Barwick, D. Coranderrk and Cumeroogunga: Pioneers and Policy, in T.S Epstein & D. Penny

Barwick, D. Coranderrk and Cumeroogunga: Pioneers and Policy, In T.S Epstein & D. Penny, eds Opportunity and Response: Case Studies in Economic Development, C. Hurst & Co London, 1972, pp.44-68

CUMEROOGUNGA (pronounced Cummeragunja)

The history of economic development at Cumeroogunga can be documented only from the published reports of the New South Wales New South Wales, for the unpublished contemporary records are either lost or inaccessible to researchers. The preservation of the journals and papers of the missionary Daniel Matthews by the Mitchell Library, Sydney, does allow adequate documentation of the earlier Maloga Mission.

The Murray River political boundary was no boundary to the Joti-Jota and Pangerang, (pronounced Yorta Yorta/Bangerang) who had traditionally occupied both shores, and thus their administration was disputed by the two governments. The Victorian Board named a half dozen settlers as ‘Local Guardians’ responsible for issuing blankets and some food and clothing from 1860 to 1891, and in 1861 asked the New South Wales government to provide similar aid, to discourage immigration. But the latter’s grants were negligible before 1883. Most of the young natives from the Upper Murray region to the east were transferred to Coranderrk between 1869 and 1879, but those about Echuca were especially reluctant to leave their tribal country, and fled across the Murray whenever the Victorian Board tried to collect their children. Inspector Green repeatedly recommended establishment of a station here, anxiously reporting that although they were readily employed and earned large sums they were ‘robbed of their money by shanty and public-house keepers’ and the death rate was alarming because of the lack of medical care.

Depopulation ln 1863 the Board enumerated 184 natives living at Echuca and camps in the Upper Murray district. Fourteen years later only 77 adults and 24 children remained here, but another 23 adults and 26 children (13 born at the station) were residents of Coranderrk. All of these, but only 25 of the wanderers, were half castes. Between 1879 and 1895 the Murray natives left Coranderrk to settle at Maloga Mission or its successor, Cumeroogunga Station.

Efforts to obtain land, 1874 -1883

An Echuca merchant, Daniel Matthews, began to visit the Echuca camp from 1864 and from 1866 escorted small numbers of children to Coranderrk. But despite Green’s support the Victorian Board would not assist him to establish a station for the Murray natives. In April 1870 he began to seek public subscriptions for a children’s refuge, to be established on twenty acres of land he had donated, across the Murray in New South Wales. In June 1874 he abandoned his business to open this ‘Maloga Mission’, acting as a volunteer lay missionary without support from any church. Eighty resided here by 1881. Matthews had to turn away many men, for the women and children had most need of protection. Donations were so small and irregular during the first decade that residents were often famished for days at a time’ and were periodically dispersed to camp and fish at the Moira Lakes until ‘the Lord again provided’ government gave intermittent grants, totalling £828 Board, for the unpublished contemporary records are either lost or between 1877 and 1882, but the Victorian Board could not assist because the station was across the Murray, although natives who ‘belonged’ to Victoria were still allowed to collect clothing issues at the Victorian Board’s depots. And 175 of the 251 enrolled at Maloga between 1874 and 1886 had some claim to Victorian recognition: 107 were local Joti-Jota and Pangerang, 24 came from camps in the Goulburn valley and the upper and lower reaches of the Murray, and 44 came from Coranderrk. Other Coranderrk folk followed, when exiled by the 1886 Act. Some 20 returned to their distant places of origin in New South Wales, 55 died at Maloga, and the remainder settled at Cumeroogunga after 1887.

Again and again Matthews’ reports noted that the men were eager workers, ‘competent and able to support themselves by agricultural labour’. But they could not obtain permanent employment. Settlers preferred to exploit the camps on their properties by paying men on a seasonal or casual basis for farm labour, shearing, fencing, harvesting and horse-breaking, expecting them to live by subsistence hunting and fishing most of the year. Maloga could not be developed as a farm community: Matthews could not provide sufficient work for the resident labour force on twenty acres. He hesitated to employ them on his own land while he could not afford wages, for antagonistic local settlers had predicted that ‘slave labour’ was the ‘real aim’ of his mission. Their hostility was partly caused by the effect of this refuge on the stability of their work force: men absented themselves to take the small cash component of their wages to Matthews for the support of their dependents, and often stayed on to help build homes there. Settlers had tolerated the native camps because the presence of their dependents tied workers to the property, and some owners tried to prevent Matthews from removing the women and children to his mission. The ire of certain others was roused by Matthews’ frequent and well-publicised complaints about the ‘use’ of native women by themselves and their white employees, his enlistment of the Victorian Board and the police of both colonies to curb the practice, and his attempts to get maintenance payments from the known fathers of some children. Matthews was one of the pioneers of irrigation on the Murray, and supported the mission and his own large family from his garden, vineyard and orchard. By 1880 he could afford wages at the rate of sixpence an hour (using chits redeemable in rations) for all work done on the mission acreage. But without land, livestock or implements he could not make the station self-supporting or even admit all the needy wanderers who sought his aid. From 1882 he encouraged three men to farm thirty acres of his own land, even borrowing a plough for them, and by 1885 he was helping two more to farm small rented acreages, while another was ‘dummying’ a selection for a European owner.

Significance of 1881 Land Grant

From 1881 to 1887 Matthews vainly pleaded for the help of the Victorian Board in obtaining a small reserve across the river as a site for workshops; any industry actually located at Maloga would be defeated by double customs duties for import of raw materials and the return of products to Victoria. And from 1881 he vainly begged both governments for boats and nets (as given elsewhere) so the men could develop their subsistence fishing as a commercial enterprise. Matthews, once an Echuca ‘ships chandler’, was well aware of the profitability of this industry: from 1855 Rice’s Murray River Fishing Company had ‘engaged Aborigines to use their skills’ to supply Victorian markets, grossing up to £10,000 by 1862 ‘on an outlay of not more than £2,000 in nets, huts, coaches and wages for the Aborigines’ (Priestley 1965:46-7).

On 5 July 1881 a petition signed by 42 Maloga men was presented to the New South Wales Governor. The demands were exactly those of the Taungerong and Woiwurrung in 1859. In fact a member of this 1859 deputation, William Barak, was then visiting Maloga with his dying son, and there were twenty other Coranderrk folk either visiting or settled in 1881. The petitioners begged a ‘sufficient area of land to cultivate and raise stock’, ‘that we may form homes for our families’ and ‘in a few years, support ourselves by our own industry’. They asked this as compensation, because ‘all the land within our tribal boundaries has been taken possession of by the Government and white settlers’. The formality of the phrasing and the excellence of the spelling suggest that Matthews assisted, but the Joti-jota and Pangerang had quite independently made earlier plans to seek compensation for the effects of European intrusion. The Victorian Board’s 1861 report quotes a Local Guardian’s report that a native of the Moira tribe, who rode up the Murray with me last November, informed me of the intention of himself and five other aborigines to proceed as a deputation to His Excellency the Governor to request him to impose a tax of £10 on each steamer passing up and down the Murray, to be expended in supplying food to the natives in lieu of the fish which had been driven away. In January 1880 Matthews and his friend the Rev. Gribble (who had just begun a second mission, Warangesda, 150 miles north) went to Sydney to organise an ‘Aborigines Protection Association’ to collect public subscriptions for the two missions, the only refuges for Aborigines in the whole of New South Wales. Their pleas, plus the reports of the government ‘Protector’ appointed in 188l, stimulated an official inquiry (King and Fosbery 1882) and appointment of an Aborigines Protection Board in 1883. The Board did not immediately establish its own stations, until 1886 merely matching public donations to the missions as the government wished to encourage ‘benevolent effort’. But the Association was relieved of control of the stations in 1897, as its contributions were negligible. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald of. 19 July 1882 explains this lack of public support: while marvelling that the two missions had proved that Aborigines were ‘not only capable of working steadily but take a pride in their homes and educational advantages’ the writer still assumed that the question of ‘how to provide for’ the natives would soon be ‘settled by their final disappearance’, and noted:

Unfortunately, the interest taken in the question by the general public is comparatively small, as the Aborigines are considered too debased in their natures and too low in the scale of mental capacity to render possible any successful scheme for redeeming them from their nomadic habits.

From 1883 Matthews had regular funds and could welcome all who wished to settle at Maloga, a total of 153 residents in 1887.

1881 Petition for Land (Important for analysis of Yorta Yorta Native Title Claim)

The Aborigines’ 1881 petition for land was answered on 9 April 1883, when 1,800 acres were reserved for their use, three miles upriver from the mission homestead, adjoining the Matthews’ freehold. The men fenced the reserve boundary by 1885, and worked without wages clearing this land and caring for the thousand sheep Matthews bought with an Association grant in 1883. He had also received £500 for building materials. As there was no suitable homestead site on the reserve he proceeded without permission, to erect cottages on the mission acres. But the ownership of the mission land had become a problem when the Association assumed control. Under the 1867 land legislation Matthews and a brother had each acquired a ‘conditional-purchase selection’ of 320 acres, adjoining a jointly owned freehold of 121 acres. During their 1882 inquiry King and Fosbery had assumed that the mission premises were on the freehold and therefore advocated its purchase, but survey maps of 1884 show that the buildings were actually located on Matthews’ selection. The Association and the new Board now demanded that the brothers surrender the whole of their 761 acres as an addition to the reserve. Matthews repeatedly explained that he could not sacrifice his only resource because of his dependent family, but his offer to donate forty acres was refused. Because of this title dispute his relations with the Association became more and more strained.

By November 1886 Maloga had fourteen dwellings (ten of them new four- room weatherboard cottages with pine floors, iron roofs, two brick fireplaces and glass windows) and eleven other buildings. Each household had a vegetable garden; residents cultivated three acres of wheat; and Matthews maintained his own irrigated gardens. A reporter from Echuca’s Riverine Herald newspaper, visiting for a week, declared that residents’ homes were ‘as well furnished as the house of the average selector’ and praised the men’s skills:

They can put up a house, a stockyard, a fence, a stable in a thoroughly workmanlike manner. They can also shear a sheep or follow the plough. The men are very handy. . They work well when they start, but some of them take an awful time starting.

Matthews’ journals had noted earlier that the Maloga folk talked incessantly of their desire to ‘own’ blocks of land, and he found them more and more ‘rebellious’. Many, particularly the newcomers from Coranderrk, openly declared that he paid too much attention to their spiritual state and too little to their economic welfare. Their land hunger was acute; five years had passed since they wrote the petition, yet they had neither homes nor crops on the reserve and the proposed extensions for a homestead site were being bitterly contested by European neighbours. Moreover, the Coranderrk exiles had made them well aware that future generations could be suddenly dispossessed by new policy decisions. The reporter noted their opinions:

I was sorry to learn that they are getting a little discontented and listened with much interest to their views of what they considered would be best for them. Their desire is that the reserve may be portioned off in farms, and given to the various families. They say — and I cannot gainsay it — that they are as competent to clear and cultivate the land as white men would be, and they assert that the possession of a piece of land of their own which they could leave to their children after them would be a stimulus to industry. The more industrious say that their progress is retarded by those who don’t care to work, and this begets a spirit of carelessness and indifference. They don’t ask a selling title of the land, but want it granted in such a manner that they can leave it to their wives and children.

Their ambition was innocently encouraged by Matthews and, for other reasons, by the new staff members sent by the Association, who had been instructed to foster this land hunger as a means of encouraging the residents’ transfer to the government reserve. When the Governor visited the district in 1887 a deputation presented their petition for allotment of one hundred acres to each Aboriginal ‘capable of and wishing to farm for himself’.

In October 1887 the Association refused further funds until all buildings were moved to the reserve. Rations were already short and the men were refusing to work without food. Matthews was demoted and his assistant became manager. Most were loyal, refusing to follow the new manager to the reserve, and went hungry as a result. Then most of the Coranderrk folk left after one of their number was expelled for neglecting his religious duties. Matthews was grieved at the number who ‘went out to camp as they stated to "get more liberty" ‘, and dismayed where the ‘rebellious’ were brought back by the Association’s manager to dismantle all the buildings in~l888. The majority were now forced to move, as the manager warned that their cottages would be taken anyhow, and threatened that they would lose their chance for a farm block on the reserve. He subsequently warned residents of the reserve that they would forfeit their rations and be expelled if they visited or helped the twenty-six Aborigines remaining at Maloga.

Matthews remained at the Maloga site until 1894, caring for as many as fifty natives. He then rented land on the Victorian side of the Murray until 1899, and tried to maintain a ‘refuge’ for half-caste children. But the Victorian Board considered this an attempt to undermine their absorption policy, and publicly ridiculed his appeals for donations. The Maloga land never became part of the Cumeroogunga reserve. It is still farmed by whites, and drying-sheds are built on the ploughed over cemetery, where fifty-five Aborigines and several of Matthews’ children were buried. This ‘sacrilege’, like the destruction of the Cumeroogunga cemetery by lease- holders (before 1944), and the vandalism at the Coranderrk cemetery, is a serious grievance for present-day Aborigines, who feel bitter resentment that ‘them white men won’t even let us keep land for our dead bones’.

The pioneer period, 1883-1906

Cumeroogunga thus began unhappily. The cottages were not rebuilt for a full year. The 134 residents still worked for rations only, under worse living conditions, and had to hand over all outside earnings to pay for dependents’ rations.

The original reservation of I, 800 acres was inadequate for pastoral and agricultural development, as only 400 acres of sandhills were above flood level and suitable for cultivation and the remainder was heavily timbered and subject to annual flooding. Local settlers’ pressure defeated the Board’s 1885 and 1887 applications for extension, but an additional 90 acres was granted in 1890. By 1899 the area of 2,400 acres was ‘too limited for the purposes of the station’ and the Board successfully applied for 320 acres in 1900. Soon afterwards the reserve reached its final size of 2,965 acres.

Between 1883 and 1893 the men cleared 1,400 acres, and erected forty buildings plus necessary water tanks, yards and fencing, although they also worked away much of the year. By 1908 there were sixty buildings, including forty-six cottages, a church, a ‘meeting house’, a school and dispensary, stores and woolshed, staff houses, and many outbuildings. The cottages were laid out in three streets, with graveled footpaths and ornamental trees. A reticulated tank water supply from 1899 was improved with pumping equipment from 1908, which maintained the cottage gardens, the orchard and vegetable crops, the sports ground, central park and fodder crops in ‘year-round perfection’.

By 1900 clothing issues were given only to the old, the destitute and school children, and ‘most residents’ bought ‘all of their clothing’ with their own earnings. The Board maintained a ‘sale store’ providing food staples and some drapery goods at nearly cost price from 1888 to 1928, and the station accounts regularly show a small income from ‘sale of meat’, which was presumably purchased by residents. These goods and an unknown but apparently large volume of purchases in nearby towns supplemented the Board ration of ‘flour, sugar, tea and meat (when available)’ which was issued to the aged and dependent orphans and intermittently to workers and their dependents. Workers had to refund from their outside earnings the cost of supplies given dependents during their absences. A station crop of potatoes, vegetables and fruit supplemented the dry ration while the water supply functioned, and householders’ own gardens provided substantial quantities of vegetables and fruit from 1891 to the late 1 920s. Subsistence fishing was always a very important source of protein, and throughout the century officials repeatedly noted that the Murray folk appeared better nourished than Aborigines elsewhere.

Priestly (1965:100-62), outlining the history of farming in the Echuca district, notes that stock-keeping was always difficult because of the dry climate and dairying and vegetable crops were impossible without expensive irrigation. The usual pattern was mixed grazing and farming (with wheat almost the only crop) but this required a minimum holding of 500 acres per family for prosperity and expensive machinery (because of the critical timing of ploughing and harvest) to prevent losses. Manuring was not practised and the wheat lands were everywhere exhausted after twenty years. Much later farmers learned that irrigation once or twice a year and fertilising with a seed drill could increase yields from the usual 7½-ID bushels to 25 bushels per acre. The New South Wales State Statistical Registers indicate that the County of Cadell average was only 8.2 bushels per acre for the period 1896-1915, and show that despite the lack of machinery, inferior land and supposed gross incompetence of the Cumeroogunga farmers, their bushel per acre production was above the county average for 9 of 18 annual returns and below it for only 6 years.

1887 Petition for Land

The 1887 petition for hundred-acre farm blocks was not granted. Until 1895 all grain was a jointly-cultivated ‘station crop’, but from 1896 to 1907 this was augmented by ‘farm blocks’ of varying acreage, cleared, sown and harvested by individuals. Their profits were a private matter, not included in the produce accounts. Six small blocks were allotted in 1895, another seven during 1896, and by 1898 twenty were being cultivated and cleared. The manager reported that ‘more blocks would be taken up but no land is available’. In 1898 twenty men sowed 140 acres; when the reserve was extended in 1899 eighteen block-holders sowed 349 acres. Their number was not stated in subsequent reports but the 346 acres sown in 1906 is virtually identical. Unfortunately their harvests of wheat and hay were often merged with the station crop or omitted altogether from the annual reports. Only the first crop is detailed, in the manager’s report for 31 December 1896:

The farm-blocks men ploughed an aggregate of 70 acres which they put under wheat. John Atkinson ploughed and sowed 27 acres with wheat - about 4 acres were destroyed by rabbits; 17 acres were cut for hay, giving a total yield of about 4 tons; 6 acres were stripped, giving a total yield of 72 bushels. He returned 12 bags of wheat to Station, that quantity having been supplied him for seed. He has cut most of his hay for chaff, and has sold over I ton. Robert Cooper ploughed and sowed 9 acres with wheat, which he cut for hay, getting a return of about 3½ tons. E. Joachim ploughed and sowed 10 acres with wheat; cut 3 acres for hay, getting about I ton return; stripped the other 7 acres for about 38 bushels of wheat. F. and H. Walker ploughed and sowed 8 acres with wheat; cut 7 acres for hay, getting about 2½ tons hay, and stripped 1 acre for 9 bushels, which they returned to Station. Bagot Morgan ploughed and sowed 8 acres with wheat, which he cut for hay, getting about 1 ton, which he sold for £3/lOfO. George Allen ploughed and sowed 9 acres; rabbits destroyed about 2 acres; crops cut for hay, about 11/4 tons.

As for the station crop of 150 acres, the 110 acres cut for hay yielded 45 tons (including 5 tons ‘used during the harvesting’), 25 acres were stripped of 120 bushels of wheat, and 14 acres were not yet ready for stripping. Years later officials justified the 1907 decision to repossess these blocks by asserting that they had been ‘generally neglected’. The 1907 Report says that the Board decision was taken after a September visit by two members, who collected evidence from the manager and local committee that the men ‘had, after sufficient opportunity, failed to properly work the blocks’. But the annual reports of the manager and committee from 1898 to 1907 had consistently declared their progress ‘very satisfactory’ and ascribed poor harvests to the droughts and floods afflicting the region. Only once was their management of the blocks criticised: in 1903 they sowed only 120 acres and some let portions of their blocks to Indian hawkers for agistment fees, but this stock was turned off and the indignant proprietors were informed that they did not have a title (as they had always been allowed to believe) but merely a ‘permissive occupancy’. In 1904 they sowed only 200 acres and some again ‘let their blocks for grazing purposes’, but the manager was ordered to impound all cattle as ‘the Board will not allow any such practice. Their angry protests to the local member of Parliament were rebuked as ‘frivolous or unfounded’ arid the Board warned that further complaint ‘would lead to the removal of the discontented ones from the station’. But the block-holders in fact acted economically’, and were vindicated in not risking a larger crop, because the station and block harvests of 1902, 1903 and 1904 were lost through ‘almost complete failure of the wheat’. After drought caused failure of their 1902 crop of 289 acres the block-holders needed cash to purchase food, particularly as meat was suddenly excluded from the ration owing to a reduction of Board funds. Agistment fees provided the only certain cash income: the manager reported that the droughts of 1903 and 1904 were so severe that ‘fishing was very poor and there was no game on the lakes, even the rabbits being poor and diseased.’ Their 1905 crop, from 206 acres, was only ‘fair’ because of flooding (which did enable the men to sell ‘several thousands’ of rabbit skins), and the 346 acres sowed in 1906 failed entirely ‘owing to the floods, which at one time covered over a thousand acres’. The 1907 report did not distinguish the block-holders’ harvest, merely noting that the gross value of wheat and hay from 290 acres was £493. despite losses from drought.

The contemporary reports do not suggest that the block-holders were incompetent, but rather that the abolition of the farm blocks became a necessary policy because the Board’s Parliamentary grant was sharply reduced in 1902. The local committee resigned and was replaced in 1904. By 1905 most of the reserve had been cleared of timber, and Board members visited to consult on plans for ‘making the station more reproductive’. In 1906 the Board hired a farm overseer and authorised expenditure for wire netting and wages to complete eight miles of rabbit- proof boundary fence; for tanks and a pump to improve the water supply; for cattle and sheep; and for six expensive machines intended for large- scale wheat cultivation. The 1906 Annual Report anticipated that ‘a much larger acreage will in future be put under cultivation’ so the station would ‘become almost, if not quite, self-supporting’. The report declared that the Board ‘steadily refused to entertain’ the many European applications to lease reserves, and had refused residents’ pleas for permission to make agistment agreements. The report also included a statement of policy, ‘reserves are for the use of Aborigines generally’, as the Board had received many complaints from residents who ‘apparently believed’ reserves were ‘their exclusive property’.

According to the 1907 report the prevailing drought was so disastrous that most of the newly purchased stock was sent elsewhere for agistment, and block-holders made ‘but little income’ from their crops. The Board announced that their cleared land would in future be worked ‘for the general benefit of the station’ while the former occupants were paid ‘wages on the usual scale’. The next two reports acknowledged that disappointed block-holders had made many protests: discipline had been preserved by the ‘removal of certain undesirable residents’.

The Board takes control, 1906-1918

The block-holders now had wages in lieu of independence. The rates were never mentioned in the annual reports, and the 1910 Regulations made under the 1909 Aborigines Act left wages to the managers’ discretion. Old people today recall that contract work brought ‘maybe a pound a week and the ration’. The block-holders, the old recall, had initially received a part- ration until harvest time, and in ensuing years subsisted on their harvest income plus earnings from general station work such as fencing and building, or cash wages earned elsewhere by shearing and labouring tasks

Despite the new machinery the wheat acreage did not expand until 1915, when 600 acres was expected to produce 12,500 bushels and 250 tons of hay. Drought affected the 1908 crop, but the annual report noted a grain income of £170 plus 450 bushels of wheat (~88) and 65 tons of hay (fl95) still to be sold. In 1909 floods and grubs destroyed 170 acres but the grain income was £33 plus produce valued at £220, still unsold. The acreage cultivated during the next two years was small, but the ‘unsold produce’ was valued at £310 and £540. In 1912 the acreage climbed, and wheat and hay had a total value of £600. The 1913 crop was also disappointing, because of delays in planting and harvesting, but grain produced a cash income of £287 and 3,900 bushels ‘after allowing for seed and horse feed’ remained for sale. The 430 acres cultivated in 1914 ‘failed absolutely owing to the drought’. Because the Board published no detailed reports after 1915 subsequent acreages are unknown, but the accounts show that grain production declined sharply after the peak years of 1916 and 1917, while the 1918 report declared that ‘sheep have taken the place~ of agriculture on account of the floods prevalent during the past two years’. Although stock numbers were only intermittently reported, it is clear that Cumeroogunga was never fully stocked. The thousand sheep bought in 1883 yielded a wool income of £116 five years later, but by 1898 there were only 166 sheep, 15 horses and 32 cattle on the reserve. In 1902 £336 was expended on sheep, but two years later they mustered only 381 sheep, 6 horses and 19 cattle. During 1905 50 heifers and 7 horses were purchased for £210, and the sheep were presumably eaten, for the muster totalled 13 horses, 76 Board cattle and 5 cows owned by residents. A year later there were 34 horses and 121 cattle: for the first time stock was sold, for an income of £221. In 1907 there were 19 horses, 154 cattle and 223 newly purchased sheep. Horse and cattle numbers remained stable for 1908, 1909 and the last recorded muster in 1912, but the sheep numbers had climbed to 900 and then fallen to 514. In this five-year period sheep purchases totalled £794, while the sale of lambs and cattle brought an income of £538, and sales of meat, presumably to residents, totalled £218. In 1913 £111 was spent on sheep, but the income from stock was £850 (wool £336, lambs £207, cattle £289 and meat £18). In 1914 the worst drought of the century forced the sale of ‘a majority of a fine herd’ at the ‘low price’ of £290 while the remaining cattle and horses were sent to Victoria for agistment. Although 200 breeding ewes were purchased, for £105, their 130 lambs had to be ‘killed for rations’ and meat sales totalled only £13. No meat was sold from 1915 to 1918 and stock sales totalled only £100, but there was apparently a small income from wool and hides. The 1918 report announced the erection of a new wool shed, but income from wool, hides and stock sales were not shown separately in the accounts after 1918, and unfortunately stock purchases were not listed separately after 1914. The next report, for the eighteen months to June 1920, noted that severe drought forced removal of ‘over 70 head of cattle and some horses’ for agistment at another reserve, and the June 1921 report noted that drought forced the sale of ‘over 600 Farm buildings at Cumeroogunga, c. 1914 sheep and some horses’. The income from leases climbed from 1921 and the ‘old woolshed’ was converted into a recreation hall in 1923.

After 1921 the wool and stock income steadily declined, and it is clear that pastoral development was abandoned by 1928.

Removal of the half castes, 1908-1924

It was always the Board’s policy that the able-bodied should support themselves and their dependents by earnings outside the station. This was advised by the Protector in 1881 and by the commission of inquiry in 1882, both also recommending that all young half castes should be placed as servants so they might become ‘gradually absorbed’ in the general population. But 132 of the 251 enrolled at Maloga had been half castes, and by 1892 three-fifths of the residents at Cumeroogunga were half castes. The Board’s 1887 report noted that it was being urged to copy ‘the experiment being made in Victoria to enforce the absorption of the half castes’, but this was ‘impracticable’ at present. Their hesitation is understandable, since the Board had been established only four years and so far only 300 of the 8,000 natives in the colony had received any aid or training. In fact Board regulations of 1895 ordered managers to ‘discourage any further introduction of half castes’ and require all men to find work off the reserves. This policy was re-affirmed in the Board’s reports of 1897 and 1898, and explicitly defined in the 1909 Act and 1910 Regulations (in force until 1940), which also empowered the Board to remove any resident for ‘misconduct’ or because he ‘should be earning a living away’. The 1910 Regulations declared:

Rations are not under any circumstances to be issued to the able-bodied without special reference to the Board. The men must go out and obtain employment and be made to understand that they must support themselves and their families.

Aged and indigent half castes could settle, but all half and lighter caste ‘lads’ were to be removed and discouraged from visiting their kin. The 1915 Act gave further powers to remove children for apprenticeship as servants, and the 1918 Act enforced the removal of the lighter caste youngsters.

The population reached its peak of 394 in 1908, when expulsions actually began; by 1915 only 252 persons remained. The seizure of children in 1915 and 1919, for placement in Board domestic service training institutions, caused some families still eligible for residence to move to camps across the Murray, where the New South Wales Board and police could not act. By 1921 the Cumeroogunga population had been halved, entirely as a result of emigration: births had exceeded deaths even before 1900 and genealogies (compiled for all families ever resident) show that the population was rapidly expanding at this period. The Board’s reports omit population figures from 1922 to 1933 but in 1924 a visitor enumerated 147 residents on the reserve and another 118 camped in bag huts across the Murray at Barmah. Other exiles had migrated to various Victorian towns.

The abandonment of farming, 1918-1 953

From 1891 to 1915 a committee of management, composed of prominent local farmers, had persuaded a reluctant New South Wales government to continue and expand farm development, insisting that the reserve could eventually produce a handsome profit for the Treasury. The Board was then reconstituted to include only senior public servants who had no knowledge of farming, and the committee was disbanded. Cumeroogunga had twice the population and more than twice the staff of the other stations, so the costs of management seemed exorbitant. The war of 1914- 18 was a turning point: restrictions and shortages, and a serious reduction of Board funds in 1915, forbade construction of the necessary flood embankment to end disastrous stock and crop losses. The general labour shortage increased employment opportunities for Aborigines, and the Board’s policy of dispersing the younger half castes seemed assured of success. Local pressure for leases of Cumeroogunga land had been building up since the 1890s and the reconstituted Board saw that agistment fees and leases would provide a useful supplement to the diminished Parliamentary grants. The agistment leases of the l920s were mostly short- term, but in 1934 the Board gave a European neighbor a ten-year cultivation and timber-use lease of 2,000 acres, for only £416 a year. Although strongly criticised by the 1938 Public Service Board report, the leases of almost the entire reserve were continued through the 1940s and l9SOs.

Beginning in the I 870s and 1 880s there was a general shift to wheat cultivation in the Echuca district and wages were subsequently so high during the brief harvest season that European workers commonly deserted their regular employment (Priestley 1965:105). By 1907 the Cumeroogunga men could earn seven shillings a day for harvest work off the station. There was little or no employment in the immediate vicinity for five months of the year, but before subdivision of the great Riverina pastoral stations (largely for soldier and ‘closer’ settlement schemes after 1918) teams of Cumeroogunga men travelled as much as two hundred miles north and west to work as drovers, fencers and shearers. From 1900 to 1915 the managers reported annually that ‘virtually all’ the able-bodied men dispersed in season for harvesting, shearing, droving, rabbiting and fencing, while some earned substantial sums fishing in their own boats for the Melbourne market or from timber-cutting in the local forests. But the conversion to one-man holdings after the 1914-18 war and the lasting drought throughout western New South Wales in the late I920s, together with the general economic depression of the 1930s, seriously reduced employment opportunities for Aborigines and drove them back to Cumeroogunga and other reserves.

Table II summarises the history of farming at Cumeroogunga. It is divided by horizontal bars denoting the introduction of legislation in 1895, 1909- 10, 1915 and 1918. Some columns are incomplete because the Board published no detailed manager’s reports after 1915, but the accompanying ‘Produce and Sale Store Accounts’ published from 1897 to 1928 document the development and decline of farming fairly clearly.

The "population" columns provide evidence of the population decline and its coincidence with legislation, as was the case at Coranderrk. The differences between yearly returns for ‘total enrolment’ and ‘average attendance’, and the fluctuating numbers of ‘adult males’ provide evidence of the impact of the Board’s requirement that the able-bodied find seasonal employment off the reserves. The ‘rations’ columns show that the proportion issued ‘some rations’ was substantially less than the total population, and returns for residents’ expenditure on food and drapery items at the station sale store provide further evidence of their partial independence of government ‘handouts’.

The returns for "grain production" are unsatisfactory, as grain acreage returns are incomplete. The block acreages sown were distinguished in only eight of the annual reports between 1896 and 1907, and have been discussed in the text. Unfortunately station and block harvests are fully detailed only in 1896 and 1905; other annual reports either merge the station and block yields or merely report the station crop, omitting the block-holders returns. Wheat was the only grain crop except for six years, when oats formed a portion of the station crop: in 1903 45 acres of oats yielded 90 tons of ‘hay’; in 1907 40 acres yielded 425 bushels of oats; and in 1908 60 acres yielded approximately 55 tons of hay. In 1910 18 acres yielded 54 bushels of oats (and 60 acres of self-sown wild oats yielded 30 tons of ‘hay’, not included in the acreage and harvest returns). In 1911 20 acres yielded 150 bushels of oats, and in 1913 100 acres yielded 3,155 bushels and 15 tons of ‘straw’.

In the "income" columns the bracketed figures for grain income in 1888, 1889 and 1891 represent the gross value of the harvest, but subsequent figures represent cash received for surpluses actually sold. From 1897 to 1918 the columns show cash received during the calendar year, but as wheat was harvested in December, when reports were due, the annual grain income was actually derived from the previous year’s harvest. The grain income recorded was that for the station crop only, excluding the block-holders’ income from 1896 to 1907. Their earnings were not reported. Grain income was negligible after the December 1921 harvest (reported in 1922), coinciding with a sharp climb in income from leases. Sales of hay were of course conditioned by the subsistence needs of station stock, and stock sales were influenced by the meat requirements of the residents. Only once, in 1906, was surplus stock sold before the population began to decline, but from 1909 to 1915 the income from livestock was approximately equal to the sales of wool, hides and meat. After the major sale of sheep in 1921 the total income from ‘stock, wool and skins’ steadily declined to a negligible figure, and the station’s main income came from leases.

The "expenditure" columns show first the costs of goods purchased outside, and then the amount of money retained within the community in the form of wages. Up to 1914 the accounts distinguished stock purchases and noted occasional expenditure on seed wheat, fodder and farriery, but merged the amounts expended for buildings, fencing, machinery, repairs and ‘equipment and improvements’. Subsequently ‘machinery, plant, harness and repairs’, and fodder and farriery’ were distinguished (but the amounts were negligible), while ‘improvements and live stock’ were merged.

The second expenditure column roughly reports residents’ wages. From 1897 to 1918 the accounts stated annual returns for ‘Aboriginal labour and expenses of cultivation and harvesting’; subsequent returns were labelled ‘expenses of cultivation, harvesting and shearing, including labour of Aborigines’. Presumably these returns include any wages paid for rabbiting and fencing, and perhaps building, but it is impossible to be certain. The returns began to climb from 1907, when the Annual Report noted that the Board spent £100 ‘in labour, rations &c.’ to control rabbits, and also allotted fencing contracts. The figures increase after the former block-holders were allotted wages; reach a peak between 1916 and 1922 when the grain income was also at its height, but then remain fairly stable until 1928, the year before cash wages were apparently withdrawn. Presumably these returns include costs of labour for the extensive subdivision fencing necessitated by leases to Europeans, and perhaps wages for the extensive ‘renovations’ of buildings and fencing, long postponed owing to the war, noted iii the annual reports from 1921 to 1926.

The Board’s 1926 Report said merely that its largest station was ‘now in first-class order’; only the accounts provide clues which confirm the Aborigines’ recollection that Cumeroogunga had suddenly ceased to be a model farm and training centre.

Protection Board Administration

The 1928 Report shows that the Board was well aware that its dispersal policy was threatened by new industrial awards and regulations: Owing to the passing of the Workers’ Compensation Act numbers of adult Aborigines were thrown out of employment, while the legal responsibility of paying award wages militates to a certain degree against Aborigines securing work in competition with their white brethren. But Parliamentary grants were also reduced as a consequence of the depression, and Board policy still insisted that the exiled half castes were ineligible for aid.

Cumeroogunga exiles took the lead in forming protest organisations in the capital cities: the Aborigines Progress Association’ was established in Sydney during 1933 and the ‘Australian Aborigines League’ in Melbourne during 1934. Their complaints, and the preparation of a petition to the King, won considerable publicity. Public concern impelled Commonwealth authorities to convene a conference of State ministers in April 1937, to discuss adoption of a new policy of ‘assimilation’ which declared that the ‘ultimate destiny’ of the half castes (fullblood Aborigines were explicitly excluded) was to ‘merge into the general population’. The Aborigines had no part in this decision, but they did appear as witnesses before the Select Committee of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, appointed in September 1937 to investigate Board administration of Cumeroogunga and other reserves.

In 1937 little remained at Cumeroogunga and only the Aborigines remembered why it had ceased to be a model farm. The staff had changed frequently and few Board members had ever visited. The incumbent officials were intensively questioned but they either did not know — or did not wish to embarrass the government by admitting — that the abandonment of farming and the exodus of half the residents to Victoria was a direct consequence of policy. During the 1937 inquiry Aborigines and officials gave evidence about the present state of the former model farm: the water supply had failed a decade earlier so it was impossible to grow vegetables or green fodder for milk cows; only a few head of stock remained after 1928; no resident had been paid a cash wage for work on the reserve since 1929; most of the reserve had been leased to European farmers since 1921, and all the farm implements and machinery had been removed to other reserves during the 1920s. Twenty-one cottages had been burned or pulled down as their occupants left for seasonal work, in order to discourage their intended return. In 1937 the remaining 25 cottages housed 172 persons and another 113 residents camped in ‘humpies’ made of old tins and wheat bags. Other former residents, forbidden access to the reserve, camped in humpies directly across the Murray. They had been driven back to Cumeroogunga during the economic depression of the 1930s, when they could not obtain work and Victorian and New South Wales authorities refused to give State Relief to Aborigines, instead advising them to return to the reserves. Although the Board declared them ineligible for aid, a sympathetic new manager put the unemployed and their dependents on the ration list from 1934.

The 1937 Parliamentary hearings lapsed through members’ disinterest and no final report was prepared, but the minutes of evidence were eventually published. Some Cumeroogunga exiles participated in a January 1938 deputation to the Prime Minister, with little result. The Board’s 1937 report had merely blamed government budget reductions for the condition of the station, but the 1938 report announced the erection of several dwellings and minor improvements to the water supply so the 324 residents could once more have vegetables and milk. Embarrassed by the revelations of the 1937 inquiry, the government ordered a Public Service Board report, presented in August 1938, which sharply criticised the leasing of Cumeroogunga and recommended reorganisation of the Board and development of the stations so residents could be trained for ‘assimilation’. But conditions did not improve and the dissatisfied Cumeroogunga residents, supported by exiles in Melbourne and Sydney, resolved to ‘strike’. Their mass migration across the Murray in February 1939 brought unprecedented press attention and debate in the New South Wales, Victorian and Commonwealth Parliaments. Public concern hastened the reconstitution of the Board as an ‘Aborigines Welfare Board’ under an amended Act in 1940.

The old Board’s June 1939 report noted that the population was now 213 persons, did not mention the strike, and merely described the station as being ‘of 2,962 acres’ of which a portion is leased to a neighbouring farmer, until such time as it can be used by the Board in the interests of the Aborigines. The station is capable of development by irrigation. The Board contemplates the provision, in the future, of small farmlets for deserving families, to which irrigation could be applied.

But the 1939-45 war delayed implementation of the policy, and its manpower demands gave impetus to the dispersal of Cumeroogunga residents. In 1939, 34 out of 47 able-bodied men were ‘unemployed and receiving rations’, and three-quarters of the two hundred residents received some rations until 1941. Only twenty of the 150 residents were given rations during the war years, and only two of the eighty remaining were eligible when ration issues ceased entirely in 1950. The station was ‘closed’ in 1953, but some cottages remained on the unsupervised reserve. To encourage dispersal the dwellings had been allowed to grow more and more dilapidated, but the Board now offered to purchase land in nearby towns and relocate residents in improved cottages to encourage their ‘assimilation’. Only three families consented to leave Cumeroogunga. After the removal of the unpopular manager the population actually climbed from 46 to 95 persons by 1961.

The loss of the land, 1953-1966

The history of Cumeroogunga after 1953 is not detailed it the published reports of the Aborigines Welfare Board, and my account must rely on other sources.4 In 1955 the Board requested the Lands Department to revoke the reservation of all but 200 acres, as the land was no longer needed by the Aborigines’. This general revocation was not made, but by 1959 a total of 1,535 acres had been revoked and subsequently leased by the Lands Department to the farmer who had used it since 1934. Moreover, the remaining acreage, including the 200 acres to be retained as Aboriginal reserve, was being farmed by other Europeans under permissive occupancies granted by the Land Department or under leases granted by the Board. Because ‘the land up to our doorsteps’ was leased, residents worked elsewhere as farm labourers. Aided by sympathetic members of the Aborigines Advancement League (a Victorian voluntary association composed mainly of Europeans), residents began in I 959 to investigate the possibilities of cooperative farming, and to petition for the use of the land still reserved. One lease was ended on 31 December 1959, but farming was impossible on 200 acres of burr-infested land. Residents continued to send letters and deputations asking for the use of more of the land their forebears had cleared, but the Board replied that the persistence of separate Aboriginal communities was inconsistent with the policy goal of ‘assimilation’ and adhered to its plans for revocation and dispersal of residents. The plans for economic development were discouraged; had not farming been a ‘failure’ in the past? The remainder of the reserve was leased until 1964, despite a 1960 Crown Law opinion that leases had always been illegal for the Board had never had authority to hand over reserves to persons who were not Aborigines.

After 45 years of complaints, and after seven years of direct negotiations with the Aborigines Welfare Board, the descendants of the pioneers won permission to begin farming Cumeroogunga once more. But the agreement signed in 1966 made them merely ‘tenants at will’ of the Board, which could cancel their tenure on a month’s notice and retain all fixed property and assets.

SUMMARY

In this paper I have tried to correct a popular pseudo-historical tradition by detailing the circumstances of the abandonment of farming at Coranderrk and Cumeroogunga. I have also tried to show how changing social, economic and political pressures influenced the fortunes of the Goulburn valley Aborigines over the last hundred years.

Their economic opportunities were inevitably conditioned by their own population structure and its enclave status; by changing settlement patterns and new forms of land use; by the effects of economic depression and war; and by the public prejudice and political pressure which shaped successive policies governing their access to and rights over land, their freedom of residence and their entitlement to aid.

Members of a landless remnant population, reduced within one generation to a sixth of its pre-contact size and still lacking immunity to introduced diseases, were belatedly settled on land only ‘temporarily reserved’ for their use. Only a small fraction of the men were healthy enough for heavy work, but their (labours were expected to support large numbers of dependent newcomers. Their sole resource was an inadequate acreage of heavily-timbered land, less than a quarter of which was suitable for crops. Their technology, or rather their individual work experience and acquired skills, qualified them for agriculture and stock-keeping, but their farming was always impeded by lack of capital for implements, draught animals, fencing and stock. At Coranderrk initially, and at Cumeroogunga always, the stable attendance of the work force was discouraged by Board policy requiring the able-bodied to absent themselves for seasonal wage employment elsewhere, to supplement government aid. Both Boards, handicapped by inadequate Parliamentary grants, Initially refused cash wages, requiring the able-bodied to work for rations only, but the food and clothing supplied was inadequate for their needs.

Wheat cultivation was initially chosen, regardless of suitability for local conditions or the numbers and health of the workers, because it needed the least capital investment: the pioneers could begin with a pair of bullocks and a borrowed plough, plus much manpower for clearing. But to be profitable grain production required favourable climate, large acreages, expensive machinery, good storage facilities and cheap transport to markets. Lacking implements and draught animals or machinery, the pioneers were limited to subsistence-level production on small acreages, and in unfavourable seasons had little return. The heavy labour was unsuitable for a population containing only a small proportion of able- bodied males. At Coranderrk the labour force was disabled by tuberculosis (then a fatal disease because of medical ignorance about its cause and treatment); at Cumeroogunga the available manpower was reduced by the policy requiring the able-bodied to seek outside employment. The aged, children and women could not share the work as a reserve labour force and indeed grain production demanded intensive labour only for the brief ploughing and harvest periods-precisely the seasons when competing wage employment was available. Pastoral development would have been more suitable for the work force, but the Boards could not initially provide adequate capital for stock and pay wages for clearing and fencing, and could never extend the reserves to allow sufficient carrying capacity for production over the residents’ consumption needs, because local pressure defeated all applications to the Lands Departments. The reserves were never fully stocked, and sales of surplus stock brought an income only after the station populations had been reduced by the exodus of the half castes.

Hop cultivation was very suitable for the Coranderrk folk, providing steady and relatively light work for the men for nine months of the year, while the aged, juveniles and women could be efficiently utilised for the March harvests and some other tasks such as weeding and tying, but its introduction without provision of wages in fact reduced the living standard of the pioneers; the workers were no longer able to supplement their rations by cash earnings outside, and the station income from other crops was curtailed. The hop crop ‘monopolized’ their labour so that dwellings and fencing fell into disrepair; all profits from this crop went to the government and residents no longer had the satisfaction of seeing their land grow bread and food and meat’. The Cumeroogunga men had initially pleaded for hundred-acre blocks which they could develop for themselves and pass on to their descendants; they waited eight years for the allotment of smaller blocks, but after twelve years labour found they had only a ‘permissive occupancy’ and when they protested the resumption were expelled from the station.

Fisk (1964) has noted that one component of what he calls the ‘response factor’ in economic development may be the ‘personality and character’ of officials and other agents of change. The unique morale and community strength of the Goulburn valley natives was initially developed and encouraged by John and Mary Green, teachers and good neighbours to the Coranderrk folk from 1860 until their deaths in 1908 arid 1919, and by Daniel and Janet Matthews, teachers and friends to the Maloga folk from 1864 until their deaths in 1902 and (939. Their names have been affectionately remembered to the present day. The succeeding ‘managers’, who necessarily personified the authoritarian control of the Boards and were blamed for policies which they had not framed, were not always so beloved or so influential. The Greens and the Matthews’ were self- recruited missionaries, who believed themselves called by God-and the Aborigines’ need-and were paid no salary to reside among and supervise them. Subsequent station managers were public servants assigned to the task of controlling residents and maintaining Board property. To protect their reputations, and consequent pay and promotions, they were easily tempted to salt their reports with complaints that any inefficiency or work undone was due to their burden of incompetent or lazy workers. This authoritarian management discouraged the development of entrepreneurial skills. The Boards assumed control of the economic development for their own profit, not to be displaced by the Aboriginal farmers they were training. And the Boards eventually abandoned agriculture and leased the land to Europeans to secure a greater profit.

The belated establishment of the two stations, and their eventual fate, was conditioned by government and public attitudes to the native inhabitants. Local pressure initially impeded allocation of reserves, always discouraged their extension, and eventually achieved their alienation. The licence moneys for pastoral leases were a major source of revenue and the votes of the squatting gentry were a major political force in nineteenth century Australia, when bitter disputes on policies for occupation and selection of Crown land caused many colonial ministries to fall from office. Later, when there were few vacant sites in these districts, local pressure for alienation was supported by the Parliamentary representatives: the Aborigines were excluded, by custom if not law, from the electoral rolls. No powerful interest group backed the claims of the Aborigines against the competing economic interests of the Europeans. Governments readily succumbed to the influential ‘closer settlement’ and soldier settlement’ lobbies, since the temporarily reserved Crown lands occupied by a declining Aboriginal population (no longer farming!) could be alienated without the repercussions likely to accompany forcible resumption of a wealthy pastoralist’s holding. Public disinterest in the fate of the indigenous minority allowed the Boards to pursue their policies without challenge. The responsible minister was unlikely to be embarrassed by criticism in press or Parliament, whether the Board published its decisions or not. Aboriginal complaints were often silenced by the threat of exile or withdrawal of aid. And of course those most likely to protest were no longer the Board’s responsibility; by legislative fiat they were no longer Aborigines, but ‘legally white’. Knowledge of the history of the Coranderrk and Cumeroogunga folk, almost unknown beyond the community of descendants, makes their reaction to present-day policies more intelligible. Their frustration, their distrust of officialdom, their belief that their only security lies in Continuing allegiance to their kinsmen and their communities, have the Strongest historical foundation. They know from experience that the denial of title or secure tenure to land has had the same effect as the gift of ‘half a cow’. On 26 January 1938 Goulburn valley folk led the first Aboriginal deputation to Canberra, to advise the incumbent Prime Minister of the need for Commonwealth intervention to improve Aboriginal welfare in all States, by establishment of what they called a ‘Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs’. In February 1970 this ministry, established in 1968, granted a loan of £65,000 to the fifth-generation descendants of the pioneers, to develop their farming on the remnant of land at Cumeroogunga. Descendants of the Coranderrk and Cumeroogunga pioneers joined yet another deputation to Canberra to protest the 26 January 1972 declaration of Commonwealth policy by the Prime Minister, which still denied recognition of Aboriginal title and traditional rights to land. But press and public displayed negligible interest, and the minister responsible for Aboriginal affairs subsequently told Parliament (Australian 24 February 1972): ‘Freehold in the Australian legal system represents a holding from the Crown, tantamount to exclusive ownership of the land, entailing a right to use and dispose of land as the title-holder wishes. This notion, we believe, is alien to Aboriginal thought and custom’.

REFERENCES

1. The Aboriginal population of Victoria was perhaps 15,000 in the eighteenth century, before smallpox spread westward from tribe to tribe; when direct contact occurred during the 1830s there were an estimated 11,500 survivors. The first colonial census of 1851 recorded 2,953 natives in the ‘settled areas’, but the first complete enumeration was that conducted by the Board in 1863 (Barwick 1971). 2. This judgement of the cause of the Protectorate’s failure was common to all the contemporary reports of the four Assistant Protectors, and is confirmed by subsequent historical studies (Bossence 1965; Corns 1968; Foxcroft 1941; Nelson 1966). The government grant of~5-8,000 from 1839 to 1842 seemed large, but more than half was consumed by staff salaries. 3. Information for this period comes from a file of sixty documents ‘Acheron Station, 1858-1863’, and Board minutes, as well as the published annual reports. The subsequent history of Coranderrk is also illuminated by the surviving correspondence and minutes. I am indebted to the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board (now the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs) for access to the unpublished papers of the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines (1860-1956). 4. Information was obtained during a 1960 visit to Cumeroogunga, by correspondence with the New South Wales Board and Lands Department, and from the records of the Aborigines Advancement League of Victoria. Reports in the League’s journal, Smoke Signals (1960-6) are supplemented by the unpublished correspondence of the Kew Branch and the Land and Education Sub-committee (MSS 1959-66).