Charles Pakana (Victorian Aboriginal News)

Today on VAN Talks we’re sitting under a beautiful tree out at Coranderrk, an historical place here in near Healesville and I’m sitting here with Uncle Dave Wandin from the Wurundjeri Woi wurrung. Now before we start this interview I just want to explain to the audience that this particular interview was intended to be something about Uncle Dave’s work out here.

The reality is that in the lead up to this interview Uncle Dave and I had a pre interview yarn. We chatted about the history of Coranderrk and the decision was made almost immediately. OK, we need to provide the history of Coranderrk and that’s as Uncle Dave recalls it, lives it and tells it Uncle Dave. Welcome to the VAN Talks podcast.

Uncle Dave Wandin

Thank you, Charles. Sorry, is it Uncle Charles or Charles?

Charles

You can call me Charles on this one. So tell us a little bit about the starting point of Coranderrk. And now I’m asking you to encapsulate essentially an hour of conversation that we had previously. But let’s start the ball rolling. When did it all start?

Uncle Dave

1863 It needs to be embedded in people’s minds. 1863 It is a cornerstone of what we do here at Coranderrk today. You have to have a beginning. Even though the history of Coranderrk goes further back than 1863, this is a place of our ancestors for, of course, many 10s of thousands of years.

Charles

And you were saying that it was a summer camp area?

Uncle Dave

That’s right, Yeah.

Charles

So what typically would have happened here, to the best of your knowledge?

Uncle Dave

Well, the summertime, the floods would have receded from the winter. You’d be camping here in the summer, collecting the the grasses for the seeds. The kangaroos would have been because the grasses from the spring would be up. So plenty of kangaroos, they’re still here today. Kangaroos and wallabies, I’m assuming they would have been emus, the possums, birds, eggs, all those kind of things, which there’s not so many of them here now.

Charles

Plenty of food.

Uncle Dave

Absolutely. Plenty of food is, you know, we’re sitting on a floodplain here of the Yarra River or the Birrarung, as everyone is now calling it. So yeah, the food would have been in plenty, but it also would have been in preparation for autumn coming up soon, actually, for the migration of the eels down the yarra river. 

Charles

OK, yeah. 

Uncle Dave:

So there will be big gatherings, not just of Wurundjeri people, northern tribes of Victoria. So the Northern Rivers don’t have eels.

Charles:

So you would have had the Taungurung coming?

Uncle Dave:

Yeah, The Taungurung, the Dja Dja Wurrung, even the Yorta Yorta on occasion. 

Charles:

Oh, really? 

Uncle Dave:

Yeah, yeah. All coming down over the, you know, crossing the Great Dividing Range to enjoy our eel harvest. So yeah, prepping the campsite, collecting food, you know, for those times where we might have hundreds and hundreds of people. You know, there’s a story about the Bolin Bolin Billabong, which is the last recorded Tanderrum, and they did record around 500 people that stayed there for six weeks.

And when you try and comprehend that, now that how do you prepare for that kind of thing? It’s like preparing for a concert today. You know where you’re going to have 10,000 people, how you going to get all the food there in the toilet facilities?

Yeah, you’ve got to have a storage of of all these things that are available. And that’s what we would have been doing over the summertime, preparing for this annual eel migration, which would also mean the migration of a lot of people coming from northern Victoria down to southern Victoria to share in our bounty.

Charles:

So the best, to the best of your knowledge, when would that have actually stopped?

Uncle Dave:

Jeez, on a date, I don’t have an answer, but as I said, the last recorded big gathering of Aborigines was at Bolin Bolin Billabong in Buleen. And I believe that was around 18, about the time of the gold rush, right, which was pretty much when life for Aboriginal people stopped. We were just in the way all the time.

Charles:

So let’s get back to 1863 and to this place. Coranderrk being used as a mission. Let’s get back onto the story there.

Uncle Dave:

Yeah. So 1863 as an important date to us was the first Declaration of the Rights of Aboriginal people. In other words, this mission station was not chosen by the government, as many of the others were, that was set aside for Aboriginal people. This was chosen by our people.

Charles:

This was Uncle William and Uncle Simon at the time. Yep. So how did that Wonga and Barak Wonga and Barak?

Uncle Dave:

We should use their proper names. William and Simon, I guess, were the Christian given names. So, yeah, Wonga and Barak.

Charles:

So how did that come about?

Uncle Dave:

Well, it comes about from again from the, you know, the Gold rush area or the beginning of Melbourne in 1835-86.

Charles:

You’re taking us back to Toorak here?

Uncle Dave:

Yeah, we can begin there.

Charles:

Let’s go back to Toorak.

Uncle Dave:

And I’ve never confirmed it, but it’s a good story? My dad told me this story and he told a lot of stories which I used to think were jokes, but I found out that some of them are true. But the one story he told me was the first mission station for Wurundjeri people was actually set up in Toorak, which at that time was far enough out of the beginnings of Melbourne that the Aboriginal people were out of the way.

Charles:

So get that problem out of the way.

Uncle Dave

Out of the way yeah, but yeah, very quickly Melbourne started expanding, especially with the discovery of gold. And so they just pushed us out from there and we either went to either Pound Bend at Warrandyte or what is known today as Dandenong police paddocks.

Charles:

But you ended up also at Taungurung, on Taungurung Country.

Uncle Dave:

Well, eventually even those places were in the way of the settlers, if you like. So Pound Bend, they discovered gold there. And yeah, very quickly. Oh no, no, the blackfellas are in the way. So yeah, that’s where I think we then moved to Dandenong police paddocks, but then farmers and that started coming in. There wasn’t just the gold.

And yeah, we would move from there. There may have been another one in between, but eventually were moved up to either the Acheron or Rubicon River on Taungurung Country, where lots of Aboriginal people were pushed from across Victoria. You know, we need to get them well out of the way.

Charles

So when you say from across Victoria?

Uncle Dave

Yeah, even though they were setting up other mission stations as well. Of course, a lot of us were running around. We were pretty much homeless. We didn’t know where we could go. You know, we’d been in trouble with the settlers. The settlers were, you know, chasing us down and hunting us, so there was quite a variety of mobs across Victoria that ended up on Taungurung Country.

Charles

So was this a forced relocation on to Taungurung Country?

Uncle Dave

Yes, it was, Yeah.

Charles

So one of the problems that I’ve heard over the over the years is that when the settlers did this or the colonists did this, they gave no thought to the fact that there were existing animosities that may have existed between mobs. I mean, even though the five mobs of the Kulin Nation, there were wars that existed and animosities existed.

Uncle Dave

There was always disputes, yeah, as it is between any neighbours.

Charles

Sure.

Uncle Dave

And they find it strange that because we were all black, so therefore we’re all of one race and all of one thing. And yet you look at the wars that are still happening in the world today of dark skin, white skin, yellow skin, red skin, whatever. It’s taken years for people to realise that we are all different. We all have various responsibilities for the area of land which was given to us, either handed down from our ancestors or from our creators.

You know, the whole colonisation thing about this is our God-given right to take this land, which is how they took over Australia. Yeah, all of those kind of things, you know, it’s it’s ridiculous. Luckily the world is waking up to that. But yeah, there’s still disputes about who belongs to what country and where.

But what was established up on Taungurung land was the land that they were given could not sustain the amount of people that were there and they were actually starving. And that’s because by the time we were pushed out of Melbourne, whether it was from Pound Bend or police paddocks, another settler had already been given a claim and he got there before us and.

Charles

This is up on Taungurung COuntry

Uncle Dave

yeah. And he sort of looked at his land and said, I can’t survive on this, what’s that land over there? And he basically shifted the claims. And so by the time we got there, there was, there was land or sorry, my ancestors got there.

There was no way that they could actually exist within that Country without supplies being brought up from Melbourne. Without supplies and being totally reliant on the government of the day to support that mission station, it just wasn’t possible.

There was no game. The land was very barren. So even though there was water there, there wasn’t much else in the way of what would normally sustain our culture. You know, it’s with supplementary fishing and hunting and harvesting of all those kind of things.

Charles

And when would this have been roughly?

Uncle Dave

So now we’re in between 1850. Well 1855 to 1860-61.

Charles

OK. So we’re leading up to the times..

Uncle Dave

To 1863 

Charles:

Now Wonga and Barak were up there.

Uncle Dave

That’s right, Yeah. Along with John Green, the appointed white Superintendent, They were very good friends, the three of them. And although there were others involved as well, I don’t have a lot of knowledge about that. Even John Green knew that it was not sustainable.

Charles

But John Green, let’s just talk about John Green, just for a minute to the best of your knowledge now. He was essentially the caretaker, the manager. Yeah. So what was his mission in life?

Uncle Dave

That’s a good question. So he was appointed by the Aboriginal Protection Board to take these groups, this group of people and and be in charge of them.

Charles

It always rings warning bells and you see the Aboriginal Protection Board.

Uncle Dave

He was a Scottish Presbyterian minister, but he had a different view of the Australian government of the day and a different he actually wanted to work with Aboriginal people. He wanted to understand them. So he was much more lenient than many of the other superintendents at the other mission stations, which were also set up around Victoria.

Charles

The superintendents at that time, they were also tasked with eliminating culture, with Christianising those, those black heathens, yeah.

Uncle Dave

That’s right. Where they’re basically to, yeah, introduce Christianity and to assimilate Aboriginal people into the new modern culture. Yeah. And to do that like any other invader or conqueror is you remove their religion, which again, we, we’re still not recognised as having a religion. They call it a culture. And yet our culture is based on making sure we pay our respects to our Creator, just like a church pays respect to God, you know, but they couldn’t understand that.

They didn’t understand the ways of the land, that it was not there for our taking. We were there as custodians and we still are here as custodians. We couldn’t sell it, we couldn’t exchange it, we could exchange goods that were harvested from it.

And we did that, you know, with many other tribes. And the whole reason our Aboriginal culture still survives today because that kind of reciprocal exchange still happens and it’s respectful and it’s there are rules and laws around that much more complicated than what we call government today. You know we talk about all the laws and road rules and you know stamp duties and taxes and all those kind of things.

So everybody whinges about cost of living and you know we had a system that was that worked for 10s of thousands of years, whereas might not have been 100% harmonious, but it was truly respectful of whose land you were on and what your responsibilities were while you were there.

Charles

But John Green? He seems to have understood a lot of this.

Uncle Dave

Yeah. How much he understood, I don’t know. There are a lot of journals and we’re still going through them. And you’ve got to read them and reread them and reread them and reread them. Just like a lawyer has to read any legislation. But from what we know, what has been gathered, he was much more lenient in how long it took for people to assimilate into the new way of life. He understood that there was, there was some power, there was a governance system, a hierarchy that if you didn’t understand that you would never get the Aboriginal people on side.

So he worked with Wonga and Barak. So instead of him telling them what they should do, like as the whole mob of going out there lining about saying you go here and you go there, he basically set these Aboriginal overseers, if you like, for it’s a better word I can say for the day you’d say, look, we need to get this done and we need to get that done.

And then Barak, Wonga and others would then delegate those tasks. So the Aboriginal people felt like they still had some control over their lives instead of just waking up in the morning. Oh, I wonder where I’m going to be working today. Kind of thing.

Charles

So that was seen up in, up north in Taungurung Country that that relationship was existing up there.

Uncle Dave

Yeah, yeah.

Charles

OK. So we’re looking around about 1861 when obviously the mob at that point in time are recognising that it’s not sustainable up there. There’s no food, there’s water but obviously not appropriate shelter. So a lot of sufferings, The move then back.

Uncle Dave

They were starting, they were starting to starve, right? Yeah, the young ones were getting the old ones and the young ones were getting sick because there wasn’t the nutrition that we were used to, even though there might have been plenty of flour and tobacco. Well, if it was, it was never enough, pretty much. It was like a prison camp. I often talk about the mission stations as being Australia’s version of the German concentration camps.

Charles

Well, the British were very good at doing that, they did it in South Africa…

Uncle Dave

And you look, yeah, you look through to history and you see it’s happened everywhere, which is why the British got kicked out of all those places, you know, eventually. And this was their last stand, really their last invaded country.

Charles

Back to about 1861 The move back down here to Coranderrk or to here to Coranderrk

Uncle Dave

Yeah, basically the mob got upset. John Green wasn’t getting any answers from the government about, you know, regular supplies and all those kind of things. So they walked off. They said we’ve had enough, you know, we’re going to, we’re all going to walk back to Melbourne, we’re going to protest.

Charles

And this was led by Wonga and Barak. 

Uncle Dave

Yes

Charles

OK. Now Barak at the time was the Ngurungaeta?

Uncle Dave

That’s a good question. I think Simon Wonga was the Ngurungaeta. I don’t think Barak was declared Ngurungaeta until we set up here at Coranderrk.

Charles

So around about 1861 walked off, came down to Melbourne.

Uncle Dave

While they were heading to Melbourne, but because of all the malnutrition and the undernourishment of most of the mob, they were absolutely exhausted.

Charles

Now this is when you’re talking about Black Spur, that geographic point. Tell us a bit about that Unc.

Uncle Dave

Yeah. So the reality is to get to somewhere where they could rest and recuperate and it was coming over the top of the mountains here though, what we know as the Yarra Rangers. Yeah they needed to be spurred on and that was for some of them with whips and some of them were carried and stretched and it was really, really hard slog and Barak and Wonga and Green and and others you know, realised that not all of them were going to be able to make it to Melbourne.

But they knew of this place here here on the Yarra and they knew that there was plenty of food and or it should have been depending on how settled it was. But as luckily no one had settled in this area. And so they looked this place and said yeah this is where you know, we would summer camp and we could support a few 100 people. So they said right, we’re going to set up camp here. All of you guys can rest, and the ones who are healthy enough will do the rest of the walk.

Charles

So this was intended to be a temporary thing just to rest the mob several 100.

Uncle Dave

They made a decision that looking at this land compared to where they come from, with the amount of people here, this could sustain them. This was sustainable. It had the, you know, it had the flood plains, it had the mountains just behind you, nice rolling hills, lots of grasslands, lots of forest lands.

So therefore the whole variety of in those days still, the medicines, the foods, both animal, birds, eggs, the waterways with plenty of fish in them and all those kind of things which would have been, you know, how we would walk across Country and look and say, well what have we got here, what is available and that would determine how long you could stay here.

But this was definitely a summer camp which once the eel harvest was over, they would prepare to move further back up into the mountains to get away from the floods actually. And there would be different things, of course, growing at the time. During there, they knew it would sustain 100 or so people that eventually came to, you know, to form Coranderrk.

Charles

So when was the official formation of Coron Dirk as a mission itself?

Uncle Dave

Yeah, so 1863, right? We’re back to the best of my knowledge, yeah. So by the time they settled everybody here, so 1861-1862, they walked into Melbourne, they arranged a meeting with the governor at the time. I don’t think we had premiers and they asked for this land. They said, look, we’re sick of being moved around Country. If you give us this land and leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone and we will look after ourselves.

Charles

And this was 50,000 acres. You were telling me..

Uncle Dave

5000 acres, 5000 acres. If you look through the record books, it’s 4800, It’s 5000, it’s 5200. It’s close enough to 5000. I just ran it up to 5000.

Charles

All right.

Uncle Dave

And the decision makers of the day through legislation actually gave the land the 5000 acres to the Aboriginals in perpetuity. That was the legislation.

Charles

So with that legislation passed, essentially granting it to the now, it wasn’t to the Wurundjeri people, it was to the Aboriginal people. Is that right? So there was still no recognition of the Wurundjeri. 

Uncle Dave

Correct. That’s right. Yeah. 

Charles

OK, So what happened then? The growth of Coranderrk

Good. They’ve come back and said, yes, this is our land. Obviously, a government and surveyor would have come out and sort of pegged out the areas as to what our limits were as to where we could live and hopefully survive. And everything was rosy. John Green, you know, still had his church services, but they were outdoor. They were out in the Bush. They did all convert here, the ones that hadn’t to Christianity, giving up their, you know, multiple wives.

Charles

And that includes Barak and Wonga, yeah.

Uncle Dave

Yeah, yeah. Barak was also had to give up his witch doctoring, as they called it in those days, because Barak was well respected as a medicine man. Although there’s he still managed to practice that and it’s and it’s a whole nother conversation about how he seemed to appear in two or three different places at the one time for treating people. And they did assimilate in the new way of life. And this ground was so good. They did start growing cabbages and corn and potatoes and all the crops that were available at the day..

Charles

And you were saying hops before as well and had pretty good hops.

Uncle Dave

Well, the hops came later and I’m not sure exactly when, but yeah, they just cleared a lot of the land and they had their own cattle, they had pigs and chickens and they had many, many horses. Aboriginal people as we know throughout all of Australia became very adept at becoming, you know, brilliant horsemen and learning how to shoot.

But they’re also very good at learning how to use tools, modern tools and and still using their action tools. I’m sure the women still would have been using their digging sticks to weed around the cabbages and peas and carrots and things like that, because that was their tool.

Charles

The adoption of this place, how successful was it in this agriculture, this adopted agriculture?

Uncle Dave

Well, it was so successful and so well run that they had time to do what we would call activities or hobbies like we all work for today. They had time to go and celebrate and party down, down on the water. They had time to still do at the right time of the year. Some of the traditional harvests of what was still left here on the land and that sounded like a hang on. These people are having fun out here.

Charles

Oh, the jealousy rears it’s ugly head

Uncle Dave

So there were people settling around the 5000 acres, and apparently quite a few of them got a bit jealous. And they thought, well, if the Aboriginals can work that land, and we’re struggling on our bits of land because we understood the soils and we understood the waters, we understood so much more than they did. I keep, I keep going back to it all the time. We are the first scientists of this country collecting data for 10s of thousands of years. You know, everyone is relying on Joseph Bank’s observations in 1770.

It’s about how they could farm. But we understood the seasons. You know, most of the settlers came out here, were brought over the ships to arrive here in spring. So everything looked rosy. They didn’t understand it would dry out or that it would flood or that it would burn and all those kind of things. We understood all that.

Charles

So how many people would have been here on the mission around about this time?

Uncle Dave

Well, from everything I’ve read so far, it sustained a sort of a permanent population of around 100. Above 100 there were other people that were able to get away from other missions, whether they escaped or were allowed to. As the word about Coranderrk got around and how good it was, many of them wanted to either leave the missions or come in from Country and live here at the mission station.

So how many people were here over the over it’s lifetime from 1863 to 1924? We haven’t determined that yet, but definitely the drawings and the plans of the village that we’ve got shows that quite comfortably with the with the buildings, there was a permanent population of 100 or more at any one time.

Charles

And when you’re talking about buildings, you were yarning with me earlier about John Green actually supporting a timber mill here.

Uncle Dave

Yeah, yeah. So you know when those places were set up, they were in the, you know, the standard slab… held up with branches that they’re like you see in all the old photos. But he’s seen the value of the timber that was around here and rather than waiting for supplies of timber to come up from Melbourne he had this idea of building a sawmill, a water operated sawmill.

Because the water was flowing, it was all year round and people quickly adapted to that and started building timber houses, although still were dirt floors. No remains of them anymore, but there’s a whole nother story to that. They even got to the stage where they were making their own bricks. That’s in the very sort of last days going up to 1924. But the reality is it was looking so successful and that was not what the government wanted. So there was a concentrated effort. It was how did they actually shut this down?

Because Coranderrk was actually on the world stage of. Because it was the last bastion of the British colony to say that they were looking after the Indigenous peoples, even though it was Terra Nullius and there were no Indigenous peoples. But they lost the war against slavery. They’d lost all the British colonies. Sorry. Yeah, the British colonies in America.

Yeah. India was in turmoil. Turmoil. Yeah. And they needed to hang on to this. And they couldn’t do that if Aboriginal people were going to survive and prosper, yeah, rather than just survive. So there was a an organisation which was called the Acclimatization Society and that’s now known as Zoos Victoria. But the Acclimatization Society was to actually turn Victoria into England and they couldn’t do that with the Aboriginals in the way. So they they underhandedly they worked out that that it was John Green and Barak. So I’m not sure what year this was, but I’m thinking that Wonga had probably died by then.

Charles

So at this stage, the Ngurungaeta was Barak. 

Uncle Dave

That’s right. And they knew that they couldn’t do anything if Barak was still in charge. So there’s a quite a few underhanded things that they did politically, but the the most ridiculous one, when I look back on it now, it wouldn’t have been ridiculous at the time, was that they they got a hold of one settler here who wanted some of this land and asked him to get Barak because he was such a good shot to go out and kill a couple of deer. Yeah, because he was having a feast or whatever.

Charles

And these would have been the King’s deer.

Uncle Dave

That’s correct. Yeah. They went out and killed these deer and then they arrested him for shooting the King’s deer. Because even here in Australia, deer, salmon and various other animals, just as they are still today in England, all belong to the King, and you have to go through the King’s, you know, gamekeeper and all that kind of thing.

Charles

You think they would have learned from Robin of Locksley, wouldn’t you? Robin Hood doesn’t work.

Uncle Dave

But luckily there was another person who was sympathetic to the Aboriginals, because I should mention that even though there were white settlers moving in around here, there was no education system. But John Green, actually John Green’s wife ran a schoolhouse here primarily to teach English and you know, basic reading and writing to Aboriginal children of the mission. But actually all the white children came here. So the first school in Healesville  was actually at Coranderrk. And the white people used to come here to learn under Mary Green. 

Charles

Good Lord. 

Uncle Dave

So there was there was already some acceptance, if you like.

Charles

A bit of reconciliation going on there.

Uncle Dave

What we’re all fighting for today, Yeah, people ask me about reconciliation.

Charles

And oh, let’s not go there. Come on and and.

Uncle Dave

To me it’s like, yeah, well this was, this was the example Coranderrk, that was the example how reconciliation could work. And yet they spent so much time then trying to shut the place down.

Charles

So how many white people would have been here? Because we know of John Green and his wife.

Ulcer Dave

Was living here. That was it. Yeah, right. So John Green was here.

Charles

Right. Yeah. So they weren’t guards or enforcers?

Uncle Dave

No, they were all outside, right? They were all outside the gates. The story that I was told that if you went outside of of the the markers and you were arrested, you were lucky because you would just be brought back. 

Charles

For the unlucky ones though?

Uncle Dave

The unlucky ones, if you’re caught by a settler or whatever, you could be shot and no one would ever be charged. 

Charles

Jeez. 

Uncle Dave

Now, whether that actually happened or not, but I yeah, we do know that by 1881 that if they did want to walk out of the front gates, you know, they had to carry a passport or a permit as it did with all the mission stations. But a lot of them were actually used as out workers on the various stations that were getting set up because they were actually very industrious. You know, they weren’t afraid of hard work.

Charles

So let’s get back though, to Barak and taking the King’s deer. Tell us that story. 

Uncle Dave

All right, So yeah, this other neighbor knew what was happening and so stood up in court. And so the charges were dropped. So then they did the next underhanded thing where they brought up a water cart. 

Charles

Oh, you told me about this…

Uncle Dave

Full of salmon and they released him into the into the Coranderrk Creek here and into the Yarra.

Charles

What was the goal there? 

Uncle Dave

Well again hoping that William Barak or or even any Aboriginal person would get caught catching the salmon, the kings salmon.

Charles

The King’s salmon 

Uncle Dave

…and they could be arrested and then taken off the mission and potentially transferred to some of the other worse mission stations…

Charles

But come on, the kick to the story is though, Unc..

Uncle Dave

But the real yeah, the reality is they knew they couldn’t do anything unless they got rid of William Barak. Yeah, and they couldn’t get rid of him..

Charles

But what happened to the fish they brought up? 

Uncle Dave

Oh, they all died. They didn’t actually see night in the waters. Yeah, well, bad, of course, we know. Then they introduced the trout, which now, you know, in all Australian rivers, which, yeah, they’re still available here, but the eels are still here as well, which is the most important part of our lifestyle out of the water and freshwater mussels aren’t here anymore. But anyway, that’s another story. Where…

Charles

There’s so many other stories we’ve got to keep track of here. So when these attempts to usurp or bring Barak down didn’t work, what was the next step?

Uncle Dave

Well, they sacked John Green. They thought if they can’t get rid of the ringleader, they’ll sack John Green and put someone else in charge. Well, actually they asked him to say you’ve got to be more harder on them and he refused to do that because he yeah, by then they weren’t just his flock, they were his friends and he was doing everything possible to to look after them.

Charles

So how long was he with them for?

Uncle Dave

That’s yeah, well, he was with him at a couple of the previous stations, but in 1981 there was an inquiry held so he would have been sacked before 1881. So we’re talking less than 20 years that he was in charge here. They brought in a couple of superintendents, but the one that I know the most about is John Strickland, who was actually directed straight from the government.

Get up there and shut that place down. And he was not a well liked person. He was apparently quite cruel. He was drunk. He was a drunk by that time. John Green after the sawmill had also introduced as a commercial crop outside of the Mission station.

Charles

We’re back to the hops great.

Uncle Dave

….growing hops would be because at that time all the hops were coming still from England on the ships and by and apparently hops don’t travel very well. And so he started growing hops here, you know, teaching the Aboriginal people how to grow hops and was actually making money out of the mission station for the mission. Yeah, yeah.

Which then allowed the apparently the women were very well dressed. You know, they loved that. We did have traveling salesman coming through here with materials and sewing patterns and things like that and which the women really loved, which is what I mean, you know, they had the time to do these instead of waiting on their one dress and one pair of boots and whatever it was that that came up from the from the government.

Charles

But the question is though that if the new Superintendent or enforcer was tasked to shut the place down, what then of the…?

Uncle Dave

Well, it still had to look like everybody didn’t want to be here. So one of the things he did was he brought in white men or white people I should say, to be a part of the hop harvest, which they were paid for. Whereas the Aboriginal people were still had to help with the hop harvest, but for their work they were only given their supplies of flour, sugar and tobacco.

And it was he had reduced all of that, he was told, to save costs. So he was saying, well we only need X amount of kilos for the thing, but basically they’re on starvation rations again, just like they were in up in Taungurung Country. So again there was a protest and Barak again walked down to Melbourne to protest against the harsh conditions. He asked for John Green to be reinstated. John Green apparently still lived nearby and we did used to sneak off the mission on a Sunday to go and and receive his services in the middle of the night. But so when he cut the rations or wasn’t given enough unless they actually got into the hop harvest, they would say, well we’re not doing the hop harvest because we’re going to starve.

So they would go off and hunt kangaroo and fish and all that kind of thing and he would then take their rations away from them. So basically they had to go back to living the way they were, but the changes had already happened and there just wasn’t enough around to support them. I get confused when we get to all this part because it actually it makes me feel a bit ill about what was actually happening.

But there were a few people. One was the Argus newspaper Argus. There was a woman called Anne Bonne who played a very important part about the recognition of Aboriginal people and her and Barak became very good friends. At one stage Barak’s son, 10 years old, became sick and he had to walk him into Melbourne from here. But we talk about the Barak walk. Barak did many walks into Melbourne to protest for his people.

He couldn’t find the hospital but he knew where Anne Bonne’s house was and so he stayed there, took his son into hospital and unfortunately his son died and he was never given the body back. It was never returned to him. I’m getting a bit ahead of the story here, but that was kind of what broke Barak and Aunty Joy’s looked at the photos of before and after his son died and you could see though the power and the presence in in Barak.

But after his son died, you could see the, you know, the sadness, which is when he took up his painting to tell it, you know, protect our culture as much as he could through his paintings. So to most people, they’re brilliant works of art, but they’re more than that to me. They’re books. They’re the Bible. Everyone has a different interpretation of art. You know, I read stories into those paintings, just like I read stories into the Country. Yeah, like I said, I was getting ahead of myself there.

Charles

So let’s get Let’s get back to 1881…

Uncle Dave

So look, yeah, look, he did go down and protest and because of the newspaper and Anne Bonne and all of those people, I don’t know what kind of society they were called. But the government actually came out here to Coranderrk and held an inquiry, and there were 41 or 47 submissions from Aboriginal people to whoever ran that inquiry. And basically they’re different to today.

The media was against the government and the people won their case to hang on to this land and to manage it for themselves. Barak’s famous words to me. Famous words was give us this country and we will show you that we can work it, that’s all he wanted was to hang on to that 5000 acres given it to him in 1863 and support his people and protect his culture. 

celebrated the….

Charles

Legislation was upheld.

Uncle Dave

Yes, absolutely.

Charles

Right.

SPK_2

And it was in the paper and apparently there was lots of partying here for a couple of days, but then they got back to managing the land. But unfortunately the powers that be backing governments, you know, we can’t accept this so… which brought around that so how can we get rid of this? So after that was when Barak’s son got sick. So Barak, when he came back from there, he was I guess depressed. He was full of grief and wasn’t actually I guess taken on his role that he used to have as Ngurungaeta.

And the reason why I’m here and the rest of my family is because he needed to choose another Ngurungaeta and he had no surviving children and he chose my great, great grandfather Robert Wandoon to be the next leader. But before Robert Wandoon, I guess came into maturity and was accepted as Ngurungaeta Barak died in 1903. And after that was when they brought in the Half-Caste Act.

It was brought back to try and shut this place down, not just because it was convenient for the whole country, although it was rolled out across the whole country because there was too much support to say no. Look the Aboriginal people were looking after themselves, so bringing in the Half-Caste Act and getting all the non full bloods who were all the workers.

Charles

Yeah.

Uncle Dave

All that, Yeah. From teenagers to up to, you know, 30 years of age. Probably 30-5, maybe.

Charles

But Unc, what would have been the ultimate goal of the government with the inhabitants here? I mean you’re saying we had or you had around about 100 or more Aboriginal people living here in an established settlement?

Uncle Dave

Although I think over the time there would have been, you know, 7 or 800 people that came through Coranderrk station.

Charles

So what would have happened to them? We would have had more displaced people. Would they have been? What was the goal? To move them to yet another area.

Uncle Dave

Well, they did, you know, when they brought in the half car, stacked most of them well, they were ordered to go to Lake Tyres. But I’m, I feel quite privileged that my particular family line, actually, when the place closed down in 1924, we stayed here in town, we got jobs in the sawmills and we found work right, and we lived on that outskirts of the boundary.

Charles

How many Wurundjeri people would have been here at the close of the mission? So 1924?

Uncle Dave

Look, I don’t know how many people all I do know well what I’ve been told that as far as full bloods go there was only 22 full bloods left of our Wurundjeri. So it shows how close they, you know, the government did come to almost exterminating.

Charles

So to all those people that don’t think genocide occurred in Australia, wake up and smell the roses.

Uncle Dave

Read the books. Look, look at the history. You know it, it’s there, it happened. You know, people ask me, oh, how come the Aboriginal people are so, so angry? It happened years ago, you know, a couple, 100 years ago. And it’s not, it’s not a claim to fame, but my oldest uncle, the last Ngurungaeta of our family today, he was the last child born here at Coranderrk.

You know, it’s not Coranderrk, is not in the history. It’s one generation ago for me. Am I traumatized by it? Well, yeah, I probably am. But I haven’t gone to a psychologist to ask. All I know is that in, you know, from 1924, we still fought to get some of this land back. And in 1998, we did. We got 200 acres back. I’m saying I’m jumping ahead there, but yeah.

Charles

Well, that’s OK because so in 1924, what actually happened then?

Uncle Dave

It was officially closed down, so they used a couple of other techniques. So they used the half caste act which removed all the able bodied working people off this land, right. So there might have been some very young ones, but mostly though the older ones who could no longer manage the land and they looked at it and said, well, you’re not managing the land anyway, so we don’t need to keep it for you. That didn’t work all that well. They then used the they used the excuse that they needed this land for soldiers settlement from the..

Charles

World War One.

Uncle Dave

I think it was actually from the Boer War it may have been…

Charles

Oh, OK. So it started sort of in in the very early 19 hundreds

Uncle Dave

Yeah. So it like 1924 was when it shut down, which was after the First World War, but they started carving up.

Charles

Oh, OK, so the starters were for war

Uncle Dave

War, which was the one most recent one to that it might have been the Crimean War. I can’t remember, so I was already whittled down as I moved people off to Lake Tyres. I’m probably getting all my timings wrong here, but the story is still there. Needs a better person than me to pull it together, but we have found out that not one soldier ever got land that was once Coranderrk..

Charles

But it was a good excuse to get rid of that problem.

Uncle Dave

It was the political excuse that they were using of shutting the place down. Yeah. And in 1924, it was eventually shut down. And yeah, the next part of that story is that basically the house that was built for John Strickland, which is the one brick building that’s left here, which was built by our people, handmade bricks basically.

They told the rest of the community around go in and take. Destroy everything. Destroy all evidence of Aboriginal people living here. So the village itself was absolutely razed to the ground. The stables, the dairy, the piggery, the butchery, the gardens, everything was dug up, everything was removed. And then, you know, by that time it was all sold off in 1924.

Charles

And at that point, we’re going to have to leave it. But let me assure you that we are coming back to Uncle Dave in a couple of weeks because the story of Coranderrk does not finish at 1924.

Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here exactly 100 years later. That’s right, Uncle Dave. Until then, thank you so much indeed for trusting us to carry this story out there.

Uncle Dave

Thanks, Uncle Charles.