| Historical notes: | Pre-European Aboriginal land use
Stone tools found on the ground during farming activities at Warangesda suggest that the pre-European area of Warangesda was not so much a permanent camp, as an area visited for seasonal foraging and occasional ceremonies. The grass lands of the Riverina contained native cereals and plants with fruit or nuts that could be gathered by hand. Small portable grindstones were part of the basic equipment carried by Wiradjuri women along with their babies and young children. Larger game animals such as kangaroos were hunted by the men, roasted in an earth oven, formed by a shallow hole in the ground, containing ash and charcoal. Sometimes the hole was lined with stones or lumps of clay, or was dug straight out of an old clay termite mound. Traces of one Aboriginal oven were found near the Aboriginal hut area, suggesting that some aspects of traditional life continued into the mission period.
Colonial frontier: c 1832- c 1841 and consolidation of pastoralism 1841 -1880
By 1832 the first settler had arrived at Wiradjuri Land near Darlington Point and within a year the Murrumbidgee river frontage between Wagga and Darlington Point was fully occupied by Irish settlers (Gammage 1983: 40). European colonial farmers occupied and sub-divided the land, displacing Wiradjuri hunter-gatherers and establishing Darlington Point as a small town. This had a direct impact upon the lives of Aboriginal people affecting their food sources, introducing disease and alcoholism and decimating their population.
Relations between the Wiradjuri and Irish settlers appeared to be good at first, but during the severe drought of 1838 these relations had deteriorated to the extent that white men formed armed posses to attack Aborigines (Eyre 1965 (1832-59): 175). Wiradjuri reacted by mounting a guerrilla type resistance against the settlers. In 1841, posses of settlers trapped a Wiradjuri group on an island in the Murrumbidgee River (Massacre Island) in which an unknown number of Wiradjuri were massacred. This massacre marked the end of organised Aboriginal resistance in the region (WLC 1980).
White settlers then weathered the 1840s depression, and drought. Increased stress on food resources began to force Wiradjuri into a steadily tightening net of dependence and poverty. At stations they received uneven treatment. This ranged from being welcomed as cheap labour to being shot on sight. The Government officials (Crown Lands Commissioners) also had various attitudes to Aboriginal people, ranging from compassion to hostility (Gammage 1986: 36).
The 1850s brought a flood of people into NSW for gold and creating a booming market for meat, and when gold rushes dissipated, a source of cheap labour for the squatters. Rising wool prices in England brought increasing prosperity to sheep farmers. Many Wiradjuri were becoming dependent on the stations in winter, following traditional hunting and gathering mainly in spring. (Elkin 1951: 164 - 186) From 1861, the Free Selection Acts brought thousands of new settlers into Wiradjuri country.
Rev John Gribble's Warangesda Mission (1879-1884)
Warangesda Aboriginal mission, under missionary John Gribble: 1880-1884. Gribble founded the mission settlement to give Aboriginal people a permanent home. Warangesda was set up after the model of Maloga and earlier mission settlements, as an attempt to create a managed farming community out of the local Aboriginal population.
By the 1870s, Wiradjuri lived in groups of several related families as in traditional times, but some were able to work for settlers, taking government and station handouts when necessary. Men were paid wages for shearing, rabbiting (after 1880 when rabbits spread to the Riverina) or harvesting; women taking in washing and mending or working as domestics. More and more their lives circled the stations. It was in this historical setting, that the Reverend John Gribble travelled into the Riverina in 1878, encountering Wiradjuri people living in hunger and prostitution.
Imprinted on John Gribble's mind was his earliest childhood recollection of becoming separated from his mother. He was found by an Aboriginal woman who cared for him at camp and returned him home. This event came to assume a special significance for him in later life when he was reaching a decision about his destiny for missionary work.
A mission in this context is defined as an Aboriginal settlement wholly organised by a missionary or missionary organisation. In the Wiradjuri language region, there have only been two missions. The first was Wellington Valley (including Rev Watson's continuation of the Wellington Valley Mission at Apsley and Blake's Fall). The only other subsequent mission in the Wiradjuri region was Warangesda, during the 1879 to 1884 period.
The Rev. John Brown Gribble, a miner who became a missionary, was deeply affected by his observation of the exploitation of Aboriginal women in the Riverina of NSW in the early 1870s. This led him to set up a dormitory for women and their children at Warangesda or 'Camp of Mercy' mission on the floodplain of the Murrumbidgee River.
To the amazement of his friends, Gribble decided to leave his comfortable posting at Jerilderie and in 1880 arrived at a parcel of land on the Murrumbidgee which had been revoked from lease. Despite local opposition, he was granted the reserve, given permission to establish a government school for Aboriginal children, and paid a government teacher's salary (Gribble 1886: 39). The name for the mission was chosen around the fireside one evening, combining "Warang" the Wiradjuri word for "camp" and "esda", the last part of the scriptural "Bethesda" (Hebrew meaning "house of mercy") (Halse, C. 1996, Gribble L. 1993).
There was local opposition to the mission. Once a station hand rode in, waving a stirrup iron and threatening to kill anyone who came near him, and gave Gribble a fortnight to close the mission. On another occasion, a case of gin was sent in to get the women drunk (Gribble 1886:41, 42). Whereas Gribble saw the mission as a way of protecting Aboriginal women from 'the white man's horrible passions' (which resulted in) ...traffic in the bodies and souls of the poor blacks' (Gribble 1886: 43),
By the end of 1880, Gribble was able to write a newspaper article describing the mission. At that stage, seven houses had been built inside the ten acre mission settlement, enclosed by a post and rail fence. There were 42 Aboriginal residents, of which two thirds were said to attend the school. All of the building work had been done by the Aboriginal men. A 19th century illustration shows the Warangesda mission at this stage. Other huts for Aboriginal families may also have been built which could have been spaced some distance from the main clearing within the original 507 acre reserve. The locations of such buildings are unable to be inferred although they may have been some fifty metres further to the north where there is a widely dispersed artefact scatter of domestic refuse.
Over the following two years, the mission became well established, the basis of its layout of the next 40 years up to its closure in 1924 was set. Gribble described the mission layout up to the building of the mission church in 1882:
"...quite a township sprung up in the lonely bush, consisting of my own dwelling, the schoolhouse, (which also served as a church), a number of two-roomed cottages for married couples, a home for girls, a hut for single men, store-room, outbuildings, and last but not least, a schoolmaster's cottage." (Gribble 1886 40)
A separate girls dormitory was set up at Warangesda by 1883 and was first supervised by Mrs. Gribble as a home to mothers with their young children, single women, and girls. Although there was a school at Warangesda, the dormitory followed the institutional model of its time, and taught housekeeping skills to the girls to prepare them for respectable employment in menial duties at nearby stations. It also housed them separately in a building which included a dining room and kitchen as well as the dormitory room. Girls were brought in from many places and kept under supervision of dormitory matrons as well as Mrs. Gribble or the wives of later managers.
Over its forty five years of operation, the people at Warangesda came to form a unified community, so that after the mission's closure, smaller communities were able to be formed nearby at Darlington Point and at the Narrandera Sandhills. The sedentary nature of mission life and other European ways such as yeomen farming, European dress and Christian belief, were underpinned by the continuing substratum of Aboriginal culture. There are hints in the historical record of the persistence of an enduring Aboriginal subculture at Warangesda.
One year the manager noted that two men arrived on the mission, after which '"the Aborigines had a Dance." (Diary May 1892) The following year both the manager and Rev. Nobbs of Whitton agreed to send twenty five men to Hay to hold a corroboree in aid of the Hay Hospital (Diary May 1893). Clearly, Aboriginal ceremony was seen as posing no direct threat to the Mission's objectives and looked on as pure performance rather than as a vehicle for the expression of Aboriginal culture. According to local lore, trees were marked near the infant burials at Warangesda. Some hunting and gathering continued to supplement shop bought foods.
During the mission period the desired, most civilising method of subsistence was seen to be small scale farming (Goodall 1982: 34). Yet continuing shortages of food supplies necessitated the occasional use of Aboriginal hunting and fishing knowledge. One recorded occasion when the mission ran out of meat, Aboriginal men were sent out on a hunt and returned in the evening with a kangaroo. The next two day hunting expedition returned with six kangaroos although it seemed a non-event to the manager who added: "Nothing important to note'" (Diary July 1887). Gribble himself recorded one occasion when traditional fishing methods were used whereby "half a ton of fish" were speared in a downstream pool.
Gribble's diaries give the impression that while there was no lack of goodwill, the mutual incomprehension between the two cultures gave limited results. Gribble had set up the mission on the normal model of its time. The retaining of management in white hands, the assimilation in church and school and the removal of children to dormitories away from parental influence, were standard methods employed by conservative settlement missionaries, such as Gribble.
Nevertheless, mission life with its attempts to civilise the Aborigines brought changes to Wiradjuri culture. By about the turn of the century, English had practically replaced the Wiradjuri language (Read 1988: 49 - 57), and rations of flour and tea had become food staples. Loss of confidence in the traditional Wiradjuri way was accompanied by a reshaping of their culture. A c1890s photograph of the mission church (AIATSIS collection) indicates that Wiradjuri regarded themselves as respectable people. They appear dressed in Victorian fashion, gazing confidently into the camera.
After a nervous breakdown, John Gribble travelled to England to publish his book "Black But Comely" and to raise funds for Warangesda. But on returning, he found Warangesda's daily frustrations unbearable. He had been at Warangesda for four years. No longer able to continue at Warangesda, Gribble left to establish a mission in Western Australia. There he caused a furore amongst the settlers by writing an expose of local mistreatment of Aborigines, "Dark deeds in a sunny land" (Pike 1972: 185- 189).
In 1887 the mission was abandoned and Gribble returned to NSW, where he opened a mission on the Darling River for the Aborigines Protection Association. In 1889-90 he was rector of Temora in NSW where he built the first church. In 1892 he went to Queensland to open Yarrabah mission near Cairns. Suffering from malaria, he retired to Sydney where he died on 3 June 1893. His tombstone in the Waverley cemetery described him as the 'Blackfellows' Friend' (Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1996). His son Ernest Bulmer took over the running of Yarrabah mission.
Warangesda Aboriginal Station under the Aborigines Protection Board of NSW (1884-1924)
In 1884 the Aborigines Protection Association took on the management of the mission and with its successor, the newly formed Aborigines Protection Board of NSW, continued to run Warangesda as a self-sufficient 'Aboriginal station'. By 1891, the mission had 600 acres already cleared, with 25 remaining to be cleared. There were 73 acres were under wheat. As a supply of shade trees was ordered, it is likely that the main pepper tree plantings date from this period. A 1908 traveller described the Mission as comprising "...2000 acres of land on which have been erected church, school, superintendent's residence, about a score of cottages for the blacks, and also a girls' dormitory. The station carries about 800 sheep, besides a few horses and cattle, and a little wheat growing is done ...The neat little white-washed one and two roomed cottages are occupied by about seventy (Aboriginal residents) ...but there have been times when nearly three hundred have been accommodated, though not all in the cottages of course ... The settlement is intended principally as a home for women and children and old men, and if any young able-bodied male(s) ...ever call in at Warangesda they are advised to seek outside work ...The men look after wheat growing and the stock, keep the fences and buildings in repair ...For this special work they are paid a small weekly wage, and men, women and children, of course, get their weekly allowance of rations. In addition the men earn good money by trapping rabbits, foxes and opossums, the skins of which are consigned to Sydney." (Harris 1913: 157-162).
Yet by 1916, the manager was requesting the Aborigines Protection Board for a pistol and handcuffs. Over the years to follow, many men were expelled from Warangesda and possibly an equal number of children were removed to institutions. The population of Warangesda was so reduced by 1924 that the Board was able to close it down and hand it back to the Lands Department as a rural lease. Within ten years of the manager being issued with pistol and handcuffs, the people of Warangesda had been expelled, the contents of their mission auctioned off, and the land offered to new settlers. By this time most of the residents had moved to riverside camps and to the reserve, several kilometres away.
After Warangesda was closed down, the profound consequences of resettlement had come to form an important element in older Aboriginal people's consciousness. Isobel Edwards remembered her childhood in the 'mission' as a golden age, compared with later life outside. Excerpts of interviews with her provide one Aboriginal perspective on what was lost by the closure of Warangesda:
"Of what I remember, I think it was a very good place, very nice, but I was born there myself. I was born 76 years ago on 26th August 1909 and I grew up there until I was about 12. My first memory of Warangesda was what a beautiful little village it was, a real little town. 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. 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. Some of the houses had four rooms and some had two rooms. 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.
"It had its own school, its church and its manager's house and a dormitory at one time for all the girls that had nobody. It was like a little town. It had a couple of fruit shops and there was a little butcher shop. Shops were mostly on the end of verandahs- the cool drink shops, that is. It had all that and a general store. I can remember about 17 houses and then apparently they used to have quarters for single men, but that was before I can remember...
"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 30 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.
"My Dad (grandfather Stark), used to do a lot of droving, and of course they only had a horse and dray then and he used to be away for months at a time, so his family stayed at the mission. It was really good. You know, it had all its own machinery, ploughs and things like that. They sowed their own crops and stripped their own crops and sent them away to Sydney. They used to cart the wheat to Willbriggie. Willbriggie was a big siding then. They had their own horses and cattle and everything like that, sheep. They didn't shear at Warangesda though. They used to take the sheep out to Beaumont's shearing shed as there was no shearing shed at the mission. They did their own dipping, and killed their own meat at the butcher's shop. You didn't have to pay for the meat, it was given to you. 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 30 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 Tubbo Station, another big shed. He was a blacksmith too, they had their own little chaff cutter.
"Different managers did different things. One of them started a big vegetable garden down near the church. The vegetables were for everybody on the mission- they didn't sell them, they used to give them to us. Of course, another manager came along and pulled it out as it was too much extra work for him to see to. I think the managers broke the mission by being nasty and mean. 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.
"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 roused on. About 60 years ago, I think it was. It broke up when everybody moved away from it. There was nobody left so they closed it down." -Isobel Edwards, Darlington Point.
In 1886, an epidemic of measles and diphtheria killed a significant proportion of adults and children on the mission (Diary 1886). White people were not exempt from the ill health arising from those living conditions. Mrs Gribble's cousin (Mr. Carpenter) who was employed as the mission schoolmaster, contracted a chill whilst duck shooting and died a few days later from a respiratory infection. He was just 28 years old. (Diary Nov. 1887) In April 1889 the manager died from pleurisy and pneumonia.
Crowded conditions and shortages of flour and meat would have lowered the standard of health. A government official visiting in the year of the 1891 floods, noted that wind blew through the slabs of the girls' dormitory and that with the damp weather many people had colds which could turn into consumption. He recommended that the dormitory be lined internally with layers of canvas and paper. (Treseder 1891: 35) Later that same year a typhoid epidemic swept through Warangesda, killing several people including another manager, Mr. Clark. In one typhoid epidemic, all of the six children in one family were killed (Sue Haw: Pers. Comm, 1993). The dormitory walls were finally lined and a fireplace installed three years later. In the same year, however, a critical article appeared in the 'Narrandera Argus' which bitterly protested Eliza Murray's admission (she was dying of pleurisy and typhoid) from Warangesda into a public ward at the hospital stating that: The condition of the woman in question reflects strongly upon the management of the mission ...vice and vermin must combine to make the place in question something very far removed from a paradise (Narrandera Argus 27 Feb 1894).
Although statistics are not available for infant mortality rates in the Warangesda mission, the mortality rates in both Aboriginal and European families were high in comparison to present day conditions. The diaries record poignant detail of illness and death on the mission. One of the manager's duties was to arrange infant funerals and burials in the children's cemetery on the mission block.
The mission experienced a short phase of government funded building and expansion in the 1896 to 1903 period. Warangesda seems to have become a self contained and confident community that gave the Warangesda Aborigines a reputation among the local Europeans as 'the aristocrats' of Aboriginal communities. At this time Warangesda was operated as a largely self-sufficient reserve, a so-called Aboriginal Station, with a population of up to one hundred and fifty people.
From 1909 onwards, the Aborigines Protection Act aimed to abolish reserves and fringe-camps by driving Aborigines off them, and into the white community. Regulations were drawn up for life on stations and reserves to make life amongst whites more attractive. The Board began an active policy of expulsion of young men so they would find work off the mission, Iight-coloured people which the Board defined as non- Aborigines, and children who were sent to be trained at institutions.
By 1920, according to Peter Read, a total of 41 men had been expelled, mostly on the grounds of breaking the station regulations, and possibly over a third of children at Warangesda had been put in institutions (Read 1983: 107 - 179). Some households probably left to protect their children. The population of Warangesda was so reduced by 1924, that the Board was able to close it.
Bill Gammage provides a vivid account of the closure of Warangesda:
"The news was a shock to the surviving residents. Knocker Williams first heard it from a white man in Darlington Point. 'Bloody hell", he said. The government cleared the people off and sold their property: at a big clearing sale in January 1925, 500 sheep, 9 cattle, 5 horses and a lot of plant were auctioned off. 'They took the heart from the Aborigines when they did that', Knocker recalled. One old man, Jim Turner, who had helped John Gribble find the site in 1879 and laboured for the mission for 45 years, refused to leave. He stood defiantly defending his front door with a shotgun, but they pulled his roof down around him and left him to the ruins. He was still there in 1930, aged 85." (Gammage 1986: 166).
The Aborigines Protection Act, which was intended to incorporate Aboriginal people into white society, in fact dislocated communities such as Warangesda. These were then forced to resettle in other camps and reserves. Some people such as Iris Clayton's family moved onto the river flats nearby, near the sawmill at Bunyip Bend or near Waradgery Beach (Iris Clayton: pers. comm.). Others moved onto the Darlington Point Reserve (on a former police paddock). Communities also formed at the Narrandera Sandhills, Grong Grong, and at Three Ways near Griffith.
The closure of Warangesda was part of a wave of reserve closures in the 1914 to 1926 period, which also closed the other large late 19th century reserves in NSW: Brewarrina, Burnt Bridge and Cummeragunja. These closures may have been linked to the partitioning of soldier settler blocks, for soldiers returning from the First World War. Board policy to reduce Aboriginal reserves may have played a part: A view that Aboriginal people were being assimilated into the general population and that 'real' Aborigines were a dying race and would no longer require land may have influenced policy (NSW Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs Paper No 4: 5, 30).
King family farm 1927-1957
In 1926, the land (originally 507 acres, later increased to 2100 acres, later reduced to 1634 acres) was put up for sale by ballot and sold to a young farmer, Stewart King, in 1927 (WLC: 1980: 2). The mission buildings became the King farmstead and were adapted to farm use until 1957, when a new homestead and sheds were built beside Waddi Creek about a kilometre away. Stewart King's descendants have continued to farm the same land to 2009.
The mission settlement site has remained part of the Kings' farm but was largely abandoned, used mainly for shed storage and stock grazing.
Warangesda as a founding settlement for other Aboriginal communities
The people that left Warangesda went out to other reserves and fringe camps and founded other Aboriginal communities. Groups at major Aboriginal settlements such as Warangesda, Brungle, Hollywood, and the Murrie forged distinct identities that were grafted onto earlier language group or tribal identity. Much of the present day Narrandera Aboriginal community is linked by kinship ties which can be traced back to the Bamblett family at Warangesda Mission in the 1880s.
Narrandera Sandhills Community: Following the closure of Warangesda Aboriginal station in 1925, the refugee households arrived at a former Cobb and Co stop outside of Narrandera and set up the Sandhills community camp. Every Wiradjuri family in the Narrandera district has a connection with the Sandhills (also known as the Bottom Sandhills or Weir's Reserve). It was the largest community camp in Narrandera and was emptied by about 1940, when it was designated as a TSR (travelling stock route).
Hill 60 Community (Narrandera): Some Aboriginal descendants of Warangesda and Narrandera families began buying blocks of land at Hill 60 as early as 1933, when Archibald Williams, Angelina Naden, and Norman Bright owned land there (1933 Narrandera Town Map, Dept. of Lands). Hill 60 reached its peak as an Aboriginal settlement over the 1940s when it was fully occupied by Aboriginal families. During the 1960s the settlement continued to shrink from about 30 to 20 Aboriginal households.
Darlington Point Reserve and town community: Within a few years of Warangesda mission being founded, an alternative camp to the mission block had formed on the river bank, half a kilometre away. Years later, when Warangesda was run by the government as an Aboriginal Station and had unpopular managers, the whole community would decamp to the river for weeks at a time. After it was closed in 1925, the refugees spread over a large area, some moving to Darlington Point reserve.
Erambie Reserve, Cowra
Although the reserve was declared as early as 1890, the Cowra Aboriginal population only began to swell in the early 1920s, mainly as a result of people leaving Warangesda |