Photographer Jon Rhodes is famed for his sensitive capture of Aboriginal Australia over many an exhibition of black and white images. So, in 2006, when he could no longer obtain that B/W film, he was forced to reconsider his life, and began writing about his accumulated images. First result was ‘Cage of Ghosts’, an award-winning documentation of the Aboriginal presence in landscape – rock engravings, carved trees, etc – which was hailed as capturing “a multi-layered country whose meanings have been shaped by the ancient cultures of First Nations people, but also by the complex, tragic history of settler colonialism”.
Now he’s scoured SE Australia for sites of remembering, though they actually extend to both Bribie Island and the Central Australian sites which become the excuse to mount a passionate case for this country to recognise 140 years of Frontier Wars – preferably with a Memorial on ANZAC Parade in Canberra. He tried to inspire both PMs Turnbull and Scomo to take up this cause and, failing them, now believes that the centenary of the notorious Coniston Massacre on Warlpiri Country in 2028 would be the perfect occasion.
He even suggests a model for the Memorial in the form of a reconstructed desert waterhole.
However, I wonder whether his new book, ‘Whitefella Way’ doesn’t actually make the case for more local memorials that would be more significant for the descendants of the c11,000 Aboriginal massacre victims ennumerated by Newcastle Uni’s Centre for 21st Century Humanities?
Rhodes’s nine sites range from Bennelong’s and Baluderri’s graves in Sydney, via the Wiradjuri sites labelled ‘The Grave of a Native of Australia’ (an unknown Calare chieftain) and “A most useful native”, one Yuranigh’s memorial, to a fish trap (and no grave) on Bribie Island, Brisbane, and the Memorial to Fred Brooks, dogger – “A True and Staunch Mate” at Coniston in the Central Desert.
A discursive bunch, made a discursive reader’s delight by Rhodes’s wide researches into such matters as pioneering history – the ‘Grave of a Native of Australia’ is actually ancillary to tributes to whitfellar explorers Oxley and Cunningham; Gubbi-Gubbi fishing methods and the incredible quantities of piscatorial remains found in middens close to both fishtrap and ceremonial bora ring; the many values of the possum skin in SE Australia; and Bennelong’s repute as a karadji, magic man, who may (or may not) have been represented in the Balls Head rock carving of a whale with a karadji or whale-caller figure inside its immensity.
Rhodes may known primarily as a photographer. But his diligence in accessing primary sources for his research more than justifies the length of and copious endnotes in this book. Did you know that the death of the youthful Baluderri – a fisherman who regularly traded with Governor Phillip – awakened the new colonists to the Aboriginal prohibition on uttering a dead man’s name?
And then there’s the last (?) and probably the most publicised massacre at Coniston in the Central Deserts in 1928. Hard to leave out, especially when Rhodes makes a good case to commemorate all of Whitefellars’ massacres in 2028. My associations with the book may include my own discovery of Yuranigh’s grave near Molong, outside Orange. But they undoubtedly started with a powerful Channel 9 docu-drama about Coniston seen in 1982 and richly deserving a rerun.
For with both Jack Thompson (I think) playing a rare evil role as the murdering Mounted Constable George Murray who lead two posses of avenging settlers and moving documented scenes of Warlpiri and Anmatyerre women descendants of the many murdered keening on the sites of the “hallowed ground, like Gallipoli is for whitefellars”, this was a searing introduction to Australia’s conflicted history for a newly-arrived Pom.
Rhodes updates the story with several healing events taking place on the 75th and 80th anniversaries of Coniston, including the erection of a natural stone monument to balance the original whitefellar recognition of Fred Brooks, the dead dogger. For his killing happened only when he reneged on agreed payment to one ‘Bullfrog’ Japanangka for the loan of Bullfrog’s wife for the night.
Ironically, we also discover that both Bullfrog and Murray survived these terrible events unscathed into the 1970s, when both died of old age.
‘Whitefella Way’ is truth-telling on a Makarrata scale. It’s published by Darkwood.
