Descendants of Warangesda
Acknowledgements
A sincere thanks from both of us to all those people who helped us with advice, time and information, particularly all those who are included in the list of participants. We hope that you will enjoy this small contribution to the Koorie history of the area. Thanks also to Harvey Johnston of NPWS (NSW) for his patience, to the staff of Pioneer Park, Griffith, for allowing us to include a number of photographs in this report, to AIATSIS and Balranald Local Aboriginal Land Council for additional photographs, and to our families for their help and support.
Copyright in this report is vested with National Parks and Wildlife Service (NSW). All participants, however, retain rights to their own intellectual property.
WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this booklet contains images of deceased persons.
Reprinted July 2023 | Graphic Design work by The Articulate Pear Pty Ltd
Robert (Bob) Harris, Griffith 32-34
Gordon Kirby, Dareton
Christine Johnson, Robinvale 39-43 Clancy Charles, Griffith
Grace Gowans, Darlington Point 49-52
Jean Cliteur, Darlington Point 53-55
Pam Edwards, Darlington Point 56-58
Heather Edwards, Darlington Point 59-60
Florence Carroll, Darlington Point 61-63
Beryl Smith, Darlington Point 64-65
Shannon Smith, Darlington Point 66
Alice Williams, Griffith 67-72
Jenny Goolagong, Griffith 73
Stanley White, Darlington Point 74
Dot Ingram, Leeton 75-77
Dennis Ingram, Leeton 78-81
Ossie Ingram, Narrandera 82-84
Doreen Christian, Griffith 85
Theresa Edwards, Balranald 86
Tommy Lyons, Narrandera 87-88
Neville Lyons, Narrandera 89-90
Carrol Higgins, Narrandera 91
Jim Ingram (Snr), Leeton 92-95
Pat Undy, Darlington Point 96-98
Leanne Undy, Darlington Point 101
Mary Briggs, Shepparton 102-103
Len (Bushy) Kirby 104
Archie Bamblett, Sydney 105
Penny Taylor, Adelaide 106-109
Section Three 111
Appendix 1. A sample page of an index to the Mission Managers’ Diary.
Appendix 2. A sample interviewee release form.
Appendix 3. Some relevant extracts from the writings of Ernest Gribble, Gribble’s son who grew up at Warangesda.
Appendix 4. Another interview with Mrs Isobel Edwards.
Section Two Oral Histories
Mrs Isobel Edwards
Darlington Point, 1992
This story was recorded on video by Pat Undy not long before Mrs Edwards passed away.
I was born on Warangesda Mission Station on the 26th of August 1909. My first memories of Warangesda was what a beautiful little village it was, a real little township. There were two streets, the school, and of course they had a teacher for the school, houses on either side of the Church, and all the houses had fences round them, water laid on, and beautiful gardens with lots of flowers. I always thought old Jack Glass, Paddy’s uncle, had the prettiest yard of the lot. Some of them had fruit trees, it was very pretty. There were 18 houses, nice little cottages at that time, some with four rooms and some with two rooms. There was a house for single men but that was pulled down. Plus there were lots more people living along the river on the property in their own camps, in tents and shacks that they built. It really was a lovely place. The Government supplied them with everything. They had a copper, a big iron boiler for washing and we were very well off from what I hear of other missions. There was a big pepper tree with a swing on it and all the children used to swing on it.
There was a home for the girls, a dormitory where they put the children who never had a parent or for young girls with babies if they had nowhere else to stay. Matron used to look after them. There was a butcher’s shop, a general store, sheepyards, cattleyards. They also had a forge, the blacksmith’s shop. They had a great big shed to put the stock in when the winters were too cold. It was a real going concern. The men ploughed the fields, sowed the seeds and reaped all the crops. They’d make haystacks and put the wheat in bags and put it on the train. The place was all fenced and all the paddocks were numbered, one for sheep, one for cattle, another for horses and so on and even as kids we knew which paddock was which. It was really a good station, they called it a Mission Station. They drove a horse and trolley to Willbriggie siding to take the bags of wheat to Sydney, away to the flour mills. There were cattle, sheep and horses, it was a lovely little place. A couple of old chaps had little shops and sold soft drinks, biscuits and lollies at the end of their verandahs.
I used to go to the little shops with a penny and spend up big. One day I went up there to old Dick’s and he said ‘Well young lady, what do you want?’ I put the penny on the counter and I said, ‘I’d like an apple, an orange, a banana, lollies, a drink and some biscuits’. And they all burst out laughing and his wife said ‘Well, give them to her!’ So I got all this stuff for a penny and when I got home I got rousted on.
They had the Church and the Minister used to come from Whitton. Every Sunday morning the Church was always full and they always had a good collection. When the old organ was played out, they gathered together and collected money to buy a new one themselves.
My father bought the old one for thirty shillings and he sold it to his boss Mr Beaumont when he left the Mission. He had it done up real good and his daughter, Mrs Margaret Davies, told me it was left to her and she was putting it in the Pioneer Park in Griffith.
We were all given rations: bags of meat, flour, baking powder, sugar, tea, salt, milk, soap, candles, and some had kerosene, the Mission gave them quite a lot of things and all free. They had their own butcher’s shop and of course they killed their own beasts and cut them up a couple of times a week and it was given to all the people. Besides the rations, people also worked for pay and the men were paid thirty shillings a week. They would work harvesting wheat, cutting the hay and making haystacks to save the feed for the cattle when there was none. They did shearing, all sorts of jobs. It was very, very good. We’d milk the cows, walk a mile there at ten o’clock every morning. It really was a good place, not like others. When work was scarce at the Mission, the men used to go out and work on the stations for the cockies, shearing in the shearing sheds. Father used to go to Kooba Station every year, shearing mainly. He also worked at Tumbelah Station, another big shed. He was a blacksmith too, they had their own little chaff cutter.
There was a nice manager’s house, a big white house. Different managers came, and I don’t know why but one of them pulled down all the fences round the houses and of course the gardens didn’t last long then. Some of them were good to the people, some weren’t quite so good. Some wouldn’t have young people on the Mission doing nothing and they expelled the young people, for no reason. Of course, it was started by a Minister but afterwards the Protection Board did everything but protect. Mr Donaldson would come and take the girls away, but never the boys. The girls would be crying, the poor kids crying for their mothers, mothers crying for their kids. He was a horrible person, Mr Donaldson. The managers never disagreed with this Donaldson.
The old butcher’s shop at Warangesda.
He came down home one evening, he was going to take us. He came to the house and I was only a kid. He said to my mother ‘Get the three girls ready for nine o’clock in the morning’ and Mum said ‘What for?’ And he said ‘Because I’m taking them. The Aboriginal doesn’t care for the children properly and I am taking the three girls to Whitton to put them on the train to the home’. When Dad come home and mother told him, he said ‘Oh is he? We’ll see about that! I’ll go and see Charlie Kirby and Jack Glass and see what they say.’ So anyhow, he went to see them and they decided they’d go to work in the morning, take two horses and leave the place, go to work and come back before nine o’clock, sneak back into the yards and hide. Anyhow, Dad was in the bedroom when Mr Donaldson came but we didn’t know that then. So in Mr Donaldson came and he said ‘Oh, you haven’t got the children ready yet Mrs Murray’ in his smarmy voice. ‘You must get them ready at once; they have to come with me.’ And mother said ‘They’re not going with you’ and he said ‘Oh yes they are’ and mother said ‘Oh no they’re not’ and he said ‘Yes they are’ in his bossy way. Then my father walked out of the bedroom with his shotgun in his hands, double-barrelled, and he said ‘You lay your hands on any of my children and see how you get on!’ And Mr Donaldson said ‘Now Mr Murray, you just put that gun away’ and Dad said ‘I’ll put this gun away when you get out this door and up the road’. And he ran, up the road and down the street, and he never come back no more and he never went to the Glasses or to the Kirby’s either.
He took a lot of the other kids, a buggy-load, all crying. I can’t understand people letting them take them, and crying over it, instead of stopping them. He was a horrible man. Most of the time, the people were happy enough but there was no Protection Board about it, they just took them away and they treated them something awful. One girl only twelve years old had to get up early in the morning at five o’clock and whitewash all the fireplaces. Some of the girls came back from Cootamundra later, back to the Point because there was no Warangesda then. They all said it was terrible.
One of Mrs Edwards’ daughters, Heather, looking at one of the old fruit trees with Pat Undy. The old dormitory is behind them.
It wasn’t bad until different managers started breaking it up and driving the people away. After they closed the mission and pulled it down, Mr Stewart King, being from Junee, got it. My grandson, Beau Edwards, has never ever been on a mission, he doesn’t know what it’s like.
Another interview with Mrs Edwards is included as Appendix Four at the end of this report. The transcript of this other interview was obtained by Pat Undy and we don’t know who the interviewer was. The information it includes is similar to this one, but there are slightly different things in each. In the second interview, Mrs Edwards makes it quite clear that there was a butcher’s shop and a store and she explains that one of the later managers let the store fall down. She also includes additional stories about Koori political action.
Heather Edwards in front of the old school. The section to the right was added when the school was converted into a shearing shed.
The old Church at Warangesda, photo taken in 1980 when it was used as a barn. It has since fallen down. (Photo courtesy AIATSIS)
Sketch of the Church from 1980 photograph (drawn by Edward Radclyffe).
Aunty Isobel Edwards and descendants of Warangesda.
Robert (Bob) Harris
Griffith, July 1993
I was born at Carowra Mission, near Wing Ding Station in 1920. Well, they didn’t start the Mission there till 1923, so I reckon they built the mission around me because I was only three years old when they started. The right spelling for the place should be Kurraarra Warra Mission but they didn’t know how to write Aboriginal languages properly in those days. In the Ngiyampaa language Kurraarra means far away and Warra means right close and they gave the mission that name because they were taking Aboriginal people from far and close to live at Carowra Tank. How we come to move from there was when they started taking the young kids, the girls mainly, and when they started taking them I had a sister one year older than me and the old man was frightened they was going to take her. (I often said to my brothers afterwards, a pity they didn’t take her! Laughter.) So we left there and after that kept going backwards and forwards and that’s how I came to be in Darlington Point when I was about four or five.
We used to live in an old mud hut there somewhere, Beaumont’s I think it was, and the only time we went out to the Warangesda Mission was when we were visiting someone there. When I went back there with you (Pat Undy), the old church and the school, they’re the only buildings that come to mind, and I couldn’t really remember much else. I know we’d go there visiting the Johnson’s and we’d see the Christians and the Murrays. Kennedy’s was around, old Dave Kennedy and old George. I do remember though when I was about five or six, they built those huts not far from the wharf on the sandhill there, when they closed the mission. Galvanised huts like they all were in them days, same as they had at Menindee and Carowra.
I was at Menindee when they started to build the huts there, when they shifted us from Carowra, I was about fifteen then. It was terrible, you had these huts and they had these places for windows only there was no windows there. When the wind blew, the sand blew right through the house because they’d built them right on a sandhill. That was why a lot of those old people started dying there at Menindee, because that time everyone believed in the bone dust and they found out, when we were digging the holes for the toilets, that you’d dig up human bones. People started dying because they reckoned the wind would blow the bone dust, that’s why they had to shift, they didn’t stay there long.
Robert (Bob) Harris
We lived at the Point when Dad was working on Kooba Station. Manny’s mother (Manny Johnson) lived with us, Lucy Harris she was but everyone called her Tiny she was so small. She was Dad’s sister but she was only a girl then. Anyway, she met Manny’s father then, Billy Johnson. He was the strongest blackfella I ever seen in my life, I think. When blackfellas first started driving cars, they reckoned it was great, but nobody knew anything about them. You might get a petrol block in an old model T Ford. The first thing Billy’d do is, he’d lift the motor out on his own, just slip it out, fix the motor, and slip it back in again.
So we were always on the move when I was a youngster, never stayed anywhere very long. There was always a job on the stations and you’d move on after a bit. I didn’t get much schooling. Two of my eldest brothers started school at the Point and I started in Griffith. I’d often get halfway to school and then wag it. Or, I’d often go to school, then I’d eat me dinner for play lunch, eat the lot, then I’d tell the teacher I had no dinner and I had to go home. They got sick of it and the teachers wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I used to talk a lot of the language too when I was a kid. I used to break out in it when I was at school. I’d forget myself, talk to the other little kids in language and the teacher’d go crook.
The language I learned as a kid was Ngiyampaa and my family liked to spend a lot of time back in our own country between the Lachlan and Darling rivers. As a young man, I used to work around Keewong and Paddington Stations and we’d often talk in the old language. The Ngiyampaa aren’t river people but they lived between the rivers and were divided into three main groups. My group is the pilaarbuyali, that means the belah people, that’s what I belong to. My mother was one of the garubuyali, that’s the stone people, garu means stone. Nilya people, they were named after the tree, and that’s the three groups that lived around Cobar, Carowra Mission where we were, and Ivanhoe, and that’s how it goes together. Manny Johnson, he spoke Ngiyampaa, same as me and a lot of Baakindji I can understand but not talk it.
Anyhow, when I was a young working bloke out Keewong and Paddington, there was this thuwi hole out there. Thuwi, that’s the hairymen. We were never allowed to go near it when we were young and in those days you did what you were told. It was only about three or four years ago that I was game to go back there with a couple of my sons and another bloke. We went there to fence it in. When we finished fencing, I didn’t think much about it, but I just wanted to have a look, to see how they saw it, so I walked round to the top of the cave where it’s just flat ground and I could see the creek down there where they used to get their water, and I looked and tried to imagine how it felt in them days and it’s real peaceful. And the more I looked, I started to get this cold feeling, you know, like you get when someone’s watching you, and I couldn’t hear the boys down below cos they was down underneath the ledge boiling the billy. And I tell you what, I never stopped and I couldn’t tell them for a while after I got down. So I waited for a while till I cooled down and I explained to them, and I said, ‘Do you want to go up there and try it out?’ and they wouldn’t go. But that’s the sort of feeling you get.
Robert (Bob) Harris
Uncle Dave Harris, my father’s brother, he’d never put caul fat or emu fat on the fire. Emu fat was the worst, if you put that on the fire, you burn that and the koorikuttha used to come down. He had one leg that was broken off and the bone was still sticking out sharp, and he carried a broken spear, and the broken point had a sharp spiky end, and he’d come down with that.
At Keewong too, there was this woman used to walk up the long verandah, and there was a gauze door that used to go into the office and it used to squeak a lot, and you’d hear these high heeled shoes go along and she’d open the door, you’d hear it squeak, and bang it’d close behind her. I’ve gone over there to see if she was in there and the door was locked and there was no sign of anyone.
Anyway, we’ve got another meeting coming up at Keewong soon and we get people up there from Wilcannia, Ivanhoe, all around and we go out and they get me to cook the emu every time. They reckon I’m the only fella can cook it, but I reckon it’s just an excuse to get out of it. Peter Thompson helps and we cook a full emu, just like the old days.
I hope that Karin lets Tamsin Donaldson know this time as I’d love to have a good yarn to her in the language cos there aren’t many of us left. She works at the Institute (AIATSIS) in Canberra and she spent a lot of time at West Wyalong knocking around with old Eliza Kennedy and learning the language. I was living at Euabalong then and it’s funny that I never heard of her till she was out with Karin. I’d enjoy swapping a few words with Tamsin.
I go to Wilcannia a lot cos half of Wilcannia’s related to me, Cobar’s another place, and three quarters of Ivanhoe’s related to me. And they said to me, ‘Go and meet so and so’. So I went and met her and luck had it that she was sober, well she’d been drinking but she wasn’t drunk like. And when she found out I was born in Carowra, and if you’re born there you’ve got to understand or talk a bit of Ngiyampaa. Anyway we got talking in the language and these two young ones, her son and daughter, they went crook on her. ‘Mum, can’t you talk English!’ And they’re fullbloods and they couldn’t understand what we were talking about. Terrible I reckon it is.
Thanks to Bob and Max Harris for taking the trouble to check the spelling of all the Ngiyampaa language words and correcting mistakes we had made.
Robert (Bob) Harris
Descendants of Warangesda
Warangesda Hall 1882
Family huts 1882
Church Warangesda 1882
Gordon Kirby
Dareton, June 1993
I was born in Balranald in 1920 in a 6’ by 8’ tent under a gum tree. Mother wouldn’t go to hospital even though it was just up the road, so I was born on a mattress on the ground with the help of an Aboriginal midwife.
My father was Charlie Kirby. I’m pretty sure he was born on Booligal Station on the Lachlan River between Hay and Ivanhoe. He used to talk about it when we passed through there and reckoned that two of his sisters were buried there in the station cemetery. They were killed breaking in horses, not at the same time. But he was reared up at Oxley with the McFarlane brothers. There were three of them and they owned Oxley, Thelangerin up the Lachlan, and Canoon on the Murrumbidgee.
Mother was Christine Bright from Narrandera before she got married. I reckon Dad lied about his age when he got married because when he died some of the old people said he was 110.
I’m a Wiradjuri man and we spent a lot of time moving around our country as I was growing up. There were 14 children and I was in the middle. With a lot of mouths to feed, Dad had to move around looking for work. He didn’t want to settle on one of the missions and live under the mission rules and risk having the kids taken.
He lived on Warangesda for quite a while when the older children were born because it was a good place then, before the rules changed and they started taking the kids away. When I was a youngster we moved to Warangesda for a while. That was after the mission closed and we lived in the old manager’s house. It was a mud hut with several rooms and there were tables, chairs and everything left there. We stayed there while Dad went off droving. I don’t remember a lot about it but nobody else was living there then. Some had moved into Darlington Point but the others were all camped down on the creek, round a big billabong on the way to Darlington Point. I remember old Jack Glass lived there, one of Dad’s mates and Bert Murray too; he and his family lived down near the old race course. Some people lived in tents, but in those days a lot of people built their own places. They used saplings and they’d hammer out kero tins, flatten them and nail them up to make the walls. They’d line the walls with newspapers, pasted up with flour and water. Some of the places would be just a one-room shed but some would have two or three rooms. They had dirt floors, all patted down, and sometimes people would get flour bags and cut them open and put them down on the floor.
Gordon Kirby in his home at Dareton.
The windows didn’t have glass, just shutters. They’d build their toilets, some by digging a hole, or they’d have 4 gallon drums with a seat on the top and dig a hole and bury it when it was full.
In them days, people got their rations, flour, sugar and tea and so on. If you didn’t want to settle on one of the missions, you were only allowed one or two lots of rations and then you had to keep moving on. When the droving cut out we moved to Carowra Tank. After the big rains, the tank turned into a lake. We lived up on the hill for several years and then the mission was moved to Menindee. We were over at Hillston at the time, at the show, and when we came back everyone had gone on the train to Menindee. So we packed up and followed. There were three rows of houses there on the bank of the river. I was about 14 or 15 then. I’d go picking grapes at Merbein then back to Menindee.
We travelled around a lot so I didn’t get much education. Dad worked on the different stations, shearing and doing other work to raise 14 children. he made artefacts too, made a bit of a living from them. He’d make boomerangs, shields, nulla nullas and small sets of artefacts and sell them to the people of the stations. They all bought them. I used to help Dad make the artefacts and two of my nephews, Arthur and Kenny are still doing it today.
In them days, we travelled around by horse and cart. Our family had a buggy (with 4 wheels) and a sulky (two wheels). We had a good few horses and they’d be hobbled out at night. Us kids had to go and get them in the mornings, track them a long way, listen for the bells and bring them back. Not many people owned buggies so if we went to town we had to help others. Some would jump in, others would give orders to Mum and Dad.
When I was a kid, people mainly cooked out of doors. Of course, some had fireplaces inside where they cooked when it was wet or cold but mainly it was out of doors cooking in the ashes, or they’d hang a pot on a tripod over the fire, or use a camp oven. We’d have grilled johnnycakes, chops or stew. We’d get kangaroo and emu, goannas, possums, porcupines, and cook them in an earth oven. They’d dig a hole, fill it with wood and light a fire. When the wood was burned, they’d shovel all the coals out, put in the meat and cover it with leaves - maybe tips of gum leaves or sandalwood to give it a flavour - then fill in the top with earth and coals. With big animals like kangaroo or emu, they might put a hot stone in its stomach to help cook it right through. Then after 2-3 hours, they’d open the oven. Some people had guns or they’d go hunting with their roo dogs. They’d hang on the kangaroo’s throat and bring them down and people would gut them on the spot. If you had a gun, you’d get ducks too. There were plenty of fish too - no carp in them days. We’d eat perch, catfish, brim and Murray cod, either caught on a line, or they’d make wire-netting traps with a funnel in one end and face it downstream because the fish always travel upstream and they’d get trapped in the funnel. We weren’t short of meat in those days.
The remains of an old mud hut on the outskirts of Warangesda.
A restored buggy at the Pioneer Park Museum in Griffith.
Emu guts was a treat. They’d turn them inside out, wash them, put the emu fat in, pin up the ends and cook them in the earth oven. Some people spoke the lingo when I was a kid but I can’t remember the word for emu guts any more. Sheeps guts, the ones with the white stuff in, the curly guts, we called them galingaa. Nobody ever ate kangaroo guts, they’re too mucky, but munku was a real favourite. You stuff the kangaroo stomach with liver and then cook it in the ashes or boil it. Dad used to cook that.
Mum never worked, she was too busy raising 14 children, but she used to deliver babies, thousands of them, at Carowra, Menindee, everywhere. People would pay here three, four quid or maybe six. We all always went around with Dad and none of us kids were snatched by the Protection Board. They’d try, they’d come and say ‘We’ve come to get the kids’. Mother would stand at the door with a tommy axe and she’d tell them to git. She’d say ‘The kids are all right, leave them alone’.
They weren’t the good old days like some people say, they were bad, it was a real struggle - not like today - but we were happy. Mother went blind when she was older, the lashes grew in and scratched her eyes. She was always plucking them out with tweezers but she still went blind. She raised 14 kids and there’s lots of grandkids.
My wife was Eileen Kirby. The Memorial Hall in town is named after her.
Sadly, Gordon Kirby passed away a few months after telling this story. He wanted his story told for the younger generation and we are privileged to be able to include it in this report.
Christine Johnson
Robinvale, June 1993
I don’t know anything about the old Warangesda Mission although you tell me my grandparents, Charlie and Christine Kirby spent their young married life there. My father was Patrick Kirby, Gordon’s older brother and my mother was Lily Kirby. I grew up at Balranald and after Mum and Dad split up we’d help Mum with picking fruit at Mildura and Coomealla. That was where I met my husband when I was about sixteen and I’m 65 years old now with 10 children, 64 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren.
My husband’s family, the Johnsons, would’ve come from over Warangesda way too. His name was Alfred Johnson but everyone called him Manny; he used to talk about growing up on the Darlington Point Sandhills and the pranks he’d get up to with Archie Coombs. After we were married we worked on Moolla Station, Jasper, Keewong and Paddington, the other side of Ivanhoe, over towards Cobar. All his family, his cousins and uncles worked up that way fencing, clearing, boundary riding and so on. This would have been during the 1940s.
It was the greatest life anyone could live, out on the stations, I loved it. We got on really good with the station owners, you know, they’d fight among themselves who wanted their fences done first, ‘cos Manny always had a mob of boys working with him from the mission at Murrin Bridge. They all wanted him to do their boundary fences and it was so good out there. I always look back and think to myself, ‘Why does that sort of life ever end?’.
There was a big homestead out on Keewong but none of us would camp in it, it was too scary. There was a big long verandah right around it and my husband and I used to sleep on the verandah and you’d hear footsteps walking right around it, a woman in high heeled shoes, and you’d hear her turn on the tap and go back. I used to say ‘Spirits will never hurt us, it’s real life things’ and we’d laugh about it.
Well, this night we had a big game of cards up at the homestead, Martin Briggs and Jean Briggs and all their family were there and I was there with Manny and his mother, Lucy Harris, and an old chap called Ted King she was living with at the time. And when they finished the cards, a couple of girls got into a bit of a barney, Hazel (Toody) Harris and one other girl. We were all preparing tea and Manny’s mother is sitting on an old four gallon drum and she had her shoes on back to front on her little tiny feet. And she’s tapping her foot and I’m cooking johnnycakes there and she had a big griddle-iron full of chops, and I said to her: ‘What’s that in the fork of that tree?’. And she said: ‘Oh, that’s only one of them old billygoats’. So that was alright, and I’m cooking away, and I had a great big heap of johnnycakes lying there. Well, I’ll never forget right up to this day, and when I think of that old woman I often sit and have a giggle about it to myself, bless her. So I looked up and I sang out ‘That’s not a
Christine Johnson (nee Kirby) in her home at Robinvale with a photo of her late husband, Alfred (Manny) Johnson, June 1993.
billygoat!’. And that old woman jumped up off that drum and she left us for dead in the dark. It was in the fork of a big box tree, this little hairy thing, and it had a beard hanging down to the ground.
And we were screaming and my husband and old Uncle Dave Harris and Ted King came down the hill in the spring cart. ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ We told him. ‘Oh, you stupid idiots’ Manny said to his mother in the language, ‘You ought to know what’s going on around here now Mum’ he said to her, and her with her shoes still on back to front. ‘Oh son, I got such a fright.’ ‘Oh Mum, you should know those sorts of things hang around an old woolshed.’
Old Uncle Dave, he used to ride the boundaries, right up in all the hills and he found an old shin bone with a shrivelled up boot on it and he took it to the police, but he used to swell up in the arm where he picked it up. And old Uncle Mick, he was riding the boundary and he could smell something rotten and he went back to have a look and this little tiny hole was in the stone in the mountain and you could smell it putrid and the hole was all greasy. So he went back to the station to pick up Uncle Dave and the others to go out and have a look. They went back there and rode those hills for two days looking for it and they found the spot and the tree near it but they couldn’t find it. The old people say that those little muckwitches, once they smell human tracks around their hole they fill it in and move to a new spot. (Mrs Johnson thought the spelling of these beings might be muckwitch because they were dirty little witches but Badger Bates from Broken Hill remembers his grandmother - Granny Moisey - pronouncing it more like magawidja.)
Those little hairy men, they’re about eighteen inches high and they’ve got hair all over and all you can see is their white eyes. This was the night my sister put the caul fat on the fire. All my life I never did that, I was always very careful in the bush, but my sister Thelma had to be a smart Alec. Everyone was asleep. We had a great big tent and we’d sleep with the flaps up and we’d have a big fire in front of the tent. We had three big kangaroo dogs and the old people had two sheep dogs so the dogs, people, everyone was asleep, but I’d be frightened to go to sleep thinking silly things’d happen to my baby boy. And I heard this big gust of wind and this little thing came right over the tent and was standing there looking as if this was what I want ‘cos they like to eat babies. Did I move! I just grabbed my little son ‘cos they like little kids, they pick them up and take them away. So I just grabbed him, swung him up and jumped right on top of my husband. ‘Chrissie, what are you doing?’ he said, but I had him pinned down and I was shouting at him to get up. By the time he got up, with all the racket and that the little hairy man was gone. Uncle Dave told me, never let the little one out of your eyesight, ‘cos they can be anywhere, behind a little rock or anything and they coax the babies away.
We had a four wheel waggon with a tarp over it and we’d go from station to station. Travel was slow but you were sure to get there. At the end of the day, you just unhook the horses, let them go, you don’t have to put fuel in them. Horses weren’t expensive, they were always breeding out there. You’d break your own horses in, my husband used to break in horses for the stations. After Keywong and Paddington my husband worked at Moolla, just out from Ivanhoe. He done all the fencing round there, Trida Station too and we done a bit of droving from Paddington Station to Pretty Pine Hotel. I only had young Alf then so I could move around with him when he went fencing. I used to have one of those big old iron beds, that was our bed, you’d pull that to pieces, put it in the wagon and pile everything on top. We had a table we’d cart around but no chairs, we used to use four gallon drums for chairs.
When my husband was fencing, he’d give me the job of peeling the posts and I’d get the wire and run them through for him. It was great out there. In town today they’re all fighting against one another, black against black, and if they was to all pull together, they’d have the world sitting on a silver platter for them, but they won’t and it makes me very sad to see our own people fighting against one another. I think back to the good times we had in the bush, all us family.
We’d cook in a camp oven or on a big griddle iron. You’d get the old hoop, cut a bit of fencing wire, twitch it around and you had your griddle-iron. You’d carry it from camp to camp and cook johnny cakes or chops. You’d have tin plates, tin mugs, we’d make our own mugs out of jam tins and a bit of fencing wire. We had great times out there. I had to cart water from the big ground tanks. I used to have two little buckets on a yoke Alf made me. I’d cart the water up to the camp. We had one of those old coppers and you’d boil your clothes and everyone was happy amongst one another. You’d have a bit of an argument at the camp. You’d talk to one another a few minutes after, make a bit of a joke of it. They used to have their little drink when they’d finished the end of the fencing. At the end of the line, they’d go into town, have their drinks, but today my heart aches to think that Aboriginal people are living like they are, squabbling amongst one another over who’s to get what, it makes a lot of heartaches for everybody.
When we had nothing, you used to have to go and work hard for your money. Well we used to do a lot of rabbiting. We used to set the traps, go round them twice a night and we’d get so many rabbits. We’d gut them out in the bush and make a big fire, burn all the guts. We’d bring them home, put them on big screens?, big ropes. We’d hang them in pairs over the ropes, then we had the big hessian bags to pull right over them. We used to get one shilling and six pence for two rabbits. We didn’t skin them. The big truck would come every second day and pick up all the rabbits. Today a pair of rabbits, it’s two or three dollars.
We always had money in the camp, plenty. We’d get so much every mile for the fencing; it was good pay. Now it’d be hundreds of dollars. We got chops from the station, and rabbits. My husband used to eat goanna, porcupine, kangaroo, emu, he’d eat anything that walked nearly though I never saw him eating snake, I reckon they’re poisoned.
We’d go into Ivanhoe once every two or three months and do a big spree. It was a little one horse town, one pub and a couple of little shops there. We’d buy flour and black syrup, a few apples now and again for the kids, onions, potatoes, you had the world in your hand. We might get a few oranges though there weren’t many of them around at that time. The station owners, they had an odd tree or two round the stations, but very few.
There’d be this vine growing over the mallee trees, wild banana, thoopa they call them. We used to have a good feed of them. My kids, now, they’d turn their nose up at it. Manny used to speak the lingo and he made some tapes of it but the kids weren’t interested in learning. I’ve got one grandkid now who’s always complaining that he never got close to Pop to learn some of his language. A few little things he picked up, like wimbidji for blackfella and nunga for woman; emu was kaltis and meat, any sort of meat was tinka and horses was yuramuns.
When we’d been rabbiting, I’d go through the rabbits and pick out a really fat one. Then you’d stick him in the fire, singe all his hair, brush him down real smooth, then you’d sharpen a little stick and pin him up. Then you’s put him in a hole, cover him over with hot coals, ashes, leave him in there for about 20 or 30 minutes. You’d pull him out and all you have to do then is unpin the skin part and that’s the best meal ever. Kids today, you tell them about that, ‘Oh yuk’, they say. Now old Uncle Willie Cobar, he lived from Carowra, to Menindee, to Murrin Bridge, he used to come miles for me to cook his ashes damper. One day I’m going to make a big fire and cook them some ashes damper. They think because something’s cooked in the ashes it’s dirty, uneatable, but all you have to do is knock it, dust it and it all falls off. A bit got burnt, you’d cut that off with a knife.
Munku we used to eat, the little bag inside the sheep, not the guts. And the curly guts, the galingaa, we’d eat that too. Nowadays there’s very few Aboriginals around that could skin a sheep in a few minutes. When we moved here we’d get one from a station and hang it from that cedar tree out there
and gut it and I’d offer to sit down and cook the kids the munku and curly guts and they’d go ‘Oh yuk!’ That munku, now, it’s a great thing for getting rid of warts. There was a young girl out at Murrin Bridge just covered in them, and old Uncle Dave, he’d tell me to just get the munku out, empty the grass out of it, then turn it inside out where the curly part, the nice part is, and rub that all over them where they’ve got the warts. Then you take that munku and bury it in the ground. Later on you find out that when that munku rots in the ground all your warts drop off. Well that girl, she never had another wart. Maybe they used kangaroo centuries ago, before they brought the sheep in, I wouldn’t know.
Those old people knew a thing or two. I used to suffer with my teeth and my old Aunty Bridget Johnson she’d say ‘I don’t know Daught’, I’m sick of hearing you crying around with toothache’. So she said to me ‘Come on now, we’ll go down the bush for a walk’. So we went down to the horse paddock gate, there was this little old tree, and she just peeled the bark off, brought it home and boiled it up for me. It was a real pretty pink when she boiled it, put it in a little bottle. Well, I only used it a couple of times and it stopped all my toothache. I don’t know what that tree is called and I often think I’ll go back and see if it’s still growing there. Another thing they’d use is emu bush, they’d boil that up and that would keep you healthy.
When I had more children, we come in from the bush. We only come on the Mission at Murrin Bridge for the kids, for their schooling. It was a beautiful mission. They had the manager and that living there and there was a school, a shop, a big store up the end, and anyone that went away looking for work, they had rations for the wife and kids, so much flour, tea, sugar, meat, and stuff like that. They had house inspections at Murrin Bridge, but they never found anything wrong with it ‘cos the women used to get up Wednesday mornings and it would always be clean and shone for the manager’s wife. She’d just come in and stand at the door and you’d offer her a cup of tea and she’d sit down and have a cuppa with you.
They’re rebuilding all their homes on Murrin Bridge now and they’re beautiful. They’re putting up all nice brick homes and a lot of the Aboriginal boys, they’ve been working, helping to build it. They’ve got their own paddock and sheep, horses and cattle. I love to visit Cousin Myrtle out there and we talk about the old days. Elaine Briggs told me that they’re taking all the kids out from Menindee and Wilcannia on a school excursion back to Keewong and they’ve got a voodoo doll to hang up to keep the spirits away. I’d love to get an old horse and buggy and take the kids from Robinvale out there before my days end, to learn about the old life.
There’s too many disputes going on these days. It’s heartaching when you come to think about why the Aboriginal community can’t get on with one another. And this Mabo thing, what are they going to do with the land if they get it? The white people came in and made something of it and we could do whatever we wanted if only we could pull together. I’m the kind of person, I’d give my last cent away to anyone that needed it. Anyone wants anything done, I’m the first person there to help them.
I always say to my kids, if you see anyone that needs any help, you don’t take your grudges out on them because they done this to you and that to you. You forget about that, put it behind you, help that person, look ahead at what you’ve got to live for, especially when you’ve got kids growing up yourself.
The Kirby family appears in many of the stories we collected and they were an important Warangesda family. This photo opposite was probably taken at Balranald where they lived for long periods. It was photocopied at the Balranald Local Aboriginal Land Council where they are copying old photos and trying to build up a historic collection.
Christine Kirby (originally a Bright from Narrandera), her husband Charlie Kirby, and one of their daughters.
Clancy Charles Threeways
Griffith, June 1993
We come here to Griffith from the Point in 1940, been here over 50 years and before that we lived at the Point. I don’t really know anything about Warangesda Mission. I only remember going out there shearing, that’s all, in the late sixties over thirty years ago now. I was working for Morrie Clark shearing in the old school house, well they used to say it was otherwise you wouldn’t know. And I come up from Sydney once and went out and found the old graves from the Mission days, over from the old homestead. The Koories was buried there and the schoolteachers and that they were buried there with them, the ones without headstones, they must have been blacks, I couldn’t say for sure. There’s two bark canoes behind the Mission cut out of one tree.
I reckon they should preserve Warangesda, what they can, but it might be too far gone ‘cos they’re only putting wheat over it now and the only thing they’re saving now is the old cemetery and the old school. They should just preserve the old school, cut off that other bit. It’s got great big timber on it, big slabs of wood, and even on the floor, big slabs like railway lines. I’d say they were hand-made like the old slab cottages. My aunty said that old grandfather Morgan from Cummeragunja and old Len Tanner from the Point built it, but then she got too old and we can’t get nothing out of her no more. They knew how to build in those days, now they get white people in to do it for them. The first lot of houses at Three ways, they got Aboriginal people building them but they built them back to front and they got white contractors for the second lot.
I was born at Cowra, under the Railway Bridge at the camp on the 12th of December 1932. I was in Cowra when the Japanese broke out and then we come down to the Sandhills at Darlington Point when I was eight or nine. Life wasn’t too bad. The red huts were there but people were already in them so we made our own house in the bush up in the bend. The red huts had a steel frame, no lining, just tin whacked on and the outside painted red. They had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room with an open fire. You’d cook in summer and freeze in winter. They had no windows but shutters that you’d push open.
The other houses were made of pine, bag hessian, paint it over the top with a corrugated roof going over the lot, that’s what we used to have. Or you’d bash out the kerosene tins, tin outside and hessian on the inside, whitewash and different things. We’d dig holes out the back for toilets, like those pit toilets Parks have these days (Clancy used to work for NPWS for about 11 years). We used river water, carry it up in buckets, all separate, one for washing, one for cooking and so on. Mostly people cooked
Clancy Charles at home in Three Ways.
on open fires inside in camp ovens on tripods. They don’t use them now but they should. Furniture was tables, chairs
They’d have steel frame beds with flock mattresses and the old bag woggers for covers. They’d sew four hessian sacks together or two grey blankets, double thickness, to make
We used to get rations at the old police station and plenty of bush tucker but we never ate snake, never touched it. I never liked kangaroo or emu, mostly rabbit or possum, maybe goanna, porcupine, fish but not emu or kangaroo, too rich. If I got emu eggs I used to give them away but I might blow them and carve them, I used to do that quite a bit but not so much now I need glasses. I used to carve
We all had a good time, played a lot of games, rounders, football, everyone out, grownups and all. Now you’re lucky if you can get them out back, never see the kids outside, but then the whole family would be in it. Things have changed now, we’re right into white people’s ways. It was stricter than it is now, you had respect for the elders, you couldn’t do anything, now they don’t care. Say anything to the kids now and they just laugh at you.
We had our own Church in the Sandhills. My father built it and I’ve got a photo with him sitting on the top and old Johnny Swift at the entrance.
We used to play the town Koories at football; we’d go over there or they’d come over to us. We all mixed all the time, white people too, no different to the dark people at all. A lot of them moved out here to Griffith too and I see them around. Three or families would get together for Christmas, now everyone’s on their own, even the kids. We had a lot of parties at the Point, up here too at Three Ways in the early days, now it’s all videos. We’d go to the picture theatre too, the Lyceum and the Rio it was, but it was never segregated like at Condobolin. There they had that little fence right across the middle. I wouldn’t stop there, I walked out, but not at the Point.
We’d go in the bush, fishing, and to the old dance hall up near where Pat (Undy) lives. We made our own enjoyment, used to get pram wheels and make trolleys and the milk tins on wire, the rollies. The kids today, it wouldn’t do for them, they want new toys all the time. We’d tell stories round the fire in the evening, nothing else to do, or they had their singalongs and that, they’d play the button accordion, violins, mouth organ, gum leaves, but not now. Now, it’s all TV and video. Those days were just as good as today, I think.
An old wool press, Warangesda.
All our family worked at the shearing in the fifties and sixties, then they all died out. I shore 32 years and never claimed tax. You only got $27 a hundred then. I worked over at Hillston for about nine years in the shearing. It was no different if you were black or white, no racism at all in the sheds, you shared your quarters, a double room with two beds in each room. We worked eight hours a day, five days a week, though in the early days we worked Saturday mornings as well.
My mother was Tilly Williams, she was raised at Brungle Mission and sent away as a domestic to Sydney. Her father came from Cummeragunja, he was a Yoti-Yota. They’d meet up with the Wiradjuri at Tocumwal in the old days.
An old photo Clancy has of the school at the Sandhills at Darlington Point. Miss Campbell is on the left.
Edward (Teddy) Christian
Griffith, September 1993
I was born 63 years ago, a few years after Warangesda Mission closed down, but my father and the other old Christians, they were all raised there. I was born at Narrandera but I’ve lived in Griffith most of my adult life. When I was a lad, about ten years old, we’d camp out at Warangesda Station, my father, my cousin and me and they used to tell me about different parts of it, what was here, there and so on. They were shearers and they was shearing in the old school and we’d camp over by the Church. Clancy Charles, he used to be out there too at the shearing. Of course, the property was owned by that old fella Mr Stewart King then and he was living in the old dormitory.
From what I remember, there was a few more old buildings out there then. There was a couple of houses in between the Church and the teacher’s house and I seem to remember a hedge in that little circle in front of the Church and a hedge going round the dormitory. There was a blacksmith’s shop next to the teacher’s house but I don’t know if that was the original blacksmith’s; there was another building up the top of the town but I think that was a machinery shed. I remember a cemetery on the left hand side as you’re going down the peppercorn driveway into Warangesda. Before you get to the main gate, there’s a gate on the left with a big timber gate post on either side and you’d go through that gate and the cemetery was in the paddock about where that one big tree is. I remember my old man telling me there’s a lot of our people buried there. It must have all been ploughed under, it’s paddocks now. According to what the old people said, they used to camp along the creek and through the bush all along the river by the mission. A lot lived on the mission itself, but some of them used to leave the mission and go down the river. Of course, after the mission closed, lots of them moved to the old Sandhills mission at Darlington Point but others still stayed on the riverbank. My grandfather, Hughie Foote, he drowned in two feet of water along that creek. He was a champion diver, but he got drunk and fell in this hole and got drowned when he was coming back from over the town.
When I was a kid, we used to often go to the Sandhills mission at the Point, the other side of the bridge. I didn’t live there but I used to go there. Kennedy’s, Bloomfield’s, Charleses, there was heaps there that I knew and I used to play with all the kids there but we never lived on the thing. We used to come over from Morundah and we’d spend a week, a month, two months, whatever was the case. The old bloke used to do a bit of shearing round the Point and when we came to Griffith, we never lived on the mission there. My grandfather, Ronald Christian, my grandmother Mathilda, my father, Archie Christian, they lived on the old mission at Warangesda but they never lived on the one here at Griffith.
My father and all my uncles were born on the old Mission and the family lived there until my grandfather moved from there to Bundure Station and from there they moved to Morundah. I went over there a few months ago where we used to camp and I didn’t know the place cos everything had changed and it took me a while to work it out. Bundure Station isn’t all that far from the Point, back of Colleambally, and all us kids was reared there. Another place was Silver Pines.
When they left Bundure, some of my uncles worked there and we all stopped there for a while before going on to Morundah. After the old people left Warangesda, some moved into the Point, some went to Cowra, Condobolin, Narrandera, they went all over the place. A lot of them worked the stations. The big ones like Kooba always had a lot of Aboriginal workers, starting in the mission days when the men would go off to work the stations and on until after the war. Then they started to move to the towns more and I remember in Griffith the Charles family used to live in Murphy Street and the Christians in Dell’s Road out near Hanwood. There was a clump of trees behind the brickworks and a lot of Aboriginal people used to live there; they called it Jeff Kennedy’s Tank as he was the first to live there.
I’d really like to see them do Warangesda up, my word yes. It was the main place for all the blacks of this region, the oldest mission. There’s no other older place in New South Wales. Dad and my uncles used to tell me that property was given to them by Queen Victoria but whatever happened to the papers and that, they don’t know, they lost it. It’d be a lot better restored, it’d be good but they’re leaving it a bit late, it’s all going to collapse soon. The younger people can go and have a look where their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers lived. All the girls used to live in that dormitory, that’d be the oldest building around the place. I do know that all the country was cleared by all the men there. My father and my uncles told me how they cleared all that country, it was real bushy, scrub and everything and they cut all the bush down. Then the government found out the ground could be worked, they could make money out of it, so they moved all the Koories, put them on the Sandhills, put them over here at Griffith. That old mud hut on the corner near Warangesda, that was built by Koories. There were two mud huts. Up past the racecourse, near the tip, there used to be a shearing shed and in front of that was a mud hut. Clancy Charles, he was there, my old man, my cousin and me. That other hut, Koories built that, they worked on it.
Grace Gowans
Darlington Point, August 1993
I was born 56 years ago and grew up in Darlington Point. We always knew that Warangesda was out there, the old people would talk about it from time to time. My mother, Theresa Susannah Christian would’ve spent time at Warangesda, there seem to have been Christians there all through its history.
My father, Alan Gowans, grew up on Toganmain over towards Hay. He fought in the First World War and went to France and Egypt. During the Second World War he worked at the garrison in Hay where they kept the internees. His life story is written up in the War Memorial in Canberra.
Dad’s father, Thomas Nicholson Gowans, a Scotsman, was the white manager of Toganmain Station and he married Louisa Hughes, my Koori grandmother. There used to be a placard up in Toganmain saying that any Gowans who came there were to be given a meal, a bed and a job. My father’s sister, Margaret Matheson Gowans married William Ferguson, the famous Aboriginal activist who founded the Aborigines Progress Association in 1937 and was the first Aboriginal person to stand for Parliament in NSW. Bill was born at Waddi just up the road from Warangesda and when he was growing up he spent time at both Cummeragunja and Warangesda.
When I was young, we lived in town down on the flats, the ones on the other side of the bridge from the flats near the Sandhills. We bought our house off Norman Carroll. It was a bag house with floorboards in the living room and dirt floors in the other rooms. It had a tin roof and the bag walls were kalsomined on the outside and papered and painted on the inside. We had an open fire in the lounge with a tin chimney with a steel lining at the back of the fireplace. You could put half a tree in it it was so big. In the kitchen we had a big stove with a huge oven set in a tin chimney that was lined with clay, all packed around the stove. The clay would be painted with red raddle, a powder mixed with water, and the stove would be blacked so that it all looked spick and span.
We had a big old black kettle on the stove all the time; it held enough water to bath a baby. And a big cast iron pot stood on the stove with stew in it all the time; you’d start a fresh
Grace Gowans, Darlington Point.
A more simple old bag house, but showing the chimney outside, Pioneer Park, Griffith.
stew once a week and everything would go into it: sheep’s head, necks, rabbits, whatever we could get. We’d eat galahs, pigeons, the lot. When I was about eight, Mum would say: ‘Go out back to the meat safe and get the banjo.’ That had me confused for a while but banjo was what they called the shoulder of a sheep. We’d also eat the galingaa (running guts) and the dundabaa (the big gut, the pleated one, the pooh bag). Lambs’ tails cooked on the ashes were one of my favourites. Dad worked at Kooba Station so there was usually plenty of meat. Sometimes we’d cook outside on an open fire, in the ashes or in a camp oven slung from a tripod. In the really hot weather, we’d dig a hole in the bank under the water level and put the butter and jellies in a bag in the hole to keep them set.
Mama used to cook dampers and sponge cakes in the camp oven and I still can’t bake a sponge as light and springy as she could. She never bothered with measuring ingredients, a bit of this, a pinch of that and it was always perfect. She had her own vegie garden too, used to grow lots of vegetables and flowers and the washing water always went on the garden. Mama won the flower show in the Church competition.
We’d make our waggas (or doonas as they’re now called) out of lambskins or kangaroo hide covered with old blankets or clean bags from the woolshed. They used to do something to the skins to keep them soft but I can’t remember what. Then with the big bag needle you’d stitch the hides or skins together and stitch the material over them. The same for the floor; you packed the dirt down and then put skins or waggas down for a carpet. I always thought the name came from the town of Wagga ‘cos we sometimes used to call them wagga waggas.
We made our own soap out of mutton fat, kerosene et cetera. You’d cook it up in a big vat and then pour it into hollow bars until it set and then you’d break off what you needed. We’d usually buy candles or use a kero lamp for lighting. Our toilet was about half a mile down the track to keep the smell and the flies away; we’d put lime and ashes down it.
All of us living on the river bank had our ways of keeping clean and healthy. On Friday nights without fail Mum would put a runny paste of mutton fat and kerosene in our hair, then she’d wind our hair up in a cloth overnight. Then on Saturday morning at about five or six a.m. we’d have it washed off and we’d be put in the old tin bath and scrubbed from head to foot (and I mean scrubbed!) with Lyle soap. The first kid had the clean water and the last had the dirty water. Then you had to brush your hair a hundred times. Sometimes we’d have our hair tied up in rag strips to give us Shirley Temple ringlets. Most Koori kids had pretty curly hair anyway so it didn’t take much to put them into ringlets. Every November we’d have our hair singed to get rid of split ends and keep it healthy and shiny.
Cod liver oil was one of the main medicines our parents gave us to keep us healthy and it must have worked ‘cos we didn’t seem to get many colds or ‘flus. Friday nights we’d line up for the cod liver oil and sometimes molasses. For a sore throat, they’d swab our throats with kerosene and we’d gargle with a red liquid called Aichorn that we’d get off the Indian hawker. The kids used to get a lot of barcoo rot in those days and we’d use a coconut oil salve for the sores or fall back on the old man weed. You’d boil it up in water and drink the liquid for all kinds of ills and put the weed on the sores. To stop bleeding you’d put on ashes or cobwebs and pepper. Scotch emulsion was something else we’d take three times a day to keep the colds away.
The Indian hawkers would travel round the country in their wagonettes selling things like needles, cotton, pots and pans, combs, clothing, and things for women like nipple cream if you got cracks from breastfeeding. There was an Afghan hawker used to come through travelling from Victoria right up to Queensland. He’d always have a good supply of hard-boiled lollies. The hawkers would take mail for you if, say, they were going through Bourke or they’d pass on messages for you. It may have been slow but it helped people to keep in touch with relations and friends. You’d always invite them
in for a feed, the tramps too, nobody went hungry. There were always a good few tramps passing through, black and white, and they’d sharpen knives or axes, do a day’s work for tea, flour or a bit of meat like gardening, fixing a fence, or chopping a load of wood. There was a yarn told about one old Koorie chap who chopped a big pile of wood for a feed. They thought he was quick and after he’d gone they found out that the pile was hollow! I remember an old Swedish bloke who’d pass through with a dog that could do tricks.
We had great times at the Point when I was young. We all lived together, there was no segregation. The only prejudice I came across was at high school in Griffith when the Italian kids were against us but we soon sorted them out! The first real prejudice I saw was in Melbourne when I was 21 at a party in the London Hotel. There were a couple of dark skinned people there from up north and they were told to leave if they didn’t have a licence so we all upped and left.
Sundays were really enjoyable. We had a claybank out front and we’d wet it all down so that it would dry out hard. Everybody would gather there, blacks and whites, no segregation, for a good old time. The men would walk down from the Sandhills with a mouth organ or squeeze-box. Johnny Swift brought his violin, he could really make that violin talk. Old people who couldn’t walk like old Tom Bell and Aunty Vi Kennedy, they’d go up in the sulky and bring them down to join in. The Edwards family would usually be there too. Everyone would bring something for Sunday dinner and we’d throw it all together. We’d sing hymns and other songs and get up and dance. Someone would play a saw with a stick, another would play the squeeze-box and others would play the spoons and sticks, Mr Edwards would play the paper and comb and they’d all sing in harmony. The Carberry girls, Jean and Tilly had beautiful voices and did wonderful harmonies. It was a real bush band. The men were great at tap dancing and doing the soft shoe shuffle. Others would just sit round the fire mending a harness or taking it easy.
Dad was the only one who had a wireless and the singing and dancing would stop for certain programmes. At eight o’clock, the adults would all listen to Amateur Hour and the kids would be sent off to play. Boxing was really popular too and everyone would get together if there was a fight on the wireless. Dave Sands and the other Sands brothers and Jack Dempsey were our heroes.
Then the old people might teach us how to track. They’d use their hands to make tracks in the sand, they could make all the different animal tracks and they’d sit there and make one, smooth out the sand, make another and so on. It was lovely to watch. Some of the old people like Uncle Len Turner and Violet Kennedy would try and teach us all the language. Uncle Len was married to my father’s sister, Mary Gowans. He’s Hector’s grandfather. He was a lot older than most of the others and still had his old tribal scars running across his chest. Then Mr Bill Edwards, he might tell us ghost yarns about hairy men, Jack O’Lantern, or will o’the wisps. Then he’d walk the kids home with a lantern but he’d follow you back and give you a real scare.
In those days people made their own entertainment more than they do today and we always seemed to be having fun. I don’t remember anyone complaining that they were bored or that there was nothing to do. Someone would soon have found you something to do! Although there were a few horses and sulkies, walking was still the main form of transport. We’d think nothing of walking to Whitton and back, sixteen miles, you’d go over there for an ice cream. Grandma Bloomfield said she and her husband and friends would walk miles to go to a dance, have a great evening dancing, and then walk back all night to be home for work the next day. In those days no-one could afford stockings, so if we were going out dancing we’d grab a bit of charcoal off the fire and run it up the back of your legs to look like the seam. It was hard to get them straight but they looked just as if you were wearing stockings until you got hot and sweaty and it ran off.
Darlington Point Picnic Day was always a great occasion. It was held on the long weekend in January on the flats near the Sandhill Mission and people would come from all the towns in the area to take part.
There would be all sorts of foot races and the Darlington Point Gift was the one with the biggest prize. There’d be men’s games, tackling, tug-of-war and chasing the greasy pig was one of the funniest to watch. Young men would look after the kids in the river and after the kids had gone to bed the beer would start to flow. Old Uncle Len Turner would put on a bit of a corroboree out there and everyone would join in.
I remember old Miss Campbell, the missionary who was here for years. Everyone loved her and my aunt Annie Gowans was a great mate of hers. Aunty Mary Turner used to work for old Dr Lethbridge and help care for the sick and act as a midwife.
All in all, the Point was a great place to grow up and is still a good place to live today.
Interior of house showing hessian-lined wall, Pioneer Park, Griffith.
Jean Cliteur
Darlington Point, June 1993
You’d have to be very old to reflect back to Warangesda, you’d have to be in your late eighties at least and there aren’t many of those around. I’m interested in hearing about Warangesda myself, ‘cos I never knew very much about it, I never knew anyone that lived on it, only Mrs Edwards and she didn’t talk a lot about it. At times she’d want to talk to you, and at others, she was reluctant to talk.
I thought the idea about Warangesda was to restore it, but not in a way that would take away the old look but to keep it as much as possible looking like it originally looked. They should take off the parts that Mr King put on, they shouldn’t really stay, it doesn’t seem right if they’re going to restore it and try to get it back to the original concept of the buildings. It’s not part of Warangesda, just part of the farming that’s been done there.
Perhaps if there was more money, they could try and get something like the Pioneer Park, in Griffith, reconstruct some of the old houses and so on. That’d be really good for the schools, and they could charge perhaps for some of the people to look through it. Of course, you wouldn’t have any of the original things that were there but you could probably get things that were that age, the old tobacco tins, the furniture, all those old flat irons and black kettles that used to sit on the old open fire. An Aboriginal cultural centre, that’s what I’d like to see it, to educate whites and Koories.
There’s certainly a lot of interest in Warangesda Mission. Evonne Cawley was here not long ago. She wanted to go out there but the gate was locked and she wanted to know if her mother, Linda, had lived there but of course she’s quite a bit too young.
I get my Aboriginal identity from my mother who was a Queenslander. She was a Bloomfield. My mother’s father was a white man and mother and the eldest boy were born in Queensland and then they left in a wagonnette, travelling from station to station getting rations. They came to Hay and had another couple of children there and then they came to Darlington Point.
I grew up on the riverbank near the wharf, just down from the Sandhills. My grandfather built the original house there, it had a cement floor in the front room and the others were dirt. I don’t think there was a night I didn’t dream of falling out of bed down into the river, we were that close. Of course the seasons have changed now. When my brother and I went to high school in Griffith, we’d get up and swim in the river in September right through to April, that was our bath ‘cos otherwise we’d have a bath in a round tub. We’d get in the river and swim of a morning before we went to school. Our mother couldn’t swim, all she could do is stand on the riverbank and say ‘You get out of that river at once.’ Of course we never moved ‘cos we knew she couldn’t come in after us. I was ten or eleven when we left the riverbank.
In the houses there wasn’t a lot of furniture, just tables, chairs and beds, some of it home made. I had a high chair made by old Dave Kennedy out of a butter box and Mum had an armchair made out of gum suckers, it was really lovely, all painted up. Beds were often a spring base sitting on kerosene tins or on four posts in the ground. We didn’t worry about curtains and we had shutters, not glass windows. Cooking was mainly done outside in the fine weather.
We’d have lambs’ tails, cooked in the ashes, throw them in wool and all then you pull the wool off, they’re scrumptious. Dad shot a swan once during the Depression, it was nice to eat even though Dad got dobbed in to the police.
The Sandhills was just behind the police paddock and I was up there all the time when I was younger. We’d go up and play rounders, cricket, never had any proper equipment but we still done it. I don’t remember having a toy when I was young. There were five houses up there and then the others down where the river is, through the fence, a lot of people in their own bag huts or whatever. They’d make them out of woolbales, wheatbags and things put around a wooden frame and most of them had iron on the roof. They used to line them inside as well, like we did, put paper on it with paste. In those days people could put their huts up anywhere, there was more freedom. There was a couple of white blokes lived on the river, Dick Thorne and Martin Donahue and they built reasonably good huts with quite good gardens with fruit trees and grape vines. There were a lot of old blokes down where they call the Bunyip Hole, they had little huts (west of town), old Bill Brown and Wonga West and they lived down there for years, whites and blacks.
I was born in 1934, sixty years ago, and when I was young everybody had coupons for everything, food and clothing. We had a hard time ‘cos my brother and I were quite big for our age and the bigger the clothes, the more coupons you had to have. Some of the old blokes would come down from the Mission (Sandhills) and Mum would buy their coupons off them so they could buy wine. You never had enough coupons for butter, sugar, all those things. It was hotter then and we had a dripsafe that would sit in a trough and one that hung under a tree. Dad dug steps down to the river so we could put the butter dish in the water. We’d buy home-made orange juice in the hot weather, fetch it in a billy. In summer, when we weren’t using the fire indoors, we’d whitewash the hearth to have it looking nice and us kids would be sent off to get gumleaves to stand in a tin of water inside the fireplace; they had to be the best gumtips, all pinkish at the ends.
The old blind fella (Johnny Swift) was just through the fence on the Sandhills and he had a sort of hut with a tent rigged up in front of it and we used to try to sneak up on him, but he had the fence rigged up with a bell that would ring in the hut and he’d come out and roll his eyes somehow and when he did that he got a glimpse of light. Numerous times I’d go and get Mum’s bread over the old bridge and I’d meet Johnny on the bridge and think I’d sneak past him but every time he’d roll his eyes somehow and say ‘Hello Griffith Jean’. This had me curious and one day I asked Mum why that old blind man called me that and she said ‘Because you were the only one of ten children born in hospital in Griffith, all the others were born on the riverbank’.
An old bag house with wooden floor at Pioneer Park Museum, Griffith, showing typical furniture of the times.
An old house at Pioneer Park, Griffith, showing a whitewashed hessian ceiling and newspapers pasted on to the walls for wallpaper.
It was pretty wild here at one stage with the police. I remember Mum’s brother, that was Bill Bloomfield, in the Depression everyone used to steal sheep ‘cos they had no meat for their kids, and Uncle Bill used to steal them quite a bit from Kooba, and Hoya, the policeman, was in the manhole of the bridge there one night waiting for him and when he got near he said ‘I’ve got you now Bloomfield’, and Uncle Bill said ‘Like bloody hell you have!’ and threw the sheep over the bridge and went over after it into the river.
My father was great, ‘cos over there where we lived on the wharf there was a big clearing and he built tennis courts there and he used to run tennis tournaments. Mary Callan was one of the greatest tennis players ever seen, and he used to have footrunning and everything.
I remember Hughie Foote because Mum would always go crook about him. She and a friend went fishing a lot and they’d be sitting down fishing and they’d get a good bite on their line and they’d pull it in and it’d be Hughie. He’d go for miles under water, see their fishing lines and give them a tug and they’d get all excited and pull it in and of course it was Hughie. They were always chasing him and we’d all have a good laugh about it.
Pam Edwards
Darlington Point, June 1993
I’ve become more and more interested in Warangesda in the last few years. This is partly because in her last few months Mother (Mrs Edwards) became an invalid and I nursed her and she talked more and more about it and partly because of the university course I’m doing. I feel quite ‘good’ for want of a better word when I’m out at Warangesda walking around, knowing that your mother was born there. This year at uni doing my BA, Warangesda will be my project that I’ll research.
History’s there as far as Warangesda is concerned and everyone knows that it was the first mission in this district and that’s where the Aboriginals were taken. I suppose if you want Aboriginal history to be remembered and taught in the schools you’d have to preserve the old mission and it might be good to reconstruct some of the old buildings but really, if they can restore the buildings that are there, that’s all I’d want to see. Warangesda to me is the history that’s there now and you’d ruin the effect of Warangesda today if you were to go any further. But it’s up to us to make sure that all the information about Warangesda is passed on to the next generation. The young people will only be interested if we take the trouble to talk to them about it. We need to get the information written down for the kids to read and draw up a plan of the Mission how it was.
If Warangesda Mission were to become a big tourist attraction it could be OK but you’d need to think carefully about it. The young people are going to be interested. I’d like to know how Jeff King (the present owner) fits into this and whether he is agreeable to having it done. If he didn’t want to make it a tourist attraction and have people coming all the time then I wouldn’t agree ‘cos we grew up with Jeff. Who would benefit from having a cultural centre there? Would Jeff get anything out of it? Maybe you could make the main entrance from the main road down the long avenue of trees which was the original entrance. That way you wouldn’t have lots of people going past Jeff’s home which could be a bother to him. Really, that’s as far as I’d like to see it go, just restoring what’s there now and having the main entrance down the trees. I may be a funny old thing but I don’t really want to see any more than that.
This year everything seems to be happening. It’s the year of the Indigenous People, things are moving on Warangesda, and mother died. It’s a shame she can’t be here to see it all because she always thought it would be nice to do it up. But if they’re going to do anything and build things, let them do it the way it was, not like the pictures I’ve seen in other books. Mother always described the houses with these white picket fences around them and with their own garden and every house had one tap outside and they had their garden and trees and she said she never saw a true picture of it yet.
Pam Edwards, at home in Darlington Point.
But I’ve seen a picture just like mother described. She said they had all their own cattle and crops and the Mission was self-supporting. The things that had to come from outside would either come by train and the railway station was seven miles out on the Griffith Road. Or the boats would come in to the old wharf on the other side and deliver things. The old bridge used to lift up to let the boats through and Mum used to talk about the old punt being there and going across on the punt.
Nine out of ten things that you hear about Warangesda was good and that’s probably why there’s not a lot written about it as people only want to write up the bad things. Mother always said that although there were bad things, mostly they were good and it’s time that the good things were said. A lot of people today are rewriting history, some of my own family included, and they say things like ‘No Aborigines went to school before 1964, or nobody could vote before 1967’ and you know that every Aboriginal in Darlington Point went to school since the days of Gribble and we were going to high school in Leeton for years and Mother always voted ever since she was old enough and said that if you wanted to vote you always could in her day.
Of course there were bad things and the main one was taking away the kids after the Board took over the Mission. Mother often used to tell us the story about Donaldson trying to take her away and the way her father, Grandfather Bert Murray, stood up to him. It didn’t enter her head as a child what was happening but she realised later on that that’s what it was. She remembers other children being taken away and their mothers crying.
Mother used to say that Grandfather Bert was one of the greatest fighters for Aboriginal rights. He and his friends Charlie Kirby and Jack Glass stood up against old Donaldson and when the school started those three were involved; they were always fighting for Aboriginal rights. If there were ever any disputes in Darlington Point involving Aboriginal people from the Mission, over drinking or something like that, Grandfather Bert was always called down from the Mission to sort it out.
His father, my great-grandfather, was Jimmy Murray and he was an important man too. They used to have their own court cases out at the Mission in his day and the elders used to decide the outcome. Jimmy Murray used to be, like, the barrister at these cases. There was one time when a woman came to Warangesda from Cowra and she didn’t have permission from Cowra to move so they weren’t sure whether to let her stay. Jimmy was the barrister in the case and the elders were the judges. There must have been something special about our family because I remember Mrs Disher coming over home when we lived down the bushes and her saying to mother that she was a princess.
There was no school in Darlington Point when Gribble set up the one on Warangesda and the white kids had to go to the Mission School. When they did build a school for whites, they built it on the other side of the river, those three old buildings there. If there was no teacher out at Warangesda, the Mission kids came in to that one then, ‘cos otherwise it was just the managers’ wives to teach them and they didn’t know much more than the kids themselves. So at the Point people were always used to doing things together. There was no whites going this way, blacks going that way. You played sport, you went to different things together. A lot of people find that hard to believe, but we could go to the same Church, school, everything. We never had any racism at Darlington Point. It was the same with the lingo, everyone spoke words of it. I grew up thinking it was a slang language that the Point people used, but apparently they were Aboriginal words but everyone used them, black and white, the old Point ones that is. Like bundi, I always thought that was a slang word for a stick.
Another important thing we all got from Warangesda was Christianity. It annoys me to hear people say ‘Oh it’s just bloody religion’. What’s wrong with being a practising Anglican or whatever? But you hear so many people saying nasty things and I’d rather walk away than get into an argument about religion because we were all brought up with it. Our Church is going to have celebrations this year because it’s 100 years since John Gribble died and we’re having a big day on September 12th
and Father Paul wants us to try to get in touch with as many people as possible who used to live here and whose family came from Warangesda. They’re not having Church in the town that day, they’re having it all out at the Mission. There’s a couple of things in the Church that came from the old Mission: the pulpit, the lectern, the bell and the plaque about Gribble’s death. So we’re having a christening out there. The font is in the Pioneer Park in Griffith, we don’t know how it got there, but Father Paul is going to get it for the day. The baby who’s going to be baptised that day would have been mother’s great-great-granddaughter. It’s sad to see all this happening and mother only passed away in January this year; it would have been terrific for her to see it.
Tony Edwards, Heather’s son, was a server in the Church for years. He’s been on the shire since he’s been 18. Well, he plays in a band, he’s a drummer with Nonnie Ingram, Clem Christian, Colin Ingram and Laurie Barlow, a Koorie band. They’ll be playing at Warangesda on the day. They’re all non-drinkers and that makes a difference. I hope it’ll be the event of the year at the Point.
Our kids have grown up not knowing very much about racism but you get these radicals coming along. I was coming back from Griffith one day with another Koorie woman and I said ‘Oh that’s a nice crop over there growing on Kooba Station’ and the only comment she made was ‘Yes, the soand-so’s, growing crops on our land’. But that’s not my way of thinking. The only thing I want, and I’ve told the kids that when I get to be 100 and pass away - I’m going to live that long - I want to be buried on the riverbank, so in years to come people can find me and say they found the body of an old Aboriginal woman on the riverbank and wonder where she came from.
Two of Pam’s nieces, Bronwyn Jefferey and Rachel King.
Heather Edwards
Darlington Point, June 1993
Well, I don’t really know yet what Warangesda means to me and I’ve only been out there half a dozen times in my whole life. It’s very interesting when you go out there with Patty (Undy) and she shows you around and tells all the stories and shows you all the places like where mother’s house (Mrs Isobel Edwards) was and I didn’t even know that until she showed me. I think Pat sat down and talked more with mother than I did and I was never really interested in what she was saying until the last few years when everyone was talking about it. So I thought ‘Oh well, it might be interesting, I’ll go along with them’, but really and truly I haven’t got a great deal of feeling about it although Pat will swing me right around one day maybe.
The thing that means more to me is where we used to live when I was a kid in an old tin hut on the other side of the river, not on the Sandhills, but down in the bushes, that brings back more memories to me. Growing up there, I thought it was lovely ‘cos the moonlight was so bright, before the rockets started interfering with the universe, and Daddy used to sit outside at night and play the mouth organ and we used to jump around and dance and sing and have a great old time. No matter what instrument he picked up he could play tunes on it and none of us can play a tune today. He had a beautiful voice too.
Growing up with mother and father down home was good. Ten children living in a small hut with two bedrooms and a verandah that we built ourselves but there was always a meal on the table and they were happy times. Everybody had coupons when I was a kid and if you ran out of something you’d swap them. We were made to go to Church when we were little and of course it was only through the Church that the early missions were built. Nowadays life is more complicated. Johnny, my son, rings me from Newcastle and he tells me a lot of things and Karen, my daughter, rings from Canberra and tells me other stuff, but life was simpler then. We used to ride horses all the time, we had two ponies and we’d ride them across the floodwaters and people had buggies for travelling around. Mostly the people with cars were white people, but they piled everyone on to them just the same. Things have always been good at the Point and I couldn’t believe it when I went to places like Bourke and Taree. Bourke is horrible and not only on the white side, the other side too. My son John was working up there but he said he was glad he went ‘cos he learned a lot of things he’d never have learned otherwise. I’ve lived in the Point all my life and I want to die here; I couldn’t live in a city, no way.
Heather Edwards, Darlington Point.
We never heard mother speak the lingo but it was probably our fault because we never listened. We picked up a few words like burrayi for kids, bungga for bread, narrabang for mad, jinan for foot and murra for hand.
Now of course, they’re all looking for Aboriginal words to stretch on their property gates.
Of course, Mother did tell us a few stories about Warangesda, like when Donaldson used to come and try to take the children away, but mother used to listen to what other people said about Warangesda and say ‘No that’s not right, that’s not what I was told’. She’d speak about Bobbie Peters too but mother used to say he told fibs.
Mother’s father came from Cowra way and her mother was a white Scots lady. People say they didn’t allow white people on to the Mission but that can’t have been true because her parents lived there. They were Bert Murray (his father was Jimmy Murray) and Mary Jane Hannah Stark, known as Minnie. We know because after mother died we found her parents’ marriage certificate among her things and they were married at Warangesda Mission. We thought it was beautiful.
Mother told me that Gribble was a fantastic man, he did everything right, but after him some of the managers were OK but two of them were terrible. One used to creep around at night trying to peep through windows to see if there was any young guys in there that shouldn’t have been, or any grog. She was also told that a lady who was a dark lady but very fair-skinned was not allowed on there when she was ready to have her baby, she had to stay off the ground.
Of course there’s other things mother told me that I’m not going to tell anyone ‘cos I might write my own book on Warangesda. We know a lady, John Gribble’s granddaughter who lives at Colleambally and she might have some photos. Of course if the kids like Beau and Anthony (my grandchildren) were interested there’s nothing I’d like to see more than have the old Warangesda Mission restored. In the long run it’ll be good for the kids to know what it was like out there.
I don’t like some of the things that was written in the past about Aboriginal people and I’ve been so hurt reading some of those things that I have to shut the book and walk away. Apparently that’s how some of them thought about blackfellas then, as if they were a mob of sheep. I was shocked and I thought to myself ‘That’s my great-great-grandmother they’re writing about and I don’t like it’.
Heather’s late mother, Mrs Edwards, (left) with Michael Walsh and Mrs Ettie Charles, Pat Undy’s late mother, at Warangesda in 1980. (AIATSIS) The old Church in the background has since fallen down.
Florence Carroll
Darlington Point, July 1993
I was born at the Point on the second of January, 1926, shortly after the Mission at Warangesda closed. I was born at the creek near the town cemetery and we shifted to the wharf and lived there for years on end. We only used to move when the floods came up. Then Dad would put the tents up in the shearing shed under the tin roof and we’d put tin tubs in the floods and paddle around like they were rowing boats.
I’ve lived here all my life except when I went travelling with my husband when he worked on different stations. My husband Norman Carroll grew up on Erambie Mission at Cowra and we moved there for a short spell but I didn’t like it, it was horrible, I’d never lived on a mission and we came back here. I had one son when we moved there and had another baby, Colin at Cowra but he died of diphtheria. Then I had Brenda my daughter and Ron. When we started work, my husband was getting station wages plus sixpence a scalp with the ears of the rabbits. It made extra money ‘cos they were trying to get rid of the rabbits in those days. We worked hard and saved money to buy this bit of land and build our house on it that I’m living in today.
We all lived at the wharf, my Uncle George and his wife Mary-Ann and my father George Clayton and Vera, and Granny Bloomfield, her name was Minnie, and my grandfather was old George Bloomfield, he was an Englishman came down from Queensland and he worked on Kooba Station for years. There was an old lady by the name of Mrs Stewart, she was blind and died when I was young. And across the creek there was Bon Hall, he was a cripple and lived with his father Jack Hall and Mrs Hall who was an English woman. There was Mr Donahue and Mr Stevenson, they were single men, they were white.
I remember Jimmy Murray, the other Murrays were Isabel, Vera, Hilda and Bertie. Jimmy’s wife had two little children and they lived up at the old mud hut near the Beaumonts, and he was in the army and his wife had a baby and it died and he went away in the army again and she had another one and he had to come home for the burial of that one too. We went up to the funeral ‘cos Mum said it would be good to watch. The Kirby’s were there too, Gunner Kirby, Wally I think he was, he only had one eye. The babies were buried up at the old cemetery near a pepper tree. Poor old Jimmy died young from shrapnel he got in the war.
Darlington Point Wharf
I loved living at the wharf. Dad used to rig the punt up on a wire across the river and we’d pull ourselves across. And we used to see the steamers go up, they’d lift the bridge and the steamers would pull in there for the night and we’d get on the steamers and have a great time there with the chaps that were on the steamers. They used to want us to go to the shop and buy something for them and they’d give us two bob. When we were kids, my Uncle Bob and Mick Kelly rode from the wharf to Canberra on bikes to get work.
The Sandhills Mission was there then and there were five red huts on it. My Uncle Bill and his wife lived in one, Mary and Johnny Herlan, old Billy and Dulcie Johnson, Mrs Glass and Charlie Runga she married, and there was Irish and Bobby Peters. We lived on the ridge near the wharf and we used to go to the mission for Church and Sunday School. Along the fence, over from the red huts, Tommy Bell, Alice Williams and all that type of person lived there; they were Christians. A lot of people used to live down off the hill. There was Topsy and Jimmy Stanley (she was Aunty Mabel’s sister); Muriel and Vivien Cooper, they lived down there too, all scattered around there; Roy Kennedy and his wife Dollo (Dot or Dorrie), she had four boys and Val, Popeye, Toby, Georgie and another one.
I remember Billy Johnson and his family well. There was Rudolph, Dulcie, Johnno and Albert; they moved over to Murrin Bridge. Dulcie’d be my age ‘cos Dulcie, Evelyn, May, Jimboy Smith, Percy Glass and myself all went to school together. When my kids were going to school and we were following the Junior Rugby, we went to Murrin Bridge to play football and I met Rudolf and Dulcie and Albert there, and Oscar his brother. Archie Coombs was up on the Mission for a while with his mother and he went to school with us too; he wanted us all to be his girlfriend. Mary Herlan and Mrs Dawson, they were like midwives and brought a lot of Mum’s kids into the world. I remember there’d be a big white basin, a big jug and plenty of boiling water.
Hughie Foote was another one they’d talk about. He’d have been years older than us and Evelyn used to talk about him. She was a Glass but they were Turners. ‘Morban’ they called him, I don’t know what it meant. The police would use him for finding the bodies if anyone drowned. I think he was related to old Len Turner.
We were never short of food when I was a kid; there were always rabbits, goanna, possum and porcupine. Mum would cook outside on a tripod in the summer and we’d go down to the river and wash our clothes on a washboard. Mum had a copper and we’d take that down and put it on bricks and light a fire underneath it. Mum used to wash for people to get money when Dad was sick, they thought he had Bright’s disease. She washed and ironed for Kooba Station and the Ryans and she worked for a lot of people like the Landers, the Ross’s and so on. Sometimes she’d work at the pub and mother and I used to go to the store and clean the floors of a night. Because I was the oldest, after school I’d go home and peel the vegies and make the kids change their clothes, and we had tickets for sugar and butter and all that then because of the war. We had cows and we had one bike between us and one of us would use it to get the cows in and Mum would milk them.
Old man weed was a favourite cure. My father boiled it up and drank it and he was never sick after that. And my grandmother was in hospital and grandfather had two white horses and a buggy and we were going in to see her one day (‘cos I lived with them). I said, ‘Well I’ll go for a swim in the river and that’ll be my bath.’ He said ‘Well, be quick’, so I went for a swim and I cut my leg so deep that it curled up on both sides. And old Dave Kennedy, he came there, and put the gum leaf over the top and I wasn’t to touch it until he came back for me and it healed. He left it on about four or five days and it must have been the eucalyptus in it because it healed really fast.
Having babies was no bother in those days either. My grandfather was a shearer and my grandmother used to go with him and Muddy Tomkins’ mother and father used to travel with them too. They’d all go shearing in the waggonettes and they’d pull up along the road and they’d just stop and have the baby, have an hour’s rest and carry on and they had ten children. When I had my children, I had to stay 12-13 days in hospital but now they’re letting them out after a day. I had my last baby in an ambulance at Mirrool Creek. I came up to Mum’s and I was feeling a bit sick that evening and I thought I’d stay the night and go back in the morning. About half past one, I kept striking matches to count the minutes between the contractions and I put the match back in the box and it must have been hot ‘cos it set the matchbox on fire. After that I had to get the ambulance from Griffith and it was a young chap must have just started, not the usual man. I put my hand over my face and said ‘Oh, I feel awful’ and he said ‘Don’t feel awful, you might bring me good luck.’ And within a few days, his wife had a baby and he said, ‘Look at that Mrs Carroll, you brought me good luck, I got a boy too.’
I was forty odd years working at the Punt Hotel. I started when my eldest boy was a baby and my grandfather used to bring him over to have a drink and take him home again. When he started to walk, I took him with me most of the time. Of course the punt stopped years ago but they still kept the name.
The old people didn’t say much to us about the old mission at Warangesda but we knew it was there. I’d like to see Warangesda restored, the old school and the teacher’s house, and the dormitory, just something there to remind people that there’s Aboriginal grounds there, but I wouldn’t like to see it taken off Jeff King. After all, that’s his living and when you go to school with people you hate to see something happen to them. They were very good people, the Kings, treated people very well. A while back some people wanted us to have land rights here.
We went to school with Jeff King and his sister and the other people, and when you grow up with people like that you don’t feel as if you want to do anything because this is a different place from what Griffith is, they’re not prejudiced here. My husband had to get a ticket, a dog licence, to go in the hotel, that was the only racist thing. But there was never many that made any trouble round here, not like Griffith today, there’s always trouble down there. When one person does something bad, they put it down to the lot of them. When you go to Griffith, they look at you and think, ‘She’s from the Mission, she’s from Three Ways.’
When my husband died, I was only young then and I had three children, and the day he died, the funeral was the next day, and before the funeral I had that much food that I couldn’t put it in my fridge. And it was white people came and give it to us. I couldn’t fault it. And his bills, he might have had little bills at the garage and places like that, they wiped them for me, they just never sent them out. It’s the same today. Mr Carter is President of the Bowls Club and he’s a dark man. And up at the Church, everyone’s involved together.
The old school teacher’s house, Warangesda.
Beryl Smith
Darlington Point, August 1993
Warangesda is special to me because my mother (Mrs Isobel Edwards) was born there. She always spoke very highly of it and used to like to go back to see the old places. She used to say that it was a great little township with their own butcher’s shop, general store, Church, school, she thought it was great. From what she said, I’m sure the general store was separate from the butcher’s. They had their own cattle and sheep too. The only bad thing I heard her say was when they used to let them come and take the kids away. Some used to let them take them and others didn’t. Grandfather Murray used to run them off so my mother was never taken.
I’ve only been out to Warangesda a couple of times and of course, there’s not a lot left of the old mission now. It’d be nice to have the old dormitory and school restored before they fall down too but that’s as far as I’d go, just restoring what’s left today. It’d spoil the place to do too much to it.
Young Peter Kelly’s house, where the Kelly’s live on the other side of town, that house was got off Warangesda and put up here at Darlington Point next door to Trevor Chalker’s place across from Tommy and Angie’s. Mother said Jim Turner used to own that house and lived in it until about 1929. Most of the houses were knocked down when the people left but that one was brought over here. It’s one of the old weatherboard houses and he’s put a couple of sleepouts on either side of it.
I grew up here at the Point and went to school here. I’ve got good memories about school, there was no segregation or anything like that. The Aboriginals and white kids went to school together, sat together, played together, it was good really. We lived in town, not the Sandhills, but we were all one big happy family wherever you lived and had lots of dances and parties. Of course life was a bit different from today but I don’t remember being short of anything, we always had new clothes when we needed them. There’s really not been a lot of changes here at the Point over the years, though we never had these kinds of brick houses when I was a kid, only weatherboard. Morals were a lot stricter though, more of us went to Church. I went to Sunday School and to Church right up until a few years ago when I stopped going.
Dad was a beautiful old fella, a fine upstanding man, tall and big. He was a beautiful singer, could sing anything. He’d sing Danny Boy, I’ve never heard another singer sing it like that. And he never learned music, but whatever instrument he picked up he could play. He used to play the gumleaf and we’d dance to it out the back yard, kicking up the dust. We used to make him take us to the pictures in the hall every Saturday night. We’d whinge around him so he’d take us, even in the rain.
Beryl Smith with one of her daughters, Darlington Point.
Kelly’s house, Darlington Point, originally from Warangesda.
I remember old grandfather Bert (Murray) too. He was another big tall old chap too, about six foot something. He was a woolclasser and used to work for a farmer around here on Kooba Station and at Tom Beaumont’s. Mother said he used to make the coffins out at Warangesda and she used to help by sitting on the wood that needed to be curved. Years ago he was going to go to England with Gribble to get the deeds for Warangesda Mission from Queen Victoria. He got as far as Sydney and saw all that water and he asked how long he’d be on the boat. And when Gribble said ‘Three months’ he said ‘That’s too long on water for me, I’m going home.’
Shannon Smith
Darlington Point, August 1993
My mother’s Beryl Smith and my grandmother was Isobel Edwards so I’m one of the younger generation. From what Nan told us, she loved Warangesda and we grew up loving it with her. I’d like to see them do up what they’ve got there but then leave it as it is.
My Nan was one of the last Aboriginal people to leave Warangesda and then the Kings bought it off the Aboriginals. My cousins are Kings so we’ve got connections out there from both sides. Stewart King, he bought Warangesda, and his brother Hector King lived out there too. Then Hector’s son Billy King married my aunt, Marcia Edwards and they’ve got seven children including Rebecca here, the baby of the family.
We’re having a special service out at Warangesda on September 12th and my two boys are going to be baptised out there and Rebecca’s brother’s having his baby baptised too. It’s beautiful for Nan’s great-grandchildren to be baptised out there. They’re using the font from the original Warangesda Church and afterwards there’s going to be a band made up of people whose ancestors came from Warangesda.
Church Warangesda, dimensions reconstructed from historic photographs (by Peter Kabailia).
Alice Williams
Griffith, June 1993
I’ve never been to Warangesda. I grew up for part of my life near the Sandhill Mission at Darlington Point, this side of the river opposite Warangesda and there were four or five houses there, red huts we used to call them. Inside the structure was all iron and the tin was bolted on to it and they were lined with some sort of white stuff that had threads through it. The rest of the Koories lived just through the fence and down on the bend of the river. We’d take our nets down and leave them in the river, one for the fish and one for the lobster and we’d go down checking them. And Dad, he’d tell me about the old Koorie cemetery across the river and he’d say: ‘Warangesda Mission, there was a mission across there my girl, Warangesda, but no one goes there, don’t even look over there’. and what he meant, I don’t know, but there must have been a lot of hurt. Koories, even though they never wrote it down, it went from mouth to ear, down the generations, and I reckon there must have been some sad memories for him to say that. Cos Koories love to talk about where they come from and they like to tell these old stories and we’d laugh about all the silly things we done, so I don’t know why Dad never spoke about it.
I have no knowledge whatsoever, all I know is that it was a mission and its name was Warangesda. But when our sewing class was talking about going there, all the hurt come up inside. But if I don’t go, I’ll sit on the river bank with a line, ‘cos I’m not sure I can go there, ‘cos of all the hurt that’s coming up inside. But I’d love to go. So. if I get up the courage to go, and if I start crying, don’t take no notice, don’t even put an arm round me, just let me do my thing.
I think the whole area should be protected because Dad said the old cemetery was over there, but I don’t know whether I’d like to see it restored or rebuilt, I’d need to look at it first, go out there, but I don’t know if I can. It’s sad that there aren’t records to tell us more about it. It must have been like Cootamundra and there’s lots of sad memories there. When they turned it into a Bible College I said ‘I’m glad’ because there was a lot of heartache and torment there for young people as well as for their parents. They used to lock them up in the morgue for punishment ‘cos they knew how Koories felt about spirits. Just imagine how those girls must have felt.
I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing to preserve it, it’s probably good for the generations to come, but for the people that can just go to a place and know nothing about it and feel all those hurts and torments, it’s be something they’d keep away from. But as for the younger generation who wants links with the places where people lived and that, it’s be a good thing.
Red Huts, copyright 2003 Maureen Mattinson (nee Fitzgibbon) Collections Heritage Darlington Point
Pat says it’s a peaceful place for her, the place where her mother was born, and I’ve never laid eyes on it even though we lived so close. So maybe I’ll go there, and maybe I’ll cry but maybe I’ll release all that too. And that story you was telling us from the old diary, about how the manager opened a letter to one of the men and he took him to the APB and got the manager told off. Well, that’d never have happened on any of the other missions I knew; there you was just a good little black boy, you didn’t go to the fella over the head of the manager ‘cos you didn’t know how to get there and if you tried, that manager brought in the police and had you sent to gaol.
So if that sort of thing was going on I reckon they had a fairer deal than any other mission and it’d be good to go there.
I was born in 1940 and I’m only 53. I grew up at the Point and we had our good times, I block out the bad times and like remembering the good things. We even had a little Church on that Mission which the Koorie fellas built. There’s that photo of it with old Johnny Swift, the blind man in the doorway and Clancy’s father on the roof. We called it a mission but it was really a reserve, Reserves were run by the Welfare or the Police, but missions had a manager.
Miss Campbell was the missionary, she lived down town and she’d visit all the people, do church services, she was one of us, we loved her like we loved our own people. There’s a fence dividing the mission from the flat where the people used to live, and Ruthie or Beryl Williams, I can’t remember which, they was always up to pranks. And Miss Campbell knew we was scared of the dark so one evening after service she said ‘I’ll take you through the fence’ and she had the big Tilley lamp and we was sticking all close together and we could hear the suckers and the leaves rustling and we seen this little hunchback and we all ran screaming ‘Ghost, ghost!’ And Ruthie or Beryl sang out ‘No, no, it was only me, and we kept on running because there was a big tall person behind her, and we all yelled out ‘Look behind you!’ and then she took off too.
Christmas, Mrs Campbell used to organise a big sort of sports day and she’d have age races and
The Murrumbidgee River, down near the Sandhills Mission.
used to laugh at her, God bless her. They’d all stand on the mark and Miss Campbell would ‘Go!’ and they’d run, the old ones, Mum and them. Great fun, good times.
I remember those little books and you couldn’t buy nothing if you didn’t have stamps. Everything came in little brown paper bags and the sugar was always put away for the baby, and the milk, and if we wanted something sweet in our cup of tea, we had to put treacle in it and it would turn the tea black. Remember the malt, I used to love that, had a spoonful a day, supposed to be good for us so I used to say ‘I’ll lick yours’.
An old fella named Bidja Berwick, one day he’d be at the Point, and a couple of days after he’d be at Condo and he’d really get around. He lived down the bend of the river on his own and we used to reckon he was an old bugeen fella. Anyway, these kids were playing down the bank of the mission and it was all sand and they were digging and they found a finger bone. They brought it up and they showed this old fella and he looked at it and he said: ‘You take that back and you put it where you found it, and if you don’t you won’t sleep at night. The spirits will come and torment you’. and I was thinking there must be a burial ground there ‘cos there’s other stories of people finding bones there. If you look at it, the old people used to bury their dead in the sand, it’s a lot easier to dig, and if the mission sprung up at Warangesda, they must have been camping round the river and that was probably their burial ground. The river and the sand, that’s where the old people always lived.
The old people gave you the teachings and stories they heard from their fathers and grandfathers. There’s this one story they told, maybe from Cummeragunja or Moonacullah. This one old fella, he used to live way up the bend of the river on his own, away from the camp. And this other fella went to get honey this day and knew where there was a nest. And this old fella said ‘Where are you going?’ And the younger one said ‘Going to get some honey.’ So this one said ‘I’ll come too.’ So they went down and this fella from the camp said ‘This is my honey tree’ so the old fella said ‘I’ll go a bit further and get my honey from another tree.’ So they parted and the young one got his honey and he’s waiting for this old fella to come back and he waited and waited and he said to himself ‘He’s a long time down there, he mightn’t have found any’. But while he’s standing there thinking, this whirlywind comes past. And when he gets back, he has to go past this old fella’s camp and when he got there, the old fella’s sitting down by the fire. And the young one says ‘How did you get here, I never seen you going past’. And he said ‘I seen you. I come in that whirlywind’. So they used to travel in the whirlywind, so the old people used to say. But there was always one clever one, they used to call them. And before they died, they seemed to know somehow, and they’d get a young fella from the tribe and they’d train him up and pass all the skills on to that person. And you look at the old people that were left, and it didn’t matter where they were living, Sydney, Darlington Point, Griffith, they always come back a little while or a couple of years before their death, ‘cos they always had this belief that they’d come back, they’d die in the place that they were born in.
All the old stories have gone, the lingo too. After the AP Board was set up, if we had anything of value, they was the trustees, it had to be in their care. We wasn’t allowed to have deeds or titles or anything because they had to manage these affairs because we were all narrabang, we didn’t know anything. Narrabang means poor thing, pitiful, but you also use it as an insult meaning mad. Koorie words are hard ‘cos they sound alike and you can make some terrible mistakes. Balan means head, but balal means woman. Nyali means meat and nyili means snot. I mean you wouldn’t want to come in and say you’d like some nyili for tea, would you! Burrii means children and burrayi means break wind (fart). Duuri means a meeting place in Queensland but here it means having sex.
I remember lots of the sayings but not the meanings, you had to work them out, no one told you. If a kid come to visit and they were touching everything, they’d say ‘He’s really wanjibaan that burrayi, eh’. I figured it out that wanjibaan meant mischievous. I wish Dad would’ve learned us the lingo, but if he had we’d probably have all been split up and sent away.
If you were speaking the lingo, they didn’t want the Koories to breed up, they tried to wipe the race out, they’d send them away, tell them they were everything but Koorie. They tried everything, their nigger hunts, their poisoned waterholes, but every time it happened there seemed to be a population explosion, so they said ‘We’ll take the kids away from their people’. But there was always something in the Koorie that made them come looking for their people, even if they had adapted to the other way of living.
One girl came out, 30 years old, and met her mother for the first time. And she didn’t know how to act, all those questions she wanted to ask like ‘Why was I taken away? Why didn’t you come looking for me?’ And she was really educated, really clever, very musical too, but I could see the fear all over her face. When you see people like that you start to remember the mission reserves.
After the Sandhills, we moved to Cowra and I really got to know the mission system. Once, there was this woman, she had no husband, had kids and she used to drink, they’d drink up at her place. So this day when she got money, she bought groceries and left them all with her sister, ‘cos if she’d of took them home everyone would have been eating them. And over came the manager with the police and opened the cupboards. They didn’t need to knock, just walked in, and because there was no food there, they took the kids. Everyone on that mission was trying to tell them she left the groceries up at her sister’s, but no, they wouldn’t take notice, and it was the most hurtful thing I ever seen in my life when I saw her clinging to the youngest and them pulling it out of her arms, and she was crying and the baby was crying and when you mention missions, it brings back all those memories and they’re painful, they really hurt.
And when we were living on Cowra Mission, Dad wouldn’t do what the manager said so the manager barred him. Jackie Charles (John) and he used to sneak on in the night. If they’d of caught him, they’d have took him to court, sent him away somewhere, just for going on to see his family and that wasn’t too far back because that manager was still there later when I was back there. I had my two eldest at Cowra when me and my husband was living there and he was doing fencing for rations. They’d find you work to do, then you’d get a few loaves of bread and little box with so many ounces of everything in it. They’d give you a cake of soap but no washing powder. And he was doing fencing and he pulled a muscle with the straining post and he couldn’t work so he got no rations. That’s how unfair he was. And that manager, he was a law within that Mission and he abused the power he had.
One of my sisters was staying there, living with a fellow and she was only sixteen and they took her away. The police, they said to me, ‘Mrs Williams, you tell them she’s living with you and they’ll let her come home to you’ but the prosecutor said ‘Oh no, the manager won’t allow her back on the Mission’, so my sister got sent away to Parramatta Girls Home when there was really no need for it. So he really waved his authority over the people, he abused his authority. So ‘mission’ brings it all back.
The Koorie, to the AP Board, they wasn’t responsible enough to do anything. The manager’s wife was called a matron and every once or twice a week she came in and she give the house the white glove treatment. She came in and she went around touching bits of furniture that was in the house, giving
it the dust test you know. That was a real insult to the people ‘cos they knew how to be clean. They mightn’t have had sinks, but they had one dish for washing their faces and one dish for washing the mugs and plates and things. This happened to my mother when she was living on the Cowra Mission.
Imagine how I felt, here at Three Ways the other day when I heard that the Housing Corporation, the Aboriginal Housing Corporation, had a meeting about a new policy. They decided that they were going to inspect the houses four times a year for damage. I was too sick to go, but when I heard about the meeting, all the hurt come up inside, like the matron coming with her white glove. I come out from under that and nobody’s putting me under it again. Even a search warrant won’t get them in my home. I have in here who I want to. That’s what our old people fought against. I told them, ‘You’s forgetting where you come from and you’s forgetting who you are’.
That manager’s word was law. I remember Ethel Lyons, used to be Ethel Bamblett, Aunty Eva Monigan reared her up and Ethel came up one time to spend Christmas with her. You had to ask permission if you could go on the Mission and sign the book and say how long you were staying and all that rot. And Ethel came there that day and she asked permission and the manager said ‘No’. There was no reason, he might have been in a bad mood. Ethel couldn’t go down to the court house or the police and say ‘Now listen, I’ve just come up to spend Christmas with my grand-mother’. There was no law for Koorie, he was under what they call the Dog Act which was no law at all. So what I’m learning about Warangesda from you, they had a better deal than any mission I ever lived on and I lived on a few of them. If they was allowed to have land, and work it, they never had that on no other mission.
Here at Griffith, there wasn’t a reserve and there wasn’t a mission. We’d build our houses on the edge of town and the Council used to say ‘Move back, we’re going to build homes there, so they’d pull their little homes back and move back a bit further. So Mr Condon, he was the butcher here, he called all the old people together and he said ‘Look, I’ve got a little paddock down over the bridge’, he said. ‘Every time you get your little houses up, the Council comes and pushes you back’ he said. ‘You can have that paddock so move over there and don’t let anyone move you off. You’ll live there from generation to generation.’ So you see, it wasn’t the Welfare, it wasn’t the Government gave us this land (at Three Ways). It was one man.
The APB must have found out that the Koories had been given land, so they brought two of the old red huts over from Darlington Point. But the first four houses built was donated. They came from the people of Griffith. The timber mill donated timber, the brickworks and all them hardware stores gave everything to build them. And the men, the carpenters and builders, they donated their time at the weekend and that and they built the first four houses. It wasn’t no government funding, it was done by gifts. But the AP Board, their field officer, old Mr Lambert, he’d come and hold his hand out for rent off them people. They should have told him to go away from here.
I think that old lady’s still alive, I think her name is Millard. She used to come around here and they formed a committee. I think they called it an Assimilating Committee, and it was through that, coming down and working with the people that they decided to ask the townspeople to get homes built. I said to her one day that Mr Lambert had told Mum those four houses just about broke the Board and Mrs Millard, she said ‘You just tell your mother to tell Mr Lambert he’s a liar. The AP Board or no one else put money into them; everything was donated.’ Then afterwards the Housing Commission built the other houses.
The year of the Bicentennial, I was suffering these bad headaches, like waves in my head hitting against something, it was horrible and I said to Brother George Mann ‘I’m experiencing a very strange headache, like water in my head, a lot of waves’ and I’d laugh about it ‘cos it sounded so silly. And he said ‘We’ll pray’. And you know, he knew nothing about Mum or Dad, certainly nothing about Dad coming from over that way, and he was saying that because of the Bicentennial, those spirits were crossing the sea from Tasmania and I was feeling them here, in my head. Now Dad’s great-grandmother, she came from Tasmania. She was Truganini’s young sister and she put her in a dugout, one of the old canoes, and pushed her out to sea when all that was going on up there, and that’s where she landed, down there in Victoria, and Dad’s descended from her. Merle Jakomos, she’s got Dad’s family tree and it dates right back to Tasmania. So the year that they were celebrating the landing of Captain Cook, these spirits were coming across the sea and I could feel it in my head. Our family is like that, something goes on, like second sight or spiritual sight.
The old people were very spiritual and some people believe that the spirits are out there watching. I prefer to believe that they are at rest, not roaming, not in torment.
One time when we were up in Bourke with the Christian Outreach, we were driving along, four of us women, going down the river to the weir, in the night mind you. We’d just got past the tip, and it was strange, it was like having a dream, a vision. I seen this very tall man, proud looking and very stern, like the old fullbloods. He had a laplap, his spear was in his left hand and his right foot was up on his left leg, on his knee, and he was standing looking stern. But there was a Koorie woman and she was sitting alongside of him, on the ground, and she was throwing the dirt and the dust over herself. And we know when people do that they’re in mourning and this fear came up on me and I said ‘Jenny turn round, I don’t want to go down there, and if you’re going to continue I’ll get out and walk back’. Because it had to be a warning, and if we’d of continued, something terrible would’ve happened to us. These things seem to happen to me and I don’t know why, it seems to run in the Charles family.