Barmah Lake, Victoria, Australia
Sunday 3 August 1884
Rowing up the Murray river, separating Victoria from New South Wales, in a native canoe, Thomas Shadrach James passes several paddle boats carrying wool and other agricultural produce from the outback which will be unloaded at Echuca wharf and transported by land to Melbourne. The 24-years-old Tamil Mauritian started teaching Aborigines children at Maloga Mission three years ago, but this is the first time he traveled up the river.
After arriving at the shore of the Barmah Lake, his companion William Cooper – a 23-years-old half-European half-Aborigines of the Yorta Yorta Nation – suggested that they make a simple ‘mia-mia’ – a temporary shelter. They then goes out to shoot some rabbits before the short mid-winter day ends.
While Thomas skins the preys, William makes fire to cook them under the winter night sky. The whole colony seems far away – the chaotic life at the mission which has become a small village, the busy town of Echuca, and furthest away Melbourne, Victoria’s capital.
As they finally sit down to eat, William looks across to the other shore of the lake and slowly tears come to his eyes. Thomas waits for him to tell why they came out so far in the bush, when he was only expecting a verbal reply to his question.
It’s certainly not the question of William’s English. Among all the Australian natives that Thomas has met, he speaks in the best English. Daniel Matthews, who founded the mission, told him that from knowing nothing of the language 13-year-old William mastered the English alphabets in three days and became fluent in no time.
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| Aboriginal Australian women and children, Maloga. |
William was born by the banks of the Murray River in 1860. His mother, Kitty, was a traditional Wollithiga woman who made first contact with white settlers and lives in the Moira Forest. Their Moitheriban group, are known as the “reed people” by neighboring tribes. Kitty and her children speak a dialect of Yorta Yorta. William’s father, with whom he has no contact, was a white man called James Cooper.
Finally, William utters, “My mother told me about this place some years ago. She was just a girl when white men first came to Yorta Yorta land. You must have heard of Edward Curr?”
Thomas: Yes, the Father of Separation who split Victoria from New South Wales, right? His son, E.M. Curr, also published a book Recollections of Squatting in Victoria last year.
William: I wonder if he mentioned anything about the crime which he committed here 41 years ago.
Thomas: I don’t recall reading that. What happened?
William wipes his tears and continues: In 1843, some Yorta Yorta men stole sheep from their farm out of hunger. the younger Curr, then reported to Henry Dana, the chief of the Native Police that large numbers of Aborigines had assembled on the south bank of the Murray River and claimed that they were "daily threatening the lives of his men and attempting to take the sheep".
So they hatched a plan. Curr with a bullock dray and sheep acted as a decoy and enticed many of our people from their reed-bed shelter. The white officers then charged from their hiding place and seized Chief Warry whom Curr pointed out. They rounded up the rest like sheep, started firing and shot some of them in the river. At least 20 men, one woman, five children were shot and killed. My mother was among the few who survived.
Thomas: … How atrocious.
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| William Oswald Hodgkinson's painting 'Bulla, Queensland, 1861' shows armed fighting. (Credit: National Library of Australia) |
William: There were many more of us before they came and took our lands, desecrate our sacred places and destroyed our livelihood. Some of us adapt by becoming slaves and servants in their farms, others hide away from them in the bush trying to survive by the old ways.
Thomas: They said this whole continent is Terra Nullius – no man’s Land – because they don’t see natives as humans.
William: But taking our land is not all they want. What they really want is to eliminate us. They call us subhuman and vermin. After Sunday service, some would go out on “black hunts” or “black shoots” and shoot as many men, women and children as possible. They took pleasure in killing us for fun as though we were kangaroos.
Thomas: I am very sorry for these horrific acts by fellow Christians who laid their hands on native people.
William: You are not responsible for what white people do. You are not white. I believe that your people have also suffered at the hands of white people. Even Daniel isn’t responsible. Even though he’s white, he’s different. He built the Mission to protect us from them. I remember the first day I met him ten years ago. He came to pick up my family, after taking a great risk to rescue my sister Lizzie and her baby from the white men who chained her and other native women as sex slaves. I don’t even know how to repay him.
Thomas: You don’t have to. As he always says, he does it to pay for his father’s sins. You know the story how his father used to be a slave trader?
William: Yes, I know that his father was a sea captain who shipped enslaved people from Africa to the West Indies.
Thomas: One day when Captain John Matthews was on a voyage, he saw an apparition of a man pointing on the map in the chart house of the ship. With curiosity, he altered the course to that specific coordinates and found a man he saw in the chart-house adrift at sea in a raft. After being rescued, the man said he had prayed to God all night for an intervention. The captain marveled at the story and after soul-searching became converted. He threw the rum overboard, gave up slave trading and moved to Australia.
William: When I learned about the plight of the Africans who are enslaved and dispossessed of everything just like us, I cried. While working as coachman for Sir O’ Shanassy in Melbourne, I also heard him speak about Pacific Islanders blalckbirded away from their islands into slavery in Queensland’s sugar plantations. It broke my heart. Why do white men do this? They claim the whole Earth as their own. Around the time Sir O’ Shanassy passed away last year, I heard politicians’ uproar over European and American invasions of “their” backyard. What an irony. The British Empire has taken Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Fiji and what not.
Thomas: Yes, they panicked that Germany was going to occupy the Eastern part of New Guinea, France going to take Vanuatu, and they were angry that the Colonial Office in London was doing nothing to stop it. So Queensland unilaterally claimed annexation of the part of New Guinea unoccupied by the Netherlands themselves, but it was later rejected, to their dismay, by London.
William: And precisely because of that, the Australasian colonies will unite and become a union. More bad news for natives like us.
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| After a massacre, those Aboriginal people who were not killed were often enslaved, similar to these men photographed near Wyndham, WA.(Credit: State Library of Victoria) |
Thomas: Never give up. I’m sure God is on your side. You are all an inspiration. When I hear the twenty-five of you singing in Melbourne three and a half years ago, it was like God spoke to me. That’s why I volunteered to help Daniel at the mission without thinking of money or anything.
William: We are all grateful for that. Although I was not at Maloga at that time, we could not have written the petition to Lord Loftus without your help.
Thomas: It was not me or Daniel. It all came out from the hearts of Moira and Ulupna peoples. I can still remember parts of it now... That all the land within our tribal boundaries has been taken possession of by the government and white settlers; our hunting grounds are used for sheep pasturage and the game reduced and, in many places, exterminated, rendering our means of subsistence extremely precarious, and often reducing us and our wives and children to beggary….
William continues: We, the men of our several tribes, are desirous of honestly maintaining our young and infirm, who are in many cases the subject of extreme want and semi-starvation, and we believe we could, in a few years support ourselves by our own industry, were a sufficient area of land granted to us to cultivate and raise stock. We have been under training for some years and feel that our old mode of life is not in keeping with the instructions we have received, and we are earnestly desirous of settling down to more orderly habits of industry, that we may form homes for our families…
Thomas sighs: Unfortunately, the request was not granted. But at least the government began to take their responsibility and formed the Aborigines Protection Board as well as setting aside reserves at Cummera. Things are looking up.
William: But it’s far from justice. Some of the petitioners still believe that it was a gift to them from Queen Victoria! We will have to do something again to make our points across. In three years, it will be the queen’s Golden Jubilee and soon after that, the centenary of the New South Wales settlement.
Thomas: There’s also a biblical teaching that in every 50th or jubilee year, property is returned to its original owners even if it had been sold in the meantime.
William: All the better. It will be a time to remind them how the last one hundred years has been apocalypse for us. All the Killing Times that happened must not be forgotten. We must have a fitting memorial.
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| William Cooper in later years |
Thomas: What would you ask for?
William: That those among us who want it should be granted sections of land in fee simple or at a small nominal rental annual, with the option of purchase at reasonable prices for us under the circumstances. It should always be born in mind that we were the former occupiers of the land. This would enable us to earn our own livelihood, and thus partially relieve the State from the burden of our maintenance.
Thomas: That’s not much at all to ask for. Even poor rural whites would want the same thing, especially the Irish. If there were justice in treatment and distribution of land, there would not have been the Eureka Rebellion, and there would not be a Ned Kelly for them to hunt down and killed four years ago.
William: He was treated badly for stealing animals. But at least, they didn’t wipe out all his people.
Thomas: In many ways, the Ireland has also been occupied by the English like Australia. If the Irish were black, the English might have wiped them out too. Not that starving them in the Great Famine was much better.
William: We natives have had our whole world taken from us, yet we are not even demanding to be given back everything. All of us can learn to share this immense land with respect for each other’s way of life. And there would be less trouble for everyone. But now we, the original owners of the land, are entirely dispossessed of it by those who call themselves Christians.
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| Thomas Shadrach James in later years |
Thomas: Frankly I am surprised that natives turn to Christianity at all. That’s why I asked you today how you decided to convert. But now I think I know the answer.
William: I am the last among my family to convert. With all the things I learned during the time I traveled the country with Sir O’ Shanassy about Christian cruelties on natives, I couldn’t have brought myself to it.
Thomas: What changed?
William: Six months ago, I woke up one night with music in my head. It came to me in my dream. I heard music that brought people with the same skin color from very far away. And they sang of a people who had been had been enslaved and taken from their homes. Then next morning at the service, when Daniel read from Exodus about Jews who were also dispossessed and enslaved by the pharaoh, I suddenly had an epiphany that this was where I was supposed to be.
Thomas: I remember that. Exodus 15:4. “Pharaoh’s chariots and his army, he has hurled into the sea.
The best of Pharaoh’s officers are drowned in the Red Sea..”
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| The University of Newcastle-led project has now mapped more than 300 massacre sites around Australia. |
William: White men have broken our faith. They have desecrated our holy places, our anchors in the world, and we have nothing left to hold on to. But with God, I feel connected with the world again. Never mind those men do not deserve to call themselves Christians. I have found Christ and his message of love and hope. I will follow Jesus and appeal to them as fellow human being. So after the service, I went to Daniel and said, “I must give my heart to the Lord”
Thomas: I can relate to that too. I don’t know where I belong or who my people are, really. My distant father is from Madras. My late mother was from Ceylon. I was born in Mauritius, and now I am in Australia.
William: You now belong with us. This is your land too. I welcome you as my brother. God has brought you to us.
William holds out his hand which Thomas holds firmly, feeling to finally belong somewhere.
Thomas: And God brought you all to me as singing angels. Praise the Lord.
William: Praise the Lord.
The two men – bonded as brothers – cross their heart, looking up to the Southern Cross high in the sky.
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| The Southern Cross |
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Thomas Shadrach James found his home among the Yorta Yorta people, and soon married William’s sister, Ada. He and his son Shadrach James would continue to teach and influence generations of Aboriginal Australian activists.
A few years later, the Frisk Jubilee Singers – an African American a cappella choir from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee – came to sing at the Maloga Mission.
One song in particular deeply captured the hearts of the Aborigines at the mission so much that they would write, “"I shall never forget the effect of our singing there. The Aborigines were at first very shy of us, but when they heard us sing, they went into a state I can only describe as one of almost ecstatic delight… The music of the plantation stirred their souls as no other music could have done… They seem to recognize us as brethren from a far distant tribe. They followed our carriages for miles along the road, and waved adieus from fences, trees, and rising grounds in a way which showed that were we ever able to return there we would be welcomed with a welcome white men seldom receive."
It was “Turn back Pharaoh’s Army” – the story of Moses leading Jews out of Egypt. This song of deliverance and hope would be notated by Thomas James, translated into Yorta Yorta language and passed down the generations, now known as Ngarra Berra Ferra.
Years later, William Cooper would found the Australian Aboriginal League, and on 6 December 1938 – weeks after Hitler’s Kristallnacht operation – lead a delegation of to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a petition which condemned the "cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany.
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Womeriga Moses nyinin wala
When Moses struck water
Wala yapunei yeiputj
Water came together
Nowra bura fera yumina yala
Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Nowra bura fera yumina yala
Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Nowra bura fera yumina yala
Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Nowra bura fera yumina
Turn back Pharaoh’s army
bura fera yumina
Pharaoh’s army
bura fera yumina yala yala
Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Yunduk bekuk Jesu
We’re going to sing to Jesus
Browal bokuna yumina
to bring some valiant soldiers’
Nowra bura fera yumina yala
Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Nowra bura fera yumna yala
Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Nowra bura fera yumna yala
Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Nowra bura fera yumna
Turn back Pharaoh’s army
bura fera yumna
Pharaoh’s army
bura fera yumna yala yala
Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Nowra bura fera yumna yala
Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Nowra bura fera yumna yala
Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Nowra bura fera yumna
Turn back Pharaoh’s army
bura fera yumna
Pharaoh’s army
bura fera yumna yala yala
Pharaoh’s army Alleluia
Next Installment will be online on
August 30 or slightly later.
