Old Times in the Kimberley

The new generation of Australian business pooh-bahs proudly call themselves social justice warriors but as such they can’t hold a candle, let alone a spear, to the indigenous warriors of our very recent past. Stamp their little feet as they do, shriek shrilly and appoint as many Behavioural Awareness Officers as they wish, but indigenous men and women as recently as the first quarter of the last century would have left them battered, or dead, in the dust and in some instances might even have eaten them.

Life in Australia pre-settlement was a bloody affair, even around the home campfires, with physical conflict a constant and magic an ever-present menace. The savages may have been noble, in the Rousseauvian mould, but they were brutal.

One of the best accounts of tribal life is to be found in the memoir of Kimberley leader Albert Barunga, an elder of the Worora tribe. Among the many gifts he left the nation is the story of his life, written up as a book by the noted West Australian author Hugh Edwards, and titled simply Barunga. It was published in 2015.

Albert Barunga and his wife Pudja dined with the Queen and Prince Philip aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia in Fremantle Harbour in 1977, where he was awarded the Queen’s Silver Medal in recognition of the achievements of his remarkable life. He was probably born between 1910 and 1912, and died in 1977, around sixty-five to sixty-seven years old.

In Barunga, Albert (who stayed with my family during one visit to Perth) frankly discusses the facts of tribal life, how the families were organised by totem or “skin”, how food was obtained, the rituals of initiation, and the sacred nature of tribal law. That law was a constant and provided security for the tribal people. They knew what the law was and they understood the penalties for transgression. For example, if a man had sex with a woman of the wrong totem—“wrong skin”—she would almost always be killed.

There were often fights around the camp. Serious troubles involved spears, but for domestic problems or arguments between neighbours the men or women usually fought with sticks. The blows were often hard enough to split scalps and break bones. Men often beat their wives for one reason or another. Sometimes the beatings were so severe that the victims were crippled or died.

Mr Barunga states, in a matter-of-fact manner that would shock the kumbaya crowd, that “cannibalism was practised by my people in a ritual way”. Infanticide is another issue that indigenous Australians today shy away from discussing but Mr Barunga says:

One of the ways the population was kept at a level balance was by killing girl babies, if they were born in a poor season.

This was necessary because the women were hunters, just as much as the men, bringing in a large share of the food in yams and small game. A woman with a small baby was restricted, and if the struggle for survival was desperate at that time, the girl baby could not be kept. A son was always allowed to live.

The customs Mr Barunga followed as a young man before he and his tribe adopted Western customs introduced by missionaries—for which he was most grateful—appear not to have changed over the millennia.

Thanks to an important paper by Colin Pardoe, an award-winning physical anthropologist and the first in his field to publicly acknowledge Aboriginal ownership of ancestral remains and to argue for indigenous rights to determine their future, we have a forensic insight into the wellbeing of pre-contact Aborigines.

In his work Aboriginal History: Conflict and Territoriality in Aboriginal Australia: Evidence from Biology and Ethnography, Pardoe states that warfare and conflict were important aspects of life in the Aboriginal past. Having studied numerous skeletal remains, some 6000 to 10,000 years old or older, he is satisfied that the historical record provides evidence that violence was common across the country, taking the form of domestic disputes, revenge killings and larger battles. He says the names of the peoples themselves—Barapa Barapa, Wemba Wemba, Wadi Wadi, Yorta Yorta—all translate as “No-No” in their respective languages, underscoring their unwelcoming attitude to outsiders.

Ill treatment of women was common, he writes, as women were generally considered the property of men to treat as they liked. This included hitting, giving away, or even killing. Fights between women were also common. Since they had married into the group from different tribes or clans, this often caused conflict, as did jealousy, particularly if a man had a number of wives.

Some groups appear to have suffered much more violence. The Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains have among the highest incidences for both men and women. Women of the Queensland coast (Broadbeach, south coastal Queensland, and Cairns) show some of the highest incidences.

Mr Barunga’s memoir validates Pardoe’s work on historical Aboriginal life. It is true that there were some bloody conflicts and murders when pastoral lands were seized, but as Western law displaced tribal law, life largely became safer for Aborigines until the 1970s when the level of violence, domestic abuse and, most heinous, child sexual abuse soared.

A recent report in the Australian on a proposal to reintroduce alcohol sales in the historically violent township of Aurukun on the Cape York Peninsula noted a 2013 Queensland study which found sex crimes against children in the community were reported at a rate 6.6 times the Queensland norm. The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases among children and under-age teens was fifty-six times the state average and included the infection of twenty-nine children younger than ten. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2016-17 the ratio of age-standardised rates for indigenous offenders was five times the non-indigenous offender rate in New South Wales and Queensland and almost nine times for the Northern Territory.

Proponents of the proposed new indigenous advisory body to inform the federal parliament on indigenous legislation have made no suggestions on how this continuing tragedy should be addressed, and the history of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, dissolved after widespread corruption and embezzlement of funds, should make the nation most wary of this initiative.

Barunga
by Albert Barunga & Hugh Edwards
Dambimangari Foundation, 2015, $39.99

Piers Akerman is a columnist for the Daily Telegraph in Sydney