Florence Falls

By Marjory Doyle

This book of short stories is based on real people and real life experiences, as well as real places. The stories are about First Nations’ people of Australia, especially in locations in and around Queensland’s Gold Coast region.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Aug 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982295639

Marjory Doyle

Marjory Doyle is a First Nations’ Australian, whose people come from the South-East Coast of Queensland. She worked for more than twenty years in government and non government sectors, advocating for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Marjory grew up hearing the many stories her grandmother and her mother passed on to her. She maintains a keen interest in women’s narratives, especially those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, and she wants to preserve these voices so that they will never be forgotten.

Book preview

Florence Falls

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After a long absence I have returned home to Florence Falls. This journey back to my country has been a journey back to my past, and perhaps my future as well. My soul is aflame with possibilities and the present is exciting, more than I ever felt possible at my age and each moment is filled with wonder. Perhaps the best is yet to be.

My name is Pearl Miller. Let me tell you a little of Florence Falls and about myself. Florence Falls is a town not far south of Brisbane near the coast of Queensland. It was named after a pioneering woman called Florence McKenzie who settled in the area in the 1860s. There was once a waterfall not far from here, just outside the town near a gorge. Nobody living today can remember when the waterfall last flowed. It is thought that back in the time of Gondwanaland there was thick rainforest all through this region.

Of course, a lot has changed over the years of the town’s history. Barney’s Bait and Tackle where my grandmother once worked is now boarded up and closed. The two hotels are still open for business. My mother first worked at the Angler’s Arms as a girl of thirteen and some my relatives did some serious drinking in their time at the Cecil Hotel. Alice Lee, the proprietor of the Ho-Hum Chinese restaurant is old now, so her son manages it for her. The Lee family history in Florence Falls goes back to the time when old Mr. Lee, Alice’s grandfather, had started a market garden in the town.

Many of my relatives are the backbone of this community, working in the hospitality and fishing industries. Before Florence Falls even existed, my people lived in this place. The area is part of our traditional homeland, our secret history which is just now coming to light. I never learned anything about this fact at school. Today I am proud to say I am a First Nation’s person as we are now called.

As a girl, I never heard any of my relatives talk about these things either; now I understand the reasons for their silence. The Queensland Parliament passed the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897¹ and this had disastrous repercussions on all Aboriginal peoples down through the generations.

Like other Australians my relatives just wanted to live in peace in their own country, to be able to earn a living and raise their families. Yet fear of having their children taken from them was a very real possibility. Every Aboriginal person came under ‘the Act’ as it became known. Survival made it necessary to keep quiet about one’s racial origins and cultural identity.

I remember as a child of the 1960s, that television had just come to our home. As a small girl I would watch the old westerns showing Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane and I too wanted to ride across wide open plains on a horse.

Little did I know back in the 1960s that these were archetypes of a dominant culture, one which had almost destroyed the native American populations. I did not know then, that I was part of an ancient lineage going back 60,000 years. I was never taught to be proud of who I was or where I came from.

Even today, in Florence Falls, many people would rather I forget that I am Aboriginal, while others never let me forget. I can laugh about it now, but it can hurt your feelings if you let it. In certain outback regions of Australia, black opal is to be found, the most expensive opal in the world. Sometimes it is mixed with other colours such as fiery reds. The black streak running through it is unmistakable. It resembles obsidian. It is distinctive and unique.

I am named after a precious jewel hewn from the oyster shell. Yet, I like to think that although a pearl, I am also like the black opal, shot through with the thing that makes it unique with its distinctive colour. I too can trace my lineage back 60,000 years on this continent, and at last it is something I can claim with pride. It is a part of who I am.

A different picture is starting to emerge today, than in previous generations, which makes me happy. Of course, there are still voices from the past. Old Mrs. Patterson is descended from the first pioneers who settled in the district. She still espouses the view that the Aboriginal people were lazy, idle people who did not utilise the land properly and were not able to ‘profit’ from it.

Her view was the dominant one shared by most white Australians in the past. Most people have never realised that everyone of us is subject, not only to Australian law, but to the law of the land itself. All across the nation, as droughts, bushfires and floods sometimes threaten all that we hold dear, people are listening to the ancient voices once again, as they inform us how we may work with the land rather than ‘manage’ it.

Mrs. Patterson’s granddaughter, Sally does not agree with the views of her grandmother’s. This young woman represents a different generation and so there is hope for Florence Falls. It is Sally, the part-time craft teacher employed by St. Luke’s Church who encourages local women to meet each week. Sally is also a social worker though she does not seem to fit into any professional box. We know her to be an excellent facilitator who ‘gets things happening’ and works behind the scenes. She is also a superb listener. She has always been a quiet achiever who likes attention focused on other women and not on herself. These qualities make her excellent for leading our group.

We laugh together as we tell our stories and sometimes, we cry together too. We are participating in a project which will raise funds towards the establishment of a Women’s Community centre at Florence Falls. The townswomen are making all sorts of items to sell – jams, baby matinee jackets and bootees, aprons, embroidered cloths, tapestries and works of art, painted in the traditional Aboriginal way by the gifted artists among us. Some of these paintings have been especially commissioned by the Florence Falls Town Council, while others will be placed at auction or sold.

The women who make up this craft group come from all walks of life. Some have known domestic violence, others racism and hardship in one form or another. But these are exciting times. I too have known much hardship in my own life yet each day I wake up wanting to tell the stories of all the people I ever knew and loved. That is why I am excited about our craft group, for it has come to represent so much.

Aboriginal women form the backbone of our communities, and indeed all the women have proven to be the strength of our Florence Falls community. At first appearance we women who meet each week would seem like any other group of women who gather across the country to knit and sew. As Paul Kelly’s song says, From Little Things Big Things Grow. This is what is taking place here in Florence Falls at this humble craft group.

Sally’s idea was the catalyst for me to begin to collect the stories which the women told each week as we met together. I have done this faithfully, with their permission, careful not to overlook anybody, for each woman’s story forms a part of the whole story of the town and its inhabitants.

Many women are glad that at last their voices are being heard and their stories will be recorded for their grandchildren and future generations.

I once heard a talk by Elie Wiesel, a Jewish holocaust survivor, who said ‘For the dead and the living I must bear witness.’² I feel that this is my task now that I am back in my country.

Some of the women are related to me, many are not. Yet we are all united in our wish to tell the true history of Florence Falls. At last voices once silent will be silent no more. As we listen to one another’s stories, injustices of the past may be healed. Tears, long held back, now fall like rain on the parched earth. In this place there is acceptance. There is no space for denial.

This has become my task, as I knit or sew along with the other women, bringing the loose threads of our lives together, fashioning a work of art, made with loving hands, which will last for all time. I listen deeply to the stories, sometimes writing them down or perhaps recording them, storing them up for the future. What will happen to these stories will be for the women who have shared them to decide.

I know that my role is to honour these stories and the people to whom they belong, whether they are living or dead. I am to ‘bear witness’ for it is what I was born to do.

The Dreaming Place

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‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream’³

(Edgar Allan Poe)

I once had a strange dream. I had travelled back in time to the dreaming place where my ancestors had always lived. It seemed I had gone back to a time before I was born.

As I looked about there was the jewelled river. It had not changed. Off in the distance I could hear the endless waves washing up on the shore. The river is tidal and in my dream the river smelled just as it did in my childhood, teeming with life. I remembered that on summer days, the river always looked deep blue or green, while on cloudy days, pearl grey.

There were two estuaries reaching out further along the river, one lead to the broad-water and out to the ocean. The other estuary flowed further upriver to where my relatives built a two-story timber cottage. It was homemade with make-shift kitchen, table and chairs and a wood burning stove downstairs. One big room upstairs had straw mattresses on beds for the small children.

Mangroves lined the river. My grandmother’s house had not yet been built and in my dream, she was still a child. I looked at the land across from river where her house would one day lie, a timber house on wooden stumps. It would have a very small room in the middle of the house with only two bedrooms and a kitchen with a wood stove. Bare wooden floors let sand creep up through the floorboards. The landscape was always trying to take over, so we learned to take care of it and not resist it. We were a people who listened to the land.

Eventually, a veranda would be built, running the length of one side of the house and reaching round the back. In the early 1960s, when we were children, my cousins and I slept on veranda beds, whenever we stayed during holidays. We had mosquito nets for hot summer nights and the holes in the nets were sewn up again and again, over the years.

My bed faced the window and looked out over the river which, in my dream, is bathed in moonlight. A palm tree grew just outside but I was still able to make out the river. The lapping of the tide would lull me to sleep and off in the distance, I could hear the pounding waves on the beach.

In my dream tea trees and other shrubs grew in the sandy soil where my grandmother and her sisters would one day make their homes. A few old shanties dotted the landscape here and there. Magpies called out from the giant tea tree. This beautiful tree would be hewn down at the beginning of the twenty-first century to make way for a monster block of units advertising ‘two million dollar views’, which is how much you will pay if you want to live there now.

The road along the river was a sandy track. About the only people who lived along this pathway were my grandmother’s people. White sandy knolls led down to the river’s edge where soldier crabs made their homes. There was nobody about, only an old Irish fisherman at the river’s edge. He looked at me curiously. Johnny McGinty’s the name, he said cautiously. His hair was white and blue eyes shone out of an old weathered pink face. He reminded me of a piece of old driftwood washed up on the beach a long time ago.

I introduced myself and enquired about my grandmother, Mary, and her family. Oh, they’re about. He looked carefully at me. He told me they lived down river. They live hidden out of sight, lest government men come to take them away. This then must be the time of the great dispersals when people were taken away to other lands, children were separated from parents and people fretted themselves to death or were poisoned or shot.

Are the mullet running? I asked him, exchanging pleasantries. He smiled. Well yes, the wattle is in flower isn’t it? He winks at me. I see you have learnt the native ways too, he says.

I thanked the old fisherman kindly, bade him farewell, and walked on further, along the river’s edge. This land here was once very swampy. I looked down and saw there were patches of grass with wildflowers growing, poking up intermittently through the sand.

Back in the time of Gondwanaland the coast was protected by rainforests. Great grandmother spoke of a time when the tide line once came much further up and that is why small shells could be found well back from the shore.

In my dream I remembered how my grandmother had been grief-stricken at the removal of all the coastal mangroves to make way for ‘development’ during the 1960s. Before anyone had coined the term ‘erosion’ Gran had issued a warning that the mangroves