WHILE I REMEMBER VOLUME 1: MEMORABLE QUEENSLANDERS

By John Thompson-Gray

John Thompson-Gray has been writing books on remarkable and untold stories of Australia's history. It is now time to tell his own story, commencing with this account of some Queenslanders who have made a lasting impression on him.

 

Pioneering, heroic, trailblazing, compassionate and philanthropic are descriptions that spring to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicious Book Publishing
• Release date: Nov 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645338928

John Thompson-Gray

De Australische John Thompson-Gray BSc BEd MEng volgde de literaire studie 'short story, life and travel writing' aan International House, Universiteit van Cambridge.

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ROSE SHADFORTH & ALFRED BROWN

ALFRED

In April 1900, at McDonnell telegraph station on Cape York, a boy was born into the Taepadhighi Tribe.

His father was probably a white employee based at McDonnell Telegraph Station, under no legal obligation to register the birth.

Under the Queensland Aboriginal Protection and the Prevention of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, the boy’s construed lack of paternal support required state intervention. It meant nothing to the Queensland Aboriginal Protector that this little boy was dearly loved and cared for by his mother and men in his tribe and had a tribal name carrying responsibility for the sacred sites of his land. Rather, the Protector saw him as light-skinned and ripe for assimilation. When he was four, Queensland police forcibly removed him to Thursday Island where a magistrate ‘committed!’ him to an institution for Aboriginal children.

At separation, his mother’s debilitating anguish and the little boy’s panic were theirs alone. Platitudes, words of carrot-comfort, were just bloody blue noise. Theirs were the stolen hearts, theirs a lifetime lament.

A year later he was sent to the Presbyterian mission at Mapoon. The mission school had an enrolment of eighty and boarding facilities for some. Missionaries sometimes followed the custom of giving an Aboriginal child the same name as one of the mission’s dignitaries. They called this little boy Alfred Brown after an unimportant visitor who returned to England. In doing so they showed no regard or recognition that the little boy had a traditional name that linked him with 40,000 years of culture. As he grew into adulthood he couldn’t recall his first cultural name and felt severed from his kinship structures.

At Mapoon the young stockman Willy Hudson and his wife Lucy adopted Alfred. He mucked in well with the Hudson children. This was a well-run mission station. While dedicated people helped children with Christianity, industrial training and the three R’s, that could never displace Aboriginal culture, language and religion. When it came to blackbirding, however, mission defences were far more effective against marauding seafarers trying to shanghai Aborigines or sell them into slavery. Pearling masters were particularly interested in aboriginal women because they could stay down longer when skin diving for pearls.

Alfred spent his first four years speaking Taepadhighi, not English. In his year at Thursday Island, language was challenging. At Mapoon, Alfred’s respect for others was returned in kind by Mrs Ward, a talented teacher who soon discovered Alfred’s determination to learn the English language and his gift of retentive memory. He mastered spoken English, reading, writing, arithmetic and geometry.

Alfred finished school at fifteen. His first job was houseboy at the Federal Hotel on Thursday Island. He watched crews on ships passing the window where he worked. Theirs was the occupation he wanted. At seventeen he returned to Mapoon and became a deckhand on the mission lugger J G WARD. As the lugger ran the mail-and-stores’ route between Thursday Island and the missions on the west coast of Cape York, Alfred learnt ropes, tides, sea, stars, weather and coastal navigation. Through Traditional and Christian Spirit, Alfred grew into a kind, thoughtful and hard working young man whose early years explained his passion for family. In Willy Hudson he had a model of a loving husband and father.

Eventually the J G WARD was sent to Kunmunya mission in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It would be years before Alfred sailed on her again.

INA

Rose Andrewina Shadforth, Ina for short, came from Normanton to Mapoon as a dormitory girl. Unlike Alfred, she was surrounded by her Aboriginal and German family. Alf and Ina knew one another during their school years.

In 1922, the Reverend James R. B. Love replaced the Rev. Nicholas Hey, a co-founder of Mapoon in 1891. The following year Love married the Mission’s teacher Margaret Hollinger and in 1926 he was the minister marrying his friends Ina and Alfred. Later that year Love was called to rescue the Kunmunya Mission, which was running at a loss: financial, emotional and spiritual.

QUEENSLAND EXPERIENCE HELPS KUNMUNYA

In 1926, the Loves transferred from Mapoon to Kunmunya and the Browns followed in 1927. Changing State protection of the Browns from Queensland to Western Australia had its difficulties but Love found a way. As Alfred helped his pregnant Ina board the coastal vessel MARELLA, everyone who turned out to bid them farewell was captivated by Alfred’s loving gentleness with Ina.

Ina gave birth to Alwyn in 1927, Laurelle in 1929, followed by Alfred Jnr, Edith, Kathy and Ivy. As a ‘Stolen Child’ himself Alfred was determined the same thing would not happen to Ina’s children. The country they were born on left the Brown children with a legacy of cultural connexion to the Worrorra tribe.

I met Laurelle and Kathy and their families at Broome in 2018. Their European clothing and grooming would have been startling in Collins Street Melbourne and their conversation as engaging. Their forthright connexion with clan and country commanded the utmost respect. It was living praise of their Queensland parents Ina and Alfred.

Alfred was born to boat. He became skipper of WS WATT LEGGATT, the schooner that replaced the J G WARD. Alfred’s Queensland experience with cyclones held him in good stead. According to the diary of Pearling Master H.D. Norman, March 31st, 1935, Alfred saw the sea go milky while the sky was clear, and land flies swarming on the cabin roof of WATT LEGGATT at sea. Knowing this to be indicative of a tropical gale, Alfred made haste to the nearest port, Barramundi Bay on Koolan Island where he sat out the blow. This was the devastating 1935 cyclone that tore the coast to shreds. As the storm abated inland, Alfred made haste southwest to the Lacepede pearling grounds in search of nine luggers unaccounted for. According to Norman, ‘Alfred Brown showed great courage in coming to the aid of those in peril on the sea and’, on this occasion, ‘seven men from East Island who had swum ashore from William Ward’s wrecked boat.’ One man had drowned and another was the victim of a shark attack.

WORRORRA, WUNAMBAL AND NGARINYIN

Three tribes occupied Kunmunya each with its own language, culture and laws: the Worrorra speaking saltwater people, the Wunambal speaking people from the north and the Ngarinyin people from the mountains. Love created the cultural linkages that united the tribes into a peaceful and respectful community. Alfred was a stabilising influence in the way he selected his crew from the tribes and the way his Queensland experience of living in a mission played out. He encouraged ‘full blood’ hunters and gatherers to use their traditional lands isolated from external intervention but pointed out that the mission was there with its crops and livestock, church, school, carts, luggers and flying doctor, its shield against blackbirders and the Protector, and its western medicine in the treatment of leprosy, measles, dengue, malaria and yellow fever.

Linguist Elkin Umbagai later acknowledged the lasting legacy left by Brown and Love:

It was because the best of our traditional ways were maintained throughout those years that we had the strength to stand up to all the moves and become welded into one community.

CONCLUSION

After WW2 Alfred was skipper of BHP’s tender YAMPI LASS that sailed the treacherous inter-island currents of Yampi Sound between Derby and the iron mines of the Buccaneer Archipelago. His children came to Queensland to track down his roots and those of their mother Ina. They succeeded.

The End

FOOTNOTE

The writer acknowledges the help of Alfred and Ina’s daughter Kathy and their granddaughter Edie Wright. The Presbyterian Church of Victoria archivist, Mrs Christine Palmer, supplied factual accounts, most from the Mission Chronicle, with deep background readings from Jebb, Mary Ann (ed.) MOWANJUM, 2008, Mowanjum Aboriginal Community and Mowanjum Artists Spirit of the Wandjina Aboriginal Corporation on behalf of Worrorra, Ngarinyn and Wunambul peoples; Love, JRB, Stone-Age Bushmen of Today, Blackie Blackie and Son Ltd, London and Glasgow 1936. Edie and Geoff Wright now live at Little River while their children, Alfred and Ina’s great-grandchildren, attend Geelong Grammar.

ELISABETH (BETTS) WELTER & GERHARD DROSTE

INTRODUCTION

The Droste family migrated from Java to Queensland via New South Wales. That was 1950 and you will soon understand why they have been Queenslanders ever since. Gerry had been here before. He was one of the RAAF aircrew evacuating women and children from the Gulf of Carpentaria during the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942.

In 1950 the family had four children under 12. They could not find a permanent rental in NSW and had to take short-term holiday houses. This included swish off-season rentals in Narrabeen, Cronulla, Bundeena and Belmore.

Gerry’s mechanical engineering diploma from Queen Emma College, and his extensive experience as an A-grade mechanic were not recognised in Australia. He was classified B-grade, worked for York Motors in Sydney but saved enough to buy a block of land. He sold this in 1953, bought a block of land in Nathan Street Nashville, a northern suburb of Brisbane, and ordered the building of a house. After a short stay in Deagon where he found a job at Highway Motors, the Drostes moved into their Nashville family home in 1954. The children, who had previously attended catholic schools, now went to Brighton State School. Their son Robert’s favourite memory was planting the trees that today stand tall along the school fence in Brighton, but this hardly compensated for his difficulty at age 13 with the new language (English) and lack of text books. Until he was 10, he was taught in Catholic boarding school reading in Dutch and Malay. Ironically, his boarding school in Semarang was formerly the Lampersari Prisoner of War Camp where he spent the last of his six years as a POW in Java. The Queensland Gair Government of the day supplied textbooks free to Queensland children but these were distributed at the start of the year before Robert arrived. He couldn’t read them anyhow while classmates could. At age 13 he refused to go to school and got a customer service job at Highway Motors.

In 1958 Gerry found a better paying job at Cyclone Industries in Geebung, sold his house at Nashville and bought a house in Cook Street Northgate.

He found an even better paying job doing maintenance on the many machines at Tip Top Bakeries in Nundah, working there until retirement in 1974. In his final year he received frequent phone calls during the night to do emergency repairs but he was surprised how many were trivial and could be rectified by the operator. When he pointed this out he was told, "You ought to tell them to stick it Gerry and resign.’ He immediately twigged. If he resigned the company did not have to pay their share of his superannuation entitlement money. If he stayed until he was 65, they did. Gerry stuck it out to get his entitlement money.

After retirement he built a kit home and swimming pool on their block of land at Hope Island. Every second year they returned to Holland to stay in touch with family and their children and grandchildren visited them regularly at Hope Island. Gerry’s old mate Gus Winckel had retired to Burleigh Heads with his wife Yvonne. The families got together at weekends to play games and talk old times.

So what makes a devout Catholic couple like Betts and Gerry so meek, yet so strong for one another and their children? Whatever it was, they brought it to Queensland for their offspring to thrive and prosper. You may find your own answers in a brief account of their earlier lives.

EARLY DAYS IN JAVA

Henri Gerhard Droste, Colonial Dutch, was born on 15 November 1909 in Soerabaja where his parents owned the first picture theatre in Java, a profitable enterprise.

When Gerry enrolled at KES, Queen Emma Technical School in Soerabaja for a five-year course in Mechanical Engineering, he became friendly with two fellow students. One was Gus Winckel. They had a common interest in water polo, Gus playing for the Neptunas and Gerry for the Crocadillas. The other was Jan Welter who invited Gerry to his family’s home, where Jan’s 13 year-old Sister Elisabeth fell in love with Gerry.

Gerry’s aim was to obtain his engineering qualifications so that he could work at a sugar refinery because sugar was like gold and a maintenance mechanic in a sugar mill was paid lucrative bonuses, enough for a man to support a wife and family. There were many sugar mills in the river valleys of East Java especially along the Brantas River and its tributary, the Lengkong.

As soon as Gerry finished his course he was called up for compulsory military training on token pay. He chose the Naval Air Force Flying School where he served with ground crew on German Dornier flying boats. A year later Gerry was discharged from national service only to find that the Great Depression had dissolved the demand for sugar and his dream with it. This was a setback because Gerry and Elisabeth were agonisingly in love and wanted to marry.

Eventually Betts’ brother Jan Welter found Gerry a job as maintenance manager on a plantation sold later to British firm J. A. Wattie & Co Ltd, one of whose ventures in Java was acquisition of old Dutch coffee plantations, which had recently failed due to a virulent leaf disease. The world demand for rubber was accelerating and Wattie was planting rubber trees.

Gerry was soon transferred to Wattie’s large Limburgh Plantation. Mr Farrow, a director of Wattie, met Gerry and Elisabeth during his regular inspection of plantations. Gerry, whose achievements