Bill Harney and the Westfield Aborigines

It was a friend’s gift of Life Among the Aborigines by Bill Harney that caused all the problems. The reading was easy, then everything went wrong. Harney was a drover, boundary rider, cattle stealer, trepang trader, bushman raconteur, Ayers Rock ranger, and writer. He had married a part-Aboriginal woman—in his own time she was described as a half-caste—but she and their two children had died. He wrote some good books; they really deserve reprinting.

Life Among the Aborigines is exactly what it says and records laughter and racism, love and violence, and is written with affection.

Harney was an uneducated man, a brilliant man. He records Aboriginal traditions and their abandonment. For some of the young men he knew, the coming of the white man served as an opportunity to break away from the oppressive rule of the old men, though it too often ended in the new oppressions of alcohol and opium. I remember Harney, vaguely, as a tele­vision bush raconteur. My copy of Life Among the Aborigines is a Rigby Seal paperback—a popular series of books that were sold in newsagents and bookshops all around the country. It has a colour photo cover of Aborigines and camels in an outback setting: a 1980 reprint of a book first published in 1957. Its age shows: a readable book about Aborigines. The prose is gripping, his love and knowledge of Aborigines clear, honest and truthful. In the book’s introduction, the anthro­pologist A.P. Elkin accurately describes Harney: “he is history and is contact”. Yet he and his books are seldom if ever referenced in modern history writing. I read the book, with pleasure. And then I made my mistake.

Admittedly, it wasn’t my fault. My bookshelves are chaotic. Anyone could have done what I did. There was a space, I must have taken something out, and quite without thinking, I slid Life Among the Aborigines in beside Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu—the copy with “Pascoe Disneyland” scrawled across the cover. Bruce Pascoe isn’t agriculture, he’s show business. The meeting was unfortunate. The shelves trembled under the strain as the Dark Emu tried to escape. Never were two books more badly placed. They both objected forcefully as Harney’s real Aborigines—think hunting and gathering and lots of sex—collided with the Pascovians—fantasy black people building houses, sowing and harvesting crops, talking to whales (do they answer?), making bread without machines or yeast, and no mention of toilets, sanitation, personal hygiene or cash crops or the trading of women.

Pascoe invents Aboriginal farmers; Harney looked at Darwin and knew individuals who were trying to enter a white world: “Let them grow a garden and they soon felt the full weight of kinship ties when, at harvest time, their hosts of relations came to help them—not to gather, but to eat the crop.”

The Pascoe agricultural empire does not deal with the fact that his possum-cloaked farmers would have been women. This is Harney and these are real people he describes:

The hunters of this tribe gathered food, the major portion of which they ate. And just as the hunting areas were divided, so were the types of food gathered by the different sexes divided also.

The men would hunt the dugong with their “liba-liba” (wooden canoes) … After eating their portion—demanded by tribal law—the rest would be sent to the women, who would hand over some titbit they had gathered in their area. As all sea foods were the prerogative of the men, so did the women control the “mernunga” (cycad-palm nuts), yams and “miganuts” from the jungles and swamps.

Discarding Pascoe, perhaps a historian or anthropologist would sit comfortably beside Harney?

I simply couldn’t put him beside Henry Reynolds’s Why Weren’t We Told? That’s the book which never mentions Harney, who could have told Reynolds everything he wanted to know. It’s also the book in which Reynolds talks of his good friend Eddie Mabo but never mentions that the university groundsman he describes was a very active member of the Communist Party.

I couldn’t put Harney beside Anita Heiss’s Am I Black Enough for You? (second edition, 2022): “My greatest educational challenge as a secondary student was that I knew more about Aboriginal Australia than my teachers.” The outback author’s laughter or tears might have shaken his book off the shelf and I’m sure he would have found this odd self-portrait as incomprehensible as I do: “I remain affectionately known as an urban, once-beachside-now-riverside Blackfella, a concrete Koori with Westfield Dreaming, and I apologise to no one.” Not even an apology for pomposity?

Bill Harney lived among un-Westfield Aborigines:

To get the real feel of aboriginal camp life one must live in their camps to see and hear the jokes they play on each other; to hear the “song-man” chant a cautionary myth as the children—with bodies and hands imitating the actions of the bird or animal he is portraying—dance before him; to lie down on the warm sand as the moon filters through the casuarina trees on the beach, and hear mothers jokingly scold their children as they gather round the camp-fire to cook small pieces of flesh on pointed sticks.

In contrast, Heiss describes her life as a modern Westfield Aborigine:

In 2019 I started counting my flights, only to shock and embarrass myself with the carbon footprint I was leaving. It’s one of the reasons I stopped eating red meat (except roo), as I wanted to do something, albeit minor, and with the carbon footprint of meat products being so high I thought I could start there. The reality is that international travel is necessary to share knowledge through literature and lecturing, and at the same time it allows me to see how Aboriginal Australia is perceived by the international community, and to speak to that as well.

Harney wrote of lives lived before frequent-flying points:

I read in the Aboriginal Ordinance that “cohabiting with an aboriginal woman was an offence punishable by law”. I smiled at that attack on established custom, for I really believe that if a Kinsey report were written about the hundreds of single men who have lived most of their lives with the natives it would be discovered that they were divided into two lots, namely, those who have lived with native women and admit it and those who will not admit it.

Perhaps this ordinance was made to protect the native people, but I have found that, with regard to sex, the aborigines had their own view on the matter. Their custom of exchanging wives was common. “Changing sweat” they called it. They exchanged, not only wives for a few nights, but, with many tribes, their names and the clothes they wore. The clothes must be full of body-sweat at the time of the giving, for in that act was a complete confidence that neither would use the other’s sweat for magical purposes and so cause each other harm.

As regards the lending of wives—a custom which led up to the prostitution of women—it was the natives’ belief that to “Hold a man as a friend one must not suppress his sexual desires”.

An aboriginal friend of mine once explained it to me. “You see, Bill, if my brother lives with me and has no wife then I know he will ‘do me a trick’ by trying to steal my wife and make trouble.” “Well,” he explained further, “I am not a ‘Bad-head’ (jealous) so I send my wife to my brother and we are all happy.”

“What about stranger?” I questioned, and his reply, “Stranger and white man all a same, brother,” explained the crux of the matter and perhaps the reason for the ordinance.

I have found that native tradition, with its prohibitions and fixed customs, really eliminates those things we know as sin and morals.

Then I found a solution to my problem. Two sensible and entertaining writers to accompany Harney. Good-natured authors, friends on my shelves, always worth reading or re-reading.

The first is the marvellous Down Among the Wild Men (1972) by the American anthropologist John Greenway. I think Harney would like this story Greenway tells of when he was visiting a remote Pitjantjatjara community in 1966:

The children of our people, like all children, were worthless little devils, though it must be conceded for this lot that they were outstandingly worthless little devils. One apocalyptic day one of them no doubt will become Australia’s Jomo Kenyatta. I wonder whether he will be my Willie, the seven-year-old who used to nuzzle up to me for lumps of over-sweet lollies the way Tjipkudu (an adult) did for the tameha [tomahawk]. The little rascal had learned some English, and when he put his arm around me would say, “Me your pren.”

“Fine bloody friend you are,” I would answer. “You’re a bloody lolly pren.”

“Me no lolly pren—me your true pren”—with that enormous Aboriginal smile.

The anthropologists, Greenway and Norman Tindale, were taping ritual songs:

Late one afternoon the little boys came up to us after their fathers had departed and announced through their spokesman, my pren Willie, that they would like to sing for us also. I do not know what they expected from us in return beside lollies, for we had been careful not to play back any of our recordings. Well, what the hell. Expecting another composition on Weet Bix, I drew them around the microphone and told them to pitch in. A few giggles, and then—

Bornana mouta toppa Tennetee,

Greena tate inna lanaada pree;

Bornana wooda toh e newebree tree,

Kilima ba enewa onee tree—

DABY, DABY CROCKA, KINGADA

WILE PRONTEE! Brrrrrr!

After I had shaken my head vigorously two or three times the way Norman does when he meets anything absolutely astonishing, I played back the tape for the boys. Their astonishment was the square of my own. They shrieked and squealed and jumped up and down, demanding that I play it again and again and again and again. I was very happy to do so. As some explorer said before me, It is the special privilege of an explorer to work miracles.

Still more delight would come from that tape. I knew Tom Blackburn, composer of “Davy Crockett”, and when I got back to the lanada pree I sent him a dubbed copy. I think it pleased him more than all the other recognition he had received for his fine song to know his composition had penetrated to the most remote inhabited place on earth and was being sung by bare-arse-naked Old Stone Age children who had no acquaintance whatever with movies, television, or radio.

My other choice for Harney is Elizabeth Durack: Art & Life, selected writings edited by the artist’s daughter Perpetua Durack Clancy. It was reviewed for Quadrant by Elizabeth Beare in July 2017, “The Woman Who Was Eddie Burrup”. I read the manuscript, which consists of extracts from Durack’s own writings, as it was being assembled by the editor. As with Harney and Greenway I felt I was making the acquaintance of a fine writer and a warm and interesting individual.

Reading this extract from a letter was laugh-aloud delight yet it concerns a very serious subject. It was written on the Duracks’ Ivanhoe Station in the East Kimberley and features an incident in the life of Isaac Steinberg, which strangely hasn’t yet made its way into history books. Steinberg was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia who had been the People’s Commissar of Justice after the Leninist coup. After going into exile in 1923, he was a co-founder of the Freeland League which attempted to find land for Jews fleeing Hitler’s regime in Germany. He was interested in acquiring land in the Kimberley. The project was eventually unsuccessful. He arrived in Australia on May 23, 1939, and the following month, with a young representative from the University of Western Australia, visited Ivanhoe Station. Elizabeth was writing to her fiancée Frank Clancy in Sydney. Steinberg’s vegetarianism may have been his polite way of coping with a lack of kosher food:

Oh golly, Frank, the Doctor has started writing beside me in Hebrew (?). He starts from right and goes to the left. I saw one of his notebooks lying around yesterday and thought I’d just glance through it but it was hielogriphics [sic]. I told [brother] Kim and he said no it wasn’t, it was German. I thought Kim was above a thing like that but it was Hebrew because I just asked him. He is a vegetarian and is slowly starving to death in a country where beef is eaten three times a day and meat sandwiches for morning and afternoon tea. His tie fell into some tomato sauce and I said I’d fix it for him. It was nice pale grey and when I ironed it, it went an ugly brown and I don’t know what to do because I’m not game to give it back to him. What would you do in a case like this? Perhaps he’s forgotten all about it. I hope so.

Another entry in Art & Life is a Quadrant book review by Elizabeth Durack published in April 1984, under the pen name Ted Zakrovsky; in retrospect it explains the genealogy of our many Westfield Aborigines:

Anyone with recall of former days—say from the 1930s and on into the 1960s—will remember when our Aboriginal population was much less and much more diffused geographically. In outback areas it was an advantage to be part-Aboriginal although no one made a song and dance about it. On pastoral properties “yella-fellas” were invariably relegated to positions of greater responsibility, though few, if any, ever married white women. (Those with the advantages of education or character melted into the general population almost without comment.)

Half-caste women, on the other hand, either married their own colour or, as was invariably their ambition, had children by white men.

They tacitly accepted the fact that such children would be cared for by missions or Native Welfare Departments. If they were in a position to raise them themselves they saw to it that they got some schooling and punished them for playing or co-mingling in any adjacent blacks’ camp.

No one called these women “racist”. They were simply regarded by both black and white as good mothers. Today some of them can watch on television as their sons and daughters take up leading positions as “Aboriginals” and know with satisfaction that it was because they brought them up white.

Peace reigns on my shelves. Bill Harney, John Greenway and Elizabeth Durack are getting on well, as I hoped. Bruce Pascoe, Henry Reynolds and Anita Heiss are over there in my new Westfield section. They, and some of my other bad books, have created what looks like a mini-cosmic black hole on the shelves. Pascoe and Reynolds are even grouchier than usual because a copy of Heiss’s very unhistorical historical novel Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray was waiting to greet them—just this once they have my sympathy.