On the afternoon of Mary’s death,

6 October 1961, two officials from the Crown Law Department knocked at the door and, despite Ada’s protestations that the files 17 18 19 20

Bromham to Andrews, 30 November 1961, CAR, MS12913/9/7, SLV; Maxwell Brown, ‘Fernando: The Story of an Aboriginal Prophet’, Aboriginal Welfare Bulletin, 4:1, 1964, p. 7. Andrews to Medical Superintendent, Kalgoorlie Hospital, 2 October 1961, CAR, MS12913/4/8, SLV. Personal communication, Gladys Tapim to Sue Taffe, September 2005. Bromham to Street, 29 November 1961, Street papers, MS2683/10/762, NLA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

contained letters written by her, confiscated all Mary’s papers. Wilf

Douglas had reported Mary’s death to the Kalgoorlie Clerk of Courts, apparently unhappy at Ada sorting of papers when Mary was still alive.21

Meanwhile news travelled rapidly among the people in the Aborig­

inal camps dotted around Kalgoorlie that their friend had died. The Kalgoorlie Miner wrote a small obituary under the heading ‘Woman Who Worked For Natives Dies’, reducing Mary’s life’s work of

activism and international advocacy to ‘welfare’. On Monday after­

noon of 9 October mourners gathered in the Church of Christ section

of the Kalgoorlie Cemetery on the red earth and under a clear blue

sky. The Wongatha people, whom Mary had come to love, ‘came from everywhere, camp people and all’, her former pupil, Gladys Tapim told me.22 There would have been representatives from the

Bilson clan, whom Mary had first met through Lulu in the 1930s. Aborig­inal pastor and her former pupil, Reg Johnston, whom Mary

had been assisting in his mother’s application to be able to collect her

own pension, placed an obituary in the local paper describing her as a ‘beloved friend of the Wangkayi’. Mary’s neighbour Nellie Nazzari described her simply as ‘a precious little lady’.23

Death brought an end to Mary’s intense, unrelenting sense of guilt.

This sense of guilt is not explicable in rational terms. She recog­nised intellectually the suffering and loss brought about through disposses-

sion when pastoralists such as her father took Aboriginal lands. And she knew, and had to put on the public record, that her father was 21 22 23

Bromham to Street, 29 November 1961, Street papers, MS2683/10/762, NLA; ‘Welfare Chief: Papers Charge is Nonsense’, The West Australian, 1 November 1961. Personal communication, Gladys Tapim to Sue Taffe, September 2005. Kalgoorlie Miner, 9 October 1961.

– 38 0 –

F inal days

a good man. The emotional conflictedness arising from these two positions seemed irresolvable. Mary’s obsessive, unsuccessful cam-

paign, over a number of years, to see Peter Pontara reunited with his parents while being educated, had its emotional roots deep in her family’s past when her father supported her mother’s decision to relinquish Jane to her fate. There was a principle at stake in the Pontara

case, undoubtedly, but her years of engagement in this case, especially when there was no evidence that Peter was unhappy, suggest a deeper explanation. The blanket of silence over the Jane episode and her sentimental­ised mem­ory of growing up at Lammermoor suggest traumatic avoidance.

In her later years Mary’s sister Helen had reconnected with Kiara,

the son of Barney, Robert’s loyal employee, and other former Lam­

mer­moor workers who were sent to Cherbourg Mission, sending them

parcels of clothes and tobacco.24 There is no evidence that Mary ever

made such contact with Dalleburra people from Lammermoor after Wyma died in 1926. Her feelings about their losses were perhaps too intense.

Helen and the rift in the family At the time of Mary’s death Nellie Nazzari was probably the only

person in Western Australia who knew that Mary had a living sister, Helen Roberts. Helen had written to Mary with good wishes

for her eightieth birthday on July 8, just three months before Mary’s

death. After the funeral Helen wrote to Pastor Griffiths to thank him and to provide information to explain Mary’s dedication to the

cause of Aboriginal injustice. The sisters had not met since Helen 24

See Christison family papers, TR 1867, series 14 for details of Helen’s correspondence 1950–1959 with Cherbourg superintendent and residents, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

left England in late 1919 and, according to Helen, Mary had not

replied to her letters for forty years. It seems that Mary spoke to

Nellie about this deep and painful rift in the family and, according to Helen, Nellie played a part in helping Mary to begin to

think about the possibility of reconciling with her sister. Before a rapprochement could take place, however, Mary was admitted to hospital for the final time.25

Helen Roberts, like her mother Mary Christison, was a person who

set great store by social position and the trappings of wealth. She was a name-dropper. Her letter to Pastor Griffiths, whom she did not

know, is revealing. She thanked the pastor for his letter to her after Mary’s death and told him that copies would be made of it and one

would be sent to ‘General Sir Phillip Christison, our cousin’. Helen

provided the pastor with her version of Mary’s earlier life, before, as she put it, ‘she got her call’. Helen referred to the line of distinguish­

ed Scots whom Mary came from. She pointed out that their father

was a nephew of Sir Robert Christison, ‘the great toxicologist and physician to Queen Victoria in Scotland’. She referred to their greatgrandfather ‘who held the chair of the Humanities in Edinburgh’.

She wrote of the great luxury in which they lived before the war at Burwell Park where ‘my sister had her own ladies’ maid’. She told

him that she and her sister were presented at Buckingham Palace to King George and Queen Mary.26

Helen explains the falling out between the sisters to Pastor Roberts

by stating that Mary cut off connection with her family when she

‘got her call’ to work for Aboriginal justice. The argument fails to 25 26

Helen Roberts to Rev. F. H. Griffiths, 21 November 1961, copy of letter given to the author by Dora Cotterill. Roberts to Griffiths, 21 November 1961.

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convince because the family freeze began in 1919 when Helen and

Mrs Christison left England, where Mary was working on her bi-

ography, long before she dedicated her life to working for justice for Aboriginal Australians.

Mrs Mary Christison, once a Shoreditch actress, had suc­cess­

fully, if belatedly, launched her daughters into respectable, moneyed English society. She had worked hard all her life to improve her

social position and understood that transgressions could jeopardise this life project. Mary Bennett portrayed her mother in Christi­

son of Lammermoor in an unflattering light. She lampooned her for excusing the insolent behaviour of a rude man because he took a

double first in Greek at Oxford. By the time Mary had returned from the final visit to Lammermoor in 1910 with her father, she

had rejected these values, so at odds with the unpretentious and honest communications which she had observed between her father and his former workforce at Lammermoor.

The visit to Lammermoor when she was twenty-nine helped to

crys­tallise Mary’s own values. She described her five years as a student

at the Royal Academy of Arts as a waste of time. She was sicken­

ed by the snobbery of the new Lammermoor owner who expected

wine with dinner and refused to drink tea with his underlings. And she recalled the childhood experiences which she had valued so much at Lammermoor – always cut short by her mother who

needed the society of Hobart and then London where she could continue to make her mark and create a secure upper-class future for her daughters.

Marriage to Charles provided an escape from her mother’s value

system but she was still living in the family home while Charles

was at sea. After the death of Robert, the diplomat and conciliator – 38 3 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

within the family, his widow was perhaps even more concerned

with propriety. In these tense family circumstances it seems that

Mary Christison criticised her son-in-law to her daughter on the grounds, according to Helen, that Charles was continuing to see a

former mistress. For Mary Bennett, loyal to the man she loved, this may have been too much to bear. Charles returned from war service

in 1916 and the couple set up their home in Lincolnshire. Helen became engaged to Stewart Roberts, a lieutenant in the Australian

Imperial Force who had been awarded the Military Cross, and the

marriage was arranged to take place in Australia early in 1920. Despite her earlier antipathy to this country, Mrs Christison, elderly,

still in mourning for her husband, and perhaps not feeling particu-

larly welcome in the Bennett household, accepted Helen’s invitation to accompany Stewart and herself to Australia.27

In what would turn out to be the final year of her life, Mary

Bennett made the only utterance about her mother that I am aware of since Christison of Lammermoor was published in 1927. She was

reminiscing with journalist Maxwell Brown about her meeting with

Anthony Fernando, the Aboriginal man who told Londoners in no uncertain terms what had been done to his people. As it was thirty-

three years since she had met Fernando it is instructive to examine this account and the way Mary’s story changes.

In March 1929, a week after she had met Anthony Martin

Fernando, an Aboriginal man who had been charged with assault

at the Old Bailey Mary told her activist friend, Constance Cooke about this meeting. She recounted a conversation about the value of

motherhood which she had heard between Fernando and an elderly woman. Mary told Constance that Fernando spoke most beautifully 27

Conversation with Elizabeth Roberts, Sydney, 27 September 2008

– 38 4 –

F inal days

to his employer’s old mother, congratulating her for having brought

up such as son as Mr Crawshaw, a lawyer who employed Fernando in his household. Mary quoted Fernando’s words to Mrs Crawshaw directly:

A good father is good, but a good mother is above every other good. I was taken from my mother when I was little, but the thought of her has been the guiding star of my life.

Mary told Constance: ‘This is what he said to her. And to me, “If

you want to help my people, you must be quick, for there are not many left. When the stations are wired in my people die”’.28

A year later she had substituted herself for Mrs Crawshaw in this

story. She begins Chapter 7 of The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being with the quote: ‘I was taken from my tribe before I was old

enough to remember my mother, but the thought of my mother is the guiding star of my life. Mary then asserts: ‘This was said to me by an old Aboriginal man in London last year’.29

Thirty years later not only does she recount the conversation about

motherhood as between her and Fernando, but she also gives her reply to him! Now she tells journalist Maxwell Brown that she said

to Fernando: ‘I am like you. I was not taken from my mother but she was taken from me and I have always been sad that I didn’t know her’. The letter to Constance Cooke shows us that the account of this conversation as told to a journalist in 1960 is not to be believed.30

Historians have been intrigued by Mary’s claim that her mother

‘was taken’ from her. There is no evidence that her mother was taken from her at any time in her childhood. It seems that Mary is referring 28 Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke papers, GRG52/32/25, SASA. 29 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, p. 112. 30 Brown, ‘Fernando’, pp 9-11.

– 385 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

to her mother’s decision to leave England, travel with her daughter

Helen to Australia and live with Helen and Stewart Roberts. Mary’s description of this parting as a ‘taking’ is almost a scapegoating of

Helen. Because Helen ‘took’ Mary Christison to Australia her other

daughter – Mary Bennett – was unable to reconcile with her mother before she died in 1922.31

A powerful memory of an impressive Aboriginal man’s remarks

about the value of motherhood made to an elderly mother mesh with Mary’s end-of-life sadness and regret about her own difficult relation-

ship with her mother. Mary Bennett was prepared to be judgemental about her mother when writing about Mary Christison in Christison

of Lammermoor after she had died. It seems that as Mary Bennett approached her own death she recognised her inflexibility. Mary’s

claim not to have known her mother is not credible. It is most likely

her indirect expression of this regret, a preparedness perhaps to try

now to understand and forgive her mother for restricting her time at

Lammermoor with her father and the Dalleburra people to a handful of extended winter visits, and perhaps more seriously for abandoning

Jane. It seems that it was not until Helen offered greetings when her

elder sister turned eighty that Mary’s rigid attitude towards Helen began to soften.

Within her own family she had had first-hand experience of bitter

acrimony. Her father Robert had begun negotiations in 1885 to buy out his brother-in-law John Beddoe, to whom he had, decades earl­

ier, given a share in Lammermoor. The bitter fight between the two 31

Fiona Paisley has written that Mary’s mother left her behind in Australia as a child. See Paisley, The Lone Protector, p. 2. I have seen no evidence for this; Alison Holland in Just Relations, p. 68 suggests that Mary may be referring to her mother going to Australia with her sister but overlooks the changes in Mary’s account of the conversation with Fernando from 1929 to 1960.

– 38 6 –

F inal days

men over the value of the stock, in which both sides appointed their

own arbitrators, led to a family rift which continued after Beddoe reluctantly accepted Robert’s final offer. In Christison of Lammermoor

Mary wrote about this dispute which rippled down through the years with Robert and his family estranged from his sister, Agnes Beddoe,

and her husband. Mary had herself written a ‘sweet letter’ to her aunt Agnes when she was nineteen but it seems not to have been

reciprocated. Family was important, but when there was trouble in the extended family Robert drew his wife and children together into ‘our little Republic’.32 The pain of these family quarrels which led

to ongoing schisms was deeply felt and not easily resolved. Robert

Christison and his daughter Mary were not particularly good at forgiving in these circumstances.

Mary saw that family was vitally important to her Aboriginal

friends. Throughout her life she steadfastly argued that the integrity of the Aboriginal family must be respected. When she was speaking to the Moseley Royal Commission in 1934 she asked that the ‘official

smashing of native families’ be stopped. Twenty years later she conducted a long, driven, lonely and finally unsuccessful campaign for

the right of Peter Pontara’s family to be together and at the same time

have access to education. She expressed her ill-founded anxiety about Peter being sent to Canada in terms of his being ‘uprooted while a

child, torn apart from his father and mother for whose love nothing

will ever compensate him’, as another child had in fact been uprooted and then abandoned by Mary’s family.33 By the end of her life the

Won­gatha people of the Goldfields had become as family to her. She 32 33

See Bennett, Christison, pp. 168–69; Beddoe, Memories; Robert Christison to Helen Christison, 28 March 1900, Robert Christison to Mary Christison 10 February 1901, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 2, SLQ. Bennett to Andrews, 10 October 1953, CAR, MS12913/4/6, SLV.

– 38 7 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

wrote about ‘my children’, then inserting ‘Aborigine’ to clarify.34 She

shared with Shirley Andrews the ideas of a London friend who had told Mary ‘I don’t need to tell you how strongly I feel about children

stay­ing with their parents in all circumstances except where the child

is in direct moral or physical danger’. This friend wrote, ‘I could never sanc­tion removing a child from its parents, even in prison. I am sure

that a child never feels secure in the world, except through their [parents’] presence, even if they seem unsatisfactory to us’.35 Mary concurred with these views. The preservation of the Aboriginal family was, in her view, of the utmost importance in assisting them to find

their place in the white man’s world. The contradiction between this conviction and her family’s treatment of Jane must have been painful to her.

Mary’s activist friends After she had died, Mary Bennett’s activist friends – Ada Bromham

of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Shirley Andrews from the Victorian Council for Aboriginal Rights and Lady Jessie Street, a committee member of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society – consulted each other about Mary’s past. In a letter to the

Attorney-General soon after Mary’s death Ada Bromham displayed

her confusion about her friend’s earlier life: ‘You are probably aware of the death of the authoress Mrs Christesen [sic] who wrote the book

“Christesen of Lammermoor” [sic] and other publications and who in widowhood reverted to her maiden name of Bennett.’36 Although 34 35 36

Bennett to Andrews, 28 October 1954, CAR papers, MS12913, box 4, SLV. Bennett to Andrews, 30 November 1954, CAR, MS12913/1/11, SLV. Bromham to Attorney-General, 23 October 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8303/5, SLWA.

– 38 8 –

F inal days

the two women had been friends for thirty years, Ada transposed

her maiden and married name, and misspelt ‘Christison’. Street had first met Mary in 1957 in Kalgoorlie when she was conducting a survey of Aboriginal conditions of life for the Anti-Slavery Society.

As members of pioneering pastoralist families who had inherited as a result of family success in the industry, they had a common back­

ground but it seems that they did not share their thoughts about their colonial legacies. Street confessed: ‘she was a wonderful woman but I don’t know anything about her early life or background’. Shirley

Andrews thought that The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being showed what an advanced and independent thinker Mary Bennett was and wondered if she had formal training in anthropology, but, it seems, none of them knew anything about Mary’s earlier life.37

Convinced that the seizure of Mary Bennett’s papers by the Crown

Law Department was a political act, Shirley Andrews took her con­

cerns to the newspapers, publicly accusing the Western Australian Native Welfare Department of acting to prevent publication of the papers. Her allegations were denied. An official of the Clerk of Court’s

office in Kalgoorlie explained that the papers were taken because

they believed that Mrs Bennett was ‘an intestate person and had no known relatives in Australia’.38

As they waited for the will to be proved, Shirley Andrews and

Barry Christophers of the Council for Aboriginal Rights sought

legal advice regarding access to the papers. Almost a year later, 37 38

Jessie Street to Shirley Andrews, 24 August 1962, Street papers, MS2683/10/847, NLA; Ada Bromham to Attorney-General, 23 October 1961, Andrews to Bromham, 10 September 1962, Bennett and Bromham papers, Acc 8303A/5, SLWA. ‘Kalgoorlie Papers Charge’, ‘Allegations Are Denied’, Daily News, 31 October 1961; ‘Welfare Chief: Papers Charge Is Nonsense’, The West Australian 1 Nov 1961, p. 10. See Holland, Just Relations, Chapter 10, for an alternative interpretation.

– 38 9 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

when Wilf Douglas, to whom the papers had been left, expressed no interest in them, the Public Trustee released the papers to Ada Bromham who was representing the Council for Aboriginal Rights.

Ada spent more days sorting, deciding what she would keep and

what she would send to Melbourne for the proposed publication about Mary Bennett.

Mary’s long awaited papers finally arrived at Spencer Street railway

station, Melbourne, in September 1962. Shirley Andrews wrote to Jessie Street:

We are a bit disappointed with the material we got from Mrs  Bennett’s papers – most of the material is too recent and is identical with much that she has already sent us. We had hoped to get some of her early material. Miss Bromham did the sorting and apparently she thought that it would be recent material that we wanted.39

Instead of the proposed book, the Council for Aboriginal Rights

dedicated The Struggle for Dignity, which was a state by state analysis

of the position of Aboriginal people under the various state laws which controlled them, to Mary Bennett. The frontispiece stated: In Memory of our friend, Mrs Mary M. Bennett. ‘The founding of a just relation of the white and the dark races is not our problem alone. It is a world problem. It is described as the most important business of this century … aggression against one race is aggression against all’. M. M. Bennett.40

Ada Bromham, Shirley Andrews and Jessie Street knew that Mary had made an outstanding contribution to justice for Aboriginal people 39 40

Andrews to Street, 29 November 1962, Street papers, MS2683/10/857, NLA. William M. Murray (ed.), The Struggle for Dignity: A Critical Analysis of the Australian Aborigine Today, the Laws Which Govern Him, and Their Effects, Council for Aboriginal Rights, Melbourne, 1962.

– 39 0 –

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but Mary’s veil of privacy over her life made the idea of a book to

recognise her as a thinker and activist who was ahead of her time too difficult.

Shirley Andrews, the recipient of those powerful photographs

of Wongatha families, responded to Mary’s unspoken request to assist them. The Social Services Act no longer excluded Aboriginal Australians from old age, disability and unemployment benefits but the Commonwealth Government had not made much of an effort to

ensure that Aborig­inal people knew of this amendment. With the assistance of Rodney Hall, who would later become well-known as a winner of the Miles Franklin Award for literature, she wrote A Yinjilli Leaflet: Social Services for Aborigines, under the auspices of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement. This four page

document told appli­cants how, where and what to apply for. With

Mary’s example of the sufferings of Norman Bilson, whose age was disputed by the authorities, in mind Shirley wrote:

If there is no-one who is likely to know your age, the Social Services Department might ask for a doctor to look at you. In such a case it is a good idea for you to keep contacting the Department regularly – you might be kept waiting for quite a long time. It is important not to get downhearted. Be patient and keep trying.41

Decades after her death another Federal Council member, Stan

Davey, spoke to me of Mary’s influence on him. He was working with Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley when he told me: She was one of the first ever to publicise information about Ab­orig­inal culture and structures; and to claim that they 41

Shirley Andrews and Rodney Hall, ‘A Yinjilli Leaflet: Social Services for Aborigines’, Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, 1963.

– 391 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

needed to be able to hang on to their land and to be respected for the structures that they possessed. Shirley Andrews, Don McLeod and Mary Bennett … these three I suppose influenced my thinking about this whole problem more than anyone else.42

Mary’s work would continue to inspire her friends in the Fed­eral

Council who fought for equal wages, equal access to social service

benefits, access to education, the right to land and for the constitu-

tional change which after 1967 saw the federal government accepting responsibility Australia-wide for Aboriginal affairs. These were all issues that Mary had raised with passion and prosecuted with reasoned argument from the late 1920s until her death in 1961.

In her last year of life Mary wrote to the Kalgoorlie Miner and

asked its readers:

Who made the Eastern Goldfields natives beggars? Surely it must have been we whites who robbed them of their land with­out giving them compensation, who robbed them of their children without giving them training for earning a living, and who have frustrated their every incentive to live.43

It would take another three decades for these questions to be

addressed in a public forum in Australia. In launching Australia’s celebration of the 1993 International Year of the World’s Indigenous

People, Prime Minister Keating spoke about finding just solutions to the problems which beset first Australians. He began with an act of recognition:

42 43

Stan Davey interviewed by Francis Good, October 1986, Northern Territory Archives Service, side A, tape 2, p. 4. M. M. Bennett, ‘Whites Made Natives into Beggars’, letter to the editor, Kalgoorlie Miner, 26 November 1960.

– 39 2 –

F inal days

Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers’.44

Despite his words echoing those of Mary’s, Paul Keating may, at that

time, never have heard of Mary Bennett. He spoke of our ignorance

and our prejudice. ‘And our failure to imagine these things being done to us’. Mary was not guilty of this failure. Keating has been

lauded for expressing these truths but we know that they were raised by Mary Bennett with the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization from the 1930s onwards. She was a woman well ahead of her time.

In the 1960s Australians seemed unable or unwilling to accept

this interpretation of their history. Bill Stanner, who presented the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Boyer Lecture in 1968, seven

years after Mary’s death, tried to explain why Aboriginal life and

culture had been so completely excluded from the Australian story. He told listeners that ‘inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness. What may have begun as a simple

forgetting of other possible views turned’, he argued, ‘under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’.45 Her own family’s ‘cult of forgetfulness’, painful

as it was, and her love of her Wongatha neighbours drove Mary to

bring to public attention the full humanity of Aboriginal people

and the failure of Australian society to accept responsibility towards them. 44 45

Paul Keating, Redfern Speech, 10 December 1992, https://antar.org.au. W. E. H. Stanner, ‘The Great Australian Silence’, in After the Dreaming, Boyer Lectures, Sydney, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1968, pp. 24-25.

– 393 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Seventy-four years after Mary’s passionate and resolute defence of

the rights of the Aboriginal family before the Moseley Commission,

Prime Minister Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations. That it

took so long for white Australia to recognise truths which were selfevident to Mary Montgomerie Bennett is a measure of this woman

who fought, often alone, for the recognition of the full humanity and human rights of her friends, the Indigenous peoples of Australia.

– 394 –

E P I L O GU E Why did Mary Montgomerie Bennett give her life so totally to

working to improve conditions for Aboriginal Australians? Her ded­

ication reminds us of the sense experienced by missionaries of a call

to save souls, her sister even using the expression ‘her call’ to describe Mary’s commitment. But her concern was with the here and now, not the afterlife. She wanted to change society so that Aboriginal Australians would have the opportunities to experience happy, ful­ filling lives.

Three aspects of Mary’s life kept coming to my attention in my

attempt to find an answer to this question. They are her privacy, even secrecy about her early life; her idealising of her father and the idyllic

childhood growing up with the Aborigines, a distorted but consol­

ing memory; and her ability to hold strong ideas about Aboriginal requirements for happiness which were very much at odds with her own life experience.

As we know, when Mary died Ada Bromham, Shirley Andrews

and Jessie Street swapped notes and realised that together they knew

al­most nothing of her early life. Ada found no family photographs in her house. Although they both came from pioneering families Jessie Street and Mary seemed not to have discussed their childhoods and their parents’ legacies – a sense of responsibility for the consequences of their families’ material success at the expense of the dispossessed.

There seemed to be nothing in Mary’s home or personal papers about her husband to enlighten Ada Bromham; nothing about her two sib­

lings, both of whom were still alive, and no reference to her two nieces. There is no mention in any of Mary’s many letters of her mother, just

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

the enigmatic ‘she was taken from me and I am sad that I never

knew her’ comment to Maxwell Brown towards the end of her life.1

And no-one knew anything about Jane, the child whom Mary Christison had adopted and subsequently sent back to Queensland.

Before she left London in 1930 Mary had shed the material

evidence of her past life. She deposited papers and photographs at the University of Queensland, Edin­burgh University, Townsville Mu­ nicipal Library and elsewhere. She controlled what she deposited.

The family secrets were safe. Her mother’s reputation as an artist was intact with a bequest to the University of Queensland of one of her self-portraits. Those of her father’s papers which she had used for

the biography and which remained with her after her mother and

sister’s departure were also given to the University of Queensland.

Cultural objects which her father had collected from the Dalleburra people were deposited at the British Museum. But there was much else about her life which she could not control.

The idealised portrait of her father, Robert Christison, shown

without any defects in Christison of Lammermoor, seemed necessary to Mary throughout her life. Twenty years after the biography was

published, poet Judith Wright began work on The Generations of

Men, about her pioneer family’s pastoral migrations. Unlike Mary she later revisited her family’s colonial story, reviewed both the evi­ dence and her analysis in Cry for the Dead and wrote with insight and

empathy about the experience of those dispossessed by her family’s earlier invasions of their land.2 Not only did Mary not revise her

views of her father; rather, she built upon them. When in 1934 she donated money for a hospital at Mount Margaret, to be named the 1 2

Maxwell Brown, ‘Fernando’, p. 11. See Georgina Arnott, The Unknown Judith Wright, UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia, 2016, for a discussion of Wright’s journey in these two works.

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Christison Memorial Hospital, she told The West Australian that her

father had wished to build a hospital for the Dalleburra.3 While we

can track Christison’s generosity in building a church at Prairie and planning to donate money for a Chair of Tropical Agriculture at the

new University of Queensland, there is nothing in his papers to sug-

gest this. Mary asserted that Christison intended to write about the Dalleburra but that he didn’t have time. This is also unconvincing as he did find time to publish about many topics that interested him. We know from her research and her frantic eleventh-hour inclusion

of the Forrest River massacre in the biography that she knew the

story of the shifting frontier: the conflict, the unequal war, the social devastation when it was over for the original occupants. Her solution

was to show her father as the exceptional pioneer, unlike the others.

The project was conceived as a celebration of his life, It was difficult enough to write about the savagery of the frontier and even harder,

but necessary, to show her readers that the situation continued in the north-west of the country at Forrest River.

After Wyma’s death in 1926, there is no evidence of Mary mak­

ing any contact with the elderly Dalleburra people who had worked on Lammermoor. Her sister Helen, when she was in her sixties, did investigate and learned that the remaining Lammermoor work­force had been shifted to Cherbourg Mission. Helen began

a cor­re­spon­dence with Kiara, the son of Barney who had been such

a help to her father, sending him tobacco and other items which he requested.4 Knowing that people such as Kiara had been shifted to Cherbourg – at odds with her father’s plans when he sold the proper­ ty – would have been painfully distressing for Mary. 3 4

‘Caring for Aborigines’, The West Australian, 3 October 1934, p. 27. Correspondence between Helen Roberts and others, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 14, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Her ‘growing up with the Aborigines who made her childhood

happy’ story repeated to journalist Max Brown, just a few years before

her death, seemed to provide Mary with a psychologically com­fort­ ing memory of childhood. A story which began in 1930, prob­ably

to strengthen her political position when under questioning from reviewers of The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being, became a

sustaining myth to which she held. It was a happier story than the more complex reality which included being on the move between England and Australia and not even visiting Lammermoor until she

was almost twelve; and seeing a little girl begging at the kitchen door

and remembering that Jane lost both her biological mother, who we know only as Judy, and her adoptive mother, Mrs Mary Christison.

The image of a childhood on Lammermoor with her father, the

rest of the family, Wyma and the other Dalleburra workers instead of the constant packing and moving between Hobart and Lammermoor

during her adolescent years must have warmed her soul. How won­ derful it was to recall those five precious Lammermoor winters when

she rode over her father’s property, asked Wyma questions about her

culture and was indulged by the stockmen. For a woman who moved house often throughout her life this memory was to be cherished, and

extended in the telling about a whole childhood rather than a few winter sojourns.

Mary held strong ideas about the necessities for human happiness

for Aboriginal people – connection to land and kin – but paradoxic­

ally her own lived experience was deficient in such connections. She

did her best to educate policy makers, bureaucrats, other activists and members of the public about Aboriginal family and its vital im­ portance for the psychological health of its members. She explained

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transferred to the young. The family provided an apprenticeship for life. She campaigned obsessively and almost singlehandedly for John

Tjantjiga, who brought his family into the Goldfields towns from

the distant Blackstone Range, to have his son Peter Pontara live with his parents while he was being educated. She supported and assisted Wongatha families to stay together and castigated Western

Australian authorities for taking the pale-skinned, well-behaved

Aboriginal children from their mothers to be placed in white foster homes against their mothers’ wishes.

For the young Mimi Christison, family, as for Aboriginal children,

was also an apprenticeship for life, where her learning about herself

and her role in the family and the wider society took place. Her father emphasised to his children their responsibilities to each other. And yet, as we know, after his death the pact was broken and it seems Mary repudiated her biological family.

A further paradox can be seen in Mary’s stressing of Aboriginal

attachment to land as central to identity. Attachment to place was, she knew, not a characteristic peculiar to Aboriginal culture al­

though their land was infused with spiritual meaning as well as being the source of sustenance. For her father, Lammermoor, the home he began making in the 1860s, meant far more to him that its financial

value. He was attached to the land and its people, using their names

such as Kooroorinya for the waterfalls and Teekaloonda where the sheep washing took place. It was only the loss of his family, who returned to England, which led him to leave this place.

Through her life, however, Mary appeared unconnected to land,

detached from any specific place, almost rootless. She sought to educate the Aus­tralian populace about the rich spiritual associations

and the nurturing role of tribal land for the Aboriginal clan. She – 39 9 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

respected this attachment and argued that Aboriginal people should

not be forcibly shifted outside their traditional land by governments for work, or be moved to a reserve. And yet, as we know in her own life, she was often on the move.

With the exception of a decade with her husband in Great Amwell,

another decade at Mount Margaret Mission and her final six years

at Kalgoorlie, she was moving back and forth, making elev­en jour-

neys between England and Australia, staying with friends in Perth,

Roelands, Leonora, or London, never buying a house despite having the money to do so. Dora Cotterill, a former pupil, described her as

restless. Somewhat surprisingly, despite spending twenty years living

and working on the Eastern Gol­dfields of Western Australia and her childhood ‘among the Aborigines’, at the end of her life she referred

to England as ‘my country’. Her mother had succeeded in ensuring that Mary’s identity was firmly as an Englishwoman.5

Neither family nor homeland grounded Mary Montgomerie

Bennett. Instead, connectedness, that essential human experience,

came through her relationships with the Wongatha people. From her arrival at Mount Margaret Mission at the end of 1931 until her death three decades later it was the women, men and children of the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia who gave meaning to her life. She shared the story of Lulu losing her arm with Commissioner

Moseley in 1934 and in 1960 she was helping Lulu to apply for an old age pension as well as helping Lulu’s grandchildren. Cheerful,

bubbly Gladys Vincent, who as Mary’s pupil had received a letter from Dr Washington Carver in the 1930s, had kept in contact with

her teacher through Mary’s war years in London. On her return 5

Bennett to Penny, 24 May 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8383A/20, SLWA.

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Mary wrote to the Roelands Mission Board, objecting to Gladys’

exploitation at Roelands where, as a beginning teacher, she was also

responsible for parenting nine children in her cottage. There were

many others she had known for decades as well as more recent friends such as John Tjantjiga.

Shirley Andrews saw Mary’s engagement with what she dis­par­

agingly called ‘welfare work’ as weakening her activism. She failed

to understand that Mary’s political advocacy was rooted in her

relationships with people. To Mary, Lulu, her husband Alec Bilson, his brother Norman, John Tjantjiga, and others were as family. Their sufferings became hers as she battled for justice for them, using all of

her energy, intelligence and diplomacy to have their applications for

pensions accepted. In the end it was her love of the Wongatha people which drove Mary.

Controlling the past? The impulse for privacy did not in the end keep Mary’s life story

hidden as she desired. In 2000 Elizabeth Roberts, her sister Helen’s younger daughter, deposited the Christison family papers in the State Library of Queensland. As the family were more apart than

together, these papers included a richly informative collection of let­

ters, including some between the young Mary and her father. There is a large correspondence between the parents, including their discus­sions

about where to send Jane after Mrs Christison had decided to end the fostering arrangement which she had taken on.6 Mrs Christison and

Helen had brought these papers with them to Aus­tralia in 1919. 6

Robert Christison correspondence with Mary and Helen Christison, May to July 1900, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 2, SLQ.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

When I asked Mary’s niece, Elizabeth Roberts, if she knew about

Jane, she looked at me blankly. The story of little Jane’s life in the Christison family had been buried. As Elizabeth was ignorant of this

situation she would not have even understood the exchange between her grandparents had she read it in the collection. At any rate she did

not cull the references to it, so we can read Robert’s advice to his wife

to ‘not state your case by letter to the Agent-General’. Mrs Christison had already done so before she received this caution, thus the official correspondence about Jane and the decisions people were making about her future is on record in the Queensland state archives.7

Mary’s decision to leave her personal chattels to Wilf Douglas,

taken when she added a codicil to her will in 1959, was no doubt a con­sid­er­ed one. She knew that both Shirley Andrews and Ada Brom­

ham, her most regular correspondents and supporters at this time, held her in high regard and may have envisaged writing about her.

Wilf Douglas, linguist and missionary to the Wongatha people, was far too involved in his immediate work to consider such an action.

These papers were not, as has been argued elsewhere, lost. Certain­

ly some were lost when Dr Barry Christophers’ garage was broken

into but they were duplicates of material already in the Council for Aboriginal Rights files. He is in no doubt that the theft was an act of random vandalism as he found some of Mary’s papers still scattered

about on the pavement.8 Christophers, a member of the Communist Party of Australia, would have had no hesitation in publicising this 7 8

Robert Christison to Mary Christison, 28 May 1900, Christison family papers, TR1867, series 2, SLQ. Barry Christophers, pers. comm. 5 May 2016; Alison Holland makes a case for political interference regarding the lost papers in Just Relations , p. 374-378. Her analysis downplays the role of personal antagonisms at a time of paranoia when activists in Aboriginal affairs treated bureaucrats and missionaries with suspicion.

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act if he thought he could show that it was politically inspired. I agree

with Wilf Douglas who observed that it would be surprising to find

anything new in Mary’s archive, as throughout her life she was in

the habit of sending copies of her letters and attachments in many directions.9

Before she saw Mary’s boxes safely on to the Melbourne-bound

train in Perth in 1962 Ada Bromham had been through them again

and had kept the letters she had written to Mary through the 1950s. It seems that Ada either gave or left her papers to fellow Perth

activist Doreen Trainor. They included Mary’s letters to Ada and her replies which she had removed from the Bennett collection

before she railed it east in 1962. In 2007, two years before her own death, Doreen Trainor made two deposits to the Battye Library in Perth: her own papers and a collection ‘Ada Bromham and Mary

Montgomerie Bennett papers’. Despite Mary’s usual reticence about herself, the correspondence between these two elderly women pro­ vides us with insights into Mary’s religious beliefs, her values, bouts

of illness, personality and above all her emotional attachment to,

and work on behalf of, her Wongatha neighbours and friends. Mary Bennett’s letters can be found in more than twenty collections both in Australia and in England.10

Shirley Andrews’ claim that Mary’s papers had been confiscated

under instructions from the Native Welfare Department is much more an expression of the political atmosphere of the times than 9 10

Wilf Douglas to Ada Bromham, 27 November 1961, Bennett and Bromham papers, MN2958, Acc 8383A/4, SLWA. In the Bodleian Library, Oxford University; in various collections in the State Libraries of Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia; in a number of collections in the National Library of Australia; in the South Australian, Western Australian, and Queensland state archives; in the University of Queensland Library; in the National Archives of Australia; as well as in the archives of James Cook University.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

likely reality. As a member of the Communist Party of Australia, Shirley was under surveillance by the Australian Security and Intel­

ligence Organisation. In these Cold War times paranoia on both sides of the political divide was high. Communists were seen as del­ iberately trying to destabilise the Australian State, while Andrews,

Christophers and others, whose social vision for the country included the extension of full civil rights to Aboriginal people, often saw their critics as without conscience.11 Mary’s papers would provide nothing

that the Department of Native Affairs didn’t know about. When she

discovered a new weapon, or argument, she used it, as for example

Dr John Bowlby’s research into maternal deprivation. Besides, in her final years, so consumed was she with the fifty or so people she was assisting to get social services benefits that she was wary of upsetting the bureaucrats, fearing that any association with her might delay Aboriginal applications.12

Mary’s sustaining growing-up myth continued after her death. A

1927 article which Mary wrote for the Journal of the Royal Anthro­ pological Institute is the only place where she had been specific about the time she spent at Lammermoor. She wrote ‘[w]hile I was living on

the station (between 1893 and 1898)’ but does not point out that they were winter visits only. It was three years later, needing to establish

her credentials, that she began the account of growing up among 11

12

See Lachlan Clohesy, ‘Fighting the Enemy Within: Anti-Communism and Aboriginal Affairs’, History Australia 8 (2), pp. 128-52; Sue Taffe, ‘Australian Diplomacy in a Policy Vacuum: Government and Aboriginal Affairs, 1961–62’, Aboriginal History, vol. 19, 1995, pp. 154-72; and Jennifer Clark, Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Crowley, 2008, for case studies of these times. Alison Holland has referred to Mary Bennett having an ASIO file. This is correct but there is nothing in it except a reference to Struggle for Dignity, the booklet published by the Council for Aboriginal Rights after Mary’s death. Bennett to Bromham, 13 March 1956, Bennett and Bromham papers, Acc 8303A.

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the Dalleburra.13. Decades later, Smoke Signals, the periodical of the

Victorian Aborigines Advancement League, included a tribute to her in their October 1961 issue. Max Brown, the communist writer who had visited Mary in Kalgoorlie, summed up what had, by now, become the standardised version:

Mary Bennett is a daughter of Christison of Lammermoor, a Queensland squatter, remembered for his enlightened treatment of the tribe on whose land he settled … Mrs Bennett grew up among the children of the Dalleburra tribe. Later she went overseas and became associated with the Anti-Slavery Society of London. She married an English sea captain and on his death she returned to Australia to give the rest of her life to the people who had made her childhood happy.14

We now have a far more complex account but Mary would probably have preferred Brown’s version of the story.

Mary’s sense of privacy, her idealisation of father and childhood

and her alienation from family hearth and home have provided

insights into this passionate, intelligent, committed activist. Not long before she died she told a journalist that when her husband died she

had died too. She had depended on her husband for encouragement, support and perhaps also to temper her responses. After his death she

described herself as being ‘in the dark’ with regard to her ideas about

political activism.15 Charles’ death and the fact that her siblings were no longer in England meant she could now fully confront the issue at the heart of her biographical project: the tragic human consequences 13 14 15

Bennett, ‘Notes on the Dalleburra Tribe of Northern Queensland’, p. 414; Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being, p. 31. ‘Western Australia’, Smoke Signals, October 1961, pp. 17-21 (this is not signed but the author is described as ‘a well-known Australian writer’). Maxwell Brown, ‘Fernando’, p. 7; Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke papers, GRG 52/32/25, SASA.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

of British colonisation of Australia. After publishing The Australian

Aboriginal as a Human Being she gave a year of her life to fieldwork,

researching the conditions of life on the ground in Western Australia. Then at Mount Margaret Mission she found her life’s purpose. The Wongatha people fulfilled her human need to belong. She may have still been an Englishwoman and England may still have been ‘home’,

but on the Eastern Goldfields she formed deep attachments with

families she had known for decades and the difficult relationships

within her own family were replaced by her sense of concern for and responsibility to those whom she loved.

Contrasting family fortunes I have found no evidence that any of the Christison family made an

effort to find out what happened to Jane Gordon after she arrived at

Townsville in September 1900. She was taken to a children’s home in South Brisbane with the Colonial Secretary’s Office deciding that

she would be sent to ‘Fraser’s Island when opportunity serves’.16 In 1904 the mission at Bogimah on Fraser Island was closed. Jane’s

grand-daughter recalls that her father remembered Jane speaking about living at Childers, a small town not far from the coast near

Fraser Island. She may have briefly been in service there or fostered for a while.17 By 1906, however, we do know she was at Yarrabah

Mission near Cairns, run by the Anglican Church. Here she received a very limited education. Instilling the habits of discipline, obedience

16 17

Colonial Secretary’s Office, Col/145, item ID 17963, 14806/1900, QSA. Conversation with Alethea Lenoy, 5 August 2017; Ray Evans and Jan Walker, ‘“These Strangers, where are they Going?”: Aboriginal-European Relations in the Fraser Island and Wide Bay Region, 1770-1905’, University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Occasional Papers in Anthropology, (a), 1977; pp 37-105.

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and routine were regarded as more important than the development of literacy and numeracy.

The historical record has little to tell us about Jane’s biological

family and their attitude to her being taken to England by Mrs Christison. We do not know how this little girl adapted to the shift

from a life of poverty and insecurity, but still with her own mother in north Queensland, to a privileged life at Hampstead in England, so far from what had been home. Nor her feelings about being put

on a ship by herself, bound for Townsville. Nor her experience in

a Brisbane institution, then transferred to the brutal authoritarian Bogimah Creek Reserve on Fraser Island where Aboriginal prisoners

were sent, and then Yarrabah Mission. Mrs Mary Christison had put

the case for her to be sent to a ‘really good school’ but Yarrabah was not required to have a qualified teacher in the early 1900s and when Jane Gordon began her ‘education’ there students were receiving two

hours of schooling a day. We do not know how it was for Jane but in 1906 she was good at sewing, winning second prize at the local

Cairns Show for a needlework sampler, but the Christisons would not have known this.18

All of this happened to Jane before she was ten years old. Jane is

most likely one of the girls in a group photo of Yarrabah children taken between 1906 and 1909. The school lacked equipment, the teacher was untrained and the children were undernourished. Clearly she was a resilient child, but although she was intelligent she was given very little opportunity to develop her skills.19

18 19

The Aboriginal News, Yarrabah, 1 October 1906, p. 2. Kathleen Denigan, Reflections in Yarrabah, Yarrabah Aboriginal Shire Council, Cairns, 2008. See page 4 for the photo which probably includes Jane Gordon.

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

In 1912 Janie, as she was now known, married Octavius Lenoy at

St Alban’s Church, Yarrabah. In May of the following year soon after the Misses Christison had had their very delayed presentation to the

court of King George and Queen Mary, Janie gave birth to the first of ten children.

Today the family of Robert and Mary Christison has died out.

Robert Christison junior, always known as Roy, married Thelma Verrier, a retired opera singer, when they were both in their fifties

and lived in Brisbane until his death in 1972, aged 85. They had no children. Helen married Stewart Roberts and had two daughters,

Rosemary and Elizabeth. Helen died in 1963. Neither Rosemary nor Elizabeth married and Rosemary died in 2012 aged 90.

By contrast there is a large, connected and proud Queensland

Aboriginal family tracing their ancestors back to Octavius and Janie Lenoy who married when Janie Gordon was seventeen. Despite

Robert Christison doing all he could for his children, and leaving them financially independent, this line of ‘distinguished Scots’, as Helen described them, came to an end. Mary chose to separate her­

self from her biological family, creating instead a geographic family on the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia. Jane Gordon showed

resilience and adaptability despite a double abandonment during her first five years of life.

How Mary Montgomerie Bennett would have rejoiced to know

that Jane’s great grandson, Max Lenoy, teaches Aboriginal students at James Cook University in Townsville and has a Masters of Education degree from Harvard University. Jane’s descendants do not have to

choose, as Peter Pontara did, sixty years ago, between family and education.

– 408 –

ACK NOW L E D GM EN T S My first ‘meeting’ with Mary Montgomerie Bennett came in 1996 when I interviewed former members of the Federal Council for the

Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Shirley

Andrews, Barry Christophers, Stan Davey and Ian Spalding all met Mary in the late 1950s when she was frail. The quality of her

thinking about the position of Aboriginal people in Australia who were not protected by the Uni­versal Declaration of Human Rights, and her dedication to right this injustice, inspired them. While I was

working on other projects this strong, passionate woman stayed in my mind.

In 2007 I began work on a study of four cross-cultural friendships

between Aboriginal rights activists in the mid-twentieth century. One of these was between Shirley Andrews, the secretary of the Vic­tor­ian Council for Aboriginal Rights, and Mary Montgomerie

Bennett who was living in Kalgoorlie when the two women first

corre­spond­ed. As I learned more and more about the eight people and their rela­tionships, the project grew to an unmanageable size. I wrote articles and chapters about some of the people in this study and

found myself drawn more and more to the writing of a full life study of Mary Montgomerie Bennett. Her journey took me to London,

Oxford, Hull, Great Amwell, Burwell, Louth, Hertford and to Canberra and all Australian states as I visited the places where she lived, and searched in archives and libraries for details of her life.

Thank you to the helpful staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford Uni­

versity, where I read the papers of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Protection Society. Mary Bennett was a member of this organisation from 1927 and corresponded regularly until her death. Thanks also

to Dr Mark Brodie who made me welcome at Keble College during my last visit and to archivist Lucy McCann who provided further assistance locating items for me when I was back in Australia.

I am indebted to the Manuscripts staff at the State Library of

Victoria, and especially Gerard Hayes and Lois McEvey, who have been of assistance over many years as I have researched the papers of

the Council for Aboriginal Rights, the Victorian Aboriginal Group,

the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Victorian Aborigines’ Advancement League.

The staff of the State Records Office of Western Australia have

provided assistance during my visits and Tim Lethorn has been par­

ticularly helpful in providing microfiche copies of material which I

requested. A visit to the Battye Library to read the Ada Bromham and Mary Bennett papers and the Doreen Trainor papers was a won­

derful experience, providing insights into the relationships between these three women, especially in the 1950s.

Visits to Perth, Kalgoorlie, Leonora, Laverton and Mount Margar­

et Community over the years have led to meetings and rela­tionships

with Mary Bennett’s former pupils. Conversations with these people have enriched this project immeasurably. I would like to thank and

acknowledge Sadie Canning MBE, Dora Cotterill, Bessie Dimer,

Olan Dimer, Jessie Evans, Violet Graham, Lorraine Griffiths, May O’Brien AO and Dimple Sullivan who all shared their memories

of their teacher and mentor, ‘dear Mrs Bennett’. I would like to pay special tribute to Dora Cotterill who has provided wonderful Leonora hospitality, has patiently answered my many questions and made

– 410 –

Acknowledgments

possible my visit to Mount Margaret Community. Dora has sup­ ported this project over a number of years.

The Wongatha descendants of Mary’s Kalgoorlie friends whose

photographs I discovered in the State Library of Victoria generously

shared their family stories and genealogies. Thank you to Amanda

Bilson, Douglas Bilson, Gareth Bilson, Robert Bilson, Diane Clarke, Laurel Cooper, Maisie Harkins, Ron Harrington-Smith, Catherine

Howard and Bernadette Maher. A special thanks to Karlene Appleton who so ably arrange the meeting and the catering at Wongatha

House on this occasion. I was very glad to be able to return these archived photographs to family members and I thank them for giving permission for them to be used on the National Museum website ‘Collaborating for Indigenous Rights’.

I am grateful to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander Studies for providing a research grant to support my

work in 2007. Thanks to the Library staff and especially to Pat Brady who shared her detailed knowledge of the collections in support of this project. I would also like to acknowledge Rachel Ippoliti, Acting Director, Aboriginal Studies Press, who took such an intelligent

interest in the Mary Bennett biography and made so many helpful suggestions for improvements to the manuscript.

A Harold White Fellowship at the National Library of Australia

in 2008 allowed me to work intensively with the papers of Shirley Andrews, Gordon Bryant, Barry Christophers, Bessie Rischbieth,

Jessie Street and Anton Vroland. The extremely helpful National Librarians engaged with my project and made suggestions for dif­

ferent avenues of investigation. During this time I enjoyed valuable discussions about the art and craft of biography with concurrent

Harold White fellows Nathalie Nguyen and Peter Robinson as we – 411 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

exchanged ideas about the challenges of writing biography. It goes

without saying that newspapers made so accessible through Trove have been absolutely invaluable in my tracking of the Christison fam­

ily in their incessant travels. The archivists at the Australian Na­tion­al University were very helpful in providing access to the working files

of the Australian Dictionary of Biography concerning Mary Bennett and Robert Christison. During my Fellowship I also made a second visit to Elizabeth Roberts in Sydney, the niece of Mary Bennett,

who provided generous hospitality and gave me some insights into the Christison family. Thank you to my friend Ann Collaery who provided comfortable accommodation and meals during my stay in Canberra and endured my endless talk about my project.

Travels in Western Australia took me to the places Mary had

lived and visited. At Roelands Mission, I met Syd Jackson, former renowned Carlton footballer, who generously shared his memories

of mission life and of Gladys Vincent, Mary’s former pupil who taught there. I am grateful for the friendly hospitality provided by Gail Thornton at Roelands. Thank you to Bev Thomson of the

Monash Indigenous Centre for helping me to organise this visit. I travelled to Marribank (formerly Carrolup) and Gnowangerup in the wheatbelt country where Mary had her first experience of working in an Aboriginal mission community. Visits to Bidyadanga Aboriginal

Community (formerly La Grange Feeding Station when Mary Bennett visited in 1930) and Broome helped me understand Mary’s commitment to learning about Aboriginal life by visiting and talking to people in 1930–1931.

In 2013 I visited the United Kingdom to research and travel to the

various places where Mary lived. In Great Amwell in Hertfordshire I visited Chardingleye, the house where she lived with her husband – 41 2 –

Acknowledgments

Charles from 1916 to 1926 while she was writing Christison of

Lammermoor. Thanks to Peter Ruffles, Hertfordshire councillor

and local historian, and historian Jean Puriss for sharing their local

knowl­edge. In Burwell in Lincolnshire I met Fiona, a descendent of Gertrude Julia Watson, one of Robert Christison’s tenants at Burwell Park where Mary lived as the privileged elder daughter of the gentry. She very generously gave me a copy of the 1912 legal document

in which Robert Christison ended her forebears’ indenture arrange-

ment. Thanks to David Robinson, local historian, who introduced me to the Louth and Lincolnshire Examiner. The staff at the Hull History

Centre where I read the papers of the Mission to Seamen, of which Charles Bennett was a member, were obliging and helpful.

In London I combed medical records in the Royal London Hospit­

al, London Metropolitan Archives, St Bartholomew’s Archives and Queens Square Archives searching for Mary’s medical history, until archivist Richard Meunier alerted me to the fact that the records of

private patients were not required to be kept in the early twentieth

century. I was more successful in tracking Mary’s hospital records in Australia thanks to the Western Australia Country Health Service –

Goldfields. I am grateful to Dennis Engler of Monash University for sharing his expert knowledge about late onset type-one diabetes with me and its likely course in the pre-insulin era.

Archivist Mark Pomeroy made available to me Mary’s records as an

art student and provided valuable sources for the Royal Academy of

Arts. The Victoria and Albert Archives provided me with information

regarding Mary Godsall’s theatrical career, and the British Museum

where both Mary and her father Robert made deposits helped as I searched for information about these lives. At the Caird Library in the

National Maritime Museum in Greenwich I was assisted to locate the – 413 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

employment records of Charles Bennett who worked for Peninsular and Orient Line as well as his Royal Naval Reserve records.

I am grateful to Nicola Beech of the British Library who alerted

me to the correspondence between Helen Roberts and the Society of

Authors once I had discovered Helen’s manuscript ‘Like the Pelican’ held in the British Library. Thanks also to my friend Geraldine Carrodus for her help when she was in London regarding this source.

Manchester Guardian archivist Helen Swainger helped me establish that Mary Bennett published just one letter in that newspaper.

Field trips in England were followed by a trip with my husband

John to north Queensland in drought. Travelling by car for a day without seeing any water brought home to us the tough lives of stoic

Queensland pastoralists. We visited Lammermoor Station where Doug Brown, the father of the current owner, took us to the site of

the old homestead, and the graveyards of Wyma, Mary’s nursemaid, and the first Mrs Christison. Tom and Andrea, proprietors of the Prairie Hotel, shared their local knowledge and put me in contact

with Bill and Lesley Bode, whose families had been associated with

Lammermoor and who helped me understand the hardship of liv­

ing with recurrent drought. In Townsville I was assisted by James

Cook University librarian Bronwen McBurnie, who has continued

to provide assistance from a distance when I discovered a Bennett corre­spondence in the Jean Devanny papers. Jan Christison has

been very generous in sharing her finds when she was engaged in a Christison family history, alerting me to deposits in the Townsville

Municipal Library and the Bowen Historical Society. The staff of the John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, were helpful and I am especially indebted to Veronika Farley for the professional work

on the Christison family papers and station records which she carried – 414 –

Acknowledgments

out for me. Staff at Queensland State Archives and at the University

of Queensland Library helped me to uncover materials which added to my knowledge of Robert Christison’s life. Conversations with Raymond Evans and Jonathan Richards while in Brisbane stimulated

me to think in a new direction. Conversations with Alethea Lenoy, grand-daughter and Max Lenoy, great-grandson of Jane Gordon

who had briefly been a member of the Christison family, provided new understandings.

I am also indebted to staff at the following insti­tu­tions: Kalgoorlie

His­torical Society; Tenterfield Family History Group, Tenterfield Rail­way Museum, Kaye Nardella, Senior Ar­chivist in the Queens­

land Land department; the Mitchell Library, Sydney; Monash University Library; National Archives, United Kingdom; National Archives of Australia; Public Record Office of Victoria; State Library of South Australia; Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office; and Sydney University Archives.

Friends, colleagues and academic associates have assisted this pro­

ject in many different ways. My colleagues in the Monash In­dig­en­ ous Centre have been supportive and I am particularly grateful to Jan Richard­son for continuing to ask me uncomfortable questions.

Participants in a seminar in the Centre for Australian Studies following a paper I gave on Mary Bennett urged me to pursue a full biographical study. Bain Attwood, Gwenda Baker, Kathleen Denigan,

Charles Fahey, Julie Fenley, Patricia Grimshaw, Rani Kerin, Andrew Markus, Peter Saenger, Joanna Sassoon and Elizabeth Willis have all contributed with suggestions, information, queries and en­cour­age­ ment. I am grateful to them all. Members of the Victorian Professional

Historians’ Association Indigenous Reading Group and Biog­raphy

Reading Group contributed ideas for me to consider. Thanks – 41 5 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

to Malcolm Allbrook for the invitation to speak at the National Biography Centre about this project. Questions generated during the discussion raised further avenues for me to explore.

I would like to thank the following people who read the manuscript

at various points in its journey towards publication: Richard Broome,

Jan Carter, Barry Christophers, Jennifer Dabbs, Russell McGregor, Jan Richardson, Tim Rowse, Bruce Sims, Ian and Barbara Spalding,

John Taffe, Larry Taffe, Marie Wood and two anonymous readers. Their insightful comments through the long process of writing and

redrafting have been absolutely invaluable. Thanks also to the editorial assistance so ably offered by Melissa Cranenbugh who helped me to see what was necessary in the final drafting.

The support of my husband, John Taffe, has been expressed in so

many ways. This decade-long undertaking has only come to fruition through his ongoing support, thoughtful commentary on drafts at all

stages of the process and belief in my ability to complete the project satisfactorily.

Thank you to Les Thomas for the cover design and drawing

the maps and to Nathan Hollier, Director of Monash University Publishing, and his staff for their friendly, calm professionalism.

I am grateful to the West Australian History Foundation for their

generous support in meeting the costs of photography for this book. Finally, having lived for so long with Mary Montgomerie Bennett,

I have felt her suffering. Over the years I have visited her various

homes in England and Australia. From beyond the grave she has

taught me much about life and its meaning. Thank you Mary. You remain a mysterious inspiration to me.

– 416 –

F U R T H ER R E A DI NG Allingham, Anne. ‘Burdekin Frontier’ in Henry Reynolds (ed.), Race Relations in North Queensland, Townsville, James Cook University, 1993. Attwood, Bain. Rights for Aborigines, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, New South Wales, 2003. Bennett, M. M. Christison of Lammermoor, Alston Rivers, London, 1927. Bennett, M. M. The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being, Alston Rivers, London, 1930. Biskup, Peter. Not Slaves, Not Citizens: The Aboriginal Problem in Western Australia 1898–1954, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1973. Bolton, G. C. A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1970. Bolton, G. C. ‘Black and White after 1897’ in Stannage, T (ed.), A New History of Western Australia, University of Western Australia Publishing, Nedlands, 1981. Bolton, G. C. Paul Hasluck: A Life, University of Western Australia Publishing, Crawley, 2014. Bottoms, T. Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2013. Chesterman, J & Galligan, B. Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship, Cambridge University Press, Oakleigh, Melbourne, 1997. Coltheart, L. (ed.) Jessie Street: A Revised Autobiography, The Federation Press, Sydney, 2004. Cribbin, J. The Killing Times: The Coniston Massacre 1928, Fontana, Sydney, 1984. Evans, Raymond. Fighting Words: Writing about Race, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, 1999. Evans, Raymond. A History of Queensland, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2007. Green, N. The Forrest River Massacres, Fremantle Arts Press, South Fremantle, 1995. Haebich, A. For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900–1940, University of West Australia Press, Nedlands, 1988. Haebich, A. Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2000. Holland, A. Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights, University of Western Australia Publishing, Crawley, 2015. Jacobs, P. Mister Neville: A Biography, Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle, 1990. Jebb, M. Blood, Sweat and Welfare: A History of White Bosses and Aboriginal Pastoral Workers, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, 2002. Kerin, Rani. Doctor Do-Good: Charles Duguid and Aboriginal Advancement, 1930s–1970s, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2011.

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Kiddle, M. Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria 1834–1890, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1961. Lake, M. Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999. Loos, N. Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal–European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier, Canberra, ANU Press, 1982. Mackellar, M. Strangers in a Foreign Land: The Journal of Niel Black and Other Voices from the Western District, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2008. McGregor, R. Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1997. Morgan, M. Mt Margaret: A Drop in a Bucket, Keith & Margaret Morgan, Lawson, New South Wales, 1986. Ørsted-Jensen, R. Frontier History Revisited: Colonial Queensland and the ‘History War’, Lux Mundi, Brisbane, 2011. Paisley, F. Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919 – 1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2000. Reynolds, H. 2013, Forgotten War, New South Publishing, Sydney, 2013. Reynolds, H. 1998, This Whispering in Our Hearts, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1998. Richards, J. The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2008. Roberts, T. Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2005. Rowse, T. (ed.) Contesting Assimilation, API Network, Perth, 2005. Taffe, Sue. Black and White Together FCAATSI: The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders 1958–1973, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, 2005. Watson, Don, Caledonia Australis: Scottish Highlanders on the Frontier of Australia, Collins, Sydney 1984. Wright, J., Cry for the Dead, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.

– 418 –

I N DE X Note: footnotes are indicated as f.

A

ABM Review, 210 Aboriginals Ordinance, NT, 139, 303 Aborigines and alcohol, 49, 62, 116, 346, 349, 352, 365, 393 birth certificates, lack of, 344, 347, 349 Child Endowment, 360, 365 see also Aborigines – pensions child removal, xi–xii, 54, 134, 172, 177–178, 205, 215–216, 225, 229, 233, 240–241, 252, 255–256, 349, 365, 393 Christianity, 49, 111, 176, 179 citizenship rights, 174 culture, loss of, 48, 195, 227, 276, 343 Day of Mourning, 241, 331, 354 death issues, 253 ‘dying race’, xii, 12–13, 147, 175, 239, 294 education, 139–140, 182, 192–193, 200–201, 205 see also Bennett, Mary Montgomerie – and Aboriginal people – education; Bennett, Mary Montgomerie – teaching educational injustice, 200, 205–206, 258–259, 269 employment, 276 extermination of, 15, 86, 91, 114, 147, 280, 288 see also Aborigines – massacres of; Aborigines – murder of family, importance of, 177, 241 imprisonment, 113, 234, 254, 256, 346, 347, 352, 365, 372, 374 labour, 20–21, 22, 53, 54, 110–111, 152, 160, 210, 219, 222–223, 242, 255, 274, 276, 304, 318, 346, 362, 363, 365, 366 see also Aborigines – wages

land rights, 115, 140, 154, 173 languages, 149, 178, 193, 204, 350 attitudes to, 65, 108, 116–117, 119, 144, 176 see also Aborigines – child removal massacres of, 11, 102, 123, 130, 134, 176, 397 see also Aborigines – extermination of; Aborigines – murder of missions, reserves and farms, 304, 364 Cherbourg, 381, 397 Cosmo Newbery, 258 Cundeelee, 309, 313–314, 315–316, 320–321, 324, 334, 336, 341, 353, 364 Ernabella, 288–291, 294 Forrest River, 177 Gnowangerup, 170, 172, 176 Halls Creek, 178 Kahlin, 152 Kunmunya, 176, 179, 289 Kurrawong, 314, 320 Madura Station, 306 Moola Bulla, 176, 178, 193 Moore River, 193 Mount Margaret, 181, 185–188, 341 Roelands Mission, 284, 304 Warburton Mission, 350 Wongatha, 330 mixed descent, 48, 53, 54, 55, 62, 116–117, 119, 144, 152, 171–173, 178, 181, 187, 192–193, 213, 215–216, 218, 218–220, 224, 225, 229, 239–241, 242, 256 murder of, 11, 15, 102, 112–113, 139, 211, 219, 393 see also Aborigines – extermination of; Aborigines – massacres of and opium, 52, 53, 54, 55, 62, 152

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

pastoral workers, 283, 362 pensions, viii, 340, 342, 344, 348–349, 350, 354, 358–361, 372–373 see also Aborigines – Child Endowment polygamy, 197, 198–199, 212, 213, 223 race and colour issues, 199–201, 229 slavery, 129, 152, 160–161, 164, 176, 210–211, 212–213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 222–223, 230, 231, 270, 274, 362 Isaacs’ definition, 222 see also Aborigines – labour; Aborigines – women – sexual abuse of; Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society storytelling, 193 strikes, 303 trading, 149–150 tribal groups Dalleburra, ix, xv, 45, 104, 110, 112, 134, 185, 397 Kabi people, 109 Kaiadilt people, 112 Kamilaroi people, 134 Meriam people, xii Pitjantjatjara, 289 Wadja people, xiii Wakka people, 109 Walpiri people, 136, 138 Wongatha, viii, 184–185, 292, 300, 331, 335, 339, 350, 372, 387 Worrora people, 176, 179 Yorta Yorta, 241 wages, 110, 160–161, 219, 222, 233, 236, 255, 263, 274, 276, 283, 355, 362–364 see also Aborigines – slavery; Aborigines – women – sexual abuse of women, 139 152, 169, 210, 212, 214, 215–216, 229 as property, 197–198, 212, 213, 215, 226–227 sexual abuse of, 140, 144, 180, 193, 194, 211, 212, 213, 254 wife sharing, 112, 194, 198, 213, 214, 237 see also white men, and sexual relations with Aboriginal women

Aborigines Act, 233–234 Aborigines Amendment Act (aka The Native Administration Act of 1936), 235, 250, 251, 254, 282 Aborigines Department, WA, 171 Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Bill, 52, 53–55 Aborigines Protection League, 115–116, 145, 147 Act for Regulating the Occupation of Unoccupied Crown Land in the Unsettled Districts, An, 11 Adelaide Advertiser, 241 Adelaide House, 32, 34 Adelphi Theatre, London, 27 All-Australian Trade Union Congress, 303 Alston Rivers, 112 American Civil War, 18 Andrews, Shirley, 304, 309, 311, 316, 331–333, 336, 345, 351, 353, 364, 376, 379, 390–391, 395, 404 on assimilation, 326 conference organiser, 358 consulted about MMB’s life, 388 Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (ASAPS), 115, 132, 162, 175, 251, 328, 335, 338, 376, 388 and MMB, 158–159, 277, 282, 315 Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, The, 124, 252–253 Argus, The, 8 Arkirka, 136, 143 Ashwin, Bill, 253, 255 Assimilation policy, 255, 302, 326, 344, 365, 375 Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, 375 Association for the Protection of Native Races, 137, 142, 244, 296 Asturias, 284 Atlantic Charter, 279 atomic testing, 325–326, 327, 328 Australia Day, viii, xvii Australia House, 160, 161 Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being, The (Bennett), xi, 146, 151–152, 154, 156, 210, 278, 322, 385, 398, 406

– 42 0 –

I N DE X

Australian Aborigines Amelioration Association, 271, 304 Australian Aborigines Evangelical Mission, 306 Australian Aborigines, Fundamental Human Rights Trust Fund, 322 Australian Aborigines League, 244 Australian Aborigines Mission, 171 Australian Board of Missions, 368 Australian Broadcasting Commission, Boyer Lecture, 393 Australian Federation of Women Voters, 141, 170, 218–219, 246 Australian Worker, The, 363 Australian Workers Union, 362

B

Baillie, Helen, 293, 296, 304 Baninya, Fanny, 313, 320 Barcoo, 18 Barker, H M, 117 Barnes, Jeff, 354 Barnes, Snowy, 374 Barney, 49, 91, 103, 107–8, 120, 127, 133, 155, 381, 397 Bateman, F. E. A, survey, 287 Beazley, Kim (Snr), 364, 367 Beckh, Doris, 297 Beddoe, Agnes (née Christison), 23, 38, 387 Beddoe, John, 23, 38, 87, 386 Beharell, Jim, 372 Bell, Albany, 304 Bennett, Charles Douglas, Commander, 71–73, 80–81, 85–86, 112, 121 Bennett, Mary Montgomerie (née Christison, aka Mimi) and Aboriginal people Aboriginal citizenship, 174 Aboriginal rights focus, 153, 367–368 and Aboriginal workers’ wages, 160 attitudes toward, 130, 220, 375 child betrothals, opposition to, 207 child removal, xi, 255–256, 365, 367 children, concern for, xi, 207, 256, 257–259, 269 discrimination, opposition to, 248 education, 181, 191, 192, 193, 248,

269, 257–259, 260–261, 262, 275, 300, see also Mary Montgomerie Bennett – teaching on family, xi, 152, 177, 300, 334, 388 ‘Kapali’ (‘grandmother’), 194 land rights, support for, xii languages, 193, 203–204, 207 love for, viii, xv, xvii massacres of Aborigines, 102, 123, 134, 138 on mixed descent people, 65, 116–117, 172, 173, 213, 318 polygamy, 198, 207, 223, 227 rights, fighting for, 231, 233, 246 slavery, see Aborigines – slavery on traditional culture, 149 traditional lands, loss of, 173 wage concerns, 160, 231, 241, 275–276 and Wongatha people, 337, 339, 346, 380, 400–401 writing about, 106–107 adolescence, 48, 51–52, 56, 61–62, 103, 155 Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society membership, 122, 275 art student, 62–63, 68 on assimilation, 365 author, 87–88, 217 archival library, 322 archiving of work, 396 Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being, The, see main entry Christison of Lammermoor, see main entry Human Rights for Aborigines, see main entry Hunt and Die (pamphlet), 293, 294, 295 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 156, 404 Teaching the Aborigines, see main entry United Aborigines Mission report, 205 ‘Wyma’ (newspaper essay), 126–127 see also Bennett, Mary Montgomerie – letter writing

– 421 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

birth, ix, 4 Bowlby’s research, 334, 355–357, 375, 404 childhood, ix, xiii, xv, 4, 33, 34, 36, 39, 41–45, 46 see also Bennett, Mary Montgomerie – adolescence Christianity, 66, 208, 284, 313 death, viii, xi, 379, 380 educating non-Aboriginal people, xi, 153–154, 175, 142–144, 148–149, 150–151, 219, 220–221, 398–399 education, 190, 277–278 estrangement from siblings, 90, 125, 300, 332, 382, 386 evidence misrepresented, 232 on family, the value of, 300, 334, 369–370 and father, x, xiii, 88–89 role in Aboriginal injustice, x, xii, xiv, 103, 119, 120, 150 romanticism of, xv, 95–101, 119, 150, 395, 396, 397 and Fernando, Anthony, 133–135 filing system, 361, 378 at Forrest River, 175 government, criticism of, 141, 215, 283, 306 guilt, xii–xiii, xv, xvii, 88–89, 310–311, 380 health, 36, 65 depression, 141, 362 diabetes, 126, 206, 251–252, 310, 323, 331, 337–338, 361, 378 eyesight, 310, 369 final illness, 378–379 Kalgoorlie, description, 318 letter writing, 206, 348, 403 ABM Review, 214–215 to Andrews, Shirley, 309, 345 to Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, 237, 239–240, 345, 252 to Baillie, Helen, 293 on behalf of Bilson, Alec, 348 to Cooke, Constance, 385 with Cooper, William, 241 to Devanny, Jean, 284

to English newspapers, 130 with Ferguson, Bill, 241 to Hasluck, Paul, 316 Keys, 232 to newspapers, 145, 206, 219 to Nulsen, Emil, 261 to Roelands Mission Board, 401 with Trainor, Doreen, 352 to Vincent, Gladys, 300 with Vroland, Anton, 201–202 to West Australian, 212 writing skills, 130–131, 211 to Wyma, 123 married life, 84, 383 meetings with Buxton, Travers, 129 Cooke, Constance, 115, 145 Fernando, Anthony, 132–133, 135, 384 Lock, Annie, 135 Parsons, Geoffrey, 295 Piddington, Ralph, 176 Rich, Ruby, 169 Scott, Michael, 295 Wyma, 116 Mimi, known as, 4 and Mission to Seamen, 123 motivation, xiii, xv, 148 Moseley Royal Commission, 222–223, 226–227, 387 Moseley’s report, 229 and mother, xvi, 33, 46, 51, 56, 63, 65, 70, 84, 88–89, 90, 92–95, 102, 188, 384–386 Mount Margaret hospital donation, 396 Mount Margaret Mission School, 268–269 see also Mary Montgomerie Bennett – teaching – at Mount Margaret and Neville, A. O., 171, 192, 226, 246, 248 papers confiscated, 379, 389 political awareness, lack of, 159 and political power in WA, 211 and Pontara, Peter, 334 on Schenk, Mysie, 186–187 speaking engagements, 141–144, 153, 175, 178–180, 228, 241, 256, 363

– 42 2 –

I N DE X

on squatters, xii teaching, 190–191 aims, 207, 208 at Cundeelee, 308 isolation, 188, 202 and language use, 193, 203–204, 207 at Mount Margaret, 192, 193, 187–188, 197, 205, 206, 220, 257–258 professional development, 191, 202 spinning and weaving, teaching of, 169, 188, 209, 291 strategy, 191, 207 traveller, xi, 32, 161, 260, 268, 369–370 widowhood, 157 zealotry, 234, 249 Bible, Old Testament, quote, 151 Bilson, Alec, 347, 376 Bilson, Bowie, 360 Bilson, Lulu, 222–226, 347, 360, 376 Bilson, Norman, 347, 376 Bilson family, 335, 380 Birdsell (anthropologist), 263 Black, Niel, 10–11 Black Man’s Burden (Morel), 333 Bleakley, John, Chief Protector of Aborigines, Queensland, 142, 294 Board of Enquiry, 137 Boer War, 66 Bolton, Geoffrey, 98 Bottoms, Timothy, 16 Bowen (Port Denison), 17, 32–34 Bowen, George, Governor of Queensland Governor, 12 Bowlby, John, 355–356, 375, 404 Bowly, Charles, 20–21 Boyer Lecture, 393 Bray, Frank, 256, 258, 271–273, 292 Bridgeman, Reginald, 295 Britannia, The, (theatre), 26 British Army, 25 British Commonwealth League (BCL), 115, 141, 145, 157, 161–162, 170, 216 247, 335 British Council for Civil Liberties, 280 British Museum, 28 British Navy, 72 Broad Arrow, Western Australia, 184

Bromham, Ada, 233, 247, 322, 331–332, 335, 342, 345, 351, 354, 371, 376, 388, 390–391, 395 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 229, 316 Brookes, Fred, murder, 129, 136 Brown, Amy, Secretary of the Victorian Aboriginal Group, 284, 292, 304, 305, 330 Brown, Maxwell, 384–385, 398, 405 Bruce, Stanley, Prime Minister of Australia, 132, 137 Bryant, Gordon, 348, 353, 364, 367 Bryce, Ernest, 296 Buchanan, Nat (Bowen Downs manager), 19 Bulletin 13, 364 Bunberry, Booloodea Timulinya see Wyma (Dalleburra woman) Burke and Wills, 11, 97 Burwell Hall, 77–78 Buxton, Travers, 126, 134, 144, 148, 162

C

Cabinet Theatre, London, 27 Caledonia Australis (McMillan), 10 Canning, Sadie, see Corner, Sadie Cape River, 92 Carbine (horse), 73 Carrick, Michael, 295 Carrington, George, 14–15 Carver, Washington, 194, 400 cattle industry, 73 Cawood, J. C., Chief Government Resident and Police Commissioner for Central Australia, 137 Central Aboriginal Reserve, 289 Chatfield, William, murder, 21 Chelmsford, Lord, Viceroy of India, 85 Chirnside, Thomas, 9, 96 Christison, Alexander (Robert’s brother), 6, 8 Christison, Alexander (Robert’s father), 6–7 Christison, Elizabeth, 300 Christison, Helen Cameron (Lily), 4, 34, 36, 41, 42, 61–62, 79, 90, 125, 381–82, 87 397, 408

– 42 3 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Christison, Helen Cameron (Robert’s mother), 6 Christison, John, 6, 8 Christison, Mary (née Tovey), 23–24 Christison, Mary Ann (née Godsall), ix, 3, 5, 24–25, 30, 32, 42 artist, 3, 28–29, 40, 42, 50, 51 birth, 25, 84 death, 89 family, 24, 25, 29, 33–43, 39, 45, 54, 65, 66, 90 heat, dislike of, ix, 41 Lammermoor, 38, 88 letters, 29, 90 marriage, 4, 24 Paris, 4, 29, 42 performing, 27, 37, 78, 383 religion, 25, 66 wealth, 382 Christison, Mary Montgomerie (Mimi) see Bennett, Mary Montgomerie Christison, Robert, ix, xv, 5–6 Aboriginal race, views on, 40, 111, 119 Aborigines, employment of, 20–21, 22, 110–111, 119, 222 Aborigines, relations with, 21, 22, 105–106, 107–108, 111 bequest, 83 betrothal, 3 burial, 83 cattle industry developments, 73 Christison, Sir Robert, meeting, 23 coxswain, employed as, 112 critical of Queensland parliamentary decisions, 39 death, 82 devout Scottish Presbyterian, 12 diabetes diagnosis, 69 Dictionary of Australian Biography entry, 99 England, return to, 23, 42 frugality, 45–46 health issues, 69, 75 heroism, accounts of, 105–106, 118 honeymoon, 4, 29 horse breeding, 73 houses, 18, 32, 36, 70 inspired by family members, 7

Lammermoor, buy-out, 386–387 Lammermoor, final trip to, 71 Lammermoor leaseholder, 19 marriage (first), 23 marriage (second), 24 meat-freezing business, 32 migration to Australia, 6–7 Port Denison, arrival at, 15, 17 portrait, 396 Queensland, anecdotes, 44 Queensland Our Home (pamphlet), 39 Queensland, promoting overseas, 100–101 ram, loss of, 104 reputation, 119, 222 Scottish origins, 3 as squatter, 18 Tovey, Mary, first meeting, 23 trespass, accusation of, 19 writer, 39, 87 Christison, Robert, Sir (Robert’s uncle), 7, 23, 24 Christison, Robert Alexander (Roy) [No 1], 36 Christison, Robert Alexander (Roy) [No 2], 39, 41, 125, 300, 408 Christison, Rosemary, 300 Christison, Thelma, 300 Christison, Tom, 6–7, 22, 23, 38 Christison, William, 6, 8, 23 Christison family, 62, 83 Christison family and moving, 43–44, 47, 49 Christison Memorial Hospital, 397 Christison of Lammermoor (Bennett), x, xvi, 210, 268, 396 additional chapter, 113–114, 123 Christison, Mary, 93 first trip to Lammermoor, 91–92 viewed negatively, 94, 102, 383 Christison, Robert loneliness, 91 marriage, 99 Mary Bennett’s love for, 102 critical analysis, 118 first edition, 124 publication, 90, 121, 122 review, 124

– 42 4 –

I N DE X

romanticism, 5, 96, 99 second edition, 124 Christophers, Barry, 312–13, 345, 353, 389, 402 Church of England, Australian Board of Missions, 210 Churchill, Winston, Prime Minister of England, 279 Claremont Mental Hospital, 349 Clint, Alf, 365, 367, 377 Coldham, Henry, 74, 76 Collinson, Chave, 144, 170, 233–234, 234 Colonial Land Emigration Office, 7 Commission of Native Affairs, 253, 289, 325 Committee for the Defence of Native Rights, 301 Communist Party of Australia, 282–283, 311–312, 402 Cook, Dr, Chief Protector in the Northern Territory, 294 Cooke, Constance, 115, 133, 138 145, 147, 157, 235 Coonardoo (Prichard), 153 Cooper, Trilby, 253, 255 Cooper, William (Yorta Yorta leader), 241, 244, 263 Cooper Creek, 18, 149–150 co-operatives, 356, 365–367, 377 Corner, Sadie (née Canning), 194, 208, 262, 279, 288, 379 Cotterill, Dora, see Quinn, Dora Council for Aboriginal Rights (Victoria), 303–4, 312, 316, 331, 345, 353, 379, 388, 402 Courier Mail, The, 117 Coverley, Aubrey, 217 Cribben, John, 136 Crowley, Bob (King-tjin), 352–353 Crown Lands Act, passing of, 19 Curator of Intestate Estates, 253 Curtin, John, Prime Minister of Australia, 277

D

Dalgety’s Monthly Review, 97 Dalleburra see Aborigines – tribal groups Dalrymple, George Elphingstone, 32

Darwin, Charles, xi, 14 Davey, Stan, 331, 338, 345, 353, 354, 391 Dawn, The, 175 Denison House, 129 Department of Native Administration, WA, 308 Department of Native Affairs, WA, 226, 258, 269, 270, 272, 303, 342, 344, 404 Department of Native Welfare, WA, 236, 329 Devanny, Jean, 284, 312 Dougherty, Tom, 362 Douglas, Alexander, 54 Douglas, Wilf, 350, 369, 379, 380, 389, 402–403 Dudley Gallery, Piccadilly, 29 Duguid, Charles, 247, 256, 268–269, 277–278, 288, 293, 316, 331, 336, 351, 353 Duguid, Phyllis, 256, 268–269, 277–279, 288, 331, 336, 351 Duke of Portland, 73 Durack, Mary, xiii Durack, Michael Patsy, xiii Durack family, 111–112

E

Eden, Charles, 15 Edinburgh University, 7 education see Aborigines – education; Aborigines – educational injustice Edwards, Daisy, 373–374 Edwards, Tommy, 373–374 Elkin, Dr, 149 Epps, Dr and Mrs, 42 Era, The, 27 Evans, Raymond, 16 Evans, Ted, Director of Social Services, Perth, 348 Evatt, H. V., 280 Eyre, Edward, 101, 107, 114, 150

F

Fairlight Station, 103–104 Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, 338, 358, 372 Fenn, Manville, 87 Ferguson, Bill, 241, 293

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A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Fernando, Anthony, 132–134, 384 Fiado, 34 Flinders River, 12, 98, 103 Floyd, Bobby, 242, 252, 256, 262, 273 Foulden, Scotland, 6 Fox-Pitt, Thomas, 329, 338, 378 Freddy-Kanaka, 76, 128 Fremantle Gaol, 340, 365, 374 Frith, William, 28

G

Garland, 8 Genders, Charles, 147 Generations of Men, The (Wright), xiii, xiv, 396 genocide, see Aborigines – extermination of; Aborigines – massacres of George V, King, 79 Giles, P. A., 137 Gilruth, John, 149 Gipps, Governor, 102 Godsall, Eliza, 25, 28 Godsall, Elizabeth (née Smith), 25, 32–33, 41, 46 Godsall, George, 25, 28 Godsall, Mary see Christison, Mary Ann (née Godsall) goldfields, 9, 23, 92, 242, 335, 341, 343, 363, 378, 400 Gordon, Jane, 54, 57, 61–67, 119, 152, 402, 406–408 Gordon, Thomas, 54, 66 Gray, Robert, 23, 50 Grayden, Bill, MLA Western Australia, 327 Great Depression, 163 Great Dividing Ranges, 34 Great Northern Railway, 46–47 Gribble, Ernest, Reverend, 112, 163, 175 Groves, Bert, 354 Gulf of Carpentaria, 12, 19

H

Hannan, Paddy, 184, 347 Hansard, 278 Harcourt, Lewis, Secretary of State for Asquith government, 79 Harding Soak, Alice Springs, 136, 138 Harris, John, 232, 252

Hasluck, Paul, Federal Minister for Territories, 302 Havlin, Mr (Australian Workers Union organiser), 373 Hawkes, Jacquetta, 377 Heathcote Mental Hospital, 349 Hebbelthwaite, James, 50 Hegney, William, Minister for Native Welfare in WA, 316 Henry, Ernest, 98 High Court of Australia, xii Hill, William, 16 Hilton Young Commission, 132 Holland, Alison, xv, 84f, 368f, 386f, 402f, 404f Hollingshead, John, 25–26 Howitt, Alfred, 107, 147, 149 Hughenden pastoral station, 23 Human Rights for Aborigines (Bennett), 322, 323–324, 326 Humphries, F W, WA Director of Social Services, 358 Hunt and Die (Bennett), 293–295

I

Imari, Angel, 376–377 Imari, Daisy, 376–377 Indian-Pacific train, viii International Labour Organization, 161, 180, 248, 357 International Year of Indigenous People, 392 Isaacs, Isaac (Governor-General), definition of slavery, 222 Ivanhoe (Scott), 97

J

Johnston, Adelaide, 374, 376 Johnston, Mysie, see Schenk, Mysie Johnston, Reg, 349, 374–375 Jolly, Dr, Chairman of the Committee for the Defence of Native Rights, 282–283 Jones, Douglas, 133 Jones, Edith, 162, 210, 275 Jones, John, General Secretary of the Board of Missions, 162, 275 Jose, Arthur Wilberforce, 124–125 Joseph-Mitchell, Mr, 295 Joyner, Ethel, 229

– 42 6 –

I N DE X

K

Kaisar-i-Hind, 81, 84, 85 Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, viii, 184, 224, 318, 339–340, 366 Kalgoorlie Miner, 342, 344, 380, 392 Keating, Paul, Prime Minister of Australia, 392–393 Kennedy, Edward, 13, 101 Kimberley region, Western Australia, xiii King, Marjorie, 170 Kitson, W. H., 232, 236

L

La Trobe, Charles Joseph, Governor, 9 Ladder, The (Bennett), 237 Lake, Marilyn, xv, 172f, 246, 247f, 368f ‘Lamentations’ quote, 151 Lammermoor, ix, xv, 4, 19, 21–22, 39, 48, 70, 78 and family rift, 386–387 Land Act 1884, 40 Land Act 1934, 259, 262 Land Acts, 10 land acquisition, 98–99 Land Bill, restrictions, 39 Land Commissioner’s Office, 98 Landsborough, William, 11–12 Lasar, Charles Augustus, 42 laws, injustice of, 134, 151, 219, 231–232, 257 League of Nations, 145, 248 League of Nations Slavery Convention, 160, 211, 223 Lees, William, 134 LeFroy, Charles, 145 Leichhardt, Ludwig, 101 Lenoy, Max, 408 Lenoy, Octavius, 408 Leonora, Western Australia, 184 Liardet’s Beach, Port Melbourne, 8 ‘Like the Pelican’ (H. Roberts), 4f, 88f, 90, 92, 155f Lock, Annie, 135–136, 137, 139, 143 London Music Hall, 26 Loos, Noel, 16 Love, Blanche, 176 Love, Bob, 176, 178, 204, 289–290

M

Mabo case, xii Macdonald, J. G., 32 Macedonia, 80 Mackinnon, William, 100 Maher, Joyce and Percy, 376 Major, Thomas, 14 Malcolmson, Walter, 210 Manchester Guardian, 131, 159, 161 Marx, Karl, 7 Mary, Queen, 79 McGinness, Joe, 378 McGregor, Atholl, 136–137 McGregor, Russell, 13 McInnes, Paddy, 349 McKenna, Clancy, 301 McKenzie, Thomas, High Commissioner of New Zealand, 82 McKinlay, John, 11–12 McLarty, Ross, 316, 345 McLeod, Alexander James, 99 McLeod, Don, 282, 301, 336 McManus, Mary, 11 McMillan, Angus, Caledonia Australis, 10 meat trade, 73 Mers-les-Bains (resort), 42 Meston, Archibald, 53 Middleton, Stanley Guise, Commissioner of Native Affairs, WA, 301, 307, 341, 344 Millard, C. H., 364 Mission to Seamen, 123, 413 missionaries, 272 missions, see Aborigines – missions, reserves and farms Mitchell, Thomas, 101 mixed-descent, see Aborigines – mixed descent Montessori, Maria, 191 Montgomerie (Tenterfield house), 36, 38–39 Moody, Harold, President of The League of Coloured People, 231 Moore River Settlement, 233–234 Morel, Ed, Black Man’s Burden, 333 Morley, William, 244 Mortimer, John, 109

– 427 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Moseley, Henry, Royal Commissioner, 222, 225, 229, 246, 260, 270 Mosely Report responses, 228–235 Mount Margaret hospital, 396–397 Mount Margaret Mission School, 183, 185, 190–191, 195–196, 207, 238, 257, 269, 289 Munmurrie, Douglas, 244, 254, 278, 346 Munmurrie, Rosie, 346 Murdoch, Hubert, Lieutenant-Governor of PNG, 222–223 Murray (constable), 136–137 Murray, Gilbert, 145 Murray, Matron, 251 MV Koolinda, 175 Myall Creek massacre, 102, 134

N

Natal Downs (pastoral station), 20 National Council for Civil Liberties, 295 National Standard Theatre, Shoreditch, 26 Native Administration Act, 315, 317, 325 Native Administration Act of 1936, The, see Aborigines Amendment Act Native Citizens’ Rights Act, 288 Native Police, 15–17, 20, 21, 22, 49, 53, 104, 106, 108, 109 see also police Natural History Museum, 112 Nesbitt-Landon, Mrs, 229 Neville, Aubrey Octavius, 170, 172, 181, 185, 192–193, 196, 209, 226, 229, 235–237, 241, 243–244, 246, 250, 292, 30 Nevinson, Henry, 161 Nicholls, Doug, 293, 331, 354 North Australian Workers’ Union (NAWU), 303 Northern Territory Aboriginal Trust Fund, 160, 161 Nulsen, Emil, Minister for Justice, WA, 261

O

O’Brien, May, Director of Education, 208 O’Kelly, A H, 137, 142 Onus, Bill, 293, 354 Ørsted-Jensen, Robert, 13, 16

P

Padygar, 136, 143 Paisley, Fiona, xv, 80f, 133f, 368f, 386f Palmer, Edward, 17 Palmer, Vance, 117 Parry-Ockenden, William, Police Commissioner, 53 Parsons, Geoffrey, 280–282 Pastoral Industry Award, 362–363 pastoralist licences, 18 Peninsular and Orient Steamship Navigation Company (P&O), 71 Penny, Ted, 375 Perth Bible Institute, 271, 273 Phillip, Arthur, viii, 241 Piddington, Ralph, 176, 211 Pike, Glenville, 117 Pink, Olive, 248 police, 123–124, 129,–130, 131, 139, 142, 143, 185, 211, 216, 224, 225, 231, 232, 234, 243, 245, 254, 270, 274, 281, 343, 372 polygamy, 197, 198, 207, 212, 213, 223, 227 Pontara, Peter, 308–309, 313–314, 323, 324, 345, 351, 357, 387 Port Denison, 15, 17; see also Bowen Port Denison Times, 20, 112 Powell, Robert, 271, 278, 288, 369 Presbyterian Church, 289 Presbyterian Church Manse Fund, theatre reviews, 37 Prichard, Katharine Susannah, Coonardoo, 153 Priestly, J. B,, 377 Prison Welfare Board, 352 Protection and Care of the Aboriginal and Half-caste Inhabitants of the Colony Act, 48 Protectors, 115, 139, 143, 181, 211 see also Neville, Aubrey Octavius; police

Q

quadroons, 236 Queensland, 11, 15–156 Queensland Country Life, 134 Queensland Land Acts, 107 Queensland Land Acts of 1860, 18 Queenslander, The, 79, 102

– 42 8 –

I N DE X

Quinn, Dora, 268, 270–274, 285, 292, 309 education, 188, 194, 271, 273 employment, 208, 270 and Mary Bennett, 188, 225, 279, 288 Quinn, Jack, 246, 271 Quinn, Lily, 225, 270

R

Radcliffe-Brown, Professor, 149 Regan (constable), 124 Reid, Jessie, 229 Reynolds, Henry, 16 Rich, Ruby, 169, 215–216 Richards, Jonathan, 15, 16 Rischbieth, Bessie, 170, 206, 218, 229, 233–234, 246, 260, 275, 287 Roberton, Hugh, Federal Social Services Minister, 359 Roberts, Elizabeth, 84, 401–402, 408 Roberts, Helen see Christison, Helen Cameron (Lily) Roberts, Rosemary, 408 Roberts, Tony, 16 Robinson, Thomas, Agent-General for Queensland, 82 Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, 367 Rockerfeller Foundation, 176 Roosevelt, Theodore, President of the USA, 279 Rowley, Charles, 341–342 Rowse, Tim, 111 Royal Academy of Arts, 28, 41, 68, 84, 383 Royal Albert Saloon, 27 Royal Naval Reserve (RNR), 72 Rudd, Kevin, Prime Minister of Australia, 393 Rutter, Florence, 296

S

Schenk, Mysie (née Johnston), 186–187, 189, 198 Schenk, Rod, 181, 185–186, 188, 192, 198, 204, 236, 257, 330, 349 Scotland, 6–8 Scott, Michael, 295 Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe, 97 Scottish Australian Investment Company, 19 Scullin, James, Prime Minister of

Australia, 163 Serle, Percival, 117–118 settlers, description of, 17 Sexton, Reverend, President of the Aborigines’ Friends Association, 213 Shaw, George Bernard, 7–8 shearers’ strike, 125 Shipman, Dorothy, 297, 351 Shoreditch, 25, 26 Skeleton Creek, 18 slavery see Aborigines – slavery Smith, Ramsay, 148 social Darwinism, xi Social Services Act, 348, 359, 361, 391 Sopher, Reverend, President of the Cundeelee Mission Board, 316 South Australian Aborigines Advancement League, 331 South Australian Women’s Non-Party Association, 115, 145 Spencer, Herbert, 14 Spencer, William Baldwin, 147, 149 St Barnabas’ Church, Pimlico, 4 St Giles in the Fields, Holburn, 25 St Jack (constable), 124 St Paul’s Church, Belsize Park, 23 Stanner, Bill, Boyer Lecture, 393 Stanton, Bishop, 100 Stolen Generation, xii, 393 see also Aborigines – child removal Street, Jessie, 320–330, 336, 350, 353, 354, 361, 376, 379, 388, 390–391, 395 Street, Kenneth, 329 Struggle for Dignity (Murray), 390 Sturt, Captain Charles, 114, 150 Sub-Committee on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Treatment of Minorities of the Commission of Human Rights, report, 330 Sweers Island, 112

T

Tapim, Gladys see Vincent, Gladys Teaching the Aborigines (Bennett), 197–199, 322, 374 Tenterfield Record, theatre reviews, 37–38 Theatre Royal, Liverpool, 27 Thomas, Tula (Doris), 349

– 429 –

A W H I TE HOT F L A ME

Thomson River, 18 Thurloe Place, South Kensington, 112 Times, The, 81, 124, 132 Tindale (anthropologist), 263 Tjantjiga, John, 313, 320, 399 Tjinannu, Pansy, 373 Torres Strait, Queensland, xii Tovey, Duncan, 23 Tovey, J. D., 23 Tovey, Mary see Christison, Mary (née Tovey) Towerhill Creek, 18 Townsville Daily Bulletin, 128 Tozer, Horace, Home Secretary, 53 Trainor, Doreen, 346, 352–353, 403 Transcontinental railway, 307 Treat Me So Gently (Tennant), 367

U

United Aborigines Mission (Australian Aborigines Mission), 135, 139 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, xvii, 303, 327, 356

V

Vallance, May, 229 Verrier, Thelma, 408 Victoria, Queen, 7, 11, 28 Victoria and Albert Museum, 122 Victorian Aboriginal Group (VAG), 202, 205, 283, 292, 305, 330, 343 Victorian Aborigines Advancement League, 336, 353, 405 Vincent, Gladys, 194, 208, 262, 268, 276, 278, 285–286, 310, 379, 400 Vroland, Anton, 189, 195–196, 201–202, 277

W

Warburton Ranges, 327–328, 330, 341, 369 Wardlaw, Henry, 304, 307 Warmboomooloo, 104–105 Waters, Fred, 303 Watts, George, 28 Werribee River, 9 Wesley, Bill, 374 West Australian, The, 232, 306 Western Australia, policies on mixed-

descent children, xi Western Australian Department of Education, 204 Western Australian Government, royal commission on the living conditions of Aborigines, 217–218 Western Australian Native Affairs Administration, 292 Western Australian Native Welfare Council, 358 Western Australian Parliament, 355 Westminister Abbey, London, 41 Whitecliff station, 223 white men, and sexual relations with Aboriginal women, 113, 117, 139, 144, 180, 194, 198, 211, 212–213, 214–215, 224, 237, 240–241 Willcock, John, Premier of WA, 251 Wills, Horatio, 17 Wise, Frank, Premier of WA, 217 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 216, 218–220, 316, 322, 331, 345, 388 Women’s Non-Party Association of South Australia, 141 Women’s Service Guilds of Western Australia (WSG), 141, 170, 217–220, 246, 287, 315 Wood, Commissioner, 123, 131 Woonggoo (Aboriginal man), 109 Workers’ Star, 283 World Health Organization, 355 World War I, 80–81 World War II, 260, 268 Wright, Hedley, 171, 173 Wright, Hope, 171, 173 Wright, Judith, xiii, xvii Cry for the Dead, xiii Generations of Men, The, xiii, 396 Wyma (Dalleburra woman), x, 33–37, 39 43, 75–76, 93–94, 103, 108, 116, 123, 127–128, 133, 236, 381 Wyndham, 9 Wyndham estate, xiii

Y

Yarra River, Melbourne, 8 Yarrow Mere Station, 54

– 43 0 –

A White Hot Flame MARY MONTGOMERIE BENNETT AUTHOR, EDUCATOR, ACTIVIST FOR INDIGENOUS JUSTICE

SUE TAFFE

Mary Montgomerie Bennett (1881–1961) is an important but underrecognised figure in Australian history. A member of a successful squatting family, she became a voice for reform at a time when Aboriginal Australians had their citizens’ rights curtailed by repressive state laws. From her late forties until her death she fought for justice on behalf of the first Australians. She was a teacher, a writer and an advocate. She vehemently opposed the separating, on racial grounds, of Aboriginal children from their families. She put the case, decades before campaigns began, for Aboriginal rights to traditional lands. And she argued for citizenship rights, including equal pay and access to old age pensions, for Aboriginal people. A friend described her as ‘a white hot flame’, relentless in pursuit of a better world for the people she loved. This first comprehensive biography seeks the sources of Mary’s inspiring energy, maintained throughout her life, in her family background and early life experiences. Sue Taffe is a Melbourne historian who has written about the contributions of twentieth century activists to campaigns for Aboriginal rights. She is the author of Black and White Together FCAATSI: the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, as well as articles and book chapters about these activists.

ISBN: 978-1-925523-18-8 (pb) ISBN: 978-1-925523-19-5 (pdf ) ISBN: 978-1-925523-20-1 (epub) www.publishing.monash.edu