FROM ‘BABES IN THE WOOD’ TO ‘BUSH-LOST BABIES’

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN AUSTRALIAN IMAGE

KIM LYNETTE TORNEY

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

December 2002

Department of History The University of Melbourne

ABSTRACT

In this thesis I argue that the image of a child lost in the bush became a central strand in the Australian colonial experience, creating a cultural legacy that remains to this day. I also argue that the way in which the image developed in Australia was unique among British-colonised societies. I explore the dominant themes of my thesis—the nature of childhood, the effect of environment upon colonisers, and the power of memory—primarily through stories. The bush-lost child is an image that developed mainly in the realms of ‘low’ culture, in popular journals, newspapers, stories and images including films, although it has been represented in such ‘high’ cultural forms as novels, art and opera. I have concentrated on the main forms of its representations because it is through these that the image achieves its longevity.

Understandings of childhood have always been central to the power of the image of the bush-lost child. I examine the development of attitudes towards children and childhood in Australia from the earliest days of settlement to the beginning of the First World War, through several main strands of children’s experiences—work, education and health.

The story and image of the ‘Babes in the Wood’ was brought to Australia with its colonial settlers. I trace its development and assimilation into the folklore culture of Britain from the late sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, and consider other European influences. It was adopted from the parent culture by European settlers to represent an Australian colonial experience and was then progressively translated into the assertively Australian image of ‘Bush-lost Babies’.

I consider other comparable settler colonies in America, Canada and New Zealand to develop my argument that the identification with the lost child image was unique to Australia, and that the other settler-colonies were dominated by the image of the captive child. This examines the power of cross-culturally transmitted attitudes towards Indigenous peoples in Britain and its colonies, including Australia.

The bush search scenario, and the way in which it came to be regarded as an affirmation of community, were rapidly associated with the image of the bush- lost child. I examine this development primarily through close studies of several different lost-child incidents. Various memorialisations of bush-lost children fitted into the wider process of memorialising the past in Australia. My consideration of this involves an exploration of expressions of grief at the loss of young people before World War I, and the change in national understandings of loss after this time.

The 1960 story of ‘Little Boy Lost’, which received intense national attention, forms the core of the concluding chapter in which I argue for the continuing currency of the bush-lost child image in modern Australia.

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This is to certify that (i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) the thesis is less than 100, 000 words in length exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.

Signed:………………………. Date:…………………...

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have had the generous help of many people in completing this thesis, and it is impossible to thank them all personally. I owe a large debt of gratitude to the many helpful librarians and archivists in various libraries and collections in Australia, England, New Zealand and the United States of America. Many people have buoyed me up by their interest in this topic, and generously taken time from their own researches to send me relevant references or suggest where material may be found. Among them are Helen Doyle, Elizabeth Graham, Cheryl Griffin, Nikki Henningham, Jan Kociumbas, Rick Hosking, Rob Foster, Phillipa Mein-Smith, Jan Gothard, Meg Tasker, Susan Martin, John Barnes, Marjorie Theobald, Rhyll Nance, John Ryan, Graham Wilson, Robert Smith, Juliet Flesch and Jane Beer. I am indebted to Peter Pierce, Gary Presland and Amanda Nettelbeck, who all very kindly allowed me to read their fascinating works at pre-publication. Colleen Wernicke and Kathy Matthews provided invaluable and patient technical assistance.

I want to thank John Hirst for suggesting many years ago that I look at this topic. I must also thank my wonderful supervisors, Stuart Macintyre and Kate Darian-Smith. Stuart encouraged me to believe that it was a reasonable topic to pursue through a PhD, and has been unfailingly helpful (and infallible) in his suggestions. Kate’s cheerful, enthusiastic and knowledgeable support has been my constant lifeline; she saved me from foundering in a sea of material.

My largest debt of gratitude is owed to Michael and Jane who have lived with this project for many years. They have cheerfully accompanied me in the search for obscure memorials and places in Australia and overseas. They have sympathised in my researching frustrations, listened patiently to my ideas, and made helpful suggestions. They have uncomplainingly put up with my disappearances from family life to write, and provided delicious meals to keep me alive. Without them there would not have been a thesis. Special thanks to Rufus and Stella, my constant companions.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page no.

Introduction 1

Chapter One Children and Childhood in 16 Colonial Australia

Chapter Two From ‘Babes in the Wood’ to 64 ‘Bush-lost Babies’

Chapter Three Lost Children and Captivity 93 Narratives in Other Settler Societies

Chapter Four Lost Children and Captivity 126 Narratives in Australia

Chapter Five Bush Searches 178

Chapter Six Commemorations of the lost 218

Conclusion ‘Little Boy Lost’: An image for 248 Modern Australia

Bibliography 263

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ILLUSTRATIONS

After page

1 ‘Lost’ (1886), Frederick McCubbin Frontispiece

2 Information board at Wayland Wood, 1999 71

3 Town symbol of Watton incorporating 72 ‘Babes in the Wood’ imagery

4 Town sign of Griston, ‘home’ to the ‘Babes 72 In Wood’ story

5 Signpost to the Caravan Club grounds adjacent 71 to Wayland Woods

6 Hannah Cooper (Duff) holding a baby 76 (possibly Jane), standing outside a slab hut

7 Members of the party involved in the search 77 for the Duff children

8 Sketch by A.W. Howitt of Liddiard’s hut, in 193 the Dandenong Ranges

9 Sketch map by A.W. Howitt of the area in which 196 Lewis Vieusseux was lost

10 Memorial to Jane Duff 237

11 Headstone on grave of Jane Duff in Horsham 238 Cemetery

12 Information board in the shelter of the Jane 239 Duff Highway Park

13 Memorial to the ‘Three Lost Children’ in 243 Daylesford Cemetery

14 Cairns and a plaque marking the starting and end 245 points of the journey of the ‘Three Lost Children’, Daylesford

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Introduction

Frederick McCubbin’s well-known painting ‘Lost’ (1886), seen in the frontispiece, would appear at first glance to be a gentle episode. The young girl is depicted standing in a relatively open area of bush, carrying flowers in her apron—she could be simply resting before heading home. The bush is neither dark nor overpowering but a soft, misty space, and the child does not seem overtly distressed. Yet I contend that the subject of painting would be immediately obvious to most Australians without any reference to the title, because the internal filter of common cultural history would render the image quite clearly a depiction of a young girl lost in the bush. Most Australians would immediately recognise the implicit threat contained in the scene. All the elements of the painting—the child on her own, one hand up to her eyes, holding up an apron full of the wildflowers for which she has searched deep into the bush, and the enveloping, obscuring nature of the bush itself—lead to one overriding interpretation, that this is a lost child. I am concerned to explore the ways in which the image of a child lost in the bush became a central and unique strand in the Australian colonial experience, creating a cultural legacy that remains to this day.

The lost child has not remained merely as an image from the colonial past. It has continued as a thread in Australian literature and art throughout the twentieth century, and the current exploration of the theme in contemporary works such as Andrew Bovell's play Holy Day (2001)1, the film One Night the Moon (2001),2 and the novel Angel Rock (2002),3 suggests a heightened perception of the importance of this image within Australian society. Even the most problematic of Australia’s lost child stories—that of baby Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance from the Uluru camping ground in 1980—has

1 Reviewed in the Age, 17 September 2001, 'Today', p. 5; 23 September, p. 9. 2 One Night the Moon, director Rachel Perkins, 2001. 3 Darren Williams, Angel Rock, Harper Collins, London, 2002. This novel deals with two, intertwined stories of lost children. The young boys become lost in the traditional sense, taking a wrong turn on a country road. While they are lost, the younger boy is taken and held captive by an evil adult, a figure who dominates the second section of Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children, discussed a little later in this chapter.

recently been revisited in the opera, Lindy (2002).4 The figure of the black tracker, who became an integral component of the stories of children lost in the bush, has also received close contemporary attention, notably in the films One Night the Moon, Rabbit Proof Fence (2002)5 and The Tracker (2002).6

The image of childhood vulnerability took compelling form in the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, which documented the results of long-term government policies of the forcible separation of Indigenous children from their parents.7 The deeply personal oral testimony to this inquiry, which was widely circulated, was enormously powerful and heightened attention on the state of children, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as a barometer of national health. This concern drew on deep-seated national images to find artistic expression. A review of Darren William’s Angel Rock refers to the author as having played ‘on the oldest fear we have, children lost in the bush’.8 The strong contemporary artistic interest in this image comes at a time when many Australians are questioning the nature of our society and its response to challenges posed by such issues as Aboriginal Reconciliation or the denial of refugee appeals. This interest suggests that the image of children lost in the bush has become emblematic of deep-seated issues of national identity. It seems that our society, particularly at times of national uncertainty, identifies with the vulnerability embodied by the figure of a child alone in the Australian bush. The fact that it is an image turned to in uncertain times suggests how deeply established it is in the national consciousness. The number of contemporary works around this theme shows that this image has particular resonance for the Australian community, and that it is used to explore national issues.

In this thesis I am concerned with understanding why this is so—what it was in the Australian experience of colonisation and settlement that

4 Lindy, composed by Moya Henderson, directed by Stuart Maunder and performed by Opera Australia, premiered at the Sydney Opera House, 25 October 2002. Age, 26 October 2002, p. 6. 5 Rabbit Proof Fence, director Phillip Noyce, 2002. The film is based on the Doris Pilkington (Nugi Garimaraj’s) book, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1996. 6 The Tracker, director Rolf de Heer, 2002. 7 Bringing Them Home: A Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Sydney, 1997. 8 Michelle Griffin, Age, 11 May 2002, ‘Saturday Extra’, p. 9. 2

established the lost child theme at the core of Australian popular mythology, and why it retains such potency today.

This is not to suggest that the image developed power only retrospectively. The earliest recorded account of a child lost in the Australian bush occurred in 1803, and the newspaper account of the incident—discussed in detail in chapter one, ‘Children and Childhood in Colonial Australia’—is both dramatic and sentimental, leaving no doubt that this was considered a genuine drama of importance to all readers. The colonial forms of media—newspapers, monthly papers, illustrated papers and journals—were the major sources that enabled me to gauge how the incidents of lost children were ‘read’ when they occurred. An illustration of this that supports my argument about the overwhelming emotional potency of the lost child image from the early colonial period can be found in three news items from the 'Domestic Intelligence' section of the Port Phillip Herald for 24 February 1846, all of which relate to the physical welfare of children.9 This section of the newspaper covered the local news and presumably represented what was considered to be important or interesting to the community. Each of the following paragraphs reflects some aspect of the physical hazards facing children in colonial society, a topic I pursue a little later here and also in chapter one. The first story, in column one, concerned a child burnt as a result of bush clearing, an integral part of the colonising process.

ANOTHER FIRE ACCIDENT - In the course of the last week the child of a man named Hogan, residing at Richmond, happening to sit down by the side of a burning tree, its clothes took fire, and before any assistance could be rendered such serious injuries were sustained as to leave but slight hopes of the boy's recovery.

In the third column of the section was an account of another common, tragic occurrence.

MELANCHOLY ACCIDENT - On Thursday a very fine boy aged twenty months, son of Mr. Alfred Woolley, of Geelong, met with an accident from the effects of which he died on the following day. The child it appears ran into the nursery where on the table one of the maid [sic] had left a pannikin of boiling water; this the child was trying to get at, when it upset upon him scalding his chest and abdomen in a shocking

9 Port Phillip Herald, 24 February 1846, p. 2. 3

way. The little sufferer lingered till the morning of Friday when he expired. The body was conveyed to Melbourne on Sunday morning and interred that afternoon.

At the centre of this section both literally and figuratively, and commanding immediate attention, was an account of a lost child.

A STRAYED CHILD - As Mrs. Sentborough was coming from Newtown on Friday evening, she met a fine little boy crying in the bush, and stating that he had lost his way. It being near night Mrs. S. was induced to take the little wanderer to her house, so that he is now comfortably 'in pound.' In case any person should be anxious to find him out, and in order that they may not have a journey in vain, we publish his description as follows:—Age, two years and a half; complexion, dark; wears a blue cloth cap, half mourning frock and white pin-before; refuses to give a name, but states that his mother is dead.

The child who was in least physical danger, at least on this occasion, is represented as the most interesting. Perhaps the fact that this was a live child made it easier to write a more lively account with its paternalistic, semi- humorous description of ‘the little wanderer’ being safely ‘in pound’. Just as this paragraph dominates the accounts of children's experiences here, so too does the image of the lost child dominate and overshadow the many other ways in which children suffered and died in colonial Australia.

Prevalence is no complete answer to this conundrum, for the other accidents reported—serious burns and scalding—were far more typically causes of colonial child deaths. An analysis of the Argus index for 1860 to 1869 shows that the paper reported approximately 70 cases of children being fatally lost in the bush.10 While this is quite a high figure for a relatively small colony it still remains a far smaller factor in child mortality than other causes. In the same period the Argus reported 117 incidents of children's accidental deaths and 205 cases of children's death by drowning, a total of 322 deaths by a huge variety of ways, some bizarre, all of them tragic.11 Children in colonial

10 Note that this figure is only for fatal cases of children lost in the bush, I have not included the numbers of children recorded as being found, nor cases involving adults. What the numbers of children lost in the bush does raise is the question of what the children were doing when they became lost, it is suggestive of quite a lot of freedom in children’s movements. I consider this in the course examining specific cases of lost children. 11 I have recorded the figures of accidental deaths and drownings separately, though of course drownings are of themselves accidents, in order to ensure that the magnitude of the risk to 4

Port Phillip District died from falling down mine shafts, and by being scalded with boiling water, hit by lightning, from drinking brandy, being 'overlain' (suffocated by fellow sleepers), falling from bullock drays, being kicked by a horse or cow, being hit by a falling branch or tree or falling from trees, from eating poisonous berries, from an opium overdose, a swing breaking, being run over by drays or carts, falling into a vat of boiling honey, by swallowing glass beads or eating the wax head of matches.

The figures show that drowning was the most common cause of accidental child mortality, and the children drowned in all manner of places—in dams, creeks and rivers, water tanks, the ocean, mud pools, quarries, wash tubs, sludge holes, reservoirs, and even the City Baths.12 Accidental deaths, including death by drowning, accounted for well over four times the number of deaths of children due to being lost in the bush in Port Phillip District during the 1860s. I take these figures, which take no account of child deaths due to illness and disease, as a reasonable indication of the situation in all areas of European settlement. Within the larger context of child mortality the lost child numbers are relatively small, yet there are no iconic paintings or stories of the drowned child, the scalded child, or the child typhoid victim. So the question must be asked, why was the lost child rather than the burnt or drowned or diseased child, taken up as the dominant image of the Australian child's experience with the land and eventually subsumed into the pantheon of Pioneer experience? What was it in this image that captured the artistic and public imagination?

Who were children and what is ‘lost’? Since childhood is central to this work, it is crucial to examine the nature of childhood in the colonial period. I do this in chapter one, initially through a consideration of the attitudes brought to Australia by its European settlers. Phillipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1962),13 and Lloyd de Mause, The

Australian children posed by drowning remains clear. This takes on particular relevance in the context of comparative studies where recognition of the danger of water to New Zealand children is apparent. There appears to have been no such recognition in colonial Australia. 12 Argus index 1860-69, Argus Index Project, Melbourne, 1999. Figures for children lost in the bush taken from Missing persons section, number of child mortalities due to accidents including drowning taken from the accidents and drownings section of each volume. 13 Phillipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Knopf, New York, 1962. 5

Evolution of Childhood (1988),14 comprehensively discuss the forces shaping attitudes towards children during the eighteenth century, when the first Australian settlers started to arrive. Other useful works included James Walvin’s social history of English childhood, A Child’s World (1982),15 Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (1967),16 and Penny Brown’s exploration through women’s writing of nineteenth-century English childhood, The Captured World (1993).17

The study of children and the family as legitimate, separate fields is relatively recent in Australian historiography. In this context, some useful works are Australian Childhood: A History (1997)18 by Jan Kociumbas, and The Colonial Child (1981) papers from the 1979 conference of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.19 Similarly, Families in Colonial Australia (1985),20 edited by Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville and Ellen McEwen and Michael Gilding’s The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family (1991)21 help to frame an understanding of the colonial experiences of family.

Throughout this thesis I have examined the term ‘lost child’ in its most literal use—that is, as a child who is lost in the Australian landscape without malignant interference by another. In the sole book yet published in Australia on the subject of lost children, Peter Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (1999), the definition is far more wide-ranging.22 Pierce divides his work into two distinct sections— the nineteenth and twentieth

14 Lloyd de Mause (ed.), The Evolution of Childhood, Peter Bedrick Books, New York, 1988. 15 James Walvin, A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood 1800-1914, Penguin, Middlesex, 1982. 16 Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, Penguin, London, 1967. 17 Penny Brown, The Captured World: The Child and Childhood in Nineteenth -Century Women's Writing in England, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hertfordshire, 1993. 18 Jan Kociumbas, Australian Childhood: A History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997. 19 Guy Featherstone (ed.), The Colonial Child, Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 1981. 20 Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville and Ellen McEwen (eds), Families in Colonial Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985. 21 Michael Gilding, The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991. 22 Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999. The theme has been mentioned in passing by commentators on Australian literature, and its literary forms have been written about in varying extents, for example, by John Scheckter , ‘The Lost Child in Australian Fiction’ in Modern Fiction Studies, vol.27, no. 1, (Spring 1981), pp. 61-72.

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centuries—and adopts different understandings in each. His work on nineteenth-century experiences utilises the widely understood definition of the term, although his differs from mine in the far greater extent to which he examines the theme of the lost child through literary representations. I examine the development of the image primarily through the reporting of actual incidents and the translation of these into a larger whole. This issue of what constitutes ‘lost’ as opposed to ‘taken’ in the context of Aboriginal children is one I pursue in my opening chapter on childhood, and also through the case study of ‘The lost child of Calandoon’ in chapter five, ‘Bush Searches’.

In his analysis of the twentieth century Pierce adopts an all-encompassing understanding of the lost, signalled by its title, ‘In the Twentieth Century: The Child Abandoned’. In this context he construes ‘lost’ to include all abandoned, neglected and abused children. Whilst this enlarged vision testifies to the innate, deeply held humanity of Pierce’s view, I feel that ultimately it only confuses and overshadows the discussion of the development of the earlier images. It is this development that I seek to pursue in my thesis.

An image outside time I will demonstrate that one very potent factor in the image of the lost child is its universality. In chapter two, ‘From “Babes in the Wood” to “Bush-lost Babies”’, I explore its European precedents in folklore such as the English ‘Babes in the Wood’ story and the story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ from continental Europe. However, as well as the power the image drew from its universality we must explore the power it drew from its particular, specific role in the Australian context. The form it took in Australia was unique—it is a national experience that transcends time and place as each example of a lost child incident demonstrates. People, particularly children, were lost in the bush from the early days of white settlement, they continued to get lost as settlement expanded, and they get lost today. This renders the image markedly different from the other major cross-colonial image concerning children in the form of captivity narratives. These narratives, examined in chapter three ‘Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Other Settler Societies’, are linked to specific phases of settlement in the colonial settlements of America, Canada and New Zealand. This is not the case in Australia. The incidence of children being lost in the bush is one of the very few constant experiences

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contemporary Australians share with colonial Australia, even though the circumstances of loss may be somewhat different. In one comparatively recent incident in 1986, two young boys working as jackaroos on a remote cattle station in Western Australia died after becoming lost when they fled the harsh conditions on the station.23 In August 2001 two girls were lost overnight in Victoria in an incident described by newspaper journalist Julie Szego as being ‘the stuff of scary folk yarns: two little girls lost in the woods on a cold, wet night’.24 Her evocation of this image demonstrates its powerful roots.

As the notion of Australianising suggests, I contend that the image had its basis in earlier British and European culture that was part of the cultural ‘baggage’ of the colonisers. The theme of cultural transference is central to this chapter and I use various artistic, theatrical and literary representations of the image to trace its development. John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (1988), Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology (1985), and Under New Heavens: Cultural Transmission and the Making of Australia (1989), edited by Neville Meaney, all help to contextualise this discussion. Rickard is concerned to understand and chart what he calls ‘certain cultural accommodations which have become characteristic of Australia’, and our ‘preoccupation with the quest for national identity … concentrated on that which is seen as being distinctively Australian’.25 Astbury places the lost child image squarely within what he calls ‘the rural mythology centred on the Australian bushman’.26 The work edited by Neville Meaney explores the process of cultural transference that resulted in Australian culture as we know it.27

I have briefly demonstrated that modernity is no protection against the

23 James Annetts and Simon Amos, aged 16 and 17 years respectively, were employed as sole caretakers of two remote properties in the Kimberley area of Western Australia in 1986. After months of this isolation, in early December 1986 they headed off into the desert in an unroadworthy utility, their intention remaining unknown. The car became bogged and the boys continued on foot in temperatures in the 40s. Eventually one boy shot himself, the other died of heat exhaustion and dehydration. An extensive search on foot and by air failed to find the bodies until January 1987. Age, 6 September 2002, p. 4. 24 ‘Girls cuddle to fight bush night fright’, Age, 27 August 2001, p. 5. 25 John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, Longman, London, 1988, pp. xi and xii. 26 Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, p. 1. 27 Neville Meaney (ed.), Under New Heavens: Cultural Transmission and the Making of Australia, Heinemann Educational Australia, Melbourne, 1989. 8

threat of children becoming lost and not being found, or found but not alive. Examples of all these incidents have occurred in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and the community response in terms of the search and support for parents remains remarkably similar across two centuries. The gathering of people from the community where the child lived, no matter how far-flung, the turning to Aborigines for tracking assistance, the lines of searchers, mainly on foot, some mounted—with some exceptions, the sympathy without blame extended to parents—these remain as much a part of the twenty-first century as the nineteenth. Some kind of collective, cultural memory appears to come into play around the occurrence of children lost in the bush. Memory emerges as one of the dominant themes of this study and, in an attempt to understand how this cultural memory operates, I examine these manifestations in detail in chapter five, ‘Bush Searches’, and in my final chapter, ‘Little Boy Lost’, both of which rely heavily on a close study of contemporary accounts of the incidents.

Although I deal with a late twentieth-century example of the lost child in ‘Little Boy Lost’ the main focus of my thesis is on the colonial period of Australian development. I am taking this to cover the period from first settlement in 1788 to the outbreak of the World War I in 1914. Australian involvement in this war changed our society irrevocably, moving it forcibly into the twentieth century. The deaths and injuries of that war shifted national understandings of grief, suffering and loss profoundly. As Dr Robert Scot Skirving observed in his anguish on his soldier-son’s death in 1915: ‘that gulf of sorrow, the Great War, separated us from all our past lives and emotions’, creating a changed world afterwards.28

A distinctively Australian image Another central contention of this thesis will be that the prominence given to the image of the lost child was unique to Australia within the British colonial world; no similar settler colonies displayed a perception of the lost child experience as carrying national significance. I will argue that the image of the captive child, that is the children kidnapped and kept by Indigenous peoples in other colonies, attained the pre-eminent position in these other colonial cultures, leaving no room in the national psyche for the lost child. In my view,

28 Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History, 1840-1918, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, p. 5. 9

the child lost in the bush was an image that Australians imbued with a meaning and emotional intensity similar to that with which North Americans, in particular, viewed their stories of Indian captives. This argument is most fully developed in chapters three and four, ‘Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Other Settler Societies’, and ‘Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Australia’. Both of these chapters are based on the study of primary texts such as letters, diaries and published personal accounts, many of which appear in important secondary studies. Most of these deal with experiences of settlement in the North American continent, generally the United States of America. Notable in the discussion of children becoming lost is Emmy E. Werner, Pioneer Children on the Journey West (1995),29, and Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country (1989).30 It proved almost impossible to find material about lost children in colonial New Zealand, which is curious given the strength of the image in Australia, the similar periods of settlement and the close connections between the countries. I consider why this might be so in chapter three.

In chapter three, I argue that the issue of white captivity by Indigenous peoples—real and imagined—dominated most colonial cultures other than Australia, though it held currency here, too. Linda Colley’s Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 (2002), explores the impact of captivity images emanating from British involvement in the Mediterranean, America and India upon their attitudes towards Indigenous peoples of the expanding empire. Seminal works on the North American experience of captivity and its effect on the developing national psyche include Derounian-Stodala and Levernier , The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550-1900 (1993),31 and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (1973).32 A crucial work in the Australian context, discussed in chapter four, is Kay Schaffer’s examination of the Eliza Fraser stories, In the Wake of First Contact (1988). Schaffer considers the importance of colonial attitudes towards female sexuality, miscegenation and female independence to the development and proliferation

29Emmy E. Werner, Pioneer Children on the Journey West, Westview Press, Boulder, 1995. 30Elliott West, Growing Up With the Country University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1989. 31 Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodala and James Arthur Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550-1900, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1993. 32 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: Mythology of the American Frontier, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown Connecticut, 1973. 10

of captivity narratives.

The centrality of lost child image to the development of a sense of nationhood is attested to by its frequent and significant representations in literature and art during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.33 It was part of the folklore by which Australians defined themselves, both to themselves and to others. This became a particularly crucial exercise in the period leading up to Federation in 1901 and in the first two decades of the new nation. The image of ‘Young Australia’ gained currency, placing children at the centre of national consciousness and endowing the already poignant image of the lost child with even greater significance.34 The perceived innocence and vulnerability of children juxtaposed to the harshness of the bush, with its implications of sacrifice in the cause on nation-building, was a very apposite image for a new nation. The First World War provided alternative and more immediately potent images for the nation, but the lost child never completely disappeared.35

Although I have focused my study on the colonial period up to the First World War, I will also argue that the image retained its continuity and remains part of the way Australians define themselves. These issues are considered in the various representations of the lost child image that appear throughout the thesis. In particular in chapters two and five, I examine the development of the story of the Duff children into its best-known form of ‘Lost in the Bush’, as a means of illuminating the ways in which the image was shaped. The final chapter ‘Little Boy Lost’ considers the modern currency of the image. In chapter five, ‘Bush Searches’, I discuss popular perceptions that the search for a lost child was an affirmation of community values, indeed an affirmation that community existed. As such it provided a tangible bridge from the intrinsically ‘selfish’ values of individuals in gold-mining or frontier pastoral centres to ‘real’ communities, capable of strenuous action for an altruistic, common goal.

The changing representations of the lost child image—fictional and real—

33 See Astbury, City Bushmen, chapter 7, ‘The Lost Child’, for a comprehensive overview of this. 34 See Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688-1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981. His chapter 7, ‘Young, White, Happy and Wholesome’, includes a detailed analysis of the image of Young Australia. 35 K.S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998. 11

that I examine in this thesis are, I believe, a telling reflection of changing settler attitudes to their place in the landscape. Intrinsically and necessarily linked to attitudes towards the bush, changing ‘readings’ of the image move through a wide range. I examine the earliest representations with their images of displacement and fear of an inimical environment and consider the argument that these are essentially manifestations of the frontier phase of colonisation, and express a deep insecurity.36 I hypothesise that, in fact, the cases of lost children reflected a colonial sense of comfort and enjoyment in the bush environment, particularly in the children. Although the real fears attendant upon losing a child in the bush never diminished, later positive literary representations reflect an increasing confidence by colonists that they ‘belonged’ in their environment. I argue that this attitudinal transformation was dominant by, and linked to, Federation in 1901; the enormously influential Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) was an embodiment of this change.37 This very popular work had the lost child returned home safely by the bush, through the agency of bush creatures, notably the kangaroo. The threat posed by the bush had receded to such an extent that it was the bush itself with its native animals that was in need of protection. The relationship between Europeans and the Australian environment forms a major plank of this study. Some of the most illuminating work in this area of environmental history is that of Tom Griffiths both individually, Hunters and Collector: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (1996),38 and with Libby Robin, Ecology & Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (1997).39

Methodology and sources This is necessarily a thesis about stories, stories from all sorts of participants in lost child incidents, whether from first-hand experience or from later generations communicating family and community knowledge. And stories are surely the most potent means by which national images are shaped and shared, in whatever form they are conveyed—not only finished literary stories either, although Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy and Henry Kingsley are extremely

36Pierce, Lost Children. See also John Carroll (ed.), Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982. 37 Ethel C. Pedley, Dot and the Kangaroo, Burleigh, London, 1899. 38 Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. 1996. 39 Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), Ecology & Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997. 12

important contributors to the iconography.40 The image of the lost child is so powerful because it has a place at every level of Australian life—in the high culture of formal literature and art as well as in the folk culture of the communal story. For the latter I have drawn upon the many sources in which folk culture finds a voice, including local historical societies, gravestones and other memorials, school cultures, popular music, family reunions and various ‘Back to …’ publications. The image continues to live through the many forms that rework and renew it. These can be found in both the popular and higher levels of culture, across a range of mediums including films, novels, art and popular song.

I use extended case studies such as ‘The lost child of Calandoon’, ‘The story of the Duff children’, ‘City meets bush’ and ‘Little Boy Lost’, to explore the wider themes of this discussion, extending from the individual to the representational. Because this image is inextricably linked to place, that is the bush, where possible I have visited sites linked with the lost child stories including Wayland Wood in England, reputedly the site of the ‘Babes in the Wood’ story. I have visited memorials in the bush at Daylesford, Natimuk and Horsham. I read some of the many ‘Babes in the Wood’ stories in the British Library in London, and tracked down scarce American stories of lost children in the library of Columbia University in New York. Above all, I have attempted to allow the story itself to be heard at its most immediate level, that is, as close to the source as possible—notably accounts from local newspapers and letters—and without much editorial intervention. In many of these accounts we hear the voices of parents with the awful immediacy of raw pain that no re-telling of the incident can capture. Similarly the voices of the searchers conveys the intensity of their need to find the lost child, the sheer physical difficulty of the search and the emotional peaks and troughs of hope and despair, occasionally culminating in rejoicing. It is at this level of personal and social experience that national cultural images have their source.

The central question addressed in this thesis is why the lost child became the dominant image of loss. Many adults also became lost, often fatally. Their

40 Henry Lawson published both a poem and short story entitled ‘The Babies in the Bush’. The poem was published in 1900, the short story appeared in Joe Wilson and His Mates, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh, 1901. Joseph Furphy, Such is Life, was completed by 1897 but not published until 1903. Henry Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, first published in 1859. 13

experiences were also recorded in newspapers, art and literature, but they never achieved the iconic status accorded the lost child. It was only lost explorers who received similar recognition. I develop this theme more fully in chapter six, ‘Commemorations of the lost’, in which I consider similarities in Australian emotional responses to a range of ‘lost’ figures. 41 Part of the answer to this central question must lie in the particular poignancy attached to the notion of a child suffering the fear and loneliness of being completely separated from the security of family and home, and their stories command engagement. The recent film, Rabbit Proof Fence,42 with its relatively simple story of three young Aboriginal girls separated from their families and institutionalised, who escape and make the long trek home, appears likely to convince white Australians of the reality of the Stolen Generations in a way that no reports or inquiries have been able.43 The power of Rabbit Proof Fence may, in some part, be linked to its medium. A recent study on the relationship between memory and history in Australia contains the suggestion that,

in the post-war world, popular culture rather than scholarly debate has become the principal site for the politics of memory … [notably] the power of film in this regard, particularly in relation to film’s mass audience and capacity to influence public contestation of narratives about the past.44

This certainly appears to be true of the film version of Rabbit Proof Fence. The significant attention given to this story and to the other detailed at the beginning of this introduction, demonstrates a strong community sense that what happens to children is important. I argue that this is by no means a modern development and that colonial responses to lost children show that the possibility of their death was regarded as holding particular significance for

41 For example Burke and Wills have been written about extensively, most interestingly from the perspective of their cultural role by Tim Bonyhady, Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth, David Ell Press, Balmain, 1991. Ludwig Leichardt’s disappearance in 1848 also generated a vast amount of literature, including Patrick White’s novel, Voss (1957). 42 Rabbit Proof Fence, (2002), directed by Phillip Noyce. The film is based on the Doris Pilkington (Nugi Garimaraj’s) book, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1996. 43 ‘Stolen generations’ has become a term to describe the Aboriginal children removed from their families by various levels of Australian government between 1883 and 1969. The term has been hotly contested, with some people arguing that the children were not stolen and that their removal did not affect whole generations. 44 Paula Hamilton, chapter 1, ‘The Knife Edge: Debates About Memory and History’, in Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia (eds) Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 25. 14

the community as well as the immediate family. I develop this discussion in chapter six, ‘Commemorations of the lost’, in which I also examine the later absorption of the lost child image into the larger Pioneer image.

As I have said, the power for both colonial and contemporary Australian society of the image of a child lost in the bush comes from that particular poignancy associated with it, which rests on shared understandings of the vulnerability and value of children. But did those understandings exist comprehensively in Australian colonial society and, if so, where did they come from? A community that began as a penal colony for a society that incarcerated and transported children seems an unlikely place to find compassion for children, or a valuing of the state of childhood. Yet, unlikely or not, these qualities were evident in colonial Australia. Children and childhood were valued. To understand how and why, we need to understand what constituted childhood in the period we are considering. Accordingly, my first chapter is an extended exploration of the meaning of childhood

15

Chapter One Children and Childhood in Colonial Australia

From the early years of European settlement in Australia children became lost in the bush. The earliest recorded instance, narrated dramatically in the Sydney Gazette, occurred in 1803 on the shores of Sydney Harbour when ‘a labouring man’ collecting timber for fencing left his ‘infant’ son alone for a short time, ‘with a strict injunction not to quit the spot’. When he returned shortly afterwards the boy had disappeared, ‘and every effort to recover it then proved ineffectual’. We are in no doubt about the parents' distress, nor the writers’ warm appreciation of the magnitude of their loss. Despair set in after a search party, assisted by both parents, failed to find ‘the little straggler’ and,

the afflicted parents joined their lamentations for the helpless object of their search, whom they now esteemed as irrevocably lost.1

Miraculously, at that moment, a man arrived in a row-boat to inform them that he had returned the boy home after finding him about five miles from where he had been left. Exhausted and speechless, the child was lying down but 'moaned lamentably', which attracted the man's attention. Otherwise, as the writer noted with dramatic relish, 'he would in all probability have perished'. The story concluded on a doubly positive note. The child was saved, and 'much to his credit' his rescuer wanted no reward, being 'amply recompensed for his trouble in a conscousness (sic) of his being the happy instrument of Providence whereby the child had been preserved’.2 Whilst there is great enjoyment of the drama of the story there is no doubting the sincerity of the view that the loss of a child in the bush was horrific, nor is there any devaluation of the parents' distress. There is also a sense of community concern and support for the safety of its younger members.

The phrase 'lost in the bush' quickly entered the 'national emotional vocabulary’ of the Australian settlers, carrying a weight of implications, and it 3 appears to be a peculiarly Australian concern. The image of a young child lost and frightened in the vastness of the Australian bush still reverberates through our culture, lurking at the edge of every parent's consciousness. In

1 Sydney Gazette, 30 October 1803. 2 Ibid. 3 Robert Holden, 'Lost, Stolen or Strayed: From the Australian Babes in the Woods to Azaria Chamberlain', Voices, autumn 1991, p. 5. 16

writing of her experiences as an expatriate in Greece in the 1980s, Gillian Bouras noted her fears that her sons would fall victim to ‘that other all- Australian terror, Getting Lost in the Bush’, fears which she came to realise had no place in Greece, but which she carried as part of her Australian cultural heritage.4 As I show in chapter three, ‘Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Other Settler Societies’, no other comparable settler society such as America, Canada and New Zealand, explicitly displayed this fear, even though the occurrence was just as likely. Possibly, because of the more actively hostile relationships experienced with the native peoples in these settlements, they focused their anxieties around a more tangible enemy.

In his study of childhood on the American western frontier, Growing Up With the Country Elliott Wild describes several incidents of children becoming lost on the Plains but for the emigrants, he claims, ‘this anxiety paled beside another’—fear of the Indians, however ill-founded.5 American Indians were known to have offered to buy white children, which substantiated a view that Indigenous peoples found European children attractive.6 Even more threateningly, children were sometimes taken, and this was the image that dominated the settler view. One of the most famous incidents involved two girls from the Oatman family who in 1851 were taken by the Yavapai people after the massacre of most of their wagon train, and then sold to the Mojave Indians. One girl returned after five years to tell her story.7 Against these tales the many incidents of Indians assisting emigrant families with food, equipment and guidance held little sway.8

It was not only from the North American settler experience that captivity narratives drew their power. Linda Colley demonstrates in Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, the long period over which captivity narratives and imagery had figured in British perceptions of Indigenous societies. In her discussion of the relationship between the ‘400, 000 or so men and women from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and above all England who crossed the Atlantic

4 Gillian Bouras, A Foreign Wife, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1986, p. 27. 5 Elliott West, Growing Up With the Country University of New Mexico Press, Alburquerque, 1989, p. 35. 6 Emmy E. Werner, Pioneer Children on the Journey West, Westview Press, Boulder, 1995, p. 121. 7 Ibid., pp. 134-6. 8 Ibid., p. 121. 17

in the course of the seventeenth century’, Colley argues that they

almost certainly took with them … a knowledge of the kinds of stories related by and about those of their countrymen who were captured by the powers of Barbary and Islam. The stories of capture by the forces of the Crescent were then adapted to a new American environment and to very different dangers. The very first account of an Englishman held captive by Native Americans to become a publishing success in London, John Smith’s famous description of his seizure in Virginia by the forces of Powhatan, and of his subsequent ‘rescue’ by Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas, was indeed the work of a man previously captured while fighting against Ottoman armies and sold as a slave in Constantinople.9

As she suggests, this understanding means that the North American captivity narratives need to be considered ‘through more than just a parochial and national lens. … they need situating in a transatlantic and … imperial context’.10 The Australian settler experience therefore, was undertaken largely by people who had linked Indigenous peoples with captivity experiences since the early seventeenth century, and on what must have appeared a universal scale.

Although there were stories of 'wild blacks', in reality there was very little in the experience of the Australian settlers that equated to the fears generated by these earlier colonial experiences. As I demonstrate in later chapters, ‘Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Other Settler Societies’ and ‘Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Australia’, whilst Australia's Indigenous peoples were sometimes regarded with suspicion and accused of holding white women and children captive, they were very frequently the means of saving lost people and rarely initiated violence. However, as Kate Darian-Smith noted in the introduction to her study of captivity narratives on the Australian frontiers, the power of the European colonial discourse largely overrode the realities of interracial dynamics,

the actualities of race relations on the Australian frontier did little to diminish the discursive and cultural power of the captivity narrative within settler society.11

9 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850, Jonathan Cape, London, 2002, pp. 140-1. 10 Ibid., p. 141. 11 Kate Darian-Smith, ‘“Rescuing” Barbara Thompson and Other White Women: Captivity Narratives on Australian Frontiers’, in Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall 18

Despite early examples of lost child episodes, such as the little boy on the shores of Sydney Harbour in 1803, the majority of stories of children lost in the bush—both actual and artistic creations—appear from around the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Peter Pierce also makes this observation in the introduction to his The Country of Lost Children—‘Narratives of lost children in the colonial period in Australia are concentrated in the second half of the nineteenth century’.12 Unfortunately he never explores why this might be so: it remains a given of the first section of his book which, although titled ‘In the Nineteenth Century: Discovering the Lost Child’, actually only discusses the second half of the century. The development of the bush-lost child as a widely recognised image seems to have occurred in two phases. The initial phase covered the early years of colonial establishment during which children were lost and sometimes found, sometimes not. Whatever the outcome, the incidents were artistically unrepresented. Pierce is correct in locating public recognition of the image in the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, I believe that these early incidents, frequently transmitted by the popular press, established a common basis of understanding about the nature of these experiences—an important critical mass—that resulted in the later artistic and cultural flowering around the image. The early incidents also served to establish the image as part of the Australian colonial Foundation experience along with drought, fire and flood.

The growth of interest in the image of the lost child from the late 1850s onwards appears to have been the result of many factors—geographic, demographic, social and cultural. For instance, the increased demand for food resulting from an influx of immigrants largely made up of gold-seekers in the 1850s promoted the movement of settlers onto small family farms.13 The Selection Acts, which were intended to open up large tracts of land currently held by pastoralists to small-scale farming, were first passed in Victoria (1860)

(eds), Text, Theory, Space: Land, literature and history in South Africa and Australia, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 101. 12 Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999, p. xii. 13 During the decade from1851 to 1861, Australia’s population increased from 437 665 to just over 1.1 million. Wray Vamplew, (ed.), Australians Historical Statistics, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, Broadway, 1987, p. 26. 19

and New South Wales (1861), and soon affected all the colonies.14 As a result there were many more children on small farms scattered throughout the bush, playing or working in it. Certainly as incidents of lost children increased, so did the public interest that manifested itself in detailed accounts of lost child episodes in newspapers and journals, or as the subject of literature and art.15 Many factors appear to have contributed to this growth of interest—the proliferation of newspapers and illustrated magazines made the stories accessible, the influx of people and wealth occasioned by the discovery of gold generated a larger, better educated reading public who had leisure to read and think. In his history of Australia written from a cultural perspective, John Rickard noted that the gold-rush migrants were more from the ranks of the skilled and the middle-class than earlier migrants, and better educated. He argues convincingly that this made for a thoughtful generation, quoting Geoffrey Serle’s assessment in The Golden Age (1963) that: ‘Seriousness of purpose, readiness of emotion, craving for respectability, prudery and sentimentality marked out this generation’.16 It was a generation of youth and families; the 1861 census figures show that the 0-9 years age group constituted over a quarter of the total Australian population—323 484 out of 1 151 947. The parents of these children, adults in the 20-39 years age group, made up well over one third of the population (446 769). These figures show that children were highly visible, and young families the dominant social grouping.17

14 The Selection Acts were seen as a means of removing the control of large areas of Crown land from wealthy squatters and of opening it up to small farmers. The selectors would pay for their land in instalments; also they must live on and improve it. Regulations about size of land available to selectors varied in each colony; however, as a generalisation agricultural blocks were not to be smaller than 40 acres or bigger than 640 acres. (C.M.H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History, 1851-1900, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1955, pp. 117- 26). 15 For example, a lost child episode features prominently in Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), usually characterised as the most significant novel of the colonial period. The Duff children, lost in 1864 and famously found after nine days, were featured in all the newspapers; images and fictional versions of their story appeared in the Illustrated Australian News (24 February 1864), and the Illustrated Melbourne Post (27 July 1866). Nicholas Chevalier published a depiction of ‘The Lost Children’ in the Illustrated Australian News (24 September 1864) and Illustrated Melbourne Post (22 September 1864). S.T. Gill, best known for his goldfields paintings, portrayed the moment of the children’s discovery by a mounted figure, probably their father, in The Australian Sketchbook (1864). 16 John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, Longman, London, 1988, p. 36; Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851-61, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1963, p. 65. 17 Vamplew, Historical Statistics, p. 30. 20

After the initial flurry of activity on the goldfields had abated and people settled to creating a society, they sought to understand and expound a national identity. Richard White, Inventing Australia (1981), contends that it had been generally accepted during most of the nineteenth century that Australia had a ‘clear political and cultural “image” which was considered neither particularly British nor Australian’.18 It was an image primarily based on newness rather than nationality. White claims: ‘Australians saw themselves, and were seen by others, as part of a group of new, transplanted, predominantly Anglo-Saxon emigrant societies’.19 However the need to define a separate Australian image grew in intensity towards the end of the nineteenth century. Particular, distinctive experiences were used to convey this national identity and the bush-lost child was one of these. These experiences were given creative form by largely urban dwellers—writers and painters—who it may be postulated had both the time and energy to consider their symbolic importance, qualities probably not available to the largely country people directly involved.20 Also the urban artist knew that he had an audience and a venue for having work published in the many colonial newspapers and journals.21

Another major factor influencing a growing awareness of the lost child image was the development during the second half of the nineteenth century of a growing perception of childhood as a distinct state of being, with certain characteristics. This was particularly important for the emotional impact of the image that depended upon shared understandings, central to which was the helplessness, innocence and vulnerability of the child figure. Furthermore, in Australia the image of lost children was also loaded with the significance for the future. Children were at once the hope and the symbol of the young nation that portrayed itself in just these terms. 'Young Australia' needed to survive the rigors of its chosen environment to prove the validity of its settlement. Every child lost in the bush represented a loss of potential future.

I do not, however, want to make too much of the symbolic quality of the child lost in the bush because I do not believe that this was explicit in the

18 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688-1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981, p. 47. 19 Ibid. 20 See Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend’, in Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 71, October 1978, pp. 191-209. 21 White, Inventing Australia, p. 62. 21

understanding of the colonial settlers themselves. I will discuss their relationship with the land later in the thesis, but at this point I want to position my argument within the wider debate about European settlement. The accepted view is that Europeans felt uncomfortable in the harsh, Australian environment. This is a view espoused by Pierce amongst many others. He expounds its implications for the lost child figure thus,

The abiding force of the figure of the lost child has, however, deeper and darker origins and implications. The forlorn girls and boys, bereft, disoriented and crying in a wilderness that is indifferent, if not actively hostile to them, stand also for the older generation, that of their parents. Symbolically, the lost child represents the anxieties of European settlers … The figure of the child stands in part for the apprehensions of adults about having sought to settle in a place where they might never be at peace.22

He goes on to describe the image as a metaphor for ‘European Australians’ to ‘express and understand the insecurities of their position in a land that was new to many of them, and strange to all’.23 Later again, Pierce suggests that the losses of children were ‘emblematic … of an anxiety that Australia will never truly welcome European settlement’.24 These views may be substantiated through a study of artistic and literary representations of the image, yet very little in my reading of contemporary accounts of the incidents supports this. Ironically, children became lost because they, and often their family, felt quite at home in the bush. Tim Bonyhady vigorously refutes the notion that early colonists felt alienated by their environment in The Colonial Earth (2000), his study of the settlers’ perceptions of, and responses to, their physical surroundings.

While many colonists were alienated by their new environment, others delighted in it. The standard test is the settlers’ response to the gum tree. The cliché would have it that the invaders saw the eucalypt as a symbol of everything that was different—and wrong—about their new home. In fact, many members of the First Fleet lauded the gum tree for its distinctiveness. Even from the 1820s, when the cliché has more substance, the eucalypts had champions. When the landscape painter John Glover arrived in Tasmania in 1831, he reckoned them a ‘painter’s delight’…. Colonists also came to feel deep affection for particular places that satisfied their taste for the picturesque and sublime … The

22 Pierce, Lost Children, p. xii. 23 Ibid., p. xiii. 24 Ibid., p. 6. 22

settler’s attachment to the colonial landscape was matched by their desire to preserve it.25

John Rickard’s lucid rebuttal of the notion of a perceived hostile environment is also very telling about the power of myth:

It is an enduring cultural myth that Europeans found the Australian environment hostile, alien, oppressive, and that they had great difficulty in coming to terms with it aesthetically … It has found expression in the work of many writers (less so with painters). Yet the myth is far from accurate: it confuses not only the various levels of perception, but experiences which have quite different cultural contexts. But a myth, once established in the national pantheon, acquires a certain power to sustain itself; it becomes an all too convenient landmark for the creative artist or social interpreter.26

He is talking generally here about the European experience of settlement but the implications of this view for the specific image of children lost in the bush are readily apparent.

Also apparent is the fact that, to arrive at some understanding of the power of the bush-lost child in the Australian national identity, we must achieve an understanding of both the experience of childhood and changing attitudes to the notion of childhood from the beginning of European settlement of Australia in 1788 to the post-Federation period ending in 1914. I have chosen to contain this study within these perameters because the shattering experience of World War I ruptured the social fabric of Australia and necessarily re- shaped perceptions of loss and national identity into very different forms. Although other experiences, such as the goldrushes of the 1850s and the Depression of the 1890s, were very significant for national life, they—unlike the war— did not radically alter the understanding of grief for lost young lives.27 We must also look at the situation of children in Europe and Great Britain from the mid-eighteenth century, because the attitudes and experiences that shaped their lives were brought to Australia as an integral part of the

25 Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, Melbourne University Press Carlton, 2000, pp. 3-4. 26 Rickard, Australia, p. 43. 27 Australian casualty figures of 226 000—men killed, wounded or taken prisoner—were the highest in any British force. (A.G.L. Shaw, The Story of Australia, Faber and Faber, London, 1954, p. 221). Military historian, Craig Wilcox, claims that World War I ‘affected Australia more than any other event since British settlement’. He gives the number of deaths (over 58 000) a human dimension with the calculation that this meant one in 10 Australian men between 18 and 45 years (World War I, Oxford Companion to Australian History, pp. 698-9). 23

cultural expectations of convicts, marines and free settlers alike. It is particularly important to understand the attitudes held by British society, because these underpinned the cultural beliefs of the colonists who shaped Australian society. Rickard describes the ‘century of migration from 1788 to 1890’ as ‘a continuing process of cultural transplantation’.28 Cultural links and influences were maintained through the continuing flow of new settlers whose attitudes reinforced or re-cast cultural attitudes, and who, of course, remained British whatever the effects of colonial life.

News from 'Home' via letters and newspapers was influential in shaping colonial attitudes towards children, as was the work of English writers whose novels formed the majority of Australian reading matter. The Australian colonists were great readers, and most of their books were imported. As Martin Lyons noted in the introduction to A History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945 (2001), ‘Australia has always had a vigorous reading culture, nurtured by general prosperity and a flood of cheaply imported books from Britain’. 29 Colonial editions were printed in Britain for the empire and Australia was the most lucrative market.30 Britain remained Australia’s main supplier of literature for a long time, as Lyons notes:

Australia was both a colonised book market and an exceedingly important destination for British literary exports. At the end of the Second World War, little more than 15 per cent of the books sold in Australia were of Australian origin.31

Similarly newspapers were plentiful and cheap with a large section of British and empire material.32 In his chapter on ‘Newspapers and Daily Reading’ in The History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945, John Arnold records a calculation made in 1882 that ‘there was one paper per 6722 Australians compared with one paper per 18 000 people in Great Britain’ to support his contention that ‘Australia had, by international standards, an exceptionally

28 Rickard, Australia, p. 83. 29 Martin Lyons and John Arnold (eds), A History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2001, p. xv. 30 See also Elizabeth Webby’s overview of colonial Australian reading material, ‘Colonial writers and readers’, chapter 2 in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 54-5. 31 Ibid., p. xviii. 32 Ibid., p. 97. 24

high rate of newspaper consumption’. 33 The newspapers all carried a substantial amount of news from Britain and, to a lesser extent, from Europe. Wallace Kirsop, in his discussion of the history of the Australian book-trade, conveys the interplay of forces on the reading of colonial Australians:

It is important to remember just how much of Northern Hemisphere traditions has survived and prospered in Australia and how greatly the book trade has contributed to this process … Apart from the influence of the milieu … the inheritance was not monolithically English in the narrow sense but diverse, plurally British, with obvious debts to Continental Europe and North America.34

In an endeavour to understand the colonial attitudes towards childhood and children that shaped attitudes to the image of the bush-lost child I will examine some of the major threads in the life of children in England and Australia— their work, educational experiences, health and home life. As a general introduction to a more detailed study of the colonial child, I will consider the broader historiography of the study of childhood. Before any of this, however, I need to consider a very basic question—who was a child?

What is Childhood? At the core of understanding attitudes towards childhood is the question of what ages were seen as marking off the state of childhood. As I shall demonstrate, this could be a flexible figure depending a great deal on class and race. European children were present from the first days of settlement in Australia. Thirty-six children—some were convicts, most of the remainder were children of marines—arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, comprising fewer than four per cent of the total contingent.35 Unfortunately details of who they were and what they experienced are minimal. In an account of his first walk at Botany Bay that involved one of the earliest cross-cultural encounters in Australia. Three days after the Fleet’s arrival, Watkin Tench

33 Ibid., p. 255. 34 Wallace Kirsop, Books for Colonial Readers: The Nineteenth-Century Australian Experience, Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 1995, p. 5. 35 Bryan Gandevia, Tears Often Shed: Child Health and Welfare in Australia from 1788, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1978, p. 13. It is impossible to be completely certain of numbers: Robert Holden in his book on the children of the First Fleet, Orphans of History: The Forgotten Children of the First Fleet, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1999, mentions thirty- four children (p. 3). The First Fleet was the name given to the 11 ships that brought the first permanent British settlers, mainly convicts, to Australia. 25

recorded that he had a child with him—‘I had at this time a little boy, of not more than seven years of age, in my hand’.36 Tench does not name the child, but Robert Holden, in his detailed study of the children of the First Fleet, asserts that this was the ‘seven-year-old son of one of the Marines, most likely Edward Munday.’37 We only know of the boy because Tench recorded the fascination his clothes and white skin engendered in the ‘Indians’. In an observation that provides a telling suggestion of the high value Aborigines accorded children, Tench noted the gentleness of the Aborigines’ examination of the child and the way in which they protected their own young by keeping them well away from the Europeans.

The discussion of how many child convicts traveled on the First Fleet raises the central question as to what ages made up childhood, specifically in eighteenth-century understanding. In this context Holden draws upon the definition used by the legal reference Blackstone’s Commentaries to arrive at a working understanding of ‘child’. This definition held that no-one under the age of seven years could be considered guilty of a felony; however children between seven and fourteen years of age could be convicted if it was felt that they could ‘discern between good and evil’.38 Beyond this the child became a youth.

Any reading in this field demonstrates the difficulty of arriving at a uniformly accepted age defining childhood, or at a common understanding of what that state should entail. Both of these aspects altered as European society in Australia developed from the days of first settlement to Federation in 1901, by which time attitudes towards children and childhood appeared to have become reasonably fixed. Other factors critical to individual experiences of childhood were class and the rural/urban divide. Just how critical class could be is illuminated by A.G.L. Shaw’s delineation of ‘one law for the rich and another for the poor’ in Convicts and Colonies. He contrasts the laughter which greeted the confession made by a member of the House of Lords in 1827 that ‘as a boy he had been a “great poacher”’, with the sentence of

36 Watkin Tench, 1788: Comprising ‘A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay’ and’ A complete account of the settlement at Port Jackson’, ed. Tim Flannery, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1996, p. 41. 37 Holden, Orphans, p. 127. 38 Ibid., p. 128. 26

transportation meted out to child offenders from less privileged social classes.39

The presence of eighteen child convicts in the First Fleet confirms that eighteenth-century Britain was a society that attributed legal responsibility to children in a way that modern society does not.40 Although ‘unusual to permit transportation of youths under fifteen years of age’, records show some convicts as young as eight or nine years.41 A very significant proportion of convicts were juveniles; 25 000, or around fifteen per cent of all convicts transported to Australia, were aged eighteen years or under.42 The increase in juvenile convicts around 1810 was in part the result of the resumption of transportation towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but also a response to the rapid population growth in Britain, a factor that I examine in more detail later in this chapter. Earlier juvenile convicts had been treated in the same way as adults, but increasing concern was expressed about the possible corruption of young convicts through close proximity with hardened adult convicts. This resulted in separate accommodation for boys on male convict ships from 1817 and, six years later, the establishment in Britain of separate hulks for boys of less than sixteen years of age. The same concerns prompted the establishment in 1819 of a juvenile section at Carters’ Barracks in New South Wales. Designed to re-educate convict boys, the program at the Barracks was divided between schooling, trade and moral instruction, with a strong emphasis on corporal punishment.43

The desirability of separating child convicts from adults, and of giving them some education was recognised by Governor Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land. Without skills and with a reputation of being difficult, the young convicts were virtually unassignable to free settlers as workers. In 1833 Arthur moved many of the boys to Port Arthur, then into juvenile barracks at Point Puer. The intention of this move was twofold—safe confinement and moral reformation. As in Carters’ Barracks, this was to be achieved through religious

39 A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and Colonies, Faber, London, 1971, pp. 163-4. 40 Tench, 1788, p. 19. 41 L.L. Robson, The Convict Settlers of Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1970, pp. 38-40. 42 Kim Humphrey, 'Objects of compassion: young male convicts in Van Diemen's Land, 1834- 1850', Australian Historical Studies vol. 25, n. 98, April 1992, p. 14. 43 Jan Kociumbas, Australian Childhood: A History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, pp. 28-9. 27

education and industrial training administered with very strict discipline. All this was consistent with notions of prison reform and a changing attitude towards the treatment of juvenile offenders gaining currency in Britain.44 By 1838 there were 375 convicts aged between ten and eighteen housed at Point Puer. This had grown to 800 by 1843, and plans were made for the construction of a large penitentiary on the panoptical model. However the plans were abandoned because of a sharp drop in the number of young convicts. By 1849 convicts aged eighteen years or younger formed under one per cent of prisoners sent to Van Diemen’s Land, compared to twenty per cent in 1845. This reflected the reduced number of young prisoners being transported.45 All these moves to provide special conditions for young offenders indicated a developing view that children were different from adults and required separate treatment.

It was 1847 before criminal law in Britain discriminated between children and older offenders. As I mentioned earlier, only children under seven years of age were excused from full culpability. Those between seven and fourteen years were subject to the full range of penalties—corporal and capital punishment, imprisonment and transportation. This was not just the theoretical possibility of punishment; in 1817 a Clerkenwell prison received 399 prisoners aged between nine and nineteen.46 The punitive rather than reforming focus of the British legal system in relation to children only began to change in the middle of the nineteenth century with the establishment of reformatory schools. This accompanied other forms of child protection, such as the Factory Acts, discussed in a later section, ‘The working child in Britain’. However, the process of change appears to have been slow—children under fourteen could still be sent to prison until the introduction of the 1908 Children’s Act.47 Rather than the duty of care towards children which as a society we now accept and expect the legal system to uphold, the eighteenth-and nineteenth- century British legal system was primarily concerned to protect property.

Fourteen years of age was a widely accepted end point for childhood during

44 Humphrey, 'Objects’, pp. 18-19. 45 Ibid., pp. 20-5. 46 James Walvin, A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800-1914, Penguin, Middlesex, 1982, pp. 159-60. 47 Ibid., p. 59. 28

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; however, there is evidence of some differing legal age criteria. Avril Kyle argues for sixteen years and under as the official age of childhood, based on the use of this figure from the 1830s onwards in British prison returns and in the application of the Poor Laws.48 This may suggest a changing attitude towards the needs of an age group who had previously been transported, a sense that care was a more appropriate response than punishment.

In the Australian colonies, however, twelve years of age was used to define childhood in the earliest New South Wales censuses (1828, 1833 and 1836), which suggests a widespread acceptance of that age as the recognised limit of childhood. Possibly it reflects a realistic appreciation of where childhood actually ended. As we see in the section on work later in this chapter, many children of that age were expected to work as an adult. From 1841 to 1856 a more refined breakdown was employed in New South Wales for census- taking, one that recognised periods of infancy (0—2 years), childhood (2—7 years), boy/girlhood (7—14 years), and adolescence (14—21 years). This age sub-division was also used in South Australia from 1841 to 1855, and Tasmania from 1841 to 1851. Victoria moved in 1857 to five-year cohorts and this became standard in most other colonies apart from Western Australia, where this breakdown was not employed until 1881. Until 1859 Western Australia tabulated returns as under 12 years, 12 to 21 years and over 21 years.49 The general move to more refined registration of cohorts, apparent from the early part to the end of the century, suggest an increasing understanding of multi-development stages in human life, and a more explicit definition of the state of childhood. It also suggests that the length of recognised childhood increased over this period.

Historians discover the state of childhood The pioneering work in childhood studies in western societies was the publication in 1962 of Centuries of Childhood, by Phillipe Ariès.50 Ariès argued that the state of childhood was a social construction that, from the

48 Avril Kyle, ‘Little Depraved Felons’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 25, no. 99, Oct. 1992, pp. 319-20. 49 Jack Camm, The Early Nineteenth Century Colonial Censuses of Australia, Historical Statistics Monograph No. 8, Australian Reference Publications, Bundoora, 1988, pp. 73-4. 50 Phillipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Knopf, New York, 1962. 29

seventeenth century onwards, became an increasingly constricting force, depriving children of the freedom to partake fully in society as they had previously. He depicted the Middle Ages as a Golden Age for children when they were fully integrated into society at all levels. Ariès considered the notion of childhood innocence, which he claimed developed during the eighteenth century, as critical in the later restrictive attitudes towards children. This attitude required that children be safeguarded 'against pollution by life ... particularly ... sexuality' and, concomitantly, that they be strengthened 'by developing character and reason'. Protection and educative moral guidance became features of child-rearing philosophies. It is during this period that Ariès locates the development of the 'association of childhood with primitivism and irrationalism ... [which] characterizes our contemporary concept of childhood’.51 Other historians dispute both Ariès’ thesis and periodisation, rejecting his vision of the happy 'traditional child', free to mix in their daily lives with people of all ages across the range of society. Nor do they all accept his view of the eighteenth century as the time that the distinction between childhood and adolescence emerged. However, all recognise his work as critical to the study of childhood.52

Australian studies of childhood The most comprehensive Australian study to date, Jan Kociumbas's Australian Childhood, appeared thirty-five years after Ariès's work. The very fact that it took until the late-twentieth century for children to be regarded as a focus for research indicates that they, like women and families, had remained absent from the historical record which, throughout all the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, dealt with adult male experiences and deeds—usually males of the ruling class. Children were treated as an almost invisible part of the larger society, neither needing nor deserving of a separate history. The growth of historical interest in children and families reflected a shift away from emphasis on the ‘makers of history’ such as explorers and statesmen, to consideration of the society and its sensibilities. In general Australian historians have examined aspects of childhood as part of wider contexts, most notably that of the family. Such historians include work of Patricia Grimshaw,

51 Ibid., p.11. 52 Lloyd de Mause (ed.), The Evolution of Childhood, Peter Bedrick Books, New York, 1988, p.5; Nupur Chauduri, 'England', in J.M. Hawes & N. Ray Hiner (eds), Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1991, pp. 241-2. 30

Chris McConville and Ellen McEwen,53 Michael Gilding54 and Kerreen Reiger.55 Portia Robinson and Beverly Earnshaw have considered the experiences of children during the early colonial period.56 The ways in which the convict system dealt with children are discussed by Avril Kyle and Kim Humphrey.57 Educational history has often illuminated the experiences of children in the schooling system.58 The remembered stories of childhood experiences in works such as Australian Childhood (1991), an anthology edited by historians of childhood, Gyn Dow and June Factor, are illuminating about the quality of the experience.59

Other historians have used behaviours specific to children as a means of understanding something of the quality and the historical context of their lives. Ken Inglis suggested some areas to consider in an evocative paper on 'Young Australia' given at a path-breaking conference of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria which, in 1979—the International Year of the Child—took 'The Colonial Child' for its theme.

We need to discover more about what colonial children did and had done to them; we need to get bearings on their experience in families, at school, in streets and playgrounds and paddocks and in the bush, on their transitions from school to work, on their biological and social journeys from infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood.60

Various papers considered what the colonial child read, their health, experiences of home and school, and the lives of urban street children. June Factor’s wide-ranging paper on the play of colonial children, in which she

53 Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville and Ellen McEwen (eds), Families in Colonial Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985. 54 Michael Gilding, The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991. 55 Kerreen Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernizing the Australian Family, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985; Family Economy, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1991. 56 Portia Robinson, The Hatch and Brood of Time, Oxford University Press, Melbourne,1985; Beverly Earnshaw, 'The Colonial Children', The Push From the Bush, no. 9, July 1981, pp. 28-43. 57 Kyle, ‘Depraved’, pp. 319-24; Humphrey, 'Objects’, pp. 13-33. 58 Marjorie Theobald and R.J.W. Selleck (eds), Family, School & State in Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990. 59 Gwyn Dow and June Factor (eds), Australian Childhood: An Anthology, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1991. 60 K.S. Inglis, 'Young Australia 1879-1900: The Idea and the Reality', The Colonial Child, Guy Featherstone (ed.), 1981, pp. 22. 31

noted the strong transference of children's games from England to the colonies, provided tangible evidence of the process and power of cultural tranference.61 Such transference at this very basic level of near-universal folklife—children’s play—indicates that cultural crossovers from Britain to Australia permeated the colonial society. This was important to the development of the Australian image of lost children, drawing heavily as it did upon the existing ‘Babes in the Wood’ story, an issue I examine in detail in the next chapter. A work that expands upon this subject is Robert Holden's study of the history Australian nursery rhymes in which he considers the adaptations made to British rhymes to reflect the reality of Australian childrens' lives.62

Inglis's paper on the image of 'Young Australia', which opened the conference, is particularly helpful in producing an understanding of the power that the image of childhood came to hold in colonial Australia during the latter part of the nineteenth century.63 He thoughtfully examined the ways in which youth both represented the developmental stage at which the country perceived itself to be, and literally contained its future. In a country newly come to nationhood the attitudes and behaviour of youth were keenly observed as indicators for the nation's future. In the final paper of the conference, 'Messages From Far Away: Recollections of Australian Childhood', Stephen Murray-Smith remarked, 'the ironical fact still remains that the one historical experience that everyone has been through is the one we know least about’.64 However Murray-Smith misses a vital issue. Whilst it is true that all people have been children, it is by no means true that their experiences of childhood have been the same or even similar. I shall examine the disparities and their causes later in this chapter.

Literature discovers childhood The flowering of the image of a child lost in the Australian bush in the second half of the nineteenth century was inextricably linked with a view of childhood as a discrete state of being with certain innate attributes—notably innocence,

61 June Factor, 'Fragments of Children's Play in Colonial Australia', in Featherstone (ed.), Colonial Child, pp. 54-62. 62 Robert Holden, Twinkle, Twinkle Southern Cross: The Forgotten Folklore of Australian Nursery Rhymes, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1992, p. 127. 63 Inglis, 'Young Australia 1879-1900', in Featherstone (ed), Colonial Child, pp. 1-23. 64 Stephen Murray-Smith, 'Messages From Far Away', in Featherstone (ed.), Colonial Child, p. 73. 32

purity and vulnerability. This understanding evoked varying responses as to how children should be treated, for did such innocence flourish with no rules or did it need the protection of strict rules? This argument was played out in eighteenth-and-nineteenth century Britain through the medium of literature, which was very influential on the attitudes of legislators and the general population at the time of Australia’s settlement.

The eighteenth century is widely regarded as a crucial period in the development of the concept of 'childhood'. Tom Paine's preaching on the 'rights of man’ caused some people to consider that perhaps children too had rights.65 Discussions as to appropriate methods of raising children shifted from John Locke's stern view of them in the late seventeenth century as 'empty vessels' in need of careful filling, to the later, mid-eighteenth century injunction of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to 'Hold childhood in reverence.' Rousseau rejected the idea of teaching children 'facts', arguing instead that they should learn from experience and within a sheltered environment. Most controversially, he rejected the notion of Original Sin, claiming that children were born innocent and only learnt evil from society.66 This view was given potent voice in the work of the English Romantics, notably William Wordsworth and William Blake. Peter Coveney places their work at the centre of the appearance of children as a literary theme: 'Childhood as a major theme came with the generation of Blake and Wordsworth'.67 Blake's fiery espousal of the innocence and vulnerability of children found voice in his Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794). Wordsworth created very powerful and influential images of the child as open to, and indeed part of, nature in a way lost to adults in 'Intimations of Immortality' (1802) and later the 'The Prelude' (1805). Coveney suggests that the child in their work is symbolic of the,

artist's dissatisfaction with ... society ... In a world given increasingly to utilitarian values and the Machine, the child could become the symbol of Imagination and Sensibility, a symbol of nature set against the forces ... actively de-naturing humanity.68

65 Walvin, Child's World, p. 45. 66 Penny Brown, The Captured World: The Child and Childhood in Nineteenth -Century Women's Writing in England, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hertfordshire, 1993, pp. 3-5. 67 Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, Penguin, London, 1967, p. 29. 68 Ibid., p. 31. 33

The writings of Blake and Wordsworth were extremely influential on the idealisation of childhood and the sentimentality surrounding it that came to dominate the Victorian era.

Yet there were huge contradictions in these developing views. Whatever the philosophies, an idealised state of childhood was a luxury available to very few. Hard work remained the norm for the majority of children who had to work to survive. Even within the classes whose children did not work, childhood was not synonymous with untrammeled freedom. A perceived need for discipline remained a facet of the increasing interest in raising children, and it was discipline applied both at home and school. Reinforced by the stern dictates of the Evangelical movement from the mid-eighteenth century on, absolute obedience came to be regarded as the paramount virtue of children. In her discussion of the representations of children in nineteenth-century literature, Gillian Avery claimed that:

Instant obedience was, in fact, the foundation stone of both Georgian and Victorian Nursery discipline: to the Georgians it was just part of the established order of things, to the Victorians a religious duty.69

An example of the literature for children that reinforced the virtue of obedience is a short story called 'Obedience' by a Mrs. Sherwood, published in 1830. A young girl, trained to obey, swallows her medicine as directed and recovers from scarlet fever; a boy brought up under a philosophy of reason will not obey and dies. By the time his parents have another son they have seen the light and altered their child-rearing methods. ‘Solomon was more frequently quoted by them at the tea-table than J. J. Rousseau’, wrote the author, grimly.70

A belief in the importance of childhood obedience was clearly part of the values brought to Australia by British settlers, but which took on particular urgency in the rural colonial context. A letter from Margaret Nihill in Adelaide, written in 1882 to her ten-year-old great-nephew living on a pastoral property in South Australia, vividly conveys the early settlers' ever-present fear of children becoming lost in the bush, as well as a firm belief in the power

69 Gillian Avery, Nineteenth Century Children, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1965, pp. 206-7. 70 Ibid., p. 206. 34

of cautionary tales.

Now I must tell you what happened a short time ago—two little boys went out for a walk by themselves, and lost their way in the wild bush. They were out all night in the cold and wet they lost their hats and boots, their poor little feet and hands were cut and bleeding from the prickly bushes, and walking on the hard ground, a great many people and the police were out on horse-back looking for them, at last they were found sitting under a tree in the scrub; in a sad plight so tired and hungry, they told their papa they would never again go out of sight of the house without someone to take care of them. … And a week or two ago, another little boy went too near the river at Port Adelaide, where he was told not, he has not been seen since, it is feared he fell in and was drowned, and that the big fish have eaten him up! … So you see how naughty it is for children to go near the banks of a river when they are told not …When you write tell me if you got the Christmas cards I sent you and little Mary ... be sure to say if Miss McIntosh thinks you are good children, and always very obedient.71

This incident provides a context for the emphasis placed on the importance of obeying parental instructions; in the bush it was often a matter of survival, not merely a dictatorial whim. Accounts of lost children, such as the case studies I use later—in particular the stories of the Duff children, Daylesford boys, the Downing children and Lewis Vieusseux—demonstrate how easily they were lost and how difficult to find, explaining why the bush was regarded as potentially threatening.

Contemporaneous with the growth of Evangelicalism was the developing view that the family home was a sanctuary from the physical and moral dangers of the world. In her study of the child in nineteenth-century English women's writing, Penny Brown locates the emergence of this ideology in England at the end of the eighteenth century.

With the rise of the middle classes and the Evangelical movement in the late eighteenth century there emerged strong ideologies of domesticity, dependent on a clear division between the public and private spheres, with the home seen as a haven of peace, a source of stability, security, virtue and piety, held together by moral and emotional bonds, a construct modelled on the heavenly home.72

71 Brenda Niall and John Thompson (eds), The Oxford Book of Australian Letters, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 92-3. The letter, dated 4 May 1882, is in the Cudmore Papers, Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia. 72 Brown, Captured World, p. 92. 35

In Australia, by the nineteenth century, a growing middle-class and increasing urbanisation of the vastly increased post-goldrush population lent itself to the proliferation of this ideology.73 The delayed emergence of this view in Australia is possibly accounted for by the prior need for a significant middle- class, urban environment to develop. The 'home as haven' view is essentially an urban understanding of the world. Rural life does not easily allow for this separation of public and private lives.

Women and children were represented increasingly in literature and art as needing to be protected from the rough aspects of everyday life in an idealised, domestic world; the world of the suburban home. Inherent to this world was the notion of innocence as a positive moral, even redemptive, force. The innocent child, 'house angels' portrayed in an 1860 temperance magazine, was accorded a goodness and clarity of vision with which to redeem even the most worldly adult.74 Nowhere is the equation between childish innocence and goodness better illustrated than in Charles Dickens' character, Little Dorrit, the moral centre of the novel—published in 1857—that bears her name. Little Dorrit, as the name suggests, is never allowed to grow to full physical or sexual maturity. Her goodness is inextricably linked to her childlike appearance and thus she must remain a static figure. Rickards’ comment that ‘Dickens was a colonial favourite’ suggests how very widespread this image of childish innocence was in colonial life.75

The death-bed scenes so beloved by early Victorians, in which childish innocence overcame adult selfishness, found expression in the developing

73 In the 1850s the population more than doubled to 1.1 million as a result of the influx of gold- seekers. Most of these were young males (Beverly Kingston, The Oxford History of Australia, vol. 3, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 108). The colony of Victoria, in which the major goldfields were situated, had a population of 540 000 Europeans by 1861, more than 46 per cent of the total Australian population (Serle, Golden Age, p. 369). Rickard characterised these men as more likely to be from middle or skilled working class than previously, with ‘bourgeois ambitions’ and often the ‘ religious enthusiasm of the chapel’ (Australia, p. 36). Serle asserted that ‘The number of well- educated men and skilled artisans who migrated [to Victoria] in the fifties was extraordinarily high’, citing literacy figures of 89 percent of males and 78 per cent of females (Golden Age, p. 371). Australia was significantly more urbanised in the nineteenth century than the USA, Canada or New Zealand. By 1870, 37 per cent of the Australian population lived in towns compared with New Zealand (28 per cent) and the USA (26 per cent). (Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 665). 74 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 91. 75 Rickard, Australia, p. 96 36

Australian literature. An early example of this is the death scene of a child in Henry Kingsley's The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859). Although we learn that he is James Grewer’s child when he was reported lost, the boy is never named, he is portrayed as a symbolic figure.

A strange, wild little bush child ... utterly without knowledge or experience of human creatures ... unable to read a line ... a little savage ... yet beautiful to look on.76

This little 'Noble Savage' is completely pure of the taint of the outside world. Kingsley's depiction of him as 'yet unfit to begin labour', even though aged about eight, illustrated his own experiences of what was appropriate for children rather than reflecting the reality for many rural children. Enticed to his death by the lure of the bush, the little boy's body was found by two young men, friends now divided by conflict over their love for the same girl. The sight of him ‘one hand still grasping the flowers he had gathered on his last happy play-day ... his long journey ... ended’ was the catalyst for their resolution of the dispute. One turned to the other with the words ‘there can be no debate between us two, not with this lying here between us.’77 Innocent, childish purity had triumphed. The chapter portraying this incident was published separately by the publishers Macmillan in 1871 as an illustrated children's book, The Lost Child.78 It certainly fitted into the genre of moral, didactic and essentially sentimental works so beloved by the Victorians.79 It is difficult to deduce whether this work was meant to be read as a warning, or simply as an adventure story. However, no child could escape the message of the danger of the bush.

A similar figure was ‘Pretty Dick’ in Marcus Clarke's short story of that title originally published in a magazine in 1869, reappearing four years later in an anthology of Clarke's short stories.80 ‘Pretty Dick’ is the seven-year-old son of a shepherd, beautiful to look at and ‘the merriest little fellow possible, and manly too!’ Clarke defines his manliness through labour—he could chop

76 Henry Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, in Henry Kingsley, ed. J.S.D. Mellick, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1982, p. 258. 77 Ibid., p. 262. 78 Pierce, Lost Children, p. 16. 79 Avery, Nineteenth Century Children, p. 175. 80 Marcus Clarke, 'Pretty Dick', Colonial Monthly, no. 2, April 1869, pp. 128-41; Holiday Peak and other Tales, George Robertson, Melbourne, 1873. 37

wood, milk a cow and ride a wild horse. Dick is the epitome of all virtues, most importantly his ennobling influence on those around him—‘Everyone loved Pretty Dick ... the men always felt as if they had their Sunday clothes on in his presence’. He is the very essence of the innocent child who has learnt from experience of life but remains untouched by adult corruption. Clarke's portrayal of childhood was deeply sentimental, and much admired for it.81

The publication of 'Pretty Dick' sparked a discussion about the meaning of childhood in the Australian bush. In the first version of the story Dick was aged twelve, a fact noted scornfully by the Argus reviewer, who asserted that:

Bush lads of that mature age are generally strapping fellows, who do not easily get lost, and are more likely to wander in the direction of the public-house than to sentimentalize upon the margins of mysterious swamps, or scale mountains in search of the picturesque and beautiful.82

Even allowing for some city-based journalistic licence, this response suggests that the real bush child was far more robust than this literary representation. Yet notwithstanding this reservation the reviewer concluded that ‘the narrative is an excellent one and is written in a style which the author would do well to cultivate’. All Dick's virtues could not protect him from the lure and threat of the ‘awesome scrub’ and he became hopelessly lost. His fear and horror at the realisation of his state is evoked in pathetic detail but comfort is offered to the reader in the final sentence—‘God had taken him home’.83

The development in Britain of a specific children's literature, which was then transmitted to Australia, was used to promote socially desirable values. Jan Kociumbas suggests that these books ‘both reflected and popularized the view that children should be kept innocent of the economic, social and especially the sexual realities of the adult world’.84 Innocent, of course, meant vulnerable and therefore only safe under adult guidance. The didactic value of death—‘to the early Victorians disobedience even in small matters was a very terrible thing’85—translated readily to Australian conditions.86 To wander

81 Michael Wilding (ed.), Marcus Clarke, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1988, p. xxii. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., p. 569. 84 Jan Kociumbas, 'What Alyce Learnt at Nine’, History of Education Review, vol.15, no. 2, 1986, p.19. 85 Avery, Nineteenth Century Children, p.175. 38

away from home without a parent’s knowledge was inherently dangerous. The dangers of such wilfulness provide the moral for many tales, such as the story of ‘little Willie’ that appeared in the children’s supplement of the Wesleyan Chronicle in January 1872. Little Willie wandered off and was lost.

There were cracks and caves in that wild part, and savage dingoes and blackfellows—to name these is enough. And so little Willie was lost, and never heard of since.87

So, the children are told, should they regard their position before God. To ignore religious teachings is the moral equivalent of wandering into the dangers of the wild bush; without God’s guidance they would be lost.

Moralising, didactic works had long been a staple of British writing for children. Gillian Avery cites such improving examples as Punctuality, Sensibility and Disappointment: Pleasing Stories for the Improvement of the Minds of the Young (Emily Ospringe, c.1820), and My Station and its Duties: a narrative for girls going into service, (anon. 1832).88 However, she also notes the development of an increasingly indulgent view of children in the second half of the nineteenth century—‘Far less was expected of the late Victorian child ... than had been expected of his parents and grandparents; he was treated as being altogether less mature’.89 This attitude is particularly apparent in Kingsley's depiction of the ‘wild little bush child’, described as not yet ready for work at eight years old, and to a lesser extent in Clarke's ‘Pretty Dick’. In this sentimental view innocence became equated with extreme childishness. Robert Holden also noted the changing attitude towards what was suitable material for an Australian childhood in his study of nursery rhymes.

With the increasingly popular sentimental image of the Australian child there came an influential reaction against the supposed violence, cruelty

86 Pat Jalland notes another instance of the didactic use of children’s suffering in a funeral sermon at St James’s Church, Sydney, in 1834, for thirteen-year-old Eliza Reynolds who died from burns. The sermon ‘emphasised the theme of repentance’ by telling the story of a disobedient child who luckily reformed before she was fatally burnt. The Revd Hill made explicit his use of Eliza’s death, telling his congregation that ‘Eliza will not have died in vain … if the burning of her body should save your soul from the fire of Hell’., Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History: 1840-1918, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, p. 70. 87 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 97 (quoting from Wesleyan Chronicle, January 1872, p. 26). 88 Avery, Nineteenth Century Children, pp. 11, 89. 89 Ibid., p. 174. 39

and coarseness of many nursery rhymes.90

Avery points to the speech of children in British novels as a telling indicator of changing attitudes towards the state of childhood.

Just as the early Victorian authors had exaggerated the maturity of the young child so the late Victorians exaggerated his childishness, and we find children of six and seven still having difficulty in talking.91

This device was used in Australia too, to denote childish innocence. In an uncharacteristic excursion into the cult of cuteness, Henry Lawson's sentimental poetic version of ‘The Babies in the Bush’ (1900) depicts the soon-to-be lost children who have begged to go ‘where the daisies growed’. As they trot off they hold on tight to their sailor hats with ‘chubby brown hand(s)’ just in case ‘a bad wind blowed’. These little tots, soon to be ‘bush- lost Babies’, are completely different children from the worldly, careworn child-labourers of other stories such as ‘Water Them Geraniums’ and ‘The Drover's Wife’. These ‘Babies’ offer a remarkable contradiction to the bush- life Lawson's other writings evoke, a life of hardship and labour with no room for cuteness.

‘Knowing’ children To sustain this vision of innocent, unknowing childhood against the reality of the child whose labour is that of an adult required a certain willing suspension of reality. Children of less well-off families had to work. It was the growing number of middle-class families with an increasingly protective attitude towards childhood that rendered anomalous the image of the working child. The antipathy felt by many people towards ‘knowing’ children was voiced in 1873 by an English tourist in America, Isabella Bird, who asserted that:

One of the most painful things in the Western states and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children, only debased imitations of men and women.92

It was the frontier conditions that were seen to subvert or destroy childhood. This possibly reflected a fluidity of roles on the frontier, where the family’s

90 Holden, Twinkle, p. 2. 91 Ibid., p. 177. 92 West, Growing, p. 147. 40

need to become established overrode many preconceptions about suitable behaviour and roles for children. The frontier operated under its own particular constraints. As Darian-Smith points out, the frontier was a trans-colonial space that operated on several levels:

Within colonial culture … the frontier was not only a geographical space, but a powerful imaginative site … Australian colonists made sense of their own experiences through collective memories, however fragmentary and inaccurate, of European colonization in other ‘New Worlds’. In these memories, the frontier was constructed as a dangerous place where Europeans could be dislocated from their own society.93

This dislocation could take the form of ignoring social expectations of what were suitable occupations for children in favour of the pressures, real and perceived, of frontier existence. Once a family and community felt themselves to be securely established and ‘off’ the frontier, they could afford to consider ‘proper’ childlike activities.

As John Somerville pointed out in The Rise and Fall of Childhood (1982), this supposed absence of genuine children was related to the developing definition of childhood in Britain, which he described as having become ‘so exalted and narrow that real children had trouble meeting it’. He suggested that the perceived prevalence of working children in America might actually represent ‘a simpler society and economy in which children were more capable and more noticeable’.94 That is, the so-called ‘extinction of childhood’ could actually represent an older model of childhood. This hypothesis is supported by Pat Grimshaw and Graham Willett in their exploration of the Australian colonial family structure, in which they argue that,

For much of the colonial period, the dominant family pattern closely resembled the traditional family of pre-industrial Europe … Husband, wife and children, on the land … worked together in a joint family economic exercise.95

This reinforces the suggestion that the colonial childhoods commented upon disparagingly by British visitors were often actually earlier models of being no

93 Darian-Smith et al., Text, p. 99. 94 John Somerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood, Sage, Beverly Hills, 1982, p. 177. 95 Patricia Grimshaw and Graham Willett, ‘Women’s history and family history: an exploration of colonial family structure’, in Norma Grieve and Patricia Grimshaw (eds) Australian Women: Feminist Perspectives, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1981, p. 146. 41

longer recognisable to the commentators. Instead of the many roles they had once played, Somerville claimed that children had been reduced to fulfilling ‘the task to symbolize the innocence which ... society felt it had lost’.96 The horror expressed by Isabella Bird at the role of children on the American frontier is very much the voice of the metropolis. The immediate demands of a settler society in Australia with a large frontier presence, militated against the trend in Britain for children’s roles to become narrow and rigid. However, with the virtual disappearance of the frontier from most of the country by the end of the century, Australia ‘caught up’ to some extent with British attitudes. The ideology of childhood transferred from Britain to Australia illustrates the larger issue of cultural transference from the centre to the peripheries, a sea- change takes place which renders the ideology distinctively Australian. Richard Twopeny, a well-educated Englishman whose family came to Australia in 1865 when his father was appointed archdeacon of Flinders in South Australia, considered the Australian child to be over-indulged,

Strict and a fortiori severe measures towards children are at a discount in Australia … The child has no restrictions put on his superabundant animal spirits, and he runs wild.97

Two different notions of valuing and caring for children are evident here—the British understanding that they require strict discipline, the Australian belief that children should be allowed freedom—yet both spring from a common understanding that children have specific needs.

The working child in Britain The contemporary view in developed Western societies that any that work requiring hard physical labour is an adult or late-adolescent activity is quite a recent understanding. In the past children were primarily workers, and their labour contributed to the survival of the family, if they had one, or to their own. In agricultural societies, children’s labour was an important part of the rural family economy. This structure changed in Britain during the eighteenth century with the shift away from subsistence farming to industrialisation and a waged labour force, which resulted in many people moving to the cities or becoming permanent itinerants. The scope of children’s labour was now

96 Somerville, Childhood, p. 177. 97 Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, Penguin, Melbourne, 1973 (first published 1883), pp. 82-3. 42

enlarged to include factories, mills, mines, as well as working as domestic servants and agricultural labourers, or they survived on the streets which was also hard work.

The factory system developed gradually in Britain during the latter years of the eighteenth century, notably in the woollen mills with, initially, no minimum age limit for the employment of children.98 There were also many children working in the unregulated weaving cottages. By 1836 there were 30 000 children, some as young as three or four, working in mills in the Lancashire area alone. Attempts were made to regulate aspects of employment by the introduction of Factory Acts in 1802, 1809 and 1823 but to little avail, because the early acts had no effective enforcement clauses. Children could be worked for twelve hours a day and longer in dangerous conditions for very little money.99 Evidence to a parliamentary inquiry held in 1832 provided an insight into the ages and working conditions of children in factories. Children aged as young as six were working up to fifteen hours days with only a forty- minute break. This work involved long periods of separation from parents and family life. The machinery was dangerous, the air often polluted and beatings were frequent. The overwhelming economic imperative of sending their children to work was testified to by parents for whom even a few extra shillings was vital.100 The very fact that parliamentary inquiries were considered necessary and appropriate indicates a changing perception of the ideology of childhood, and the subsequent acts give form to that ideology.

The Factories Act 1833 limited the employment of children to nine years old and above and restricted the hours they could work.101 Importantly the act also established an inspectorate with the power to enter mill premises and require evidence that the legislation was being complied with.102

Factories were not the only sites of harsh conditions for child workers,

98 Robert Southby, ‘Child Health in 19th Century Australia’, in Featherstone, Colonial Child, p. 50. 99 Ibid. 100 Walvin, Child’s World, pp. 62-4. 101 Southby, in Featherstone, Colonial Child, p. 50. Children aged 9-13 years were supposed to work no more than 48 hours per week; 13-18 year olds not more than 68 hours a week. 102 John Cannon (ed.), The Oxford Companion to British History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 363. 43

indeed all workers. If anything, children working in the mines suffered even more horrific conditions. Commissions into the work of women and children in mines heard of very young children working underground for over fourteen hours a day, pulling and filling coal carts. Some became lost for days in the labyrinthine passages. The act of 1842 prohibited women and children younger than ten years from working underground.103 It is notable that women and children were bracketed together in this legislation, suggesting an official view of common vulnerability and need for protection.

Mines and mills were by no means the only workplaces of British children. Legislation was enacted throughout the 1850s and 1860s to protect children in a wide range of industries and to ensure some level of education. Working life for rural children was also harsh, with long hours in the fields from a very early age. They might work alone, with labouring gangs, or with their families. Farmers hired casual labour and education suffered dramatically at harvest time. Although the Agricultural Children’s Act 1873 forbade the employment of children under eight years of age and provided for compulsory education, school-teachers continued to note ruefully the drop in attendance at times of peak agricultural activity, a complaint echoed in Australia.104 The introduction of legislation attempting to moderate and control children’s work experience reflected a growing community and government affirmation of the notion that children required and deserved protection, that there was something different about the state of childhood which should be valued.

The treatment of children in work environments could be regulated. But the children who really generated public concern in England were those on the streets, and there were thousands of them. In his major study, London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Henry Mayhew estimated the number of children working on London streets to be around 10 000. He set the upper limit of childhood at fifteen years. They worked as hawkers—of flowers, fruit, matches, clothes pegs, pins, buttons—as porters, shoeblacks, street musicians, running errands, holding horses, as Billingsgate or Covent Garden boys. Noting that the street children were mainly escaping difficult home situations, Mayhew observed that ‘the boy is more the child of the streets than is the girl’.

103 Walvin, Child’s World, p. 65. 104 Ibid., pp. 73-5. 44

He considered that boys’ work on the streets often included selling, but that sadly, girls could often ‘do little but sell’, themselves.105 Other girls’ work was inside—in factories or domestic service—rendering them far less visible than the boys.106

This explosion of the urban and street population was partly the result of social changes beginning in the eighteenth century. From the 1740s the population of Britain, indeed all of Europe, began to increase steadily. In the fifty years from 1750 to 1800, the population of England rose from 5.7 million to 8.6 million. By 1850 it stood at 16.5 million. The Scottish population also grew, but less rapidly than in England. However Ireland’s population increased at a dizzying rate, from 3 million in 1750 to 5 million by 1800, and to well over 8 million in 1845. This huge growth made Ireland dangerously vulnerable to the vagaries of the potato harvest, and the Irish Famine of 1845 to 1848 caused the death of over a million people and the subsequent emigration of many hundreds of thousands.107 The causes of this population boom during the first half of the nineteenth century are debatable. However, a significant contributing factor was the tendency for more people to marry and at an earlier age, thereby creating a significant rise in fertility rates. The falling death rate was most marked for children, although newborns continued to be vulnerable. Thus more children were born and more survived.108 At the beginning of censuses in Britain in 1801, the proportion of children aged less than fifteen years old was estimated at thirty per cent of the population, rapidly rising to, and remaining at, forty per cent.109 By 1821 nearly fifty per cent of the English and Welsh population were nineteen years or younger.110. The unprecedented rise in numbers of children in proportion to the overall population led to a concomitant change to their visibility as a social group.

The increasing number of juveniles on British city streets in the early nineteenth century had already been noted with some anxiety by middle-class

105 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, Thomas Nelson, London, 1967 (1851), vol. 1, pp. 468-71. 106 Thomas E. Jordan, Victorian Childhood: Themes and Variations, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1987, p. 126. 107 Oxford Companion to British History, p. 763. 108 Walvin, Child’s World, p. 20. 109 Ibid., p. 18-19. 110 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 26. 45

observers, and it appeared to coincide with an increasing crime rate. The crime rate began to rise from the middle of the eighteenth century but jumped dramatically in the early part of the next century, at least partly in response to the social instability resulting from industrialisation and urbanisation.111 Orphaned or neglected children often formed bands and were involved in illegal behaviour. This sometimes led to their appearance in the courts and a sentence of transportation. The increasing number of street children appearing in British courts confirmed for many observers their sense of the inherent moral dangers for unsupervised children to be found in cities. Charles Dickens, widely known in Australia for his many novels and the magazines Household Words and All The Year Round, immortalised the street urchin figure in Oliver Twist (1838), with the Artful Dodger and his gang representing damaged youth. These children were seen as corrupted by the urban life into an early, evil adulthood, doomed to failure.

Legislative measures taken to deal with the problem of escalating crime often served to exacerbate the situation, particularly in the case of children. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 gave relief only to those who entered the workhouse and accepted its strict and degrading regime.112 Families were often split up and destitute children could be forcibly sent to work for manufacturers. Many preferred to take their chance in the cities.113 Street behaviour that previously had been overlooked, or regarded as acceptable, became criminal under the Vagrancy Act 1824 and Malicious Trespassing Act 1827. Mayhew recorded the incarceration of two six-year-old boys for ‘throwing stones, knocking on doors and obstructing the highways’. Another boy was ‘jailed for a week for playing cricket in the streets’.114 Greater control of street behaviour was made possible by the establishment in 1829 of the Metropolitan Police Force. Increasingly, the control of children came to be seen as a function of the state.

The working child in Australia In Australia the first working children were young convicts. The numbers of young convicts had remained low for the first few decades after the arrival of

111 G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England, Methuen, London, 1962, p. 95. 112 Ibid., p. 761. 113 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 26. 114 Walvin, Child’s World, p. 57. 46

the First Fleet, and it was considered unnecessary to transport them on special ships or to separate them from adult convicts upon arrival. However the increasing number of juvenile criminals forced the issue.115 The introduction of separate children’s ships and receiving institutions made it seem less inhumane to sentence juveniles to transportation. The apparent growth in juvenile crime coincided with an increasing view that punishment should be more scientific. The view that children could be considered sufficiently sentient of good and evil to be gaoled contrasts with the Rousseau-inspired notion of the innate innocence of humans, corrupted only by society, which increasingly dominated the public perception of childhood during the nineteenth century. The differing views of what would save the child— punishment or education—were reconciled in places such as Point Puer, described earlier, though with questionable success. This institution encapsulated the contradictions in concurrently held views of children. Here boys would be isolated from the corrupting influences of adult convicts and society, and be educated by rigorous moral instruction and useful work, the latter being vital to the survival of the developing colony. Its closure in 1849 reflected another shift in attitude towards penal reform.116

The colony’s pressing need for labour undermined theories of total, penitential incarceration, which involved hours on treadmills or in Bible readings. The cheap labour force offered by children, convict or free, was important to government and settler alike. This was not markedly different from the situation in Britain for the children of poor or farming families. Initially under government control, convict boys worked at clearing land and sowing crops, they minded stock, cut timber and prepared stones for use in building. Convict girls cooked, cleaned, sewed and harvested.

Juvenile labour, whether free or convict, was a scarce commodity in early colonial Australia. However the period 1830 to 1840 saw an influx of immigrants with families, many of whom were from the poor-houses of England. In an article on colonial children, Beverly Earnshaw notes that ‘In 1837, one third of the immigrants were children under seven years of age, and some ships carried more children than adults’.117 The presence of children was

115 Shaw, Convicts and Colonies, pp.160-1. 116 Humphrey, ‘Objects’, p. 32. 117 Earnshaw, ‘Colonial Children’, pp. 28-43. 47

regarded with mixed feelings by labour-hungry settlers. The 1838 Select Committee for Immigration suggested bringing out only families with a couple of children, or those whose children were aged ten years or older and therefore eligible to work. The committee further suggested restricting numbers of children under seven because ‘the necessity of supplying food for so many unproductive consumers presses heavily upon the employers’.118 Children could be an attraction to employers, however, as some testified to the Select Committee, ‘families who have boys from ten to sixteen that can be useful I pay higher wages to. The boys are employed with their fathers in shepherding ... some of these boys are the most attentive shepherds in my service’. Another settler considered it

desirable to engage middle aged men with large families provided these families do not consist principally or wholly of females ... such families provided there are several boys in each above the ages of eight or ten may be employed with more profit to the master than young married men.119

Contemporary accounts stress the importance of children’s labour to the success of the family unit, particularly rural families. Katherine Kirkland, who published a journal of her own bush experiences in early Port Phillip, commented on a neighbouring family’s good fortune in not needing many servants, as

the children were so useful and never idle. His two little boys managed the cattle as well as any stock-keeper could do ... A large family in the colonies is a blessing and a fortune to their parents, if well-doing. 120

Children worked on farms from a very young age looking after stock, gathering and chopping wood, collecting water, planting and picking crops. Many of the incidents of lost children began with the child undertaking work for the family, such as looking for stray animals or gathering wood. Two of the best-known of these incidents, which I examine closely in later chapters, had work related beginnings. The Duff children, whose story is told in chapter two,

118 Ibid., p. 31. 119 Ibid., p. 32. 120 Katherine Kirkland, ‘Life in the Bush’, Chamber’s Miscellany, 1845, p. 208, this is reprinted in Hugh Andersons’ The Flowers of the Field: A History of Ripon Shire, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1969. 48

‘From “Babes in the Wood” to “Bush-lost Babies”’, were lost collecting broom for their mother. The ‘Three Lost Children’ of Daylesford, central to chapter five’s examination of ‘Bush Searches’, were thought to have been lost while looking for goats. Children could also work for other farmers to generate income. This is not to suggest that children lived lives of unmitigated toil. Play was a feature of children’s lives, often blended into their work.121 Play usually meant outdoor activities, and it was also in the course of this that children became lost. Ironically, it seems that their sense of familiarity and ‘at homeness’ with the bush tended to lead them to wander further than they knew. However as June Factor reminds us, ‘childhood in the modern sense— in the sense of freedom from the responsibility to work—was a rare commodity in colonial Australia’, particularly in the early colonial period. Factor illustrates her point with an account of a five-year-old girl in the 1840s, the eldest child, being required to mind cows on her own for whole days. ‘Day after day, she stayed on guard, her only plaything through the long hours a handful of pebbles or a bunch of wildflowers’.122

Children’s experience of work varied across class and economic groups. The children of Georgiana and Andrew McCrae—colonists who came from the educated British upper-class and who moved in the colonial society around Governor La Trobe at Port Phillip— laboured on the family property, but also studied with their tutor. The diary of George, the oldest son, records that over several days in December 1846 the boys read Roman, French and English history, studied Latin syntax, planted potatoes, read the Aeneid, brought in the cows, ploughed fields, worked on square roots and cut wood.123 This is very different from the unmitigated labour and loneliness without benefit of education that was the lot of most colonial children from poorer families, the grinding drudgery of which is vividly depicted in the semi-autobiographical writing of Henry Lawson and Steele Rudd.

As in Britain, the colonies’ introduction of legislation in an attempt to regulate child labour indicates where and how children were working in areas other than agriculture. The first New South Wales Coal Fields Regulation Act 1862 introduced a minimum working age of thirteen years. In 1876, following

121 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 89-90 122 Factor in Featherstone (ed.), Colonial Child, p. 55. 123 Hugh McCrae (ed.), Georgiana’s Journal, William Brooks, Sydney, 1978, pp. 260-73. 49

a NSW Select Committee finding that boys of thirteen and fourteeen were working very long hours in the coal mines, further legislation was introduced reiterating the proscription on employment of children under thirteen years of age in coal mines, which suggests that the first act had been ineffective. This 1876 legislation also forbade the employment of women in mines and prescribed a maximum working week of just over fifty hours for boys aged between thirteen and eighteen years.124 Further acts passed in the states continued to regulate conditions for children working in industry and retail, tightening provisions for the employment of children under fourteen. These pieces of legislation demonstrated a changing understanding of the ages that constituted childhood, as well as changing attitudes about the type and hours of work that it was reasonable to require of children. However, the importance to the family of children’s earnings was still recognised. In New South Wales children were able to obtain a licence to conduct a trade outside school hours. Almost 1 000 trading and theatre licences were granted to children in 1911.125

Urban life created numerous opportunities for child labour, sometimes as part of a family business. Michael Gilding recorded that children of dairymen, mechanics and gardeners were sometimes kept home to assist with work. Other instances included children of outworkers in the clothing and footwear industries, or working as assistants to parents in brick-making, or conducting on family-owned omnibuses. Possibly most prevalent was the use of girls for domestic and child-care duties. In a list which echoes Mayhew’s account of the London situation, Gilding records the types of casual work undertaken by street children in 1870s Sydney—selling matches, flowers, fruit, newspapers, and carrying messages or busking.126 As I note later in an examination of education, this work had a marked effect on school attendance rates.

The various pieces of legislation introduced to protect working children highlight their physical vulnerability. As I outlined in the introduction, the lives of colonial children were at great risk from all manner of accidents, of which being lost in the bush composed only a small element. They were in far greater danger from illness, disease and work-related accidents and it is this

124 Bryce Fraser (ed.), The Macquarie Book of Events, Macquarie Library, Sydney, 1986, pp. 232-3. 125 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 118. 126 Gilding, Making and Breaking, pp. 20-3. 50

issue of health and mortality that I intend to consider next. It provides a context in which to consider the colonial family’s response to child mortality which, in turn, helps to answer another critical question—how valued were children?

Childhood health and mortality This question is critical to the image of the lost child because the pathos and power of the image of the child lost in the bush is at least partly founded on the implied background of grieving, anxious parents. That the lost child will be forever mourned, that its absence leaves a permanent gap in the family is the subtext of the stories in which lost children are found dead, or not found at all. Yet this actually runs counter to commonly-held contemporary assumptions about the attitudes of colonial parents—one that the prevalence of childhood mortality made it easier for parents to bear, and another that larger families in that period meant that the loss of one child was more easily accepted. Neither of these assumptions holds up against the evidence of affection and grief shown by bereaved colonial parents in letters, diaries and on memorial stones. As Pat Jalland affirms in her authoritative study of the social and cultural history of death in colonial Australia:

There is little evidence that parents in the early nineteenth century invested less affection in their children and felt less distress at their deaths than parents a century later, despite differing expectations of their survival. Colonial parents did not feel that several remaining children would compensate for the loss of any one, however alarming the child mortality statistics. Most Australian parents grieved at the deaths of their children. Like parents elsewhere, they had different ways of expressing their sorrow and dealing with it, according to gender, class, wealth, family size, and the cause of death.127

Families in the early colonial period were not always large, and class differences were a factor in this. Kociumbas records an estimate that the average family of a poor settler in New South Wales during the 1820s and 1830s comprised four living children, compared with the seven or more in affluent families, such as those of merchants or large landowners.128 This is a view supported by Katrina Alford in her study of the economic history of

127 Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, p. 73. 128 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 48. 51

colonial women, Production or Reproduction (1984), in which she notes the relatively large families of clergymen and free settlers in comparison to those of convict background.129 Fertility was dependent upon good nutrition and general health and many of the early immigrants were drawn from dispossessed rural families who had suffered long periods of poor nourishment, which could result in underdeveloped pelvic structures in women, making childbirth very hazardous for both the woman and baby. Alford did note a trend towards larger families in New South Wales with family sizes almost doubling, from 2.74 births per marriage in 1836 to 4.64 per marriage in 1845.130 The myth of the very large families in which the loss of one child would remain virtually unnoticed is easily dismissed in the light of these figures. Even the larger families of the later nineteenth century were not huge. The birth rate rose from 25 per 1000 of the European population in the early decades of settlement to peak at 40 per 1000 in the early 1860s. It is estimated that women who bore children from the 1850s to the 1870s averaged seven live births.131 By 1871 children aged fourteen years and under comprised forty-two per cent of the white population.

It was not enough to survive birth. Further hazards awaited the newborn baby—lack of understanding about hygiene, nutrition and proper food storage, combined with a scarcity of trained medical care and poor sanitation saw infant mortality at around ten per cent of live births by the 1840s.132 Often the infant mortality was even higher than ten per cent, for example figures for Castlemaine, Bendigo and greater Melbourne show a minimum of 150 deaths per 1000 live births over the period from 1861 to 1898.133 Nor was this an aberrant figure based on specific local conditions. Jalland refers to figures that show infant mortality across all colonies was high before 1890—between 110 to 130 deaths of infants under one year for every 1 000 births.134 An examination of survival rates reminds us that colonial parents had to accept the real possibility of their children dying.

129 Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1984, p. 56. 130 Ibid. 131 Gilding, Making and Breaking, p. 65. 132 Ibid., p. 64. 133 Grimshaw et al., Families, p. 129. 134 Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, p. 69. 52

In the 1880s, of every 100 children born, 90 at most might be expected to survive to the age of 1 year, 82 to 5 years and only 78 to adulthood. By the turn of the century, 90 might survive to 1 year, 88 to 5 years and 85 to adulthood. By about 1950, the respective figures were 97 and 96. Today the parents of a child can expect it to grow up, whereas there was little more than a 3 in 4 chance of this in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.135

Surviving birth and infancy were not the only challenges, nor was class a safeguard. Children of the upper and developing middle classes were no less vulnerable to the ravages of contagious diseases such as diptheria, measles or scarlet fever than those of the poor settler. Any ordinary infection had the power to kill. They were however, more likely to have better nutrition, cleaner surroundings and access to medical treatment, and less likely to suffer a work- related accident, thus giving them a better chance to survive until adulthood. The general move to the suburbs during the 1880s and 1890s was driven partly by a sense that they were healthier places to raise children than the inner cities, with space and fresh air to ward off disease. This mistrust of cities was not without foundation. In the middle of the nineteenth century Sydney had a higher mortality rate than London—25 per 1 000 people compared to 22 per 1 000. During that same period infant mortality was at 20 per cent in Melbourne compared with around 13 per cent for the rest of Victoria.136 The dramatic population increase subsequent to the discovery of gold probably contributed to the epidemics of measles, diptheria and scarlet fever which became a feature of the second part of the century. Mortality from typhoid fever and dysentry were higher in the city than in outside areas, in some cases double.137 All families were forced to recognise the extreme vulnerability of children, and the desire to protect children from the newly understood dangers of infection contributed to the development of the family as a separate unit.

Clearly childhood was a vulnerable time; the ever-present danger of child mortality may well have heightened rather than blunted parental attachment. The care and nurturing of children was clearly a central role of the colonial family and any death a kind of failure.

135 Gandevia, Tears, pp. 92-3. 136 Ibid., p. 79. 137 Ibid., pp. 83-7. 53

Education in Britain and Australia Education, the other major strand with work and health in the lives of children, increasingly became a means for both understanding and shaping the state of childhood during the colonial period. As with the legal age definitions of childhood, the introduction of compulsory school attendance ages, detailed later in this section, provides a reference point to chart social understandings of childhood. In England education for the masses, or elementary education, employed methods that both reflected and fostered the developing factory culture. The monitorial system and rote learning are good examples of techniques that were both cheap and efficient. Knowledge of the Bible was regarded as important, as was the ability to calculate. Grammar schools for the sons of wealthier families followed the traditional classical curriculum. Girls of these families were educated at home. It was 1870 before school boards were established to ensure universal elementary education, and 1880 before the introduction of universal compulsory schooling for most children of less than ten years of age.138

In the first years of New South Wales’ settlement education was largely inaccessible to poorer colonial children, free or convict. The need for their labour combined with lack of schools or teachers made this so. However, education was available to the children of the elite in New South Wales. These children had access to governesses or tutors, and some were sent ‘home’ to England for a formal education. The first Bigge report showed that only around thirteen per cent of children in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were being taught regularly. The Church and Schools Corporation, established in 1825 to promote education in New South Wales under the auspices of the Church of England, foundered under opposition from other denominations. Governor Bourke’s view of the Church of England’s attitude to education may be gauged by his disgusted characterisation of their establishment in 1832 of The King’s Schools at Parramatta and Sydney as being for ‘the Sons of the wealthy Colonists’ while ‘the children of the Poor are educated in mere hovels under Convict School Masters’.139 In 1833 Governor Bourke enabled funding support for other schools run by major

138 John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England, Methuen, London, 1973, pp. 314-5. 139 Fraser, Events, p. 417. 54

denominations, mainly Roman Catholics, Presbyterians and Methodists. Missionaries, clergy and teachers from these other groups had been arriving since the 1820s in a display of sectarian rivalry.140 The way in which education became contested ground indicates a sense of the importance of ‘winning’ young children to certain beliefs. The educational experience was largely one of rote learning with strong emphasis on religion and morality.

Education came to be regarded as the right of children and, as such, a tangible sign of the state of childhood. This was an understanding slow in coming, it was the latter part of the nineteenth century before any of the states introduced compulsory education. Even then education was often regarded as secondary to work demands. Once again class was a major factor, possibly more important here than in any other sphere of children’s experience.

There were two areas of government-supported schooling in the 1850s and 1860s—schools run by the Denominational Board and those run by the National Board. As its name suggests, the Denominational Board supervised government grants for schools that offered religious instruction of particular denominations, whilst the National Board controlled schools that offered general, non-denominational religious instruction.141

The introduction of compulsory education in Australia began with the Victorian Education Act 1872. This, and the similar acts which were subsequently introduced in other states, became known as the ‘free, secular and compulsory’ acts. The Queensland State Education Act and South Australia’s Education Act, both in 1875, continued the trend. The South Australian Education Act required seventy days of compulsory education per half-year for children from seven to thirteen years. The New South Wales Select Committee on the Employment of Children (1877) recommended the abolition of child labour and a compulsory minimum level of education for all children.142 However, it was 1880 before New South Wales introduced compulsory education with is Public Instruction Act.143 Included in this was, for the first time, some responsibility for secondary education, which implies

140 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 50. 141 Theobald and Selleck, Family, School & State, p. 45. 142 Fraser, Events, p. 419. 143 Kingston, History of Australia, p. 200. 55

an acceptance of a lengthening period of supported childhood. Tasmania followed in 1885.144 The relative speed of this introduction of compulsory education compared with Britain possibly reflects a more radical view of the needs of children in this newly evolving society, and also greater wealth. The expansion of the education system indicates a firming up of understandings as to what were suitable experiences for children, and a willingness by government to take responsibility and of parents generally to accept control. However absenteeism was and remained a problem; even if rural children did attend school, farming demands took priority—schools would empty at harvest time.145 As Geoffrey Sherington noted in the context of his study of state education in the Illawarra district, a dairying area of New South Wales,

the labour of most boys and girls was an important part of maintaining dairy farms. Formal instruction had to take place in harmony with rather than displacing the domestic economies of rural life. Local activity and local needs were an integral part of the organization of colonial schools in the district.146

Nor was this work-related absenteeism confined to rural areas; children of the working poor in urban or mining communities were also kept from school to help at home or undertake paid employment.147 In an article on the Ragged Schools of Melbourne, John Stanley James—the reporter known as ‘Vagabond’—noted that:

The average attendance is over 120, but on this day (Wednesday) many children were absent, selling in the market. Friday is another day on which many children are kept away from school, sent gathering wood, &c., by their guardians: and every afternoon a number of boys leave at half-past two, to obtain the first instalment of the Herald, which they sell in the streets.148

The South Australian act allowed absenteeism of up to twenty days out of fifty-five in recognition of the necessity for children’s labour, particularly at harvesting, shearing or fruit-picking times. Even in the last decade of the 1800s attendance of New South Wales schoolchildren averaged only sixty per

144 Fraser, Events, pp. 419-20. 145 Grimshaw et al., Families, p. 177. 146 Geoffrey Sherington, ‘Families and State Schooling in the Illawarra, 1840-1940’, in Theobald and Selleck, Family, School & State, p. 115. 147 Ibid, p.190. 148 Brenda Niall and Ian Britain (eds), The Oxford Book of Australian Schooldays, Oxford University Press, Melbourne,1997, p. 43. 56

cent, which indicates the dominance of work in children’s lives.149

Aboriginal children No overview of childhood and children in colonial Australia could be complete without some consideration of the place of Aboriginal children in this context. Immediately apparent is the great contradiction between the developing rhetoric of childhood and the reality of treatment of Aboriginal children by Europeans. The epidemic of 1788 that killed so many of the Aboriginal peoples around Sydney left some Aboriginal children apparently uncared for. From the journals of Watkin Tench we learn that Nanbaree, a boy of nine or ten years, ‘was adopted by Mr.. White, surgeon-general of the settlement, and became henceforth one of his family’. A girl of around fourteen years, ‘was received as an inmate, with great kindness, in the family of Mrs. Johnson, the clergyman’s wife’. In an incident which foreshadowed the many name-dispossessions to come Tench recorded that her name was Bòoron ‘but from our mistake of pronunciation she acquired that of Abaròo, by which she was generally known’.150 Both children eventually took themselves back to the bush.151

The uses and abuses of Aboriginal children by European settlers were manifold. In With the White People (1990), an illuminating study of Aboriginals who worked with European settlers, Henry Reynolds explains why the Aboriginal children were valued and how they were employed.152 Aboriginal children could be ‘trained’ more easily than adults, and were already masters of tracking and other bush skills. They could be useful as translators and guides in the search for new territories. Reynolds relates Edward Eyre’s account of his acquisition of two young Aboriginal boys while overlanding stock to Port Phillip. They proved useful, ‘Young as they were, too, we found them active and useful, especially in tracking lost animals’. Too useful, in fact, to return the boys to their parents when they encountered them on another trip, in spite of the obvious family affection. John Batman, an early settler of Port Phillip District, also refused to return two young Aboriginal boys to their parents, claiming that they were ‘as much his property as his

149 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 120. 150 Tench, 1788, pp. 105-9. 151 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 2, 10. 152 Henry Reynolds, With the White People, Penguin, Melbourne, 1990. 57

farm’.153 The language of possession used by settlers about Aboriginal children demonstrates the way in which they were dehumanised. They were hunted and captured like animals and this was recorded quite openly. People wrote of ‘getting’, ‘acquiring’ or ‘securing’ a child. One woman asked a friend on a station to ‘catch a little Mary-mary’ to ‘break in for housework’.154 This attitude remained a feature of colonial frontier life. Augustus Glissan, manager of a cattle station in far north-western Queensland, wrote in 1899 to friends in Melbourne about

one of my boys named ‘Oscar’, this boy I got at Cooktown in 1887 & he has been with me ever since & when I got him he was a thorough Myall ... he was somewhere about 9 or 10 years of age then—but could not be certain to a year or two, the police got him for me.155

Oscar was not only an object to be acquired and passed around, he was condemned to a permanent state of childhood as demonstrated by the use of the term ‘boy’. At 21 or 22 years of age no white station hand would have been a boy, but it was the generic term for male Aboriginal station workers of any age reflecting their powerlessness and lack of status.

Aboriginal children were sold or traded as commodities, and there was absolutely no recognition of any special rights to protection and nurturing due to them. Their race apparently placed them outside any European definition of childhood. This was both a logical and convenient extension of the wider attitude that placed Aborigines outside humanity, thereby justifying their brutal treatment. The assault on Aboriginal children came from virtually all sections of the frontier settler society. Many children ‘taken in’ or forcibly kidnapped, were used as labourers on farms such as John Batman’s, some were trained as servants or treated and displayed as interesting novelties.156 Sealers were notorious for abducting Aboriginal women and children as sexual partners, as well as to obtain their labour help in the hunt for and processing of the seals.

153 Ibid., pp. 166-7. 154 Ibid., p. 173. 155 Kim Mc Kenzie and Carol Cooper, chapter 9, ‘Eyewitness?: Drawings by Oscar of Cooktown’ in, McCalman, Iain, Cook, Alexander and Reeves, Andrew (eds), Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 158. 156 Reynolds, White People, p. 169. 58

Missionaries were also involved in the removal of native children, with the intention of ‘saving’ them through education and Christianity. The Native Institution, established at Parramatta in 1815 by former Pacific missionary, William Shelley, was modeled on institutions for children of the poor in England. Aboriginal families resisted parting with their children to the school, and the numbers remained low until it closed in 1829. 157 The curriculum of the mission schools was limited, as anthropologists Catherine and Ronald Berndt noted:

Also, missions were responsible for establishing the first Aboriginal schools. During the earlier period, most teaching concentrated on two aspects. One was Christianity. The other was preparing children for menial employment in adulthood: domestic work for girls, outside labouring for boys.158

Many children were slaughtered along with adults in the settlers’ push to establish possession of the land. Children were among the more than 300 bodies found after the Waterloo Creek massacre of January 1838.159 At the infamous Myall Creek massacre six months later, at least half of the thirty or so victims were children.160 An awful indication of the impact of European settlement in Australia is to be found in the statistics gathered by missionary Lancelot Threlkeld. These showed that, by 1838-40, there were no children at all in some Aboriginal communities in New South Wales.161

Clearly there was only a minority European understanding of Aboriginal childhoods as in any way special or deserving of protection. Their treatment, the very language used to talk of them, offers a sharp contrast to the sentimental view of childhood perpetuated during the Victorian era. This dismissal of Aborigines—whether children or adults—as not worthy of consideration, culminated towards the end of the nineteenth century in the adoption of the national image of ‘Young Australia’, a completely white image.

157 Kociumbas, Childhood, pp. 11-13. 158 Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, ‘Body and Soul – More Than an Episode!’, in, Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions, (eds) Tony Swain and Deborah Bird Rose, Australian Association for the Study of Religions, Adelaide, 1988, p. 47. 159 Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 674. 160 Kociumbas, Childhood, p. 18. 161 Ibid., p. 19. 59

‘Young Australia’ This image of youth and vitality was an apposite and evocative way for a new nation to represent itself, and reflected the value accorded children in colonial society. As I noted earlier children were scarce in the early days of Australian settlement, in contrast to Britain. Children (twelve years and under) comprised only sixteen per cent of the population of New South Wales in the first census of 1828. It was not until the 1870s that the proportion of children under fourteen in Australia became comparable to that of Britain at around forty per cent of white population.162 This is in marked contrast to the figures quoted earlier, which showed that in 1801 the proportion of children in Britain aged less than fifteen was estimated at thirty per cent of the population, and this soon rose to forty per cent. This must have caused a discernible difference for Australia’s colonial settlers until the last third of the nineteenth century, and one can only speculate about the effect of the early absence of children in white Australia.163 Did it cause children to be more valued, or was it primarily as a potential labour force that they were missed? I believe that contemporary evidence supports the former case.

Certainly once the initial struggle for survival was over and a sense of nation-building began to dominate, intense scrutiny was brought to bear on children. There was concern and curiosity about the type of children one could expect from convict parents and society. As Portia Robinson notes in her study of this first native-born generation, early reports appeared to confirm these fears. In 1800 Governor King wrote of ‘the greater part of the children of this colony ... abandoned to ... wretchedness and vice’, a view endorsed by the influential Samuel Marsden.164 However by the 1820s visitors were commenting in pleased surprise at the normality and safety of New South Wales.165 At the conclusion of his report on the state of the colonies J.T. Bigge noted with some wonderment that the children of convicts ‘were a remarkable

162 Ibid., pp. 38, 94. 163 Victoria was the exception to this because of the large cohort of young parents and children in the 1860s and 1870s as a result of the gold-rush influx. This is reflected in the figures of assisted migrants to Victoria, 1851-9, which show that the largest group by far at around 37 000 was married women and children (Serle, Golden Age, p. 387). This was also reflected in the national distribution of elderly people (over 65) in 1901, Victoria had the most at 5.5 per cent of its population (Kingston, Oxford History of Australia, p. 117). 164 Robinson, Hatch and Brood, p. 43. 165 Ibid., p. 3. 60

exception to the moral and physical character of their parents’.166 In his account of his colonial experience in the 1820s Alexander Harris noted the strength of the bond between mother and child in bush families, a result he believed of their isolation and the ensuing naturalness of the relationship as opposed to the artificial constraints of society.167 These widely divergent views can lead only to the conclusion that each commentator saw what they wanted to see in the society, based on their own assumptions and prejudices.

Later visitors commented, not necessarily favourably, on the attention given to children in the developing urban, middle-class. Richard Twopeny’s is a testy account of the middle-class colonial child from babyhood to late adolescence—‘the little brute is omnipresent, and I might also add omnipotent’. The young child is described as ‘having breathed the free air of Australian independence too early’, being therefore virtually impossible to make ‘tractable’. The ‘Australian schoolgirl’ is a ‘decided improvement’ upon the boy, who has ‘all the worst qualities of the English boy ... [with] few of his redeeeming points’.168

An anxiety expressed by middle-class parents from the earliest days of European settlement related to the colonies’ perceived roughness, lack of educational facilities and freedom for children, freedom having no good connotation. The effect of this freedom was commented upon by a recently arrived governess in 1860, who lamented that ‘you will meet with few quiet patient girls here’.169 This fear perhaps helps to explain the enormous public reaction in 1864 to Jane Duff’s ‘womanly’ goodness when she was reported to have looked after her brothers for nine days while lost in the bush, sacrificing her own comfort for her little brother by using her dress to cover him at night.170 This was been read as both vindication of the worth of such behaviour (the lost children were saved), and as convincing proof that ‘proper’ qualities existed in the Australian girl.

The conclusions reached by all these commentators, whilst interesting, are

166 White, Inventing, p. 24. 167 Alexander Harris, Settlers and Convicts, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1964, p. 111. 168 Twopeny, Town Life, pp. 82-9. 169 Gwen Jones, ‘Growing up in the 1850’s’, in Featherstone, Colonial Child, p. 37. 170 This episode is examined in detail in chapter two. 61

not crucial to our discussion about the state of childhood in colonial Australia. What is critical however, is that children were placed in such a central role by these commentators. The moral well-being, the social health, of the developing colonies was considered by all to be best judged through the state of the children it was raising.

The need to shape these children properly became increasingly the role of government, primarily through the education system. Inglis talks about the development of manliness becoming a valued trait in British boys during the 1880s as a response to the ‘cult of the little girl ... at its prime in Britain during the 1870s’.171 Gender roles became increasingly static, and the notion of the nurturing, motherly girl took its place in Australian children’s literature, importantly including school readers. These were a very significant means of promoting gender values. Boys were encouraged to be brave and physically active such as in ‘Walking to School’, a poem in which the father has decreed that the five-year-old must now walk to school alone—‘Still, five is really very old;/It’s pretty close to being a man’. The lesson for little girls in the same book is that they must do as Father says and care for the garden or the flowers will die.172 Senior students using the Eighth Book of the Victorian School Readers were given much more overtly nationalistic material including George Essex Evan’s ‘The Nation Builders’ and ‘The Women of the West’. Kociumbas details the special subjects and reading material introduced for girls in New South Wales that included instruction in humility and duty, as well as guidance in skills suitable for housekeeping and motherhood.173

In her study of women’s education in nineteenth-century Australia, Knowing Women (1996), Marjorie Theobald, affirms that ‘The state school had a moral mission specific to the female child’.174 This meant that all ‘schoolgirls … were exhorted to be good wives and mothers in the private sphere of home’ and educated accordingly. Theobald points to the readers and school papers, often the only reading material available to a child, as encapsulating this specific moral world. She illustrates this point with a page

171 Inglis, in Featherstone (ed.), Colonial Child, p. 17. 172 ‘Polly’s Garden’ and ‘’Walking to School’, The Victorian Readers, Third Book, Education Department of Victoria, reprinted 1986, first published 1930, pp. 7-12. 173 Kociumbas, Childhood, pp. 122-3. 174 Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 200. 62

from a Royal Reader of 1891 with its instructional story of two little girls washing their dolls’ clothes.175

With the emphasis placed on the ‘manly’ boy and the ‘motherly’ girl in the late nineteenth century we arrive at a curious situation in which children become valued for their perceived ‘adult’ qualities. This is certainly an anomaly at a time in which the notion of childhood was becoming more rigidly defined and constrained. It was of course, partly the product of the movement towards social modification exemplified by such things as the move to compulsory education, and the increasing, state-sanctioned, medical and scientific pressure on parents as to how children should be raised.176 The anxiety about producing ‘good quality’ children was closely linked to the developing self-image of Australia as a nation. It was ‘Young Australia’ which became the chosen image. Childhood and youth were seen to encapsulate the independence, the vigour and lack of servility that the nation wanted to believe of itself. Here was the image to differentiate Australia from ‘Mother England’ and ‘Father Briton’.177 Importantly, the relationship must remain cordial. ‘Young Australia’ must show respect for its parentage even while displaying superior development. Richard White discusses the distinctive qualities of the cartoon representations of ‘young feminine Australia’ that stressed her youth, beauty and innocence—clear contrasts with the old, corrupt world. She is respectful of her parentage, while asserting her ‘approaching adulthood’178 As John Rickard noted:

Much Australian history has been preoccupied with the quest for national identity—a preoccupation which is itself revealing—and has, as a result, often concentrated on that which is seen as being distinctively ‘Australian’

The ultimate distinctively Australian image of the colonial period was its youth, placing them at the very centre of the national stage.

As I have demonstrated in this chapter, the colonial settlers of Australia had moved from a society that paid no particular attention to the children in their

175 Ibid., pp. 200-3. 176 Ibid., pp.130-47. 177 Inglis, in Featherstone, Colonial Child, pp.1-23. 178 White, Inventing, pp. 120-1. 63

midst to one which utilised images of youth as the national image, and valued highly the perceived qualities of that state. It is in the course of this journey that we find the explanation for the symbolic importance that came to be accorded to the image of children lost in the bush. A minister, Reverend Morison, writing in 1867 on this subject, accords equal sympathy to children and parents:

There is something peculiarly distressing and lamentable ... when children, so helpless and entirely destitute of resources, are lost ... a source of bitter and poignant grief to the parents, who are almost more deserving of pity than the lost child, as an occurrence of the kind never takes place without the parents taking the blame on negligence on themselves. 179

The overriding imperative for adult care is recognised here in a way not often voiced in these stories, though parental despair certainly is. Morison’s acceptance that children should be cared for, whatever the situation, reflects what quickly became a widely held attitude in the colony. Children were watched almost as canaries down a mine-shaft. Their well-being and survival became touchstones for the developing nation. In his preface to Tears Often Shed, Bryan Gandevia claims that children ‘are the best index of the adaptation of a society and its culture to the contemporary environment’. Thus to lose a child to the environment was at once a failure of the society and a questioning of its right to exist.

In this chapter I have demonstrated that Europeans carried with them to Australia attitudes towards children, which were then re-shaped by a wide range of influences into something different and peculiarly Australian. So also did they bring the stories that mediated and gave voice to their experiences in the new and very different environment. One such story, central to the lost child image, was that of the ‘Babes in the Wood’, which I have mentioned briefly in the context of childhood. As with the attitudes towards children, this image too assumed a different and unique form in the Australian context. It is the development of this story with its surrounding mythology that I examine in my next chapter, ‘From “Babes in the Wood” to “Bush-lost Babies”’.

179 Gandevia, Tears, p. 39.

64

Chapter Two From ‘Babes in the Wood’ to ‘Bush-lost Babies’

This chapter will show that the ‘Babes in the Wood’ story was an integral part of the cultural knowledge of the European settlers who came to Australia from early convict to late colonial times. The story provided an evocative medium for the settler community to interpret its own experiences and assert its uniqueness whilst establishing its continuity and rightful place within the Mother culture. In the Introduction to her study of death in Australia, Pat Jalland explains that she chose to study certain areas—those she describes as ‘the more neglected aspects of a vast subject’ including ‘death in the bush’— because ‘these themes are distinctively Australian and represent discontinuities with traditional European culture’.1 As Jalland implies these ‘discontinuities’ are more than mere differences; whilst continuing to claim a distinctive part in the European culture, they represent a genuine revision developed to meet the particular emotional needs of the settler community in a new environment. The form of these revisions is often illuminating about the anxieties and aspirations of the colonists. The development of the unique image of the bush-lost child is one such discontinuity; it exemplifies what John Rickard has described as ‘cultural accommodations which have become characteristic of Australia’.2

The issue of cultural transference and transformation, commented on by Jalland and Rickard, is central to this discussion of the development of national imagery. The extent to which cultures are transmissible is at the core of the argument around the theory proposed by Louis Hartz in his influential and provocative The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (1964).3 Hartz contends that these colonies were ‘fragments’ of their European countries of settlement, and that the colonial culture was determined by that which prevailed in the mother country at the time of settlement. Further, he

1 Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, p. 2. 2 John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, Longman, London, 1988, p. xii. 3 Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia, Harcourt, Brace and Wold, New York, 1964. 65

argues that the new societies took on this culture so thoroughly that it became accepted as distinctively theirs, and became the dominant mode. In other words, the fragment became a frozen whole, which was not then challenged by other contesting views, such as would be the case in the necessarily more interactive cultures of continental Europe.

While Hartz propounded this argument about large cultural and social issues, such as the feudal ideology as opposed to the liberal or radical ideologies, it has implications for all aspects of the colonial culture. The Hartz ‘Fragment thesis’ was rigorously assessed by A.W. Martin and Geoffrey Bolton in an issue of Australian Economic History Review devoted to it.4 John Hirst revisits the thesis in the context of the transformation of British social institutions in Australia.5 Critics of the ‘fragment thesis’ point out that it fails to allow for any influence on the colonial culture by the environment in which settlers found themselves. In his discussion of the process of cultural transmission in the development of European Australia, Under New Heavens, Neville Meaney suggests that the harshness of much of the continent caused settlers ‘special difficulties [in] making the land their own’.6 In response, he claims, the settlers ‘in their attempt to make themselves at home, depicted the environment as another, if slightly exotic, Europe’.7 He demonstrates this through the early paintings of Australia that represented the land in images of an English gentleman’s country place. I contend that this was the same motivating impulse that caused settlers to reach for the image of the ‘Babes in the Wood’ to describe the early incidents of lost children in Australia. They sought to place the new experience within the security of a known image, an image from childhood, an image from the core of European folklore. Naming the experience was a way of asserting ownership of the experience, just as much as the process of giving European names to geographic features declared ownership of the land. However, just as over time the paintings were affected by a developing sense of ease in the Australian environment that allowed a freer vision, so did the images by which colonists represented their experience take on a distinctively Australian colonial edge. Thus the ‘Babes in the Wood’

4 Australian Economic History Review, vol. XIII, no. 2., (September 1973), Sydney University Press, pp. 131-47; 168-76. 5 John Hirst, ‘Keeping colonial history colonial: the Hartz thesis revisited’, Historical Studies, vol. 21, no. 82, (April 1984), pp. 85-104. 6 Neville Meaney, Under New Heavens, Heinemann Educational Australia, Melbourne, 1989, p. 13. 7 Ibid. 66

metamorphosed into ‘The Bush-lost Babies.’

Anita Callaway, in her examination of the popular visual culture in theatre in Australia, Visual Ephemera (2000), demonstrates the way in which Australian colonial culture was often based on the European, but uniquely altered over time by Australian conditions. She argues that the Australian pantomime provided a medium through which to view the ‘Australian settler culture [which] is not quite the same as its European counterpart; rather it seems to have passed through a distorting lens’. Specifically it is in the transformation scene—which Callaway describes as a ‘poetic interlude …[involving] a technically sophisticated sequence of unfolding scenes— that she locates the critical difference in the cultures:

British transformation scenes embraced many themes, but the version typical of Australian pantomimes presented—in various allegorical guises—a seemingly inevitable progression from the prosaic colonial past to a future nationalistic apotheosis.8

One such scene discussed in detail by Callaway centres around what she describes as ‘that archetypal figure of white Australia, the lost child’. This figure appeared in ‘The Fairy Home of the Waratah’, the transformation scene for ‘Little Red Riding Hood; or, Harlequin Boy Blue, the Good Fairy, and the Naughty Wolf’ that appeared at the Theatre Royal, Sydney, for Christmas 1884. Callaway quotes from a contemporary account of the scene:

A little girl gathering wild flowers in the Australian bushes losses [sic] her way, and falls asleep under a ‘Waratah tree’. The fairy which watches over the Waratah takes the child under her protection and shows the dangers the child passed through without feeling their effects, a bush fire, a storm on the mountains … The child sleeps soundly, the drifting clouds carrying her to ‘Govett’s Leap’ with the sunshine above and into the obscure abysses below. Ultimately we find her in the fairy home of the Waratah.9

The scene is interesting for several reasons. It demonstrates the extent to which the image of the lost child had been absorbed into the folktale world of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and friends. It both references and draws power from the ‘Babes in the Wood’ story that was an important part of European folk

8 Anita Callaway, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2000, p. viii. 9 Ibid., p. 184. 67

culture. However, this cultural transference is neither complete nor untouched; the characters have metamorphosed into something presented as uniquely Australian—the bush-lost child. The traditional expression of the ‘mother’ culture—the Christmas pantomime story— was altered by being seen through different eyes and told in the different tongue of the transposed culture.

‘The Fairy Home of the Waratah’ incorporates the child into Australian rites of passage revolving around the bush—becoming lost, a bush fire, and a storm. It serves both as an assertion of the uniqueness of the Australian experience and a claim of its role in the larger European culture as embodied in the pantomime form. Importantly also, as Callaway notes, this was more than a year before Frederick McCubbin’s painting Lost (1886), which became the iconic image of the lost child story. This exemplifies my point in chapter one about the development of a critical mass of public understanding of an image being required for it to develop into a creative shape. Callaway points out that the pantomime reached a very large audience, ‘as large or larger as those for traditional High Art, and … broadcast a nationalist agenda that was at least as forceful’.10 The child lost in the Australian bush, gathering Australian flowers, could be read as an expression of the attraction and dangers of the environment, but also of belonging to, and within, the environment. The lost childs’ final absorption by the bush, through the medium of the Waratah fairy, appears very benign. It is a caring rather than threatening action, and few children would fail to be delighted at the idea of living in a fairy home.

The pantomimes described by Callaway overwhelmingly refer back to English folk culture in the form of children’s nursery rhymes or stories that were, in turn, part of larger European culture. Cinderella, Humpty Dumpty, Harlequin, Robin Hood, Dick Whittington and Little Red Riding Hood are just some of these.11 The presentation of several Babes in the Wood pantomimes in colonial Australia shows that this too was a foundation British children’s story. Callaway notes The Babes in the Wood was performed at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, for Christmas 1879, and Babes in the Wood, Bold Robin Hood and His Foresters Good appeared again at the Theatre Royal,

10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., pp. 178-84. 68

Melbourne as a Christmas pantomime in 1892.12 The performances cited by Callaway all come from the latter end of the nineteenth century, which suggests that it took some time for the pantomime Babes in the Wood to develop an Australian persona. Clearly these childhood stories were regarded as very powerful vehicles to evoke widespread audience recognition and participation. To the colonial audience, which was largely British or of British parentage, they represented a common experience at that visceral level of childhood where stories are absorbed without intellectual mediation. With this depth of background, powerful images can be quickly evoked by a passing reference. It was this near-subliminal quality that made the’Babes in the Wood’ image so evocative, drawing upon a fund of emotional, sympathetic responses laid down in childhood.

The English ‘Babes in the Wood’ The English ‘Babes in the Wood’, upon which the Australian image drew, had a long history as part of English culture. A written form of the story first circulated in England in the late sixteenth century. Records of the Stationers’ Company show that in 1595 a ‘Thomas Millington entered for his copy under the hands of both wardens a ballad entitled “The Norfolk Gentleman, his Will and Testament ... ”.’ A play based on the story was published in the early 1600s, the forerunner of many printed versions.13 An early, illustrated chapbook version of the story is believed to date from 1700.14

The tale is thought to have developed from an incident in a well-off Norfolk family where the death of his father in 1562 made seven-year old Thomas de Grey heir to the family estates including Griston Hall, near Watton in Norfolk. Should Thomas die without children the estate would pass to his uncle, Robert, a Roman Catholic. The boy’s father was Protestant and a clause in his will indicates that he had quarrelled with his brother before he died. Young Thomas had been married while an infant but died suddenly and inexplicably, aged eleven. Local opinion, inflamed by anti-Catholic feeling, held that the uncle engineered the boy’s death to inherit the estate and the

12 Ibid., pp. 179-80. 13 14 John Ashton, Chap-Books of the Eighteenth Century, Benjamin Blom, New York, 1966, (first published 1882), pp. 369-75. Ashton dates this version at 1700 at the latest, but he believes it is probably of even earlier origin. 69

story began to take shape. The later life of the uncle, Robert de Grey, was similar to the figure in the sixteenth-century ballad—he was imprisoned as a recusant, fined heavily and lost two sons by drowning.15 The gist of the story remained consistent throughout its ensuing reproductions, though the language changed to reflect social conditions. For instance a later chapbook version of the early to mid-1800s replaces the ‘Gentleman of good account’ with ‘A merchant of no small account’.16 But the changes were minor. What remains clear is that the story was always an allegory with clear moral lessons. The wicked uncle suffers from the ‘heavy Wrath of God’ for his betrayal of duty and humanity.

The multiplicity of forms in which the story was told ensured that it was known across all strata of English society. Ballads and songs were accessible to the illiterate, and chapbooks (sometimes known as ‘penny histories’) made literature available to virtually all, especially children. In his study of the form, The Penny Histories (1968), Victor E. Neuburg asserts that, ‘Chapbooks ... formed the most important and numerically the most considerable element in the printed popular literature of the eighteenth century’.17 Chapbooks were paper-covered books whose title page, usually bearing a woodcut illustration, served as a wrapper. They were fairly small and were carried for sale by itinerant pedlars and hawkers known as chapmen. This meant that they were accessible to people living in small towns and villages, as well as to inhabitants of the larger urban centres who enjoyed relatively easy access to books. Chapbooks generally drew upon traditional tales from folklore and medieval literature.18 Neuburg argues that the extent of the chapbook trade, in terms of the number produced and their considerable dissemination throughout London and the provinces, calls in to question the assumption of large-scale illiteracy among the poor in eighteenth-century England. He asserts that the ‘mass reading public which was a feature of Victorian England had substantial roots in the preceding century’, and that chapbooks both contributed to and were evidence of that literacy.19 Neuburg’s claim for a growth in literacy in

15 Ibid., See also Tales of Old Norfolk, Polly Howat, Countryside Books, Berkshire, 1991, pp. 113- 17. 16 Victor E. Neuburg, Penny Histories. A study of chapbooks for younger readers over two centuries, Oxford University Press, London, 1968, p. 131. 17 Ibid., p. 3. 18 Ibid., p. 3-7. 19 Ibid., p.45-6. 70

Britain during this period is supported by Elizabeth Webby in a discussion of colonial readers and writers for the Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Webby begins her contribution with the assertion that: ‘The English colonisation of Australia from 1788 coincided with a vast increase within the parent culture of both general literacy and the ready availability of reading matter’.20

The ‘Babes in the Wood’ story incorporates elements of other traditional European folktales such as Hansel and Gretel. There is the malevolent adult, the soft-hearted villain and the welcoming of the children by forest creatures. Given the story’s longevity, multiplicity of forms and geographical spread— and supported by Neuburg’s argument for a larger than expected literacy level among the British poor—it is highly probable that the story of ‘Babes in the Wood’ (also known as the ‘The Lost Children’ or the ‘Children in the Wood’) was an integral part of the cultural experience of many, if not all, of the convicts, marines and free settlers who came to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The story’s ubiquity was attested to by English writer and politician, Joseph Addison, when he wrote in the Spectator:

The old ballad of the Children in the Wood is one of the darling songs of the common people, and has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part of their age.21

There is a serendipitous link with Australia in Neuburg’s relation of a story about Sir Joseph Bank’s sister, ‘who was herself a collector of chapbooks’.22 It is fascinating to speculate on the possibility that Banks himself read chapbooks as a child, and to wonder whether anything on the 8000 kilometres of Australia’s east coast, charted on the 1768-71 voyage he made with James Cook, caused him to remember the old ‘Babes in the Wood’ story.23 By the nineteenth century versions of the story located it firmly as a tale for children

20 Elizabeth Webby, ‘Colonial writers and readers’, chapter 2 in the The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (ed.) Elizabeth Webby, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 50. 21 Jennifer Westwood, Albion: A Guide to Legendary Britain, Grafton Books, London, 1985, p. 171. The Spectator was a periodical that appeared daily from March 1711 to December 1712. It was briefly revived in 1714 and reprinted regularly throughout the eighteenth century. 22 Neuburg, Penny Histories, p. 30. 23 Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999, p. 26. 71

whereas the original versions were directed towards parents and guardians. The movement of the story into the realms of fairytale directed at children is best exemplified by Randolph Caldecott’s illustrated version, one of the many folk tales that he illustrated in the latter part of the nineteenth century to popular acclaim.24 The pretty, pastel-toned illustrations served to soften the story and distract the reader from the grim nature of the tale.

In the course of this thesis I have attempted to visit actual sites to trace the stories that form its core. This has often been an operation in following folklore, and so, on a holiday in England, I took the opportunity to visit the supposed site of the ‘Babes in the Wood’ incident in an attempt to understand the strength of the story’s continuity. This took me to the small town of Watton in the Breckland region of Norfolk, England. I had been told that this was the site of the original ‘Babes in the Wood’ story and that the family in which it had happened, the Gristons, still lived in the area. Eventually, after some convincing that I was seriously inquiring about what he called a “story for children”, a guide in the Watton Visitor’s Centre directed me to Wayland Wood, also known as ‘Wailing Wood’, about a mile south-east of town. The name ‘Wailing Wood’ was said locally to refer to the cries of the lost children, heard in the sound of the wind in the trees.

There was scant reference to the folktale at Wayland Wood. A small carpark included an information board showing the path around the wood and giving some detail of its history, including a reference to the ‘Babes in the Wood’ (see Illustration 2). A pamphlet outlining the Nature Reserves in Breckland described the wood thus

Traditionally this ancient and historic wood was the setting for the legend of the Babes in the Wood. It was mentioned in the Domesday Book ... This is almost certainly one of the few remnants of the wildwood that once covered much of lowland Britain. The plants and animals living here provide a direct link with those in the prehistoric forest.25

The wood itself, in the steady drizzling rain, was all-enveloping. Two foresters were cutting down some trees when I arrived but I soon lost sight of them. The

24 Randolph Caldecott, 1846-86. His original publications are largely undated. 25 Nature Reserves - Breckland, the Secret Heart of Norfolk, Countryside One, Breckland Council, Dereham, Norfolk, 1998. 72

high and quite dense interweaving canopy blocked out the sky and light which was disorienting and unnerving. All sound was muffled. The track was unmarked and it was sometimes difficult to know where to go. It was an unsettling environment. Local folklore held that, until struck by lightning in 1879, there had been a large oak in the wood under which the children had died. No remnant of the tree remained and there was nothing about it on the information board so I eventually retraced my steps and headed for the security of the car.

On the drive back into the town I realised that, for all its lack of public awareness or information, Watton had incorporated the story into its town sign that stood in the main street and was reproduced on the front of its various information brochures (see Illustration 3). The rather whimsical image depicted two plump and naked little cherubs reclining comfortably under an oak, lolling against its trunk, looking totally unworried. There was no angst or suffering in this representation. The town sign of nearby Griston, supposedly the home of the evil uncle, was much more overtly violent, showing a well- dressed male threatening two children with a sword (see Illustration 4). This image bears very close resemblance to the engraved illustration of the chapbook version of the story referred to earlier, The most Lamentable and Deplorable HISTORY of the TWO CHILDREN IN THE WOOD.26

A caravan club site bordering the wood advertised itself by a sign proclaiming ‘Babes in the Wood’ with a cartoon-type representation of two children (see Illustration 5). Similarly, the accommodation pamphlet from Watton offered the possibility of B&B accommodation at, ‘Griston Hall Farm ... A 16th Century farmhouse. Reputedly the Babes “wicked uncle’s house!” from £17.00’. Indeed the most striking feature of the visit for me was the way in which the story based on an actual incident was regarded locally as a very peripheral tourist attraction, possibly useful for filling space in tourist brochures and as a marketing pitch for a B&B, or for providing a distinctive town symbol. The local history of families and communities divided by religion and of violent deeds for personal gain had been lost.

Whatever the modern attitude, the size of ‘Babes in the Wood’ holdings in

26 Ashton, Chap-Books, pp. 369-75. 73

the British Library affirms a continuing interest in the story in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century England. The British Library hold ninety- eight pieces that come in many forms—pantomimes, chapbooks, songs, picture books, plays, ballads, novels, short stories and plays. Initially the titles usually referred to ‘children’ rather than ‘babes’, and examples of this include The History of the Two Children in the Wood,27 The Norfolke Gentleman His Last Will and Testament (and how he committed the keeping of his children to his owne brother who dealt most wickedly with them and how God plagued him for it. To the tune of Rogero28), and The Children in the Woods.29 The latter, or versions of it, is probably the most common form of title and it was often performed as a ballad. However, increasingly throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, use of the term ‘Babes in the Wood’ came to dominate, and this would be the phrase carried to Australia with its colonial settlers as part of their cultural and emotional inheritance. However Australia was not the only colonial outpost to which the story travelled.

The ‘Babes in the Wood’ in the American colonies That this story was also taken to other colonies by settlers is beyond doubt. The National Index of American Imprints Through 1800 records twenty entries for the Babes in the Wood story.30 The constancy of publication of the story in America, with twenty printings between 1768 and 1800, suggests that it was a popular and widely disseminated story; five out of the twenty versions are set to music, one ‘To a very Mournful Tune’. Places of publication are distributed throughout the rough triangle formed by New York, Boston and Salem.31 The Children in the Wood, a musical of the story imported from England, had at least 124 American performances between 1790 and 1810, and continued to be performed regularly until the Civil War.32 A German verse translation of the story, published in Lebanon, Pennsylvania in 1809 confirms that interest in,

27 Ibid. 28 Author unknown, London, ca. 1635, National Library of Australia, Canberra [mfm 791, reel 2123 (284/85)]. 29 Donald Wing (ed.), Short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English books printed in other countries, 1641-1700, Modern Language Association of America, New York, 1994, p. 543. 30 Clifford Shipton and James E. Mooney (eds), National Index of American Imprints Through 1800, The Short-Title Evans, vol.1: A-M, American Antiquarian Society and Barre Publishers, 1969, pp.147-8. 31 Ibid. 32 Susan L. Porter (ed.), British Opera in America, Garland Publishing, New York, 1994, pp. xiii, xv. 74

and knowledge of, the story was not confined to the English-speaking settlers.33 Yet despite this evidence that the story travelled to America and survived within the culture, I can find no reference to any stories of ‘American Babes in the Wood’. There is no translation of the experience into the Indigenous colonial culture, so it remained an imported story. I examine more closely elsewhere in this thesis possible reasons why the image was not taken up as having meaning in the American colonies in the way it was in Australia. However, in broad terms I believe that the role that the ‘Babes in the Wood/Bush’ filled for Australian colonists was taken in North America by the ‘Indian Captive’ image, which tended to focus on captive children and women. In a chapter on ‘Chapbooks in America’, Victor Neuburg notes that, of the American chapbooks printed specifically for local interest, ‘the most characteristic of these ...[was] the ‘Indian Captivity’ titles, of which many hundreds appeared in typical chapbook style’.34 Linda Colley notes that, of the captives, ‘women and the healthy and malleable young, were adopted and absorbed into Indian communities’. This possibility of losing children to people perceived by British colonists as savages was horrifying. Colley believes that:

An awareness that white children could become targets for adoption in this way lies behind the most anguished passages in Jonathan Dickenson’s God’s Protecting Providence, Man’s Surest Help and Defence (1700) … a runaway publishing success in Britain35

Dickenson, his wife and their six-month-old baby were held by a group of Indians after being shipwrecked off the coast of Florida. Their horror at one of the Indian women suckling their child gave way to relief when they realised that otherwise the baby would probably have starved. This desire for the baby’s survival carried only so far, however, as Dickenson related a parental horror:

One thing did seem more grievous to me and my wife, than any other thing; which was, that it it should happen, that we should be put to death, we feared that our child would be kept alive, and bred up as one of those

33 Die kinder im Wald, Libanon (Pa.), Gedruckt bey J. Schnee, 1809, [National Library of Australia, mp3, Shaw-Shoemaker no. 50922]. 34 Neuburg, Penny Histories, p.48. 35 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850, Jonathan Cape, London, 2002, p. 145. 75

people: when these thought did arise, it wounded us deep.36

His fears suggest that the captivity experience involving children was seen to encompass loss on two levels—the physical loss of the child, and the loss of civilization to savagery. This provided a very strong image with which to define the sense of struggle for survival against a threatening environment that typified the American pioneer society’s perception of itself.

The ‘Babes in the Wood’ in Australia The imagery of the ‘Babes in the Wood’ story was first given an Australian context in 1866 with the publication of The Australian Babes in the Wood - A True Story Told in Rhyme for the Young.37 Written in Britain for British children, this told the story of three children from the Duff family—lost for nine days in the mallee scrub of the Victorian Wimmera in 1864 and found close to death—within the framework of the traditional English ballad of ‘The Babes in the Wood’. The storyteller of The Australian Babes In The Wood drew upon the well-known tale to set the scene, ‘My children, oftimes you have heard/ Of the pretty babes left in the wood/ By their wicked uncle’s will’. He then moved the story across to ‘Australia’s distant strand’ and a perfect, loving family. There were no wicked uncles or evil witches in this story, ‘the endless waste’ of the bush is the enemy. The children’s survival was portrayed as a triumph of faith, ‘A living testament of love/ A living test our faith to prove/ In God’s almighty hand.’

The story of the disappearance of, search for and eventual discovery of the three Duff children has become so central to the theme in Australia, and is so widely referred to, that it requires close examination. According to A Story of Horsham:

The last great human bush story was in 1864 when Jane Duff, then seven years, cared for her two brothers in bush west of Horsham for eight nights and nine days . . . a child who was a reminder of the finest human qualities needed in a faraway province.38

This depiction of the incident and its implications from a local history of the

36 Ibid., pp. 145-6. 37 By the author of ‘Little Jessie’, The Australian Babes in the Wood, Griffith & Farran, London, 1866. 38 Brian Brooke and Alan Finch, A Story of Horsham, City of Horsham, 1982, p. 10. 76

area in which the children were lost, evokes the heroic dimensions accorded the story. Many generations of Victorian schoolchildren read the story of the Duff children, who were lost near Horsham in 1864. Under the title, `Lost in the Bush’, the story was included in the Fourth Book of the Victorian Readers, which was used in Victorian schools from its publication in 1930 to the 1960s. Versions had also been included in earlier versions of The School Paper, which I examine later. The version presented to schoolchildren was, however significantly different from that which the Victorian public followed so avidly in the newspapers of the time.

The headline “Loss and Apprehended Death of Three Children”, in the Melbourne Argus, 27 August 1864, introduced the first version of the story. The Duff children, Isaac, Jane and Frank—aged nine, seven and nearly four years—lived in a hut on Spring Hill station around 35 miles north-west of Horsham in the Mallee country of Victoria. John Duff was a shepherd on the station, which had resulted from the division of a larger property—St Mary’s Lake—in 1856.39 Isaac and Jane were actually children of their mother’s first marriage and their surname was Cooper. Their father, Joseph Cooper, had been an itinerant bushworker in the Horsham district who died in the late 1850s. The youngest of the children, Frank, was born in 1860 at Spring Hill.40

There were very few fences on stations in the 1860s and the sheep were cared for by shepherds living in slab huts scattered around the runs. These huts were simply built from rough slabs of timber and roofed with bark held in place with logs; the floors were trampled earth (see Illustration 6). This latter feature was central to the incident because, on Friday 12 August 1864, all three of the Duff children went into the bush to collect broom for their mother and became lost, remaining so for nine days and eight nights in cold winter conditions. The newspaper report’s assumption of the children's death tells us how likely a fate it was, given their youth, the length of time they had been missing, and the type of country into which they had wandered.

39 L. J. Blake, Lost In The Bush: The Story of Jane Duff, Whitcombe and Tombs, Melbourne, 1964, p. 7. The complicated settlement process in this area outlined by Blake with people taking up large runs, losing them, re-buying and subdividing, is typical of the three-stage pattern of pastoral settlement described by geographer J.M. Powell. He characterises the stages as Accretion, Leap-frogging and Clusters and Infilling. (The Making of Rural Australia, Sorrett Publishing, Melbourne, 1974, pp. 35-6). 40 Ibid. pp. 1-4. 77

The sufferings of the poor trio will, as far as human foresight goes, never be known, but it will require little experience of colonial life to understand how great they must have been.41

More than thirty local people began a search, following the children’s tracks for days before a thunderstorm obliterated them. When Aboriginal trackers were brought in to the search, they quickly rediscovered tracks and found the children, emaciated and weak, but alive. All survived their ordeal. It was calculated that they had walked over 60 miles, with the older two children both caring for Frank— carrying him, and placing him between them at night. On particularly cold nights Jane used her dress to cover him (see Illustration 7).

The first report of their survival related few of these details, choosing instead to focus on what was to become the main thrust of the story, the noble selflessness of Jane. It included an ‘eyewitness’ account of how,

when found, [Jane] had just divested herself of her little frock, and was with it covering up her two brothers, who were lying helpless on the ground. This … was not the least touching incident of the whole affair.42

Although this account proved inaccurate, the immense emotional force of the image could not be denied. In spite of evidence that both Isaac and Jane looked after Frank and cared for each other, the conception of Jane as mothering the boys was rapidly established. This is exemplified by Nicholas Chevalier’s romantic portrayal of this supposed incident, which appeared in the Illustrated Melbourne Post of 22 September 1864. This must have captured the imagination of the colonial audience because it remained the way in which the story was presented.

The most detailed and influential version of the Duff story was published in the Weekly Review and Messenger, a Protestant religious paper, written by the Horsham Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Patrick Simpson, ‘to transfer it from the class of anonymous reports to the class of authenticated

41 Argus, 27 August 1864, p. 6. 42 Hamilton Spectator, 27 August 1864, p. 2. 78

statements’.43 He was certainly close to the events, both in time and place, having accompanied the local doctor on a visit to the children three days after they were found. The minister gathered the details of the story from the children, their parents and ‘the principal persons who had been engaged in the search’. The resultant account of the episode was detailed and extensive. It introduced elements of the story that were to grip the public imagination and remain part of every subsequent retelling. One such feature was the children's search for wildflowers, as well as broom. This idyllic note harmonised with notions of the innocence of childhood and provided a dramatic contrast to the dark events that followed. Similarly, the immediate response of helpful neighbours served as a reassurance of solid bush values—Simpson noted approvingly that ‘word was sent to the neighbouring stations, and men in numbers flocked to Spring Hill to render aid’.

The 'reading' of the children’s tracks by the Aborigines was described in great detail by Simpson, mainly because of ‘the touching incidents’ evoked. The tracks showed that the bigger children would carry the tired younger child, until the older children became too weak, and collapsed under the double burden. Another pathetic incident involved the discovery of bundles of broom dropped near a spot similar in appearance to country around the Duff’s hut. Imagining themselves to be near home, the dutiful children had collected broom for mother, only to drop it when they realized their mistake. Reverend Simpson related the story of the children’s survival as a clear example of God's care. The children's behaviour, particularly that of Jane, had earned them His care. She had used her own clothing to warm little Frank and, each night in the bush, had said her prayers, ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. The children’s survival was seen as a direct answer to prayer.

Public interest in Simpson's story necessitated a reprint in the following week's edition of the paper.44 The story of the loss and discovery of 'the Duff children', as they became known, appeared in local papers across Victoria. They remained in the public eye because of an appeal, begun in Geelong, to reward the ‘heroic conduct of Jane Duff’ with ‘something more substantial to the little maiden than empty praise’, and over £300 was raised. News of the

43 The Weekly Review and Messenger: a journal of politics, literature, and social and Christian progress, Melbourne, 3 September 1864, pp. 4-5. 44 Ibid., 10 September 1864, Supplement, p. 1. 79

children's experiences also spread overseas, with emphasis placed on the religious aspects.45 The British publication mentioned earlier, The Australian Babes In The Wood, was one of several that promulgated the incident as a story of moral instruction for children.46

Thirty years later, in January 1895, the story was revived as ‘The Babes In The Wood’ in the children's column of an Australian weekly religious magazine, the Southern Cross.47 The opening sentence—‘It was when I was a boy that they were lost’—made it clear that this was a remembered version of the story. The author, a Reverend P. W. Fairclough, did not know the children's ages and position in the family. Perhaps reflecting the central position originally accorded Jane, he described her as being eldest. Thus she was represented as caring for both boys, though primarily for the younger one.

Even more influential on following versions were the creative details with which Fairclough filled out his story. An example of this is the description of the children at play in the bush before becoming lost. Simpson mentioned only that they collected wildflowers; Fairclough expanded upon this, possibly in an attempt to help his readers identify with the children.

They had a good time in the scrub. Very likely they climbed trees. Perhaps they found a 'possum asleep in a hollow log, and poked him with a stick. I daresay they chased lizards and butterflies. No doubt they found some wild flowers, and ate some bright amber gum from the wattle trees.

In the story's first appearance in the School Paper for Class 111 in April and May of 1896, these possible activities were rendered as facts. ‘Very likely’, ‘Perhaps’ and ‘I daresay’ disappeared.48 Every subsequent version repeats

45 ‘Lost in the Bush’, Sunday at Home: a family magazine for Sabbath Reading, Religious Tract Society, London, 1865, pp. 269-70. 46 Others include Anna Sewell Sister’s Love; or Lost in the Bush, Jarrold and Sons, London, part of their Household Tracts for the People series, no. 73, ca.1870; O.F. Timms, Station Dangerous:, or, The Settlers in Central Australia, Sydney, 1866; Sophia Tandy, The Children in the Scrub: a Story of Tasmania, Hobart, 1878. 47 The Southern Cross: a weekly religious journal, Melbourne, 18 January 1895, pp. 66-7. 48 The School Paper, Class 111, Victorian Education Department, April-May 1896, pp. 33-6 and pp. 52-4. Although this was the first time that the Fairclough version was published for school consumption it was not the first appearance in school reading material of the story of the Duff children. Robert Holden, ‘Lost, stolen or strayed: From the Australian Babes in the Wood to Azaria Chamberlain’, Voices, Autumn, 1991, p. 64, notes two earlier incidents of the story in school readers – the earliest being the Australian Second Book (1868), and later, the Second Reading Book (1877). 80

this, even that by L. J. Blake, in what has been regarded as the definitive book on the story.49 Fairclough wrote ‘If we suppose that they were lost on Saturday, for I don’t remember the day, this was Tuesday night. On Wednesday the blacks set out’. In the 1896 version this became, ‘They were lost on Saturday, and on Wednesday the blacks set out …’ and this account remained accepted ‘fact’. The story published in the School Paper of 1896, ‘The Australian “Babes In The Wood”’, retained the religious emphasis of the Fairclough story, but by 1903 this had disappeared. Jane's noble, motherly behaviour was seen as sufficient reason for telling the story. A note appended to the 1903 version indicates that it was written by a teacher at Horsham State School, Mr. B.T. Pearse, based on the Fairclough story. Closely following on its publication was the second public appeal to raise money for Jane Duff, by then Mrs. Turnbull.

A letter to the Argus in 1904, from a Thomas Young of Horsham, described the present financial difficulties of Mrs. Turnbull. Coincidentally, he also explained the division of the money raised by the first Jane Duff Testimonial Fund, with £150 going to Jane and £75 each to the boys.50 According to Young:

As years went by the heroine, Jane Duff, married, became Mrs. Turnbull, and lived in Horsham; the £150 was spent in the purchase of a house. Her husband did not enjoy the best of health. The property was mortgaged in course of time to provide necessaries for herself and a very large family, of whom nine are living and two dead. About four months ago the husband died and left the widow in indigent circumstances and totally unprovided for … The object of this appeal is to raise sufficient funds … to release the deeds of the house and hand them back to Mrs. Turnbull, who is not in good health, and thus securely provide a home for her in the advancing years.

The Education Department took upon itself the task of raising money from the school children of Victoria to provide Mrs. Turnbull with an annuity. When the appeal closed in February 1905, over £366 had been collected.51 In 1908 the story reappeared in the School Paper under its lasting title of ‘Lost In The Bush’. This version remained virtually unchanged throughout subsequent publication in 1923 and its inclusion in the Fourth Book of The Victorian

49 Blake, Lost In The Bush. 50 Argus, 16 July 1904, p.17. 51 The School Paper, May 1905, p .60. 81

Readers for Government schools. This was by no means the end of the story of the Duff children. I consider other aspects of the way in which their experience was incorporated into the emerging national mythology in various parts of the thesis, most notably in chapter six, ‘Commemorations of the lost’.

The Duff’s story had received international attention because of the surprising length of time that the children survived exposure in the bush, and for the Christian behaviour of Jane, who had cared for her younger brother and recited the ‘Gentle Jesus’ prayer every night. It was taken up as a story particularly suited to inculcating religious values in children. Neuburg linked the decline in popularity of chapbooks during the late eighteenth-century with the rise in publication of didactic, improving books for children.52 Many of these works were published by the Religious Tract Society and closely resembled chapbooks in appearance.53 It is certainly no coincidence that versions of the incident involving the lost Duff children such as The Australian Babes in the Woods, The Lost Children in the Wood54 and Sister’s Love or Lost in the Bush,55 were presented as didactic works in praise of childish goodness and faith in God in a style reminiscent of the old chapbooks with verse stories and illustrations. This format had proved very successful in reaching a large percentage of the population, particularly children, and people would be more receptive to stories presented in a known way.

The story of the Duff children was also the basis for A Little Australian Girl, or The Babes in the Bush, by Robert Richardson which was published in the late 1870s.56 This appears be the first incidence of the conjunction of ‘bush’ (used in Australia to replace ‘forest’ or ‘wood’57 ) with the ‘babes’ imagery, creating a distinctively Australian image which could take its place in the established genre of folk-tales. Like the earlier version, this too was an

52 Neuburg, Penny Histories, p. 64. 53 Ibid., pp. 65-6. 54 Author unknown, The Lost Children In The Wood, London, sold by the booksellers, c.1819. 55 Sewell, Sister’s Love. 56 Robert Richardson, A Little Australian Girl, or The Babes in the Bush and Other Stories, Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, Edinburgh, ca. 1877-9. 57 ‘Bush’ probably derived from Dutch ‘bosch’, used earliest in South Africa and U.S. See ‘bush’ entries in Joan Hughes (ed.) Australian Words And Their Origins, Oxford University Press, Melbourne,1989, p. 92. See also William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, Barry Andrews (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, second edition, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 135. 82

instructional tale. The motherly care of the girl for her brothers and her faith in repeating prayers every night were obviously regarded as potent examples of Christian values. This story too appears to have been written primarily for British readers and the scene is carefully set, the family at the centre of the story live ‘on the border of a great forest, or what in Australia is called the “Bush”... All around the cleared space which formed Mr. Alister’s farm, the bush spread unbroken for miles and miles’.58 It is the omnipresent bush that threatens the children rather than any human evil and this remains a constant factor in colonial Australian ‘lost child’ stories. Other consistent features are the communal search—‘Such cases always draw out the ready sympathy and help of an Australian community—and turning to Aboriginal trackers for help, in this case ‘Tommy Sundown’.59 Tommy agreed to help in the search only because the little girl had always been kind to him, reinforcing the importance of good behaviour. The portrayal of Tommy as having a choice in this matter suggests the way in which, under circumstances of need, tracking skills gave Aborigines greater agency than usually allowed them.

To a settler culture which was starting to seek images to define itself, whether or not consciously, this appropriation and re-shaping of well-known stories offered a way of asserting its uniqueness whilst claiming continuity with the ‘mother’ culture. Following Richardson’s use of the term, ‘Babes in the Bush’ achieved a recognised currency. In 1900 both Henry Lawson and Rolf Boldrewood used it as the title of very differing works, which I will examine in detail later in the thesis. Their differences illuminate the changed meaning of the term over time. Contrary to the Hartz theory that the cultural fragment became the whole, we see that the Australian colonists—in the course of defining their own culture—felt impelled to measure themselves against the home culture. Another example of this desire to both claim and re- write stories from ‘home’ was evident in the depiction of Grace Bussell who, in 1876, rode her horse repeatedly into surf off the coast of Western Australia to rescue passengers from a sinking ship. For this she was lauded as ‘the Grace Darling of Australia’.60 Grace Darling had become a national heroine in England in 1838 when she helped her lighthouse-keeper father rescue

58 Richardson, Little Australian Girl, pp. 5-6. 59 Ibid., p. 20-1. 60 Author unknown, ‘A Brave Australian Girl’, The Victorian Readers, Fourth Book, Education Deaprtment of Victoria, Melbourne, 1986, (first printed 1930), p. 85. 83

passengers from a foundering ship during a gale.61 Holden points to another direct linkage made between the English and colonial values when he notes that,

It was but a short step for Jane Duff to join company with another real- life media heroine of the century, England’s Grace Darling, and in A Book of Golden Deeds (first published 1864), these exemplars of Christian faith, courage and selflessness survived to inspire children until well into the century.62

This juxtaposition positioned Jane Duff, and by association Australia, firmly within the moral establishment of the British Empire.

The desire to display and affirm the character of Australia’s young people became of increasing concern towards the end of the nineteenth century. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, sub-titled The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, had particular resonance for Australians. Not only was the theory of Social Darwinism that was developed from Darwin’s work used to rationalise the destruction of the Indigenous peoples and their lifestyle, but the notion of an evolving and improving species was a very attractive concept to embrace. Darwin concluded that,

as species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rare and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most. 63

Not surprisingly, colonists happily identified themselves as the group undergoing ‘modification and improvement’. Therefore heroes and heroines, particularly young Australians, were hailed as concrete evidence of the developing moral and physical strength of the national type. Richard White undertakes a detailed analysis in Inventing Australia, of the implications the theory of Social Darwinism held for the developing Australian society. He points particularly to the colonial need to test the strength of their race,

61 John Cannon (ed.), The Oxford Companion to British History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 276. 62 Holden, ‘Lost, stolen’, p. 66. 63 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, John Murray, London, 1892 (1st ed. 1859), p. 402. 84

sometimes in sport, but most importantly, in battle.64 This could be the battleground of war, in defence of Empire, or as some writers of literature for children suggested, the battle of establishing civilisation in frontier wildernesses. White refers to English writer, E.W. Hornung’s characterisation of the ‘typical Australian’ in his novel A Bride from the Bush (1860), as ‘one of the highest if not the highest development of our species.’65 The genre of imperial adventure stories, produced for children in the British Empire developed and reinforced this theme of the hardy young colonial. Robert Dixon’s Writing the Colonial Adventure (1995), is an exploration of such texts from both British and Australian writers, and the ways in which they both reflected and helped shape attitudes towards masculinity, adventure, and nationhood.66

Perhaps the strongest example of the value accorded Australian youth by the community was the adoption of images of youth as visual symbols of nation. White points to the popular use over several decades of two images depicting Australia in cartoons or illustrations—an idealised young woman, and the ‘little boy from Manly’. Both were young, vigorous and healthy. One illustration he reproduces shows an upright, sturdy young female shepherd, firmly shaking the hand of a slightly effete looking Prince Alfred; this was published in Punch, 25 January 1868. The ‘little boy from Manly’ was a later image, created by Bulletin cartoonist, ‘Hop’ (Livingston Hopkins), in 1885. This figure has his genesis in a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald in March 1885, in which a young boy contributed the entire contents of his money box in support of the contingent about to depart to fight in the Sudan— Australia’s first overseas military involvement. Initially used to represent Australia’s patriotic support of England and the Empire, the image of the boy grew and evolved over the next thirty years, achieving manhood at Gallipoli. He came to represent the healthy self-sufficiency of the colonial ‘child’ from its ‘parent’ England.67

64 Richard White, Inventing Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981, pp. 70-2. 65 Ibid., pp. 78-9. 66 Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, gender and nation in Anglo-Australian popular fiction, 1875-1914, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995. 67 White, Inventing, pp. 120-2. 85

Changing meanings of ‘Babes in the Wood’ By the end of the twentieth century the phrase ‘Babes in the Wood’ had become so entrenched in our everyday language as to have almost lost its original context and resonances. A survey of library catalogues shows an equally diverse use of the phrase or its variants. The British poet, Michael Hamburger, even speculated about an alternative fate for the children in his poem based on the story.

No, they didn’t get out, Nor did they die, then. They grew up, learning To live on what they could find, To build shelters, fend off Wild boars that rooted around them, Inquisitive bears.68

In general, however, the term ‘Babes in the Wood’ is now used to denote innocents abroad rather than actual children. It implies a naivety and simplicity in the face of a complex and potentially threatening world. An example of this more recent usage, Babes in Ver Woerds (1982), relates the experiences of two New Zealanders, one coloured, in apartheid South Africa.69 An earlier example of this usage is to be found in the British Library holdings—The babes in the wood—a tragic comedy, a story of the Italian revolution of 1848 (1875).70 Babes in the Wood, a Romance of the Jungles (1910), is set in the jungles of India and, like so many of these stories and unlike the original, has a happy ending.71

An early Australian example of this more generic usage of the term is Rolf Boldrewood’s Babes in the Bush (1900).72 This first appeared in serial form in the Australian Town and Country Journal (6 October 1877—1 February 1879) as ‘The Wild Australian’ (or ‘An Australian Squire’).73 The change of

68 Michael Hamburger, Babes in the Wood, Sceptre Press, Knotting, 1974. 69 Jeya Wilson and Peter Utting, Babes in Ver Woerds: Two New Zealanders in South Africa, Price Milburn, New Zealand, 1982. 70 James De Mille, The babes in the wood- a tragic comedy, a story of the Italian revolution of 1848, W.F. Gill, Boston, 1875. 71 Croker, B.M., Babes in the Wood - A Romance of the Jungles, Methuen, London, 1910. 72 Rolf Boldrewood, Babes in the Bush, Macmillan & Co, London, 1900. 73 Alan Brissenden (ed.) Rolf Boldrewood, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1988, p. 517. (Barry Andrews and William Wilde, Australian Literature to 1900, Gale Research Company, Detroit, 1980, p. 152, record it as having been first published as ‘An Australian Squire’). 86

title for the 1900 publication in book form is intriguing. Possibly it reflected the more nationalistic mood of Australia around federation, which would render the notion of an Australian Squire anachronistic at best, and offensive at worst. It may also reflect a perception that the phrase held high recognition value and was evocative of a distinctive experience. The story was of a well- bred but impecunious British family who, after some picturesque and predictable vicissitudes, made good in Australia. They did not abandon the colonies with their newly acquired wealth, rather they aspired to embody the best of both worlds. Grandly the father proclaimed that he had now ‘achieved the position of which he had so often dreamed ... an Australian Squire’.

Despite this usage, the image never completely lost its original meaning. At the same time as Boldrewood’s Babes in the Bush was published, Henry Lawson published both a poem and short story entitled ‘The Babies In The Bush’. He used the term in its original sense to denote the physical loss of children in the Australian bush. The poem, first published in 1900, is a very sentimental rendering in which two chubby little toddlers wander off into ‘the awful scrubs’ to search for daisies and buttercups.74 The bush itself is rendered in oddly disparate images. The saccharine refrain with its suggestion of guardian spirits implies a gentle end to the children’s wandering,

O sing me a song of a fairy bright, Of a spirit that bell-birds know, That guides the feet of the lost aright, Or carries them up through the starry night, Where the bush-lost Babies go.

This contrasts oddly with the harsher bush elements Lawson calls upon—the ‘awful scrubs’, and ‘the awful suns’ in ‘the broiling week’. Yet the final image is one of peace—the distraught mother is consoled by her husband.

But the strong man kneels by her side and turns Her face from the clearing bare, To the stars above, with a husband’s love— And “Our bush-lost babes are there!”

And she sings in her heart of a fairy bright, Of a spirit the bell-birds know, To guide the feet of the lost aright

74 Colin Roderick, Henry Lawson’s Poems, John Ferguson, Sydney, 1979, pp. 165-6. 87

And lead them on to a land of light Where the bush-lost Babies go.

The poem is almost formulaic, too sentimental, too lacking in any sense of real humanity to have much effect. However Lawson’s short story around the same theme is evocative and powerful, this was a tale of madness and despair. In Joe Wilson And His Mates, a young drover, Jack Ellis, related the story of his growing friendship with the dour boss drover named Walter Head.75 The real Walter Head was quite well known to Lawson through his close friendship with Mary Cameron (later Gilmore). Head and Cameron were involved with preparing for the New Australia settlement planned for Paraguay; they both worked on the association newsletter. Ultimately Walter Head never joined the Paraguayan settlement; at the end of 1893, just before his family was due to leave his son, Rowland, was lost in the Gippsland bush where he and Mrs. Head had been visiting relatives. The boy was never found.76 Part of the power of Lawson’s depiction of this incident surely lies in his knowledge that it was a very real danger.

In the fictional version, Walter Head takes Ellis home to meet his wife and we understand the source of his unhappiness. Mrs. Head is unstable, unhinged by the loss of her two young children ten years earlier when they were living on a property in outback New South Wales. She too clings to the story offered by her husband that the children have been taken by the Bush Fairies, but this brings her no lasting peace because she also believes that they will be returned to her ‘next year’, always next year.

Mrs. Head’s re-telling of the incident becomes increasingly fraught and, whilst the images of the children mirror those in the poem, the sense of impending horror mitigates against any sentimentality. The sheer isolation of the small family group within the immensity of their surrounds is very effectively established.

It was a lonely place; there wasn’t much bush cleared around the homestead, just a hundred yards or so, and the great awful scrubs ran back from the edges of the clearing all round for miles and miles—fifty

75 Henry Lawson, Joe Wilson And His Mates, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh, 1901. 76 Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children, An Australian Anxiety, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999, p. 77-9. 88

or a hundred miles in some directions without a break;77

With her husband and the men away from the house Mrs. Head allowed the children to venture a little way into the bush to see the buttercups, telling them to go straight down to where she could see one of the men working.

The little ones toddled off hand in hand, with their other hands holding fast their straw hats. ‘In case a bad wind blowed,’ as little Maggie said. I saw them stoop under the first fence, and that was the last that any one saw of them.78

She loses her grip on the story for a while but Jack feels that he needs no telling. His imagined evocation of the scene is a compelling one.

There was no need to tell me about the lost children. I could see it all. She and the half-caste rushing towards where the children were seen last, with Old Peter after them. The hurried search in the nearer scrub. The mother calling all the time for Maggie and Wally, and growing wilder as the minutes flew past. Old Peter’s ride to the musterers’ camp. Horsemen seeming to turn up in no time and from nowhere, as they do in a case like this, and no matter how lonely the district. Bushmen galloping through the scrub in all directions. The hurried search the first day, and the mother mad with anxiety as night came on. Her long, hopeless, wild-eyed watch through the night; ... The systematic work of the search-parties next day and the days following. How those days do fly past. The women ... driving from ten or twenty miles, perhaps, to stay with and try to comfort the mother. ... Comforting her with improbable stories of children who had been lost for days, and were none the worse for it when they were found. The mounted police out with the black trackers. Search parties cooeeing to each other about the bush, and lighting signal-fires. ... And the boss himself, wild-eyed and haggard, riding about the bush with Andy and one or two others perhaps, and searching hopelessly, days after the rest had given up all hope of finding the children alive.79

Yet the desperate urgency of the search is only a prelude to the worst horrors of the story. Lawson evokes an incident of horrific proportions in which the whole family is destroyed, not just the children. While Mrs. Head wants to believe in the Bush Fairies she is subject to the Voices, which tell her that the children will never return and that she should drown herself. Most painfully,

77 Henry Lawson, ‘The Babies In The Bush’, Joe Wilson’s Mates, Lloyd O’Neil, Melbourne, 1970, p. 140. 78 Ibid., p. 141. 79 Ibid., p. 142. 89

the Voices speak of her deepest fear, one common to parents of lost children, ‘they told me it was all my own fault —that I killed the children.’ As Jack discovers later, the bodies of the children were eventually found and buried. Whilst Mrs. Head knows this she cannot accept it and hold on to any degree of normality. To survive she must deny reality, but her husband cannot. He carries a double burden—guilt at his absence when the children disappeared and the need to support his wife. His guilt has a genuine basis, for he was away on a secret drinking binge when the children were lost and has to live with the thought that he could have saved them.

I could have found those children, Jack. They were mostly new chums and fools about the run, and not one of the three policemen was a bushman. I knew those scrubs better than any man in the country.80

The scrubs, the bush, had become an inexorable enemy. Once the source of his wealth as a major landholder and the basis of pride in his bush skills, Walter Head sought to escape the bush. Andy, who had worked many years with Head, recounted that:

The little ones were buried on the Lachlan River at first; but the boss got a horror of having them buried in the bush, so he had them brought to Sydney and buried in the Waverly Cemetery near the sea. He bought the ground, and room for himself and Maggie when they go out.81

Lawson depicts Head’s determination to deny the vast inland Australia and look to the sea. This is a potent image for the whole European settlement of the continent, which clung literally and imaginatively to the coastline and the sea.

A duality in the perception of the ‘wild’ environment remains a theme of many ‘lost children’ stories. In many European folk tales the woods appear to operate universally as an image for the unknown, offering both a potential refuge and a threat. A recent study of the stories of ‘feral children’, Savage Girls and Wild Boys (2002), locates many of these children in woods, the natural home of wild things.82 Woods generally, and often significant individual trees, formed the basis of a livelihood and religion of many ancient

80 Ibid., p. 147. 81 Ibid., p. 145. 82 Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A history of feral children, Faber & Faber, London, 2002. 90

societies, including those in the British Isles. Druidism was closely associated with the oak and mistletoe.83 The local story of the Babes in Wayland Woods depicted them taking shelter and dying under an oak tree. Hollow trees also have a long history of association with folk tales. In his examination of the role of trees in British history and legend, J.H. Wilks takes particular note of the role of hollow trees, which he claims,

have throughout the ages given shelter and refuge not only to individuals but also to nascent social movements, revolutions, or breakaway religious sects. There are cases on record of the insides of large trees having been used for long-term family housing . . . or as workshops, storehouses, alehouses, tollbars, lighthouses, hidey-holes by the score, even chapels.84

In the Australian context trees—hollow and otherwise— sometimes served as prisons, with captives chained to, or imprisoned in them. Operating almost as a microcosm of the bush image, they are potent dual images, containing suggestions of both entrapment and shelter. Many stories of lost children record them having crawled into hollow logs for shelter, and often this was where they died.

The duality of the hollow tree image reflects a wider paradox in attitudes towards the Australian bush, a paradox often reflected in literary and pictorial representations of lost children stories. It would be more accurate to say that these stories represent children lost to, rather than in, the bush. By this I mean that the bush is often shown as an enticer of children into its depths, and then either a devourer or heartless force. The lost boy in Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, is lured into the bush by ‘fancying he could see other children far up the vistas beckoning to him to cross and play in the merry land of shifting lights and shadows’.85 His mother calls them ‘Pixies’ and warns him not to follow, ‘they’ll lure you on, Lord knows where’, but the child cannot resist. Initially welcoming, the bush seems to entice him further on with its riches—quantongs and raspberries, the image of another child that becomes a kangaroo, ’a pretty grey beast’, and most enticingly ‘A wee little

83 J.H. Wilks, Trees of the British Isles in History & Legend, Frederick Muller, London, 1972. 84 Ibid., p.192. 85 Henry Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, edited by J.S.D. Mellick, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1982, p. 258. (First published by Macmillan & Co., Cambridge, 1859). 91

native bear’ which is quite amenable to being cuddled and carried.86 Kingsley makes explicit the culpability of the bush. After the boy’s body is found he is buried in a site that looks across the river, ‘into the treacherous beautiful forest which had lured him to his destruction.’87 Even when children survive the bush may be shown as alluring, tempting them into its wilds. In the Sister’s Love (ca. 1870), version of the story of the Duff children, the children were led off the track by the attractions of the bush.

Oh! there are the banks of the beautiful broom, And the gum-trees that tower so high; Now Frankie can gather a bunch of gay flowers, And hark to the wattle-bird’s cry.88

In many of the literary representations of lost children they become a sacrifice to a bush which is a disturbing, inimical force, hovering always in the background of European consciousness as a force to be reckoned with. Yet these representations do not mesh with the responses to their bush surroundings by children, either native born or those who came from overseas. In a letter from Van Diemen’s Land to his wife in England in 1831, the senior public servant G.T.W.B. Boyes wrote

you cannot imagine such a beautiful race as the rising generation in this colony. As they grow they think nothing of England and can’t bear the idea of going there. It is extraordinary the passionate love they have for the colony of their birth ...89

This perception is echoed by others in writing about the young colonists, including one of the earliest upper-class colonists of New South Wales, Elizabeth Macarthur. When writing in 1798 to an English friend about the decision to send the children to England for an education she concluded that, ‘But hereafter I shall much wonder if some of them make not this place the object of their choice.’90 Mrs. Macarthur judged well her children’s affiliation to the country. Her daughter, Elizabeth, and sons James and William, returned

86 Ibid., pp. 259-60. 87 Ibid., p. 264. 88 Sewell, Sister’s Love, p. 9. 89 G.T.W.B. Boyes, Diaries and Letters, vol. 1 1820-32, Peter Chapman (ed.), Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, letter of 23 October, 1831, p. 27. 90 Elizabeth Macarthur, The Journals & Letters of Elizabeth Macarthur 1789-1798, Elizabeth Farm Occasional Series, Historic Houses Trust of NSW, Sydney, 1984, p. 40. Letter to Bridget Kingdon, 1 September, 1798. 92

happily to Australia after extended stays in Europe. There is a note of surprise mixed with relief in her realisation voiced in a later letter that the children

are delighted to return to their native land, and breathe not a regret for the gay scenes of the English metropolis. Nothing they saw in France or Switzerland effaced the strong desire they had to return to their native wild woods in New South Wales.91

Peter Cunningham, surgeon on convict ships during several voyages to New South Wales and author of Two Years in New South Wales (1827) and Hints for Australian Emigrants (1841), also noted a strong love of country in the colonial-born children.

The currency youths are warmly attached to their country, which they deem unsurpassable, and few ever visit England without hailing the day of their return as the most delightful in their lives; while almost everything in the parent-land sinks in relative value with similar objects at home. 92

Nor was it just the comparative warmth and freedom of the new country that appealed, the landscape was seen with unprejudiced eyes by the colonial youth and loved. Cunningham wrote of the native-born delight in their surroundings:

Nay, the very miserable-looking trees that cast their annual coats of bark, and present to the eye of the raw European the appearance of being actually dead, I have heard praised as objects of incomparable beauty! — and I myself, so powerful is habit, begin to look upon them pleasurably.93

The ease with which children, whether overseas or native born, adjusted to their bush surroundings is evidenced by their play in it. Sometimes it was this very play that resulted in their being lost, and this provided an apposite image through which to view the settler’s potentially complex relationship to the land. As John Rickard concludes towards the end of his chapter on the environment in Australia: A Cultural History:

It can be seen, then, that the Australian response to the environment has not been uniform. At one level the colonists took pleasure in the country

91 Elizabeth Macarthur to Eliza Kingdon, 11 December 1817, MP 12, in Hazel King, Elizabeth Macarthur and Her World, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1980, p. 83. 92 Peter Cunningham, Letter XXI, [Currency and Sterling] p. 107, in Elizabeth Webby (ed.), Colonial Voices: Letters, Diaries, Journalism and Other Accounts of Nineteenth-Century Australia, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1989. 93 Ibid. 93

they found and created. At another level they sought images which dramatised the process of colonisation and, ultimately, nation-building.94

The Australian colonial settlers’ need to see themselves as struggling righteously to win their nation, and yet as being quite at home in their chosen environment, could be fulfilled within the dramatic image of a child lost in the bush.

The original ‘Babes in the Wood’ stands as an image of human greed and cruelty, while in contrast the Australian ‘Babes’ suffered because of their contact with the land itself. In this sense the Australian image differs markedly from its English predecessor, and this is reflected in the change of terminology from ‘Babes in the Wood’ to ‘Bush-lost Babies’. Yet the link remained strong, and the Australian image relied upon the power of the older story to establish its own resonance. The transformation of the image is an example of a kind of cultural chain migration, a process in which stories from the home country, and the understandings they voice, suffer a sea-change over time, emerging recognisable but uniquely altered. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, the ‘Bush-lost Babies’ was an image that allowed Australian colonists to assert the uniqueness of their experience within the larger European culture. The prominence in Australia accorded the image of children lost in the bush was peculiar to the Australian colonial process. I explore this claim in the next chapter, ‘Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Other Settler Societies’, in which I place the Australian experience within the context of the larger field of British settler societies.

94 Rickard, Australia, p. 69.

94

Chapter Three Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Other Settler Societies

the straying of young children must have been something of a problem ... Although the problem of lost children is not recorded nearly as often as one might expect. (John F. Walzer, The History of Childhood) 1

In the course of this chapter and the next, I shall examine the role of the lost child and captivity narratives in Australia and other comparable colonial settlements—the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. I have chosen to consider these countries because of the common British background to their colonial settlement, as a way to develop comparisons for the Australian experience. This meant that, despite some difference in the periods of settlement, colonists had similar bases for cultural and social attitudes towards children, and shared common stories for giving voice to their experiences. Although the settlement of America and Canada began considerably earlier than in Australia, and there was some change in the shared understanding of settlement, I believe that comparisons remain valid because the experiences of loss were not merely constructs of particular periods. Being lost in the bush was most frequently an incident associated with the early stages of settlement, no matter at what date that settlement occurred. The frontier of European settlement was the main site of lost children. However, it was not only an incident accompanying early settlement. As the various accounts that I examine demonstrate, children became lost in dense country at all times in the process of settlement, and still do today.

The casual passing comment by John Walzer in his discussion of childhood in eighteenth-century America with which I headed this chapter, takes us right to the heart of a conundrum. There are startlingly few references to lost children in accounts of the North American settlement process, particularly in comparison to the Australian experience. Walzer pursues this intriguing point no further, yet it points to a remarkable divergence in the Australian and North American colonists’ perceptions of the experience of settlement. Why was this so? As I demonstrate in this chapter, there can be no doubt that children

1 John F. Walzer, ‘A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth Century American Childhood’ in Lloyd de Mause (ed.), The History of Childhood, Peter Bedrick, New York, 1988, pp. 351-82. 95

became lost in the woods and on the prairies of America and Canada during settlement. However, virtually every reference to ‘lost children’ from that period in North America actually denotes children taken by Indians. Similarly, when pressed for stories of children ‘lost’ during the process of colonial settlement, sources in New Zealand immediately made reference to those kidnapped by Maoris. The captivity image in North America and New Zealand appear to have completely dominated the colonial discourse about dangers for children, leaving no room in the national narratives of settlement for any other images of vulnerable children, such as those lost in the natural environment.

An understanding that the incidence of children becoming lost was essentially a frontier experience remained a constant across continent and time. What was variable, however, was the vision of the frontier. In the wider colonial process stories of captive white women and children appear to be largely, though not solely, a frontier phenomenon. Graeme Davison, in an illuminating discussion on the topic, argues that the frontier was as much a mental as a physical state.

Frontier was the word used in Australia and elsewhere throughout the New World to describe the areas, often wild and untamed, beyond the settled parts of the country. The word was in common use by the 1840s ... The frontier was always both an idea and a place. It signified both a line on the map and a geographically indeterminate boundary between the known and the unknown, the civilised and the rude, the safe and the dangerous, the ordered and the anarchic.2

The mental identification of oneself as being on the frontier proved an enormously influential factor. For many colonial settlers the wider trans- cultural mythology had established the frontier as a place of danger. Therefore to regard oneself as living on the frontier was to feel constantly vulnerable to the forces of ‘the unknown … and the rude’—dangerous and anarchic forces. It was these feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability associated with being at the very edge of civilisation confronting the uncivilised that allowed stories of stolen white women and children to flourish. Indeed, in some specific instances, this fear was justified and reinforced by ongoing battles with Indigenous peoples.

2 ‘Frontier’ in Graeme Davison, John Hirst, Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 269-70. 96

The differences in North American and Australian processes of settlement and frontier identification were marked. In the course of an examination of the different nature of the Australian and American frontiers in her seminal work on the Native Police of Port Phillip District, Good Men and True (1988), Marie Fels outlines the different settlement patterns,3

in American historiography it [the frontier] represents the continuous movement westwards, over an extended period, of Europeans and their stock. In the Western District of Victoria, the process was different. The geographer, Powell, has described the three-fold process of pastoral mobility—accretion, leap-frogging, and cluster and infill, and the evidence in [Henry] Dana’s journal supports the notion of a process of pastoral expansion by leap-frogging, with infill by outstations.

The perception of a relatively even frontier moving in a linear fashion westwards across America, carries a far greater sense of control over the experience than the seemingly random process of Australian frontier movement. The process of leap-frogging outlined here by Fels is an isolating one, moving settlers out onto small islands of ‘civilization’ surrounded by seas of ‘savagery’. The consequent sense of exposure at the frontier would lend itself to the promulgation of fear and rumour.

Fels concluded that ‘The patchy experience of Europeans on the stations is probably partly a function of this selection process’. Selection here, of course, refers to the selection of large tracts of land for pastoral runs in the early days of Australian colonisation; after the 1850s it referred more to smallholders taking land for farming from the Crown land previously used by pastoralists. The ‘patchy experience’ referred to was the widely variable nature of Aborigine-settler contact. One run could be in a constant state of readiness for Aboriginal attack while neighbouring runs were completely peaceful, with no notion of Aboriginal threat. This sense of threat could ebb and flow depending on near or distant incidents between Europeans and Aborigines, and on the expectations of individual settlers. A major factor in the relationship was clearly the perception of the Indigenous inhabitants held by settlers. Those who carried the notion of treacherous, ‘savage natives’ as part of their psychic baggage would certainly find them. The ‘island’ type of settlement depicted by Powell would help to generate a sense of isolation and paranoia. For some

3 Marie Hansen Fels, Good Men and True, The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District 1837—1853, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 132-3. 97

settlers in such an atmosphere events were inevitably read through the logic of fear—a request for food became a sinister threat, a lost child was probably stolen.

To establish the context of the Australian experience I shall make a detailed examination of the role of captivity images and narratives later in this chapter. Before that, however, in order to establish the uniqueness of the Australian response within the British settler colonies, I want to consider some of the incidents of lost children in other British settler societies and the way in which these stayed undeveloped national images, remaining locked into a specific time and place with no national resonance.

In the North American woods In North America the frontier was initially epitomised by the dense woods of the east coast that created an environment in which it was easy to become lost, particularly in winter. In February of 1736 the Boston Evening Post carried this lengthy story of the loss of two young girls in a snowstorm.

And from Newport, on Rhode Island. That they had there the following melancholy account from the East End of Long Island of Two girls who perished there in a Snow Storm: Their Parents are inhabitants of South Hampton, and retire with their families into a place called Coogg[?], about 12 miles distance from the Town, on the South side of the Island very often in Winter, in which place this Tragical Story happened. The eldest was about Twelve Years of Age, and the only Daughter of Ichabod Cooper; the Youngest was about six, the Daughter of Henry Jessup; Both of them went into the Woods on the 30th of January last to gather some Berries. Their parents towards night were very uneasy by Reason of the Snow which fell that Day, and the Childrens absence. They communicated their Minds to some of their Neighbours, who forthwith went in Quest of them that Night, and Saturday, Sunday and Monday following, but in vain. The next Day they found the Youngest, about a mile from any House, under a Bush, carefully wrapt up Heads, Hands and Feet, with her own and the Eldests’ Riding Hood: They continued their Search for the other all the following week: And on the 10th Instant, no less than Five Hundred Men on Horseback, from East Hampton, Bridge Hampton, and South Hampton, rang’d the Woods, but could not find her.4

The speed and scale of community response, culminating in the search by 500 mounted men, accords with Australian accounts. Unlike Australia however,

4 Boston Evening Post, 23 February, 1736, p. 2. 98

the story did not ‘travel’, and this perhaps offers a partial explanation for the failure of the lost child image to take a place in the national imagination. In a footnote to this incident Walzer notes that the story was not carried by papers in New York or Philadelphia; in other words, it remained a local story and was thus subject to being forgotten.5 As well, by remaining within the local context, the story failed to contribute to a universal understanding of the experience. There was no development of the communally recognised signifiers that one finds in the captivity narratives, a consistent feature of which was the volume, speed and wide spread of their telling.6 Australian stories of lost children were relayed to many in the community very soon after the incident occurred, in large part due to the proliferation of newspapers and journals in colonial Australia. This was a significant contributory factor to the community knowledge and expectations of the ‘lost in the bush’ experience.7 The increasing ease of communication at the time of Australia’s colonial settlement compared to the early days of America’s East Coast development was another possible factor in these stories acquiring a national significance.8

The New York Mercury also recorded an incident, in February 1754, in which the woods and snow made a fatal combination.

We hear from Reading, that two young Children were frozen to Death there on Monday Night, the 21st instant: They had been sent out in the Evening, to bring home some Sheep, but lost their Way in the Woods, and were not found till the next Day.9

In her journal for the period 1759 to 1807, colonist Elizabeth Drinker included two incidents of lost children, in different seasons. She noted briefly in December 1771 that ‘H.D and John Drinker gone this morning toward Trenton in search of H. D, J. D.’s son, who’s been missing several days’.10 Later, in July 1781, she mentioned several accidents having lately happened, amongst them being

5 Walzer in de Mause (ed.) Childhood, p. 377. 6 For details of this see chapter four. 7 By 1888 almost 600 newspapers (including dailies and weeklies) were published in the Australian colonies. (Elizabeth Morrison, Oxford Companion to Australian History, 2001, p. 471). 8 During the 1850s an inter-colonial telegraph system was established through the eastern states of mainland Australia. 9 New York Mercury, 4 February 1754, p. 3. 10 De Mause, Childhood, p. 356. 99

Two little children in ye Jerseys, some days ago, [who] wandered out of their knowledge in the woods, and were not found ‘till ye third day — one is likely to recover, the other not.11

It seems that becoming lost in summer was slightly less critical than in winter, when snow and cold were deadly. The harsh winter conditions critically reduced the time in which a person could be found alive and made the process of searching very difficult. Irrespective of whether the children survived, none of these incidents received much attention outside their immediate area. At the same time as they were taking place, another type of fear for children predominated, the fear that they would be taken by Indians.

Captivity narratives in North America The possibility that missing children had in fact been taken by Indians had a demonstrable basis in the North American experience. In the introduction to their comprehensive study of American captivity narratives, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550-1900, Kathryn Derounian-Stodola and James Levernier confirm that it was a very real facet of the American colonial experience:

From the beginnings of European exploration and settlement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the end of the nineteenth century, Indian captivity was very much a historical reality for countless explorers and settlers living on the edge of the American frontier, and in one form or another it touched the imaginations and fears of virtually everyone for whom it was a possibility.12

With numbers of captives estimated to be in the ‘tens of thousands’, this was indeed a genuine threat.13 The captivity of white settlers had occurred since the beginning of the European colonisation of North America and this had been widely reported back to ‘home’ countries in Europe. The image of Indigenous peoples as marauding, dangerous ‘savages’ was quickly and inextricably established in European consciousness through the medium of captivity narratives.14

11 Henry Biddle (ed.), Extract from the Journal of Elizabeth Drinker, From 1759-1807, A.D., J.B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1889, entry for 1 July 1781, p. 135. 12 Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola and James Arthur Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550-1900, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1993, pp. 1-2. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 100

Captivity narratives depicting American Indians murdering and kidnapping vulnerable whites, particularly women and children, were bestsellers in England. There was a multitude of such stories—a descriptive bibliography lists 250 works published before 1800.15 Some of the captivity narratives were written in French, others in German, so this genre with its inherent message of native savagery was available to much of Europe.16 Most influential upon the expectations of Australian settlers, of course, were the narratives written in English.

One of the earliest and most famous of these narratives was that of Mary Rowlandson, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, published in 1682 in America and shortly after in London. It was a huge popular success; according to one historian it was second in popularity only to the Bible.17 The title pages of the different editions of Rowlandson’s story provide a revealing appreciation of the understandings and interests of the different audiences. The title page of the edition published in Cambridge, New England, did not identify Mrs. Rowlandson as a minister’s wife, and presumably this was well known.18 In keeping with her Puritan values, stress was placed on the redemptive aspect of her experience. The full title read:

The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, With the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Commended by her, to all that desires to know the Lords doings and dealings with Her. Especially to her dear Children and Relations.19

The London edition stressed the veracity of the tale. ‘A True History of the Captivity & Restoration’, was claimed on the title page, which also accentuated the dramatic element of Indian behaviour, ‘The Cruel and Inhumane Usage she Underwent amongst the Heathens for Eleven Weeks

15 R.W.G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1949. 16 Derounian-Stodola and Levernier, Indian Captivity Narrative, p. 9. 17 Ibid., p. 14. 18 Gary L. Ebersole, Captured by Texts Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity, University Press of Virginia, Virginia, 1995, pp. 18-19. 19 Frances Roe Kestler, The Indian Captivity Narrative: A Woman’s View, Garland Publishing, New York, 1990, pp. 567-8. 101

time’.20 This suggests a need to accentuate the exotic and dramatic to capture a buyer’s interest. Mary Rowlandson depicted the Indians as savages who murdered and tortured indiscriminately. She described them refusing help to her badly injured six-year-old son, who died, and, later beating to death and then burning a fellow female prisoner and her young child in front of other child captives.21 Her depiction of the innate brutality of the Indian— particularly shocking in violent actions towards women and children—was echoed in countless other captivity narratives, ensuring that the readers carried this as the central image of the ‘native’. Richard Slotkin, in his important study, Regeneration Through Violence, concluded that ‘ it was within this genre of Colonial Puritan writing that the first American mythology took shape’.22 This mythology necessarily included an understanding of the Indian as a savage, unpredictable murderer, who would attack families and carry off women and children to an awful fate, one that always included the possibility of sexual molestation for females. The propaganda value of this imagery was enormously important in unifying public opinion behind the often-harsh treatment meted out to the Indians by settlers, the military and governments. Although these narratives came from long before the British settlement of Australia, the images they carried were not forgotten by the later frontier settlers. The aggressive responses to American Indians would have offered an easily identifiable image upon which Australian settlers could draw in their dealings with their own continent’s Indigenous peoples.

As I have noted, many of the captives were children and often taken to replace Indian children who had died. Derounian-Stodola and Levernier have suggested four major reasons why Indians took captives—for revenge, for ransom, to replenish tribal numbers and for slaves. There was also a long tradition of Indians taking children from other tribes, so the practice was not directed exclusively at Europeans.23 However, the colonists perceived kidnapping as a tactic in the Indians’ resistance to colonisation, and the frequency of this behaviour must have heightened the sense in British readers of the high value natives placed on white children, and fed the assumptions

20 Ibid., p. 69, title page of the third edition of the story, printed in London, 1682. 21 Ibid., pp. 27-30. 22 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: Mythology of the American Frontier, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown Connecticut, 1973, p. 94. 23 Derounian-Stodola and Levernier, Indian Captivity Narrative, pp. 2-8. 102

sometimes made later in Australia of a child’s disappearance being due to Aboriginal kidnap.

There was another aspect to the American child captivity narratives that undoubtedly generated great concern, and also reverberated in the Australian context. This was the ‘Indianisation’ or acculturation that sometimes took place. One of the most complete accounts of this North American phenomenon is given in the story of Mary Jemison, often known as the White Woman of the Genesee. Mary was around 15 years old when taken captive; most of the rest of her family were massacred. Her story was first made public in a narrative written by James Seaver, published in 1824, which he based on extended interviews with Mary, then around 80 years of age. The work was a huge popular success, eventually going to over 30 editions.24 Mary told of being given to two women of the Seneca tribe who took her to their home, washed and dressed her in ‘complete Indian style’, and then, joined by the women of the town, went through an ceremony of adoption. She was taken in to the family to replace the two women’s dead brother. From then on, related Mary, she was treated as a full member of the family, with great kindness and affection. She was not allowed to speak English and, after four years with the Indians, described herself as having ‘become so far accustomed to their mode of living, habits, and dispositions, that my anxiety to get away had almost subsided’. This was in no small part due to her now being happily married to Sheninjee, a Delaware Indian, to whom she had borne two children.25 As if this was insufficient example of the potential dire consequences to a white female child in captivity by natives, Jemison also compared the lot of an Indian female very favourably against that of white women. This provided a marked contrast to other stories that described the drudgery and bestiality of the Indian women’s lives at the hands of brutal, savage males.

With them [the Indians] was my home; my family was there, and I had many friends to whom I was warmly attached. Our labour was not severe ... Notwithstanding the Indian women have all the fuel and bread to procure and cooking to perform, their task is probably not harder than that of white women, ... and their cares certainly are not half as numerous, nor as great.26

24 Kestler, Captivity Narrative, p. 117. 25 Ibid., p. 128. 26 ibid., pp. 128-9. 103

It is difficult to assess what would have caused greater horror to the white reader—miscegenation or the assertion that heathen native women lived a better lifestyle than civilized, Christian white women! Worse was to come with Jemison’s assertion of the high moral character of Indian life.

No people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace, before the introduction of spirituous liquor amongst them. The moral character of the Indians was uncontaminated. Their fidelity was perfect; they were strictly honest; they despised deception; and chastity was held in high veneration, and a violation of it considered sacrilege.27

This depiction of the Noble Savage may have more to do with Seaver’s representation than with Jemison herself. However, the implied criticisms of white society as destroyers of peace and suppliers of alcohol suggest the voice of real experience. If accepted by settlers, this picture of Indian life would completely undermine the rationale for destroying natives. Mary Jemison’s story represented the very particular way in which children were seen as vulnerable, not simply to being taken captive but also to being seduced away from a civilised, Christian life. However, her depiction of Indian life remained unusual within the genre of captivity narratives, most of which reinforced the image of brutal savagery.

Many of these narratives found their way to England where they were read avidly. The story by Quaker Elizabeth Hanson of her capture with her four children by the Kickapoo, God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty, first published in America in 1728, was printed and reprinted in London within a few years.28 Of the many hundreds of Indian captivity narratives published in chapbook form, some were published in England and Scotland including A Narrative of the Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of William and Elizabeth Fleming (1756) and The Affecting history of dreadful distresses of Frederick Manheim’s family (1793). So from the seventeenth century British readers were presented with numerous images of Indigenous peoples who attacked settlers in a seemingly random way, murdered and cannibalised, and, most importantly in this context, kidnapped children. Indian captivity narratives were, for the majority of Europeans, the ‘major source of

27 Ibid., p. 132. 28 Derounian-Stodola and Levernier, Indian Captivity Narrative, p. 14. 104

information about American Indians’ for hundreds of years.29

A reader of these narratives would also have to conclude that female children were the prime target for Indian raiders. This might well have been the case, but not for reasons of sexual desirability, as many of the stories implied. Studies of various captivity groups show that children, particularly young girls, acculturated best to the Indian life, and so were obvious candidates for captivity.30 In Captives (2002), Linda Colley confirms this point in her discussion of the potential fate of Indian captives. Some were used to extort ransom, while others were made slaves or tortured in retaliation for their captives’ dead. Colley noted that, in contrast to these usages

some captives, particularly women and the healthy and malleable young, were adopted by and absorbed into Indian communities as a way of compensating for the losses they had sustained from disease and death.31

The involvement of women and girls in Indian life led to a prurient response from many people. The sexual interest expressed in many of the captivity narratives is undeniable, and this became increasingly dramatic throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Would the female be subjected to the worst of all fates? Stories such as these were calculated to rouse the protective ire of any white male. Two versions of the kidnap in 1832 of Sylvia and Rachel Hall (aged 17 and 15 years respectively) demonstrate the potential use of the vulnerable female-child image. The girl’s own version, written by Sylvia’s husband in 1867, is very factual and unemotional, although in no way avoiding the horror of the Indian attack in which their parents, siblings and friends were killed

we saw an Indian take Petigrew’s child by the feet and dash its head against a stump; and Davis’ little boy was shot by an Indian, two other Indians holding the boy by each hand.32

Later the Hall sisters saw a pole from which hung the scalps of their parents. However, in a matter of days and with the intervention of other Indians, the

29 Ibid., p. 51. 30 Ibid., pp. 5-6. 31 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850, Jonathan Cape, London, 2002, p. 145. 32 Kestler, Captivity Narrative, p. 212. 105

girls were taken to white soldiers and returned to their surviving brother. Though describing two Indians taking locks of their hair they made no mention of the possibility of becoming ‘wives’.

A comparison with the second version, written in 1832, obviously for the purpose of raising popular feeling against Indians, demonstrates the emotional vulnerabilities of the intended audience.33 The attacked settlers were portrayed as ‘defenseless inhabitants of the frontier towns’, and the Indians as ‘savages with their tomahawks in hand’ who carried out ‘the most inhuman barbarities!’ These barbarities were described in the most emotive language;

they horribly mutilated both young and old, male and female, without distinction of age or sex! ... The bodies of the slain whites were cut and mangled in the most cruel manner that savage barbarity could devise; their hearts were taken out and their heads cut off!34

The girls taken prisoner were described as ‘two highly respectable young women’, which both affirmed their right to the sympathy of the respectable reader and emphasised the potential horror with which they were faced. In this version they eventually came to realise that

they were to become the adopted wives of the two young chiefs by whom they were first seized! ... If there was anything calculated to add more horror to their feelings, it was this, which was indeed calculated to produce a greater shock than the intelligence that they were doomed to become the victims of the worst savage torture!35

The threat of two respectable young women suffering the ‘fate worse than death’ at the hands of barbaric ‘savages’—apparently worse than being tortured—was intentionally imflammatory. The writer made his intention clear in the concluding paragraphs in which he again invoked images of innocent women and children who were brutally murdered. Then came the rallying call, invoking both the need to revenge the victims and protect themselves:

Shall we, fellow citizens, quietly look upon these transactions? Can we look upon them without feelings of revenge? How soon may it be before our frontiers are in the same way invaded, and our own brothers and

33 Ibid., pp. 207-11 (William P. Edwards, Narrative of the Capture and Providential Escape of Misses Frances and Almira Hall, two respectable young women of the ages of 16 and 18 — who were taken prisoners by the Savages, New York City, 1832). 34 Ibid., p. 207. 35 Ibid., p. 209. 106

sisters scalped? Shall we allow these brutes to dull their tomahawks on the bones of our friends, in order that they may only re-sharpen them for our relations?36

These potent images of dangerous ‘savages’, intent upon the murder and kidnap of innocent, ‘civilised’ settlers formed the basis for popular European stories of the colonial experience.

The North American captivity narratives had been widely read in Britain and Europe since the middle of the sixteenth century. Stories such as Sylvia Hall’s served to reinforce to these readers, including many who became Australian colonists, the continuing threat of Indigenous peoples. This was reinforced, particularly for the Australian settlers, by events in New Zealand, which added another strand to the colonial cross-cultural narrative of settlement.

Captivity narratives from New Zealand A similar story from New Zealand places the image of perfidious native in close proximity to the Australian colonial project, both geographically and chronologically. When, in 1834, Mrs. Betty Guard and her children were taken captive by Maoris after the wreck of the ship on which she and her family was travelling back from a visit to Sydney, her husband returned to Sydney to organise for their ransom. He changed his mind, though, and convinced Governor Richard Bourke to mount a punitive expedition consisting of a warship and a detachment of soldiers from the Sydney garrison.37 Their campaign succeeded in the rescue of Mrs. Guard and her two sons, but also resulted in such widespread killings that an inquiry was called. When Mrs. Guard arrived in Sydney she was the recipient of a subscription fund. This close connection between Sydney and the Guard incident would have ensured the story was widely known in the Australian colonies, and thus the image of barbaric natives who threatened women and innocent young children was further reinforced.38

36 Ibid., pp. 210-1. 37 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, Auckland, 1996, p. 169. 38 Kay Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 44. 107

Another incident that took place around fifteen years earlier in New Zealand, involving a massacre and the captivity of white women, would also have had strong reverberations in the Australian colonies as well as in London. The Boyd stopped in New Zealand to collect timber en route from Port Jackson to London and many of the passengers were from Sydney, including the two female survivors—one, Mrs. Morley, a mother with her child and the other a young girl, Betsey Broughton, whose father was Deputy Commissary at Sydney. The captain had in some way angered the Maori with whom he was trading and they attacked the boat and crew, reportedly cannibalizing some of the dead.39 When questioned about the fate of her mother, Betsey said that she had been killed, then cut up and cooked. Such exotic, horrific news was widely reported within the colonial sphere. Salmond records that:

Stories of the Boyd ‘Massacree’ were told and retold, in Port Jackson, Calcutta, Paris and London. The tale played its part in the ongoing European debate about the essential nature of ‘savages’.40

This incident gained even greater power as evidence of innate native treachery with the erroneous attribution of responsibility to Te Pahi, a Maori chief who had visited Sydney—indeed lived with Governor King—and whose son, also implicated, had met the royal family. An account of the massacre appeared in the Sydney Gazette and there was a universal sense that Port Jackson people had been tricked by the apparently reasonable appearance of Te Pahi.41 The newly-arrived Governor Macquarie reported the loss of the Boyd to London and Calcutta and also suggested that a warning be given all South Sea whalers and East India Company vessels ‘to be very vigilant and guarded in their intercourse with the New Zealanders, as well as with all the Natives of the South Sea Islands, who are in general a very treacherous race of People, and not to be trusted’.42

A broadsheet titled ‘Atrocious and Horrible Massacree’, published in London, reinforced the view of Maori as ‘Monsters’. The story, with its accompanying illustration and ballad, finished with the admonition that ‘let no

39 Anne Salmond, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans 1773-1815, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 1997, p. 383. 40 Ibid., p. 388. 41 Sydney Gazette, 10 March 1810. 42 Salmond, Between Worlds, p. 387. 108

man after this trust a New Zealander’.43 Thus was the notion of the ‘treacherous savage’ reinforced and disseminated throughout the society from which Australia’s colonists were drawn.

The extent to which these stereotypical colonial experiences became entrenched in the national consciousness of Britain and the Empire may be gauged by the eager public reception in the 1890s of a fabulous story serialised in Wide World Magazine, ‘The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - As Told by Himself’. This story contained all the well-known elements of colonial adventure—an intelligent, innovative European male, a shipwreck, a desert island, some obliging natives who recognise white superiority, cannibals and two young white girls held captive as his ‘wives’ by an evil native chief. Public controversy surrounding the authenticity of the tale was played out in the pages of the World Wide Magazine and the Daily Chronicle, whose correspondence pages carried letters both ridiculing and supporting de Rougemont’s story.44 According to Sarah Burton, who related this story in her book Impostors (2000): ‘The circulation of the World Wide Magazine rocketed as de Rougemont’s story was lapped up by avid readers in all corners of the globe’.45 Eventually de Rougemont (whose real name was Henri Louis Grien) was exposed as a fraud. He had composed his story over several weeks using material in the British Library.46 It is difficult to decide what is the most compelling evidence of the colonial mindset—the fact that such an amazing story was so widely accepted, or that so much colonial adventures material was held in the British Library. Even the revelation of fraud did not seem to deter his readers; Burton reported that sales figures remained at 400 000 per issue after the revelations of fraud.47

This incident says as much about the powerful medium of literature as it does about the British perception of Indigenous peoples within settler societies as ‘savages’. In the increasingly post-oral, literate world of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the printed word offered an authority that moved stories outside their immediate communities and offered them longevity. The fact that

43 Ibid., p. 389. 44 Sarah Burton, ‘The great pretender’, Age, ‘Good Weekend’ magazine, 15 July 2000, p. 50. 45 Ibid., p. 47. Impostors: six kinds of liar, Viking, London, 2000. 46 Ibid., p. 50. 47 Ibid. 109

a story was put into print reflected the importance accorded to it by a community—no printer would want to publish something that would not sell. The sheer number of captivity narratives from North America and elsewhere was a measure of their popularity. With this consideration in mind, I turned to the literature of North America, Canada and New Zealand to see if stories of lost children were part of their settler cultures.

The lost child in the literature of colonisation Susanna Moodie’s semi-autobiographical work, Roughing It in the Bush, or Life in Canada (1852), depicts experiences in the Canadian woods similar to those on the American east coast recounted earlier from the Boston Evening Post and the New York Mercury.48 In a letter to her publisher Moodie noted that she was sending him a chapter entitled ‘Jeanie Burns’ in which she had recounted ‘many interesting anecdotes of persons, who at sundry times, and under my own knowledge, had been lost in the woods.’49 The stories themselves tend to read as fiction so it is useful to find this assertion of veracity. Moodie tells the stories through the medium of a conversation between herself and a neighbour of longer experience in the bush, a Mrs. H—, who initiates the conversation with the news that ‘One of Clark’s little boys that were lost last Wednesday in the woods has been found’. She then responds to Moodie’s query as to how the boys were lost with

Oh, ‘tis a thing of very common occurrence here. New settlers, who are ignorant of the danger of going astray in the forest, are always having their children lost. This is not the first instance by many that I have known, having myself lived for many years in the bush. I only wonder that it does not more frequently happen.50

Mrs. H—‘s assertion of the frequency with which children became lost in the woods reinforces the question of why these incidents failed to find a lasting place in the Canadian or American national sense of self and pioneer beginnings. These lost child incidents were occurring at very much the same time as similar incidents in Australian colonies that became immortalised in

48 Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, or Life in Canada, Carl Ballstadt (ed.), Carleton University Press, Ottawa, 1988, (first published by Richard Bentley, London, 1852). 49 Ibid, p. xxxv. 50 Ibid., p. 129. 110

folk story, literature, poetry, painting and memorials.51 Interestingly Mrs. H— points to the ignorance of new settlers as the critical problem, rather than the nature of their surroundings. This was not an explanation that found much voice in Australia. Although some parents clearly regarded themselves at fault over the loss of a child, the public response was to blame the environment. This important difference in community reaction is one that I examine in my concluding chapter.

As was often the case, the two Clark boys, aged five and seven years, disappeared while fulfilling a task to support the family existence—taking lunch out to their father working in the woods. Although ‘very smart and knowing for their age’, for some reason they wandered off the path. When one boy was eventually found some fifteen miles into the woods, he could not explain what happened. ‘How they came to ramble away into the woods, the younger child is too much stupefied to tell; and perhaps he is too young to remember’.52 The anguish of parental loss and the support of neighbours, hallmarks of the Australian experiences, are evident here too:

At night the father returned, and scolded the wife for not sending his dinner as usual; but the poor woman (who all day had quieted her fears with the belief that the children had stayed with their father), instead of paying any regard to his angry words, demanded, in a tone of agony, what had become of her children? Tired and hungry as Clark was, in a moment he comprehended their danger, and started off in pursuit of the boys. The shrieks of the distracted woman soon called the neighbours together, who instantly joined the search.53

The story told by the found child, Johnnie, of his older brother’s loving care has distinct resonances of the actions of Jane Duff that generated so strong a response in Australia and England:

William, the elder boy, he says, promised him bread if he would try and walk further; but his feet were bleeding and sore, and he could not stir another step. William told him to sit down upon the log on which he was found, and not stir from the place until he came back, and he would run on until he found a house and brought him something to eat. He then wiped his eyes, and bid him not to be frightened or to cry, and kissed

51 Ibid p. xxiv. The editor, Carl Ballstadt, believes that although published in the early 1850s the writings were ‘in many respects, a product of the 1830s’, these being the early years of Moodie’s settlement. 52 Ibid., p. 129. 53 Ibid., pp. 129-30. 111

him and went away.54

In spite of a search that included the use of Indian trackers (the only time I have seen their help in searching recorded in North American material, in marked contrast to the Australian genre), William was never found. It was thought that ‘the generous herted[sic] boy’ had fallen victim to the perils of his environment in the form of wolves.

The Indians traced him for more than a mile along the banks of the stream, when they lost his trail altogether. If he had fallen into the water, they would have discovered his body, but they say he has been dragged into some hole in the bank among the tangled cedars and devoured.55

This conjunction of childish innocence, kindly care of his younger brother and an unknown but assumed brutal death would seem ideal for mythologising, yet it remained undeveloped and uncommemorated, except by Moodie. In marked contrast to the Australian experience, nothing in this story appears to have ‘spoken’ to the Canadian colonists about their wider experience of settlement.

Moodie’s neighbour, Mrs. H—, continued her discussion of lost children with an evocation of the experience of becoming lost in the woods:

I have known many cases of children, and even of grown persons, being lost in the woods, who were never heard of again. It is a frightful calamity to happen to any one, and mothers cannot be too careful in guarding their children against rambling alone into the bush. Persons, when once they lose sight of the beaten track, get frightened and bewildered and lose all presence of mind; ... they plunge desperately on, running hither and thither, in the hope of getting out, while they only involve themselves more deeply among the mazes of the interminable forest.56

She reinforced this warning with several more stories of lost children, one a young girl who left the road to pick berries and lost her way. She stayed still and was found. A young boy walking with two others on road through a forest was not so fortunate. When his companions realised that he was no longer with them, the boys turned back to search before deciding that the missing boy was deliberately hiding and left to make their own way home. A community search

54 Moodie, Roughing It, p. 130. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., p. 131. 112

the next day failed to solve the mystery although there were suggestions that a bear was responsible.57 Yet even with the greater level of natural threat to children inherent in the North American woods—snow, dense vegetation, wolves and bears—the image of the captive child remained dominant. Mrs. H— concluded her tales of lost children with

a case where two boys and a girl were sent into the woods by their mother to fetch home the cows. The children were lost; the parents mourned them for dead, for all search for them proved fruitless.

However, the eldest boy appeared seven years later, explaining that they had been ‘carried off by a party of Indians’. The girl and other son had acculturated to Indian life, only one boy clung to the memory of his past. His return home took the form of a dramatic discovery; his Indian appearance confused his mother and she denied who he was until he exclaimed:

Mother, don’t you remember saying to me on that afternoon, ‘Ned, you need not look for the cows in the swamp, they went off towards the big hill,’ The delighted mother clasped him in her arms, exclaiming, ‘You say truly,—you are indeed my own, my long lost son!’58

The perceived threat from Indians again outweighed in settler consciousness the very real threats posed by the environment. Possibly it was the random nature of Indian raids that caused them to loom so large in the pantheon of pioneer dangers. At least in theory, by being very careful of your children you could protect them from the woods; no such consoling thought availed in the face of Indian attack. Perhaps, also, it was easier to blame Indians and to thereby justify their slaughter, than to accept the inherent dangers the land held for European settlers.

An early Canadian book for children, first published in 1852 as the Canadian Crusoes, depicted three boys lost for several years in the woods who survived in the face of every difficulty, reinforcing the notion that the environment could and should be mastered by white settlers.59 The choice of title is indicative of this mindset. Linda Colley offers Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), as one possible parable for British empire-making, quoting

57 Ibid., pp. 131-4. 58 Ibid. 59 Thanks to Jane Beer for acquainting me with Canadian Crusoes. This novel by Catharine Parr Traill (Susanna Moodie’s sister) was later published as Lost in the Backwoods. 113

James Joyce’s assertion that the character of Robinson Crusoe is ‘The true symbol of the British conquest’.60 Crusoe mastered both the strange environment and the natives of the desert island on which he found himself after being shipwrecked. The invocation of the Crusoe image implies British control over their surroundings.

One of the few examples I found in the American literature of colonisation of the translation of an incident involving children lost in the woods into a literary form is an epic, almost unreadable, poem entitled The Lost Children of the Alleghanies Found By a Dream (1898).61 It tells the story of an incident in the Alleghany mountains of Pennsylvania in 1856 in which two brothers, aged five and seven years, become lost. Their bodies were found two weeks later. Their story—described as being ‘Revised with a moral by Zim. Price, Philadelphia, 1898’— is buried in the elevated rhetoric. The poem becomes a medium for conveying moral lessons, the first of these being a warning to parents to be careful of what they say in front of their children. The boys were lost in an attempt to emulate their father who had announced that he was going bear hunting.

And with gun in hand sped off to the wood, in search of bruin, his fancied prize. Strange! without a thought of the lads who heard his plans, and believed that all was real, That they too for fun, might shoulder their pop guns, and follow after his heels.62

The boy’s suffering and death is seen to be redeemed by the conviction that they have gone to Heaven:

O the joys in quest! the heavenly bliss! the soul’s delight and true happiness! The haven of rest for the lost! and e’en wanderers in earth’s lone, dark wilderness!63

60 Colley, Captives, p. 1. 61 Although the title page of the pamphlet reads The Lost Children of the Alleghanies the actual poem is headed The Lost Boys of the Alleghanies. The title page also records that the poem tells a true story. Published in 1898 by A.C.M. Hiester, Annville, Pennsylvania. (Microfilm copy held by Columbia University Library, New York). 62 Ibid., p. 8. 63 Ibid., p. 20. 114

The other moral element drawn by Price in an extended second section, ‘The Lost Today’, links the physically lost boys with the morally lost boys and men subject to the demon drink—it became a temperance plea.

This wail of wails has gone up, and, on all sides is now heard, praying for aid!

Not for sons lost in mountains or forests, nor in the deep sea and its dense fog; But, for the myriads by friends enthralled in the deep marshes of the DRINK BOG!64

Of more interest to this study than the poem is the Preface and the few pages at the end of the poem that give a brief outline of the boys’ state when found and describe the country they had traversed. The writer dedicated his narrative poem to the memory of ‘the lost children of the Cox family’ and then related the factual basis for the work.

The thrilling narrative herein related is an historical fact. It took place in the wilds of the Alleghany mountains, Bedford Co., Pa., in the year 1856. A large edition of the story published some time thereafter, has long since been exhausted. Our apology for rewriting it is two-fold as will appear in the sequel. The story is thrilling, romantic, tragic and dramatic all combined, because of the fact that the boys that were lost in the mountain, were found dead, after a fortnight of terrible suffering, which no pen can fully describe. Another interesting feature is the fact that they were found by a man who lived twelve miles distant, who dreamed of their whereabouts three nights in succession. The two lost lads are typical of the lost of to-day, in whose behalf the story has been written.

The appeal for authority based upon authenticity and the characterisation of the incident as ‘thrilling, romantic, tragic and dramatic’, suggest that the writer and his community were so distant from such experiences as to make it seem unbelievable. The gap of forty-two years between the incident and its literary appearance indicates that it had not held public imagination.

Just as in Susanna Moodie’s story of the Clark boys, there were details in this incident that would lend themselves readily to mythologising—the

64 Ibid., p. 33. 115

bareness of the wildernesss which offered no sustenance, the emaciation of their bodies, the shoes worn through and clothes in tatters. Poignantly, the dead boys were found lying side by side, with the head of the younger boy resting on a smooth stone pillowed by a hat, presumably placed there for him by his brother. News of the loss and death of the boys was widespread:

on the day of the funeral about five thousand persons were present. This being a sparsely settled district—many came from a great distance. A number from Pittsburg, Johnstown and Bedford.65

However, this and other similar incidents remained minor, local events that were quickly forgotten until someone saw a way of using them as a vehicle for an improving morality lesson. The emphasis on the use of lost children stories as didactic tools was strong. A story published in 1830, The Lost Children, was used to warn children of the awful consequences of truanting from school. Two boys did so and went to play in a cave which collapsed on them. The moral was clearly drawn:

And when to school you’re duly sent, Be sober, gentle, and content, Obey your master and his rule, And never play truant from the school.66

Unlike the Australian morality stories based on lost children, the incidents themselves had no cultural continuation. They were given scant attention apart for the admonitory use to which they could be put. There were some other literary representations of children becoming lost, but in these too the incidents remained undeveloped. They were apparently regarded as discrete, having no lasting meaning for the community and generating no iconic images.

Conrad Richter’s The Trees (1940), the first volume of a trilogy chronicling the late-eighteenth century movement of pioneers into land west of the Allegheny Mountains, bears some comparison to the Australian literary genre of the lost child.67 The trilogy bears a startling conceptual resemblance to Frederick McCubbin’s iconic Australian triptych, The Pioneer, first exhibited in 1904. Both mediums represent the pioneer first surrounded by dense, almost

65 Ibid., pp. 29-30. 66 Author unknown, The Lost Children, Cory, Marshall and Hammond, Providence, 1830, p. 15. 67 Conrad Richter, The Trees, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1940, pp. 159-81. 116

overwhelming forest; then establishing a farm, and lastly as part of a developed, thriving city. It is in the earliest stage of this that the child becomes lost in Richter’s work—a little girl called Sulie. In an episode familiar to Australian readers she was sent out with her brother to fetch the cows and the children became separated; the boy returned home, the girl did not. Family and neighbours searched the surrounding dense woods. While the men searched, the women waited and told stories of other lost children. In one story a panther took the child, another girl, mistaken for a deer, was shot and buried by an Indian. The story of a young boy lost for seventeen days who had gone completely wild evoked a response that ‘Sometimes ... it’s a good thing if you don’t find a lost young’un!’ which raised the issue of whether it is preferable to know of the child’s death rather than the endless pain of never knowing—an issue that also figures in many Australian stories.

“Once they’re out too long,” Mrs. McFall said, wiping her eyes, “I’d as soon see them dead and buried. That’s easier to stand than this waitin’ around and never knowin”.68

In her young, female vulnerability Sulie seems very like a figure from the Australian canon. The men’s touching description of the small playhouse she built deep in the woods, the other signs of her they followed without any success, are all familiar details. However there remains one critical difference—a brief reference to Indian horse tracks introduces the possibility that this, too, was a captivity experience. The possibility is raised again at the novel’s conclusion by Sayward, Sulie’s sister, as she ponders the future:

Never again would they see the face of their little Sulie, for if she wasn’t dead, some Indians far off in the vasty Northwest country had her.69

An inconclusive meeting in the final volume in the trilogy, The Town, between the family and an Indian squaw who may be the lost Sulie, reaffirms the likelihood that she had fallen victim to Indian kidnap rather than the wilderness.70 Once again the captivity image is dominant, overwhelming the image of the lost child alone in the environment.

Possibly the best-known literary representations of white American

68 Ibid., p. 172. 69 Ibid., p. 302. 70 Conrad Richter, The Town, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970, (first published c1950). 117

settlement, nationally and internationally, are the ‘Little House’ stories by Laura Ingalls Wilder. These follow the movement of the author’s family from the Wisconsin forests westwards across the prairie. The stories highlight a changing understanding of what constituted the frontier, with prairie replacing forest as the image for new settlement and its attendant dangers. Some dangers —the weather and Indians—were dominant and held sway everywhere. These two figure as potential threats far more frequently in the ‘Little House’ books than concern about children becoming lost. The weather was frequently a factor in anyone—adult or child— being lost; several books contain episodes in which blizzards either caught people out on the prairie without shelter, or so disoriented them that they wandered away from the settlement into wilderness.71 Only twice did the stories record incidents of children becoming lost because they were on the prairie. In one incident Laura’s little sister, Grace, disappeared when playing around the house. The family went searching and eventually Laura found Grace picking flowers in the hollow left by a buffalo wallow. Laura’s dread coloured her view of her environment as she contemplated ‘the horrible, sunny prairie [which] was so large ... the enormous bigness of the prairie’.72 Later, Laura and another sister become lost for a short time when they take a shortcut home from town across the prairie, completely losing their bearings in the tall grass. Both these incidents convey the ease with which children, in particular, could simply vanish in the vastness of the prairie. The frontier had moved away from the all-enveloping woods to the wide-open spaces of the inland.

Lost on the trail and prairie As the Wilder stories demonstrate, the movement of settlers westward changed the image of frontier changed from woods to prairie, and accordingly, the ways in which children became lost. In a far-ranging examination of the female experience of the frontier, The Land Before Her (1984), Annette Kolodny identifies the shift in frontier imagery as being well established by the mid-nineteenth century:

In fact, by 1850, the cutting edge of settlement had for so long been identified with the prairie that heavily wooded landscapes no longer

71 See On the Banks of Plum Creek, The Long Winter, and The First Four Years. 72 Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake, Lutterworth, Guildford, 1961, pp. 275-81. 118

figured prominently as emblems of the frontier.73

Kolodny further argues that by this time the prairie was represented in literature as park-like—open, flowered expanses that held no threat.74 Yet this was not the case, as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories demonstrated. The very tall prairie grasses constituted a threat to children, a threat acknowledged in a social history of the Northern Plains, The Sod-House Frontier 1854-1890 (1954). Yet again it was a casual recognition of the phenomenon, rating a brief paragraph in a chapter on ‘Women and Children’ and sandwiched between far more detailed expositions on the problems of keeping houses clean and the gardening exploits of pioneer women.

Occasionally children became lost on the prairie. In 1868, in Lancaster County, Nebraska, two children, seven and eight and a half years old, wandered out to where their brother was herding cattle. They became lost in the high grass. The parents sought them for four days and, thinking that the wolves had eaten them, mourned them as dead. ... Finally after they had been absent eleven days, the father found them purely by accident. They were sleeping in the high grass. Their clothing was torn and they were so weak from lack of food that they could not walk. The father carried the little girl on his back some distance, then set her down and went back for the little boy; thus alternately carrying his precious burdens, he finally brought them safely home.75

This prosaic account registers none of the drama inherent in this story. Again, in terms of the length of exposure, the age of the children and their condition when found and the period and place in which they were lost, there are marked similarities between this and the story of the Duff children. Yet while Jane Duff was lauded as a heroine and the incident was read as evidence that God cared for children and, by implication endorsed their being in Australia, the Nebraskan story remained merely an example of the hardships faced by pioneer women.

The wagon trails heading westwards were another milieu in which children became lost, as diaries and other accounts by emigrants recorded. Yet at no time were these incidents seen as unique or deserving of particular attention.

73 Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630—1860, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1984, p. 175. 74 Ibid. 75 Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier 1854-1890, Johnsen Publishing, Nebraska, 1954, pp. 237- 8. 119

They were a minor factor in the many threats to young life, threats that were dominated by the overpowering fear of Indian capture. In his study of childhood on the far western frontier, Growing Up With the Country Elliott West discussed the issue of lost children on the wagon trains. It was, he acknowledged, a genuine threat.

There was the real possibility of becoming lost. This threat, the subject of some of the most enduring fairy tales of children’s culture, suddenly seemed more real when facing the vast sameness of the Great Plains. ... The anxiety of mothers, some of whom kept their young on leashes while in camp, surely was communicated to the boys and girls.76

West records some incidents which gave basis to these fears—a twelve-year- old lost for hours while looking for firewood, others gone missing while playing or searching for lost toys—but asserts the insubstantiality of these fears against that which encapsulates the American settlers’ image of the threat inherent in the country.

But this anxiety [of children becoming lost] paled beside another. “A dreadful fear of the Indians was born and grown into me,” remembered Anne Ellis ... Like most children, she had listened from infancy to stories of slaughter and captivity, of hot-eyed savages snatching Babies from their cradles.77

The enormous weight of emotional dread invested in this image of marauding, child-stealing Indians appears to have left no room for any imaginative investment in other images of childhood danger, such as becoming lost. In her Pioneer Children on the Journey West, Emmy E. Werner, like Walzer, refers to the danger of becoming lost on the trail as a real but minor hazard: ‘Occasionally, children on the trail got lost, were abandoned, or were kidnapped’.78 She records one such incident related by Elisha Brooks who travelled in 1852 with his mother and siblings from Michigan to California to join their father.

In one of the[se] detour camps, a little three year old boy, the only child of his doting parents, was missed at supper time, and we all turned out exploring the country far and near through the dense sage brush that covered all the ground, without finding a trace of him. Soon after a

76 Elliott West, Growing Up With the Country University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1989, p. 35. 77 Ibid. 78 Emmy E. Werner, Pioneer Children on the Journey West, Westview Press, Boulder, 1995, p. 2. 120

terrific storm arose, lasting through the night and destroying all hopes of finding the child alive. However, the search was renewed at dawn, but by nine o’clock, it was decided that he had probably been devoured by the wolves that we had heard in the lulls of the storm, and the company, all but our family, hitched up and drove on ... leaving the stricken parents alone in their despair … In about an hour, a man rode up on horseback inquiring whether we had lost a little boy, as one had been found that morning about two miles away, moaning under a sage brush, nearly dead. It was our missing boy, and the delerious parents took him, and turned their team towards home.79

Another account comes from a mother on the trail to Oregon in 1853 whose young daughter, Lucy, was left behind in the confusion of a drink break.

Here we left unknowingly our Lucy behind, not a soul had missed her until we had gone some miles, when we stopped a while to rest the cattle; just then another train drove up behind us with Lucy. She was terribly frightened and so were some more of us when we found out what a narrow escape she had run. She said she was sitting under the bank of the river, when we started, busy watching some wagons cross, and did not know we were ready. And I supposed she was in Mr.. Carl’s wagon, as he always took care of Francis and Lucy, ... when starting he asked for Lucy and Francis said “She is in Mother’s wagon,” ... It was a lesson to all of us.80

In a footnote to this Schlissel records that:

The loss of a child in all the confusion and disorder of travel was a fear that haunted many mothers, and indeed similar accounts to this one appear in a number of women’s diaries.’

Yet, as always in North America, fear of the fate of lost children generally revolves around Indian captivity. Margaret Frink thought she had lost her son while they were making their way to the Californian gold fields when he disappeared on a horse that he had found. Her real anxiety was not so much over his loss but what that might mean.

To increase my agony a company of packers [told of passing five hundred Indians]. I suffered the agony almost of death in a few minutes. I besought [them] to turn back and help us look for our lost boy, but they had not time ... The thought of leaving the boy, never to hear him again!

79 Ibid., p. 123. 80 Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey, Schocken Books, New York, 1982, p. 212. 121

But just at dark, Aaron came in sight having the lost boy with him. My joy turned to tears.81

In Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West (1997), Sarah Carter examines the strength of the belief of European women that their children were in danger of abduction by Indians in spite of there being ‘no documented case of such an event in the territory that became the Canadian West’.82 In particular, West points to local histories as the source and promoters of ‘many outlandish tales of attempted abductions, along with other folktales of “Indian visits”’.83 This accords very closely with the role of local and family histories in Australia and with the stories they include of the threats Indigenous people posed to pioneering settlers. I examine some of these stories and their modes of transmission in the following chapter, so will not consider them in detail now. In the North American context, Carter makes clear a connection between lost children and the perpetuation of ‘captive child’ narratives which, at one level, was very simple:

The frenzy of interest in the “captive” girl may also have been stimulated by the fact that there were many missing children in Canada and the United States, and people hoped that theirs had been discovered.84

This is quite a remarkable assertion but, unfortunately, is not pursued. Who these missing children were, how many and how they became missing is not considered. It suggests the possibility that at least as many children became lost in North America as in Australia; however, it remained an unrecognised cultural phenomenon, perhaps largely by choice. Most people must have recognised that children lost for a long period in the woods or prairie were almost certainly dead. The possibility of their being captive at least offered hope. Belief in abduction by Indians was undoubtedly a way of evading the probability that the child was dead. Carter cites several such cases, including this detailed account of the drama surrounding Annie Russell.

In 1898 a Reverend Sproul was travelling in South Dakota where he met an

81 Ibid., p. 49. 82 Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, 1997, p. 35. 83 Ibid., p. 148. 84 Ibid. 122

Indian family whose members included a young girl whom Sproul decided was white. This he based on her ‘general appearance [which] indicated that she was of “refined extraction”’; his suspicions were reinforced by his perception that the Indians tried to keep her away from outsiders.85 Despite the family’s protestations that Annie belonged to them, Sproul succeeded in having her removed to a children’s home and he started looking for her ‘real’ family, whom he had decided were from Canada. The responses to Sproul’s story indicate how easily children could be lost in sparsely settled environments. One man was looking for his daughter Mathilde Stelter, aged six when she wandered away onto the prairie and not seen since. A group of Cheyenne were rumoured to have been in the area at the time. However, her description did not fit Annie. More definite was John and Adelaide Turton whose three-year-old daughter Gertie had disappeared five years earlier when she went to call her father in from a nearby field where he was working. The Turtons remained certain that she had been taken by Indians and, upon seeing Annie, claimed her as their daughter. They explained away the many physical inconsistencies—Annie was thirteen, their Gertie eight, but their children were all large for their age; Annie’s dark complexion was the result of the Indians using vegetable dye upon her, and her jet black hair was dyed, when a lock was washed its true colour was brown.86 Public opinion confirmed their attitude; a sceptical reporter commented that the dying process had been so successful that ‘a stranger might be inclined to say that she had Indian blood’, but he concluded anyway that readers should rejoice because the girl ‘had been rescued from a life of degredation’.87

The Turtons took ‘Gertie’ home and refused to accept all representations from her Indian family as to her lineage. Even though most people outside the family appeared to doubt that she was Gertie Turton, there seems to have been a consensus of opinion, voiced by Senator James Kyle, that she was ‘better off in a good American home than among her former associates’.88 The Turtons were actually living in Canada. Eventually, after a long battle to have her returned to them, her Indian family agreed that Gertie/Annie stay with the Turtons as long as she maintained regular contact and could decide for herself

85 Ibid., p. 150. 86 Ibid., pp. 152-3. 87 Ibid., p. 154. 88 Ibid., p. 156. 123

at the age of eighteen years where to live. It seems that she remained with her new family when the time came to choose.89

The similarities between this story and that of the Downing child, lost from Callandoon in Queensland and ‘found’ years later living with Aborigines— which I examine at the end of chapter four—are remarkable. The overriding convergence lies in the willing suspension of rational response shown by the families whose little girls were lost—anything could be explained away for the sake of recovering a lost child. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the suffering of parents whose children were lost without trace. Without a body they lived with the possibility, however unlikely or irrational, that their child might be alive somewhere. It also reflects the cross-cultural colonial belief in the innate superiority of the white settlers’ lifestyle; any child taken away from the degradation attributed to the native life was considered to be ‘rescued’.

The New Zealand experience I expected to find that New Zealand would generate stories of lost children parallel to the Australian experience. After all, settlement in New Zealand took place at much the same time as Australia, from much the same population cohort, and with isolated frontier settlements. However, I have not yet found one account of children lost in the New Zealand bush in the colonial period. I do not believe that this means it did not happen, for logically it would have occurred. Rather, I think that these incidents were not widely noted and that this demonstrates the failure of the image of the lost child to take hold of the national imagination as it did in Australia. If we can understand why this was the case, it may illuminate the distinctiveness of the Australian experience.

A contributing variant may the basic climatic difference—New Zealand is a much wetter environment than Australia with many streams, powerful rivers and lakes. Snow-capped mountains and imposing glaciers provide strong visual reminders of the powerful presence of water. In a section on pioneer life in The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand (1996), water heads the list of dangers for colonial children,

Cemetery headstones tell of children who died from drowning—a constant danger given the open drains, uncovered water wells, water

89 Ibid., p. 157. 124

races and the proximity of so many settlements to streams and rivers, the course and volume of which could change so suddenly. 90

This is reinforced by Mary Trewby in her history of New Zealand childhood, The Best Years of Your Life (1995), where she describes life on the goldfields: ‘the harsh landscape was unforgiving and many children died from drowning in the swift-flowing rivers where the gold was found’.91 In the course of her New Zealand research, which involved reading memoirs, Pamela Riney- Kehrberg from Illinois State University noted that ‘there was some concerns about children being swallowed up by streams on their way to school’.92 This was not only a threat for New Zealand children. As the figures I cited in the Introduction showed, many Australian colonial children also drowned, but it was not such an all-pervading threat as in New Zealand. The overwhelming visual presence of water in New Zealand, with its numerous lakes and fast- flowing rivers, contributed to its important place in the national imagination. Rather than a generalised fear of the danger posed to children by the ‘bush’, common to Australia, New Zealand settlers could locate their fears in the image of water.

The fear of water dominates the only New Zealand literary representation of the experience of the lost child that I have been able to locate. This involves a very minor incident in the novel Allen Adair (1925), set on the gum fields of the North Island. The central character’s five-year-old daughter wanders away from the house after a fight with her younger brother. She was found unharmed late on the same day and never felt herself to be lost. The anxiety of the parents and the support shown by the local community parallels many of the recorded incidents of lost children in other settler colonies. Notable in this story, and indicative of the extent to which water was the image representing natural hazards, was the father’s consoling realisation that,

The dry and long summer had dried up all the bogs and swamps, and unless she had gone a considerable way into some distant gully, and fallen into a hole in a stream, she might even be out all night with

90 Keith Sinclair (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1996 (second edition), p. 72. 91 Mary Trewby, The Best Years of Your Life, Penguin Press (NZ), Auckland, 1995, p. 10. 92 In email, 14 May 1999. 125

nothing worse than fear and hunger.93

However, like the settlers of North America, the imaginative concern for the welfare of pioneer children in New Zealand appears largely to have focused on the perceived threat posed by the Indigenous people—in this case Maori.

there is a gap between two races which have never met before. Neither would recognise themselves as they are seen across that space … One of the strangest phenomena in the gap is what happens to children who wander or fall into it. Abduction is carried out without compunction and even with the sense of conferring benefit.94

This comment by Peter Walker, made in his narrative study of the life of a young Maori boy taken from his people in 1869 and raised in a European family, The Fox Boy (2001), offers an intriguing perspective on the whole cross-cultural abduction experience. It encompasses the vision from both sides of a savage ‘other’ from whom children should be saved. As we have seen, this was a common thread in the colonial settler discourse, particularly in relation to supposedly captive white children. The notion that it could operate in both directions is novel. It suggests a rationale for the child abductions— both real and imagined—that so dominate the colonial meta-narrative of settlement. This is as true for New Zealand as it was for North America—the lost child is read by settlers as a stolen child, with accounts always focused around the relations between indigenes and invading white settlers. This means that there was something peculiar to the Australian experience of Aboriginal and settler interaction that promoted, possibly even necessitated, the development of the lost child image rather than the stolen child. The Australian experience simply could not support the image of marauding Aborigines taking white children captive. Although there were some reports of this, they always petered out. I discuss this in detail in my next chapter.

Walker makes his comment in the context of child kidnappings by both Maori and English. In one instance a young English boy aboard a ship was grabbed by Maori in canoes when an argument broke out during bartering. He escaped when his captor was shot. A few days previously, three Maori boys

93 Jane Mander, Allen Adair, Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1971, (first published by Hutchison 1925), p. 121. 94 Peter Walker, The Fox Boy: the Story of an Abducted Child, Bloomsbury, London, 2001, p. 4. 126

had been taken by force ‘in an attempt to gain their friendship’.95 Both of these incidents took place within the space of one week in 1769, perhaps setting a pattern for each group’s expectation of the others behaviour.

One of the best documented of these incidents in New Zealand involves the kidnap in 1874 of eight-year-old Queenie (Caroline) Perrett. Taken from near her home in the Taranaki area of the North Island, supposedly in retaliation for her father’s work in clearing a Maori burial ground for the railway, Queenie was eventually ‘found’ by her niece in 1929. Peter Walker suggests an alternative explanation for the kidnapping:

Could her abduction have been a direct act of revenge for the kidnapping of William Fox, news of which had just reached Taranaki? 96

William Fox’s Maori family were from the Taranaki area and, at the time of the Perret kidnapping, had just found out their child was alive and being raised as a European. So Perret could certainly have been taken in revenge. Ultimately however, the reason remains unknown.

The ‘finding’ of Queenie Perret received considerable publicity at the time through newspaper reports, including her own account of her experiences.97 Once again it raised the issue of the integrated captive phenomenon—a feature and fear of colonial settler cultures, whether as verifiable fact or as rumour. Queenie claimed to have ‘no recollection whatever of my early life at Lepperton’, surprising given her age at the time she was taken. This may have been partly the result of shock, but it was possibly also a tactic of self- preservation. In her interview Perrett agreed that she knew her skin was lighter coloured than the Maoris but never questioned it ‘because I accepted the fact that I was a Maori’. Perrett became Maori—she married twice, bore children and lived completely with Maori people. She was Mrs. Ngoungou. It was only a chance sighting late in her life by a niece who noted a strong family resemblance to her own mother that led to her being ‘recognised’. In many ways Perrett/Ngoungou epitomised the fear of all colonial settlers that children taken into a native community would lose their European identity and

95 Ibid., pp. 4-5. 96 Ibid., p. 180. 97 The Sun, 27 July 1929, magazine section. See also Miriam Macgregor, Petticoat Pioneers, vol. 2, A.H & A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1975, pp. 149 - 60. 127

completely accept and value the Indigenous culture. She was happy to have the mystery of her parentage resolved but this did not affect her sense of self:

I am a Maori. I think as they think ... All my interests and friends are Maori, and my children also, so why should I seek to change my life now? ... Was I happy with the Maoris? Well, when I look back over my long life with them I think I can say yes. ... I might feel out of place among the Pakehas, for their ways are not my ways, and it is too late to change my habits now.98

By the time of Perrett’s rediscovery, the fraught issue of her Maori lifestyle, including husbands and children, seemed to have lost intensity, perhaps because the Maori were seen to be a conquered people who no longer challenged the colonial project. The story was told as a rather quaint echo of times past—the pioneering days—an attitude exemplified by its inclusion in Petticoat Pioneers (1975), a collection of life stories of ‘pioneer’ women in New Zealand. It also featured in an episode of a national television program, Epitaph, screened by TVNZ in 1999.

The national myth of settlement is an intangible concept that frequently finds tangible expression through art and literature. As I demonstrate in the course of this thesis, Australia has many examples of this around the image of the child lost in the bush. However, as I have shown in this chapter, the other comparable colonial cultures of America, Canada and New Zealand have few or no creative representations. In comparison, the image of children held captive by the Indigenous people of the country has been a rich source of inspiration to the artistic imagination of these nations, generating stories and visual representations that have currency in the modern community.99 The ‘Captive Child’ rather than the ‘Lost Child’ was the image of childhood absorbed by these cultures into their national myth of being. The powerful emotional hold of the ‘Captive Child’ image in these other cultures was confirmed for me when any request for information on lost children made to libraries and historians in the United States, Canada and New Zealand was met with references to captive children. There was simply no recognition of the ‘Lost Child’ as a phenomenon. In the following chapter I examine the effect of

98 Macgregor, Petticoat Pioneers, p. 160. 99 For a contemporary example of the genre, Dances With Wolves, a film produced in Hollywood in 1990 and which enjoyed wide popular success, included the figure of a young white woman held captive by the native Indians. 128

this trans-colonial mythology of captive children upon the Australian colonial experience, and consider how this contributed to the development of the distinctively Australian image of the ‘Lost Child’.

129

Chapter Four Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Australia

In the course of researching stories of lost children I found that a surprisingly pervasive and durable strand of the Australian ‘lost children’ genre was that of white children supposedly kidnapped by Aborigines. This was surprising because, unlike the North American and Canadian experiences, there is no substantiated evidence that such a thing ever took place in Australia. However, Kate Darian-Smith, who has explored this theme extensively, noted in a comparative study of South Africa and Australia, Text, Theory, Space (1996), that the imaginative power of the captivity image was paramount over any reality.

The actualities of race relations on the Australian frontier did little to diminish the discursive and cultural power of the captivity narrative within settler society.1

I came to the conclusion that the widely disseminated stories of women and child abductions in other British-based settler communities, some of which I examined in the previous chapter, resulted in the development of culturally transmitted attitudes and fears about the Indigenous peoples of the invaded countries. As I demonstrated earlier, settlers were exposed to the notion of Indigenous treachery and malevolence—whether in Australian or other colonies—through stories in newspapers, magazines and books. The Australian abduction stories eventually petered out for lack of real foundation, and I will argue that this lack of genuine captivity incidents in Australia left a void in national imagery that was filled by the development of a distinctive, parallel image—that of a child lost in the bush.

The colonial reports of abducted children carried overwhelmingly malevolent connotations—the children were reportedly murdered, cannibalised, or debased to the level of their ‘savage’ captors. In the case of females these reports also carried the implied possibility, horrifying to colonial settlers, of their coming to sexual maturity among ‘the blacks’ with attendant

1 Kate Darian-Smith, chapter 6, ‘”Rescuing” Barbara Thompson and Other White Women: Captivity narratives on Australian Frontiers’, p. 101, in Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (eds), Text, Theory, Space: Land, literature and history in South Africa and Australia. Routledge, London and New York, 1996. 130

notions of sexual despoliation and miscegenation. This chapter considers these issues and other raised by this response to Indigenous people. Foremost among these is how and why these stories gained currency at the frontier stage of colonial development. The date of that stage varied across Australia depending upon the settlement process. Much of Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were frontier areas long after Victoria or New South Wales considered themselves settled. Even within states the frontier was not chronologically constant, so the frontier was not fixed by dates. I examine what was it about the frontier experience that provided fertile ground for stories of white children being taken by Aborigines. I also consider the wider issue of why the captive woman/child image held such potency, and what the pursuers of lost children and women (and the society they represented) gained from the pursuit. To establish the Australian context for this discussion I want to consider two stories that illuminate the complex attitudes held by frontier settlers towards Aborigines.

‘Mr. Duttons Child’ and ‘little Joe Burrett’ Amongst the earliest stories of a stolen white child in Australia was one in which the supposed kidnap was eventually considered to have been for benign reasons. In most cases when Aborigines were accused of stealing white children they were also reported to have killed and possibly also eaten them. The reported ‘abduction of Mr. Duttons Child’ from Fremantle, Western Australia, in March 1830 received markedly different responses from settlers and colonial officials. The settlers had no doubts that he had been taken by Aborigines, although officials were not so certain. A co-settler, Mrs. Whatley, wrote:

I am very sorry to hear that Bonny Dutton is lost. From many circumstances it seems but too certain that the natives have carried him off. He was a very fine interesting boy, about four or five. The Dutton’s live at Preston Point a few miles from Fremantle.2

Whatley failed to detail the ‘many circumstances’ that implicated the Aborigines in the disappearance apart from relating

that a native was seen with a piece of cloth like Bonny’s frock, and when asked for the white pickaninny [sic] he pointed towards the blue

2 Canon Alfred Burton, ‘The Diary of Anne Whatley’, Early Days- Journal and Proceedings of the Western Australian Historical Society, vol. 1, pt. 7, 1930, p. 24. 131

mountains; but ten to one that he knew what was meant.

The Aboriginal man’s apparent suggestion that the boy had wandered off in the direction he indicated was treated with scorn by Mrs. Whatley. Her comment of ‘ten to one that he knew what was meant’ showed her belief that he was being duplicitous in deliberately misleading his questioners. Yet what could this certainty of the innate untrustworthiness of the Aborigines have been based on? The Whatleys and the Duttons, part of the first European settlement in Western Australia, had been in the area barely five months and there were no earlier reports of kidnapped white children. The inflammatory nature of such beliefs, and their probable disastrous results for Aboriginal people, became evident in a later diary entry by Anne Whatley, when she wrote:

One of the men sent in quest of Bonny Dutton fired at some natives, who in return, set fire to part of Perth and speared several bullocks. The soldiers were called out ... They fired two or three times just enough to awe them. After the battle, Capt Irwin rode towards the lagoons to search for wounded natives. He found two, I think ... Bonny has not yet been found3

How firing ‘just enough to awe them’ was transformed into a battle in which at least two natives were wounded is never made clear, but Whatley never questioned the justice of the action. This violence took place after the posting of an official notice from the Colonial Secretary that offered a reward for the recovery of Bonny and included this warning:

As there is no evidence or just grounds for believing that the child was taken away by the natives, I am further directed to caution those individuals, who may go out in search of the child, from committing an outrage against the aboriginal race of inhabitants of this country on pain of being prosecuted and tried for the offence as if the same had been committed against any other of His Majesty’s subjects.4

Clearly the official view had no impact on the general understanding of Bonny’s disappearance, suggesting that evidence (or lack of it) carried little weight against ingrained prejudice. The argument of ‘no evidence or just grounds’ failed to take into account the need of the settlers to attribute reason

3 Ibid., pp. 24-5. 4 Ibid., p. 36. 132

to their surroundings. Direct cause and effect—a belief that Aborigines had kidnapped the child—was much easier to comprehend than a child simply disappearing into the bush. This also provided a tangible figure to blame as opposed to the amorphous, all-encompassing surrounding bush. At least the Aborigines could be pursued and dealt with, and their ‘otherness’ made them a logical enemy, particularly with the experience of earlier British-based colonies weighing against them.

Bonny Dutton survived his disappearance, and was returned to the family by Aborigines.

The natives, it appeared, had apparently taken him as a matter of curiosity to show their women a white child: they had been very kind to him, and he was restored to his parents perfectly well.5

It is impossible to know what really happened—perhaps the child was lost and later found by Aborigines, perhaps they did ‘borrow’ him as a curiosity. The Aborigines, like many Europeans, may have felt the fascination of the ‘other’. Curiously there is no report of Bonny’s account of the incident; at four or five years of age one would expect that he was quite capable of answering questions and giving some description of what took place. What did happen was far less important than what people believed had happened. The official warning prohibiting violence against Aborigines in the cause of the search for Bonny Dutton suggests that aggression would be the typical response.

Margaret Kiddle depicted a similar incident in her children’s book, West of Sunset, and in doing so drew upon her own family history.6

‘Joe Browning’ is little Joe Burrett (my great-uncle) who loved all birds and animals and who was stolen away by the blacks. When he returned to his distracted mother he was, according to family tradition, ‘brown as a berry and fat as butter’. The blacks had fed him on witchetty grubs.7

A readiness to believe the Aborigines meant no harm in taking Bonny Dutton and Joe Burrett (if indeed they did) seems to have been closely related to their

5 Ibid., p. 25. 6 Margaret Kiddle, West of Sunset, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1961 (first published 1949) pp. 182-86. 7 Note by Margaret Kiddle about basis for characters in West of Sunset, in Kiddle papers held in University of Melbourne archives, accession no. 92/42, folder labeled ‘Notes for West of Sunset’, 1946. 133

gender. Across the colonial captivity narrative genre it is clear that boys were perceived as being less attractive to Aborigines and also less vulnerable to despoilation.

An example of the apparently innate mistrust harboured by many settlers towards Aborigines, focused on a perceived coveting of white females, is found in a letter written in 1832 to friends in England by Eliza Shaw from a newly-established settlement on the Upper Swan River in Western Australia.8 She gave a very poignant account of the death by drowning of her two young sons, sadly by no means an unusual incident. The bodies of the missing boys were found in the river

it is supposed that they were either fishing or drawing water from the River and that Frederick fell in and poor William jumped in to save him and by that means both were lost, but God only knows …

This appeared to be a straightforward if tragic accident, but some line of thought caused Mrs. Shaw to add the comment that

the Natives were very troublesome at that time, but I should never have given them credit for having taken them, had they been girls I might have thought differently.

Why might she have thought differently? What would been the critical difference to make her suspect ‘the Natives’ if it were girls missing? The comment is left unembellished, which in itself is suggestive. Eliza Shaw was clearly writing from an unspoken but shared understanding of native lust for white females. She considered that there was no need to expand upon that point because Mrs. Waghorne, her correspondent in England, would immediately understand the implications. So not only were the Aboriginal people perceived as potential abductors of white children, they were attributed with a preference for girls. Yet this was a barely-established settlement in which tensions and antagonisms between the colonisers and indigenous inhabitants had not yet had time to become entrenched. One must look to wider sources to account for this prejudice against Aborigines and the assumption that violence against them was justified. An extremely influential force in this cross-colonial cultural transference was undoubtedly the captivity

8 Stephen Martin, A New Land: European Perceptions of Australia 1788-1850, Allen & Unwin and State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p. 73. 134

narratives discussed in detail in the previous chapter.

The mindset of many generations of Australian settlers regarding Aborigines would have derived from this accepted wisdom about ‘native’ behaviour. Even if not at a conscious level, the innate savagery, brutality and lechery of ‘The Native’ became part of the recognised fabric of the colonial experience, whether in America, Canada, New Zealand or Australia. The colonies fed off one another’s stories, absorbing them into their own experiences to create, ultimately, a generic colonial view of the relative roles of settler and idigene. These colonial attitudes and suspicions played a central role in the story of Eliza Fraser—arguably Australia’s best-known captivity narrative.

The several stories of Eliza Fraser The dissemination of the story of Eliza Fraser is a fascinating example of the phenomenon of a trans-colonial narrative. Shipwrecked on a sand island off the coast of Queensland (now known as Fraser Island) in May 1836, Fraser united several colonial narratives in one person—the shipwreck survivor, the sexually vulnerable White Woman held by blacks and the civilised Christian suffering at the hands of savages. Kay Schaffer’s In The Wake of First Contact provides an illuminating deconstruction of the many versions of Fraser’s shipwreck, subsequent experience with Aborigines, and ultimate return to civilization, first Sydney, then England.9 Schaffer identifies three versions of the story as told by Eliza Fraser—the official report made to government officials, the version given to the Sydney public through newspapers, and the final, most sensational, account presented to the wider audiences of England and America.

Schaffer traces the increasing embellishment in descriptions of the hardships inflicted on Mrs. Fraser through each version. In the official, first account the worst behaviour that the natives were accused of was general harshness towards the survivors. Mrs. Fraser claimed that,

I was treated with the greatest cruelty, being obliged to fetch wood and water for them and constantly beaten when incapable of carrying the

9 Kay Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact: the Eliza Fraser Stories, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995. 135

heavy loads they put upon me;10

This would very probably describe the life of many white women in the colony, at least as far as the type of labour, and would not necessarily generate much sympathy, although the notion of a white woman being forced to work for Aborigines would be considered shocking. Nor did this early account contain accusations of cannibalism, brutality or sexual threat. However, by the time of her interviews with Sydney journalists, Mrs. Fraser was describing the Aborigines as savages and cannibals, who had speared her husband, tortured and killed another of the sailors, and who, by implication, threatened her own innocent purity. These details appearing at the same time as the establishment of a subscription fund, nominally for all survivors, must have incited public generosity. The crew received only a small amount of the collected funds and Mrs. Fraser was the chief beneficiary.11

Perhaps it was this financial reward that motivated Mrs. Fraser to more sensational details. Her third and most widely known account was published in London in August 1837, not long after her arrival in England. Schaffer records an astonishingly rapid dispersal of the story.

Within days of publication in London, it appeared in provincial and colonial papers; within a month, it took on a variety of popular forms. Woodcut illustrations and cartoons appeared, depicting her perilous ordeal. Broadsheets and handbills summarised the most lurid details. A sideshow performance was organised in Hyde Park. The account was adapted into a chapbook version in England and transformed into a classic captivity narrative in the United States. Mrs. Fraser became a ‘media’ event.12

The rapid translation of this story into a multiplicity of mediums suggests a great readiness in the public to absorb stories of Indigenous brutality towards white women. As Schaffer notes, the illustrations accompanying both an English broadsheet ballad13 and the American captivity narrative14 versions of the story were wildly inaccurate.15 The broadsheet ‘savages’ were

10 Ibid., p. 34. 11 Ibid., pp. 42-3. 12 Ibid., p. 43. 13 Author unknown, Wreck of the Stirling Castle, J. Catanach of Seven Dials, London, 1837. 14 Author unknown, The Narrative of the Capture, Sufferings, and Miraculous Escape of Mrs. Eliza Fraser, New York, 1837. 15 Schaffer, First Contact, pp. 47-9. 136

stereotypical Africans with earrings, very full lips and bones through their noses. They carried knives and axes and wore the skirts of American Indians. In the background were large Polynesian-style canoes. These figures were, in fact, a mélange of all known ‘savages’, the generic ‘savage’.16 Similarly the American version placed the story within a local context; the ‘savages’ wore moccasins and feathered head dresses and fought with tomahawks. The universality of the imagery is indicative of the extent to which all Indigenous people tended to be dismissed as ‘savages’, prone to irrational brutality and likely to capture white women and children with evil intent.

Schaffer describes the story’s appearance in two colonial publications— Tales of Travellers and Alexander’s East India Magazine—as ‘a colonial text of Empire.’ She locates them within the adventure genre that also included stories of shipwrecks, runaways, castaways and mutinies and concludes that the appeal of this genre was that they were read as ‘celebrations of Empire, which positioned the reader with the narrator in a guise of superiority of the civilised West over the barbarism of the rest of the world’.17

Captive or rescued? – whites living with Aborigines As we saw in the North American situation, gender was one of the major factors in the power of the trans-colonial captivity stories. In Caledonia Australis (1984), his study of Scottish highlanders in colonial Australia, Don Watson remarked that:

Towards the end of the eighteenth century white men on the American frontier began to pursue white women and children they insisted were held captive by the Indians. It was extraordinary how the story reproduced itself in various places.18

He made this observation in the context of his discussion of the White Woman of Gippsland story, which I will shortly examine in detail, and which epitomises one aspect of Watson’s argument. The very idea that Aborigines were holding captive white women and children was just as powerful in motivating settler reaction as any reality. While it is indisputable that whites

16 This generalising of natives is also apparent in representations of ‘good natives’. A British publication of the story of the recovery of the Duff children includes an illustration of the trackers as Maori. (Sunday at Home, 1865, p. 270). 17 Schaffer, First Contact, p. 59. 18 Don Watson, Caledonia Australis: Scottish highlanders on the frontier of Australia, William Collins, Sydney, 1984, p. 173. 137

were taken and held as prisoners by North American Indians, Watson legitimately highlighted another central issue when he noted that the American frontier males pursued those they perceived as ‘captive’, suggesting that this was not necessarily the view of the ‘rescued’ person. He was alluding to a well-documented phenomenon, discussed earlier in the previous chapter in the context of the White Woman of the Genesee story, of ‘captives’ who became fully integrated into their host community, rendering meaningless the terms ‘captive’ and ‘rescue’. This proved such a problematic situation for the whites to accept that they often denied it, exerting enormous pressure to force the ‘rescued captives’ to return to ‘civilised’ society.

In raising the issue of the integrated captive, Watson highlighted an integral and fundamental difficulty in dealing with stories of lost or captive or rescued whites—the problem of language. Language is central to an understanding of any human experience that it simultaneously expresses and shapes. The vocabulary to describe an individual’s experience can only be drawn from that pool to which the storyteller’s society has access. This shortcoming is very evident in the language of relationships between white and Aboriginal cultures. An examination of several Australian captivity/rescue narratives demonstrates the limitations of language in conveying the experience, although we also see the power of language in shaping the desired response. The story of Eliza Fraser, outlined earlier in this chapter, is a good example. As I have shown, she portrayed herself to, and was accepted by, white society as a helpless captive who had been rescued from brutal treatment at the hands of savage, cannibalistic natives. In the light of earlier mental conditioning this was virtually the only interpretation available to the colonising society, and it was also useful for Fraser to represent herself in terms which that evoked maximum sympathy. However, standing outside that nexus of language and society, one can see other possible interpretations of her experience. In any real sense Eliza Fraser, with the other shipwreck survivors, were rescued rather than captured by the Aboriginal peoples of the island. Their dispersal amongst the different groups of Aborigines was very probably a means of sharing the load of providing for more people, rather than anything sinister. The physical demands of food, wood and water gathering and of childcare would be no more onerous than that expected of Aboriginal women. Eliza’s complaint that the women had rubbed her with ‘gum and herbs, which had the effect of making her nearly as dark as themselves’ implied that they were

138

trying to reduce her to their level, when in all likelihood they were using traditional techniques to protect her from the weather and insects.19 In actuality it seems that the Aborigines treated the survivors as part of their own group, they were being taken in. Without that support all the shipwreck survivors would very probably have died.

The same could be said of William Buckley who lived for over thirty years with the Watourong people before rejoining white society in 1835. However inaccurate a representation, the only terminology available to contemporary white commentators was that of rescue and recovery. Commentators on Buckley’s story, of which there were many, noted sadly that he had ‘descended and conformed to all their barbarous habits, without endeavouring to raise them in any degree.’20 This disparity of understanding is true of visual representations as well as written accounts. In a study of nineteenth century Aboriginal artists, Andrew Sayers directs the reader to an Aboriginal artist’s, Tommy McRae, paintings of Buckley.21 These are significant for two reasons. Firstly the fact that McRae most probably painted these works during the 1880s or 1890s suggests a remarkable longevity of interest in the story among Aboriginal people.22 Colonial historian James Bonwick noted that Buckley’s story ‘was widely known by Aboriginal people throughout Victoria in the 1850s’.23 It is impossible to be sure how McRae learnt of the story, although it could have been from stories told him by Aborigines or Europeans. What is significant is the viewpoint of his paintings that contrast with European depictions of Buckley returning to ‘civilisation’. McRae represents Buckley entering the Aboriginal world, which for him was the most important aspect of the story and serves as a reminder of the dual visions available for all Aboriginal-European interractions.24

However, no white male association with Aborigines could evoke the deep- felt and unified response accorded to the notion of white women being held

19 Neil Buchanan and Barry Dwyer, The Rescue of Eliza Fraser, Noosa Graphica, Noosa Heads, 1986, p. 46. 20 Charles Barrett, White Blackfellows: The Strange Adventures of Europeans Who Lived Among Savages, Hallcraft Publishing, Melbourne, 1948, p. 24. 21 Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 41. 22 Ibid., p. 28. 23 Ibid., p. 41. 24 Ibid., see M9 and M31, p. 39. 139

‘captive’. Kate Darian-Smith considers this social reaction through the experience of Barbara Thompson, whose ship sank in the Torres Strait leaving her the sole survivor. Thompson was rescued by people of the Kaurareg and taken into their society. Five years later she was reunited with white society through the arrival in that area of HMS Rattlesnake. There is an important similarity between this incident and the European rediscovery of William Buckley. While Thompson herself, those on the ship and subsequent commentators all agreed on the benign aspect of the Kaurareg’s treatment of Thompson, their language could not reflect this. As Darian-Smith points out, Thompson’s return to European society was characterised in many writings as both a ‘rescue’ and as an ‘escape’ from ‘captivity’.25 The mental leap to acknowledge the kindness and care of natives for a white woman was apparently too great. Thompson recorded that the first question asked of her by the men of the Rattlesnake was whether she had been wrecked or kidnapped by ‘the blacks’. Even Thompson found difficulty in expressing herself outside the conventions of white society. When asked if she wanted to stay with the Kaurareg or return to Sydney she simply replied, ‘I am a Christian’.26 To the modern reader this seems an inconsequential response, however to a contemporary of Thompson’s it would have gone to the heart of the matter. To be a Christian was to be civilised, and ‘natives’ could never be civilised. There was, therefore, a strong moral imperative for Thompson to return to her own society.

The ‘White Woman of Gippsland’ Perhaps no other single incident in the history of Aboriginal/European relations in Australia crystallised white fears, prejudices and power so fully as the search for ‘The White Woman of Gippsland’. Although there was never any incontrovertible evidence that such a figure actually existed, the image was immensely powerful, generating three separate searches and an anti- Aboriginal hostility that resulted in many deaths.27 The emotive image of a vulnerable, civilised white woman suffering at the hands of savages drove colonists, and colonial newspapers, into a frenzy. Importantly this crisis came not when her captivity was first postulated in 1840 by settler Angus McMillan, but six years later, when clashes with Aborigines over the use and possession

25 Darian-Smith et al., Text, Theory, Space, p. 104. 26 Ibid., p. 103. 27 Watson, Caledonia, p.178. 140

of land and stock had escalated considerably in Gippsland. During this time other reports about a captive white woman emerged in several frontier areas of Port Phillip District, which suggests a symbolic role for the figure.28 The captive figure provided a noble image to embody and justify an essentially base grab for land and power.

It is also noticeable that all the stories I have examined of stolen white children in the Port Phillip District come after the first newspaper publications of McMillan’s circumstantial letter in which he described the threatening figures of fleeing Aboriginal men,

with shipped spears driving before them the women, one of whom we noticed constantly looking behind her ... on examining the marks and figures about the largest of the native huts we were immediately impressed with the belief that the unfortunate female is a European—a captive of these ruthless savages.29

Once the trans-colonial fear of native captivity acts was raised by this story many circumstances were interpreted within this context, and Aboriginal malevolence seen as the most likely cause of children’s disappearance. McMillan’s shocking description must surely have served to justify for many of the colonists their worst fears about ‘black savages’—established as cultural expectations by stories from earlier colonial experiences, particularly those of North America.

In the ‘White Woman of Gippsland’ saga it is impossible to separate the search from the colonial push to eliminate an Aboriginal presence in the area and establish European ownership. The press cries about ‘slavery worse than death’ voiced the worst and yet most thrilling fears of white colonists—a white woman in sexual thrall to a black. In her exploration of the role of white women’s ‘sexual defilement’— real or imaginary—within the wider context of captivity narratives, Darian-Smith notes its explosive power.30 This image freed searchers to follow their worst instincts in the treatment of Aborigines in the name of a higher cause.31 It has been estimated that no fewer than fifty

28 This also includes the Mallee region, see Caledonia, p.173. 29 Port Phillip Patriot and Melbourne Advertiser, 18 January 1841. 30 Darian-Smith et al., Text, Theory, Space, p. 100-1. 31 Ibid., p.106. Two competing search parties (one publicly-funded, one government) were formed in 1846. That led by Christian De Villiers and James Warman alleged a massacre 141

Aborigines had been killed in the search for the woman.32

Yet there is a strong argument that, even then, many people regarded the whole thing as a hoax. In her detailed examination of this story, The White Woman of Gipps Land: In Pursuit of a Legend (2001), Julie Carr notes a correspondent to the Herald newspaper in May 1847 who asserted that

The report of a white woman is looked upon by all of us as a clever hoax. From first to last we were convinced that no white woman is or was lately alive; and we could only laugh at the exaggerated statements which appeared in the Melbourne papers.33

This was not an isolated belief. Carr noted that the search expedition led by Captain Dana also appears to have concluded that the affair centred around ‘an imaginary being’ and that the story was ‘a joke upon the part of a few waggish settlers in the district’.34 So while this was understood by at least some Port Phillip colonists as a hoax, apparently few people were prepared to expose it as such, and the reasons for this were complex. The story of a captive white woman provided an excellent rationale for driving away and even killing the local Aboriginal people in the name of a rescue search; also new land could also be explored and ‘opened up’ in this process. A more important factor was the settler’s reluctance to challenge the great colonial myth of native savagery and innate lust for white women. Carr notes, as I did earlier, the major impact of the North American captivity narratives upon Australian colonial perceptions. The anxieties, expectations and suppressed sexual interest of settlers in the White Woman of Gippsland story must have been drawn from outside sources and transposed onto the imagined woman, although there being no basis for them in the Australian experience.

The power of the captivity narrative and the reason for its continuation, despite people’s understanding that it was a hoax, lay in its representative quality. This was an image that gave shape to the deepest fears of colonial settlers, as Carr says, ‘The White Woman story expressed anxiety about

of the Kurnai people against the group led by William Dana based on the discovery of large numbers of human bones at a site on the Gippsland Lakes. 32 Watson, Caledonia, p. 178. 33Julie Carr The White Woman of Gipps Land: In Pursuit of a Legend, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p. 160. 34 Ibid. (Carr based this on a report published in the Port Phillip Patriot and Melbourne Advertiser, 7 April 1847). 142

miscegenation and cannibalism—the clichéd ‘fate worse than death itself’ for a white woman’.35 No certain captive white woman was ever found, but a great deal of new land had been surveyed and Aboriginal resistance effectively crushed by the time the search was officially abandoned in late 1847.36 The White Woman of Gippsland was buried as anonymously as she was discovered, and by the same man. McMillan conducted an inquest into the remains of what he asserted was a ‘European woman’ with ‘half-caste child’ and concluded that this was the elusive White Woman, thus allowing the quest to end. A eulogy in the Port Phillip Herald gave public imprimatur to the conclusion of the saga, as well as reminding readers of the validity of the cause.

Death though regarded as a mishap by others, must have descended as a blessing upon this poor woman, who has undergone a trial far more harrowing and terrible than even Death’s worst moments. She is now no more—and it is a melancholy gratification that the public suspense has been at length relieved, by her discovery even in death.37

In other words, she was better dead than living as the ‘wife’ of an Aborigine.

Other white women living with Aborigines Stories of white woman living as part of Aboriginal groups are found elsewhere in Australian folklore. In contrast to the Gippsland story, some allow for the woman to be there by choice rather than as a prisoner. The Cooktown Cemetery contains a gravestone marked by a wooden cross bearing a plaque which records the story of the ‘Normanby Woman’, a white woman who lived with Aborigines on the Normanby River southwest of Cooktown. In the 1880s a rumour was current in the area of the white woman, but she had not been contacted. A chance sighting by a prospector who was convinced that the girl was European led to her capture, although the men involved considered it a rescue. When washed she was found to be around thirty years of age with ‘Nordic features, [and] … beautiful long blond hair’.38 She refused

35 Ibid., p. 92. 36 This also happened in other circumstances. Upon his return from a fruitless search for JT Gellibrand in the early stages of European settlement in the Port Phillip District, William Buckley reportedly expressed the opinion that some of the search party were more interested in scouting for good land (see John M Wilkins, The Life and Times of Captain William Lonsdale, 1799-1864, privately published, 1991, p. 58). 37 Port Phillip Herald, (Extraordinary edition), 5 November 1847. 38 R. Brasch, Even More Permanent Addresses, Collins, Sydney, 1989, pp. 85-6. 143

to put on clothes or eat and had no English and her only apparent wish was to return to her Aboriginal group, members of whom had followed her European captors. She was injured during an attempted rescue by the Aborigines, and died shortly afterwards. No one had been able to establish how she came to be with the Aborigines. Some suggested that as a small child she had been the sole survivor of a shipwreck who was taken in and cared for by the local Aborigines.

Another somewhat similar story in Western Australia in 1883 revolved around the supposed discovery of a white woman who, with her baby son, had survived a shipwreck twenty years earlier. The woman and her son were thoroughly integrated into the Aboriginal group with whom they lived and would not leave them. Unlike the figure in the Cooktown story, this woman was allowed a choice and never seen again.39

Whether or not either of these Australian incidents actually took place is immaterial. The stories would circulate as truths and, despite the fact that they actually involved the saving and care of white women, confirm the settlers deepest fears about what could happen on the frontier. White women living as, and with, Aborigines could only represent a breakdown of civilization of the magnitude to threaten society.

One of the few accounts of a ‘captive’ white girl from an Aboriginal perspective was given by Norman Tindale in writing of the Aborigines of the Coorong area in South Australia.40 The story genesis lies in ‘the Maria massacre’ which Amanda Nettelbeck describes as ‘famous ... in South Australian narratives of the foundational years’.41 In July 1840 the brig Maria, carrying two dozen settlers and travelling from Adelaide to Hobart, was wrecked off the Coorong. The passengers made it safely ashore and began to walk back to Adelaide where, shortly after, word arrived of their massacre.42

39 Jack Loney, Wrecks on the Western Australian Coast and Northern Territory, Lonestone Press, Yarram, 1994, p. 81. 40 Advertiser, ‘Vanished Tribal Life of Coorong Blacks, Tragedy of Supplanted Race, Country’s Changed Aspect,’ 7 April 1934, p. 11. I am indebted to Amanda Nettelbeck for alerting me to this story and for generously sharing a relevant chapter prior to publication of Fatal Collisions. 41 Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Reconstructing the “Maria” Massacre’, chapter 1, Fatal Collisions, (co- authors Rick Hosking, Rob Foster), Wakefield Press, Kent Town, 2001. 42 Ibid., p. 13. 144

Tindale recorded that the Ngarrindjeri people concurred with that version and outlined their explanation of the killings.

Native tradition is fairly unanimous in its statement of the reasons for the killing of the Maria survivors. They were escorted safely ... [by Milmenrura people until] several of the sailors took a favourable opportunity of interfering with some native women. They were attacked and killed43

The ‘captive white girl/woman’ element does not enter the story for over another forty years. It does so through the handwritten memoirs of Henry Dudley Melville, which he intended for publication, as Nettelbeck reminds us. In his account Melville described a white woman passenger who was saved from death to serve the native ‘chief’.

The natives of our run were the tribe that had murdered the crew and passengers of the ‘Maria’ some nine years previous to our occupation … [I learned that] the women were not killed at the same time as the men were, one woman was kept by a chief for three months and in trying to effect her escape was overtaken and speared at the Murray mouth.44

Melville’s implication of sexual violation of white women drew upon deeply held fears already confirmed for the wider public in the stories of Eliza Fraser and the White Woman of Gippsland, in Australia, and countless captivity narratives from North America.

The fact that none of the contemporary accounts mentioned a lost female passenger and the stereotypical nature of the image—white woman kept by native ‘chief’ as sexual slave—must raise doubts about her existence. However the oral history of the Ngarrindjeri, recorded by Tindale, also included the girl. It portrayed her role in the Aboriginal group very differently to Melville’s sensational account.

In the native tradition one white girl escaped from the scene of the massacre and made her way north ... Standing on the point of land at the Murray mouth she appeared to the natives of the Murray Mouth clan as a ‘maldarpi’, or evil spirit-being, and the men in great fear, picked up their spears and shields to go and kill her. The wife of the ‘rupuli’ or chief old man, shouted out “Where are you going? She is a woman.” and scolded them into putting their weapons

43 Ibid., p. 19. 44 Ibid., p. 23. 145

away. The white girl dropped on her knees and made signs with her hands. The old woman beckoned to her and led her away. Later, the old men had a ‘court’ to allot the girl to a husband, but nobody would have her: all were frightened that her colour—white is a sign of mourning— might adhere to them. She wandered about with the women folk for “two years”. One day she accompanied a party of women ... to gather herbs for food. A party of police approached in a whaleboat, seized her, and, despite her cries and protests, took her away to Goolwa.45

This was the story of a woman saved by Aborigines and stolen away by whites. The only similarity between this and the Melville story is the presence of a female survivor. The Ngarrindjeri story provides a remarkable insight into the view of Europeans from the perspective of ‘the other’. Most notable is the Aboriginal males’ revulsion at the girl’s white skin, which stands in direct opposition to the commonly accepted European view of the lustful savage coveting the refined white woman. The striking final image of the girl, taken into captivity by white police and crying to the Aborigines for help, is another directly contrasting view that completely turns around notions of ‘captivity’ and ‘rescue’. The presence of this story in the Ngarrindjeri history represents a group insisting on their own self-image and perspective on events, rather than accepting external ‘givens’.

The story of captive white women, exemplified by the White Woman of Gippsland, and those of the lost or stolen white child in the Australian settler culture, drew upon the same emotional sources. The issues described by Carr as circulating around the Gippsland story—‘Anxieties about identity, place and notions of belonging’—are also relevant to the image of the missing child.46 These figures represented the idealised wife or daughter or sister of every settler, innocent and vulnerable figures at the mercy of a hostile environment and savage, therefore lustful, ‘natives’. As we saw in the search for the White Woman of Gippsland and in following story of Martha Ward, the imperative to rescue these figures took searchers into a potent world of male chivalry.

‘Carried off by the blacks’ – the disappearance of Martha Ward The convergence of captivity myths and lost child imagery in Australia is

45 Tindale, Advertiser, 7 April 1934, p. 11. 46 Ibid., p. 2. 146

exemplified in the disappearance in 1843 of two-year-old Martha Ward. She lived at Arindoovong, a small settlement near Portland in the Port Phillip District, where her father kept the Traveller’s Rest Inn. The incident occurred in a period of marked antagonism between white colonists and the local peoples—Marie Fels concluded that ‘all historians seem to agree that 1842 was the worst year for Aboriginal-settler conflict’ in the Portland area.47 A reading of the local paper, The Portland Mercury, and Port Fairy Register, in the months preceding Martha Ward’s disappearance reveals frequent articles detailing the hostility and perfidy of the ‘blacks’ and the idiocy of the Protectorate.48 A petition for the establishment of post offices in the district cited the threat posed by Aborigines as a major reason.

The Blacks have also, as is well known to your Excellency, ever exhibited hostile dispositions towards the white population, and although a short time since an aboriginal force arrived and are at present stationed about 20 miles from the township, still whatever service it might otherwise be to the settlers it will be of little if any avail unless there be means of immediately reporting to the commander the depredations of the savages.49

The Aboriginal hostility to settlers was represented as an innate quality—part of their ‘savagery’—without any acknowledgement that it could be a response to white behaviour. In a long editorial dealing with the issue of treating Aborigines as full British subjects before the law we find the following diatribe, and thinly veiled threat.

It is notorious that not a week passes without the settlers suffering loss from the depredations of the blacks upon their flocks, and that the lives of themselves, their families and their servants, are at the mercy of the savages. It is well known that in the exact proportion in which they have been treated with kindness, and indulged with a part of the white man’s fare, have their greedy desires and untutored propensities been whetted, and that thus philanthropy suffers punishment for its own benevolent intentions ... When, then, stock or flock masters perceive robbery in return for their kindness, and hear threats of death as the rewards for their compassion, will not a feeling of indignation at such base ingratitude, coupled with a wish to protect their properties, in obedience

47 Marie Hansen Fels, Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District 1837-1853, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 125. 48 The Portland Mercury, and Normanby Advertiser, 7 June 1843, p. 3; The Portland Mercury and Port Fairy Register, 2 August 1843, p. 3. 49Portland Mercury, 9 August 1843, p. 3. 147

to the first law of nature, incite them to oppose lawless aggression.50

This was a portrayal of the settlers as they would wish to see themselves, as civilised and compassionate people under constant threat from ungrateful, greedy Aborigines. The newspapers clearly portrayed a community, or at least an element of the community, that viewed itself as surviving on the frontier. The attribution of ‘greedy desires and untutored propensities’ to Aborigines would also imply a propensity to uncontrolled sexual predatory urges that was guaranteed to inflame European sensitivities. The editorial provided a strong context for, and justification of, violence towards Aborigines. As ‘savages’ they became logical victims, the settlers were simply defending themselves ‘in obedience to the first law of nature’. This appeal to an inalienable higher, natural law served to absolve settlers from any notion of blame. Aborigines were represented as natural pests—later the editorial refers to ‘districts infested with the blacks’—with all the attendant implications of vermin and how they should be treated.

That this attitude was the dominant contemporary mode of understanding the dynamics between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ becomes very clear in reading newspaper reports of the trial of three European men for the murder of an Aboriginal woman, Coonea, near Port Fairy. The incident had taken place in February 1842 and the men committed, but the trial did not occur for seventeen months, and clearly the issue festered among the settlers of Port Phillip. It became symbolic of the plight that settlers felt themselves to be in, at the mercy of savage blacks and ineffective, even malicious bureaucracy. The government was branded at fault for ‘issuing squatting licenses ... [which] permit settlements in dangerous localities’, and then not protecting them.51 The ‘Protectors of the Blacks ... seem to consider that as such they should be persecutors of the whites’.52 The siege mentality demonstrated by these accusations is a feature of the frontier perspective—it was settlers against the rest of the world, and it was in this context that little Martha Ward disappeared.

We have seen how this antagonism towards Aborigines was reflected in the

50 Ibid., 21 June 1843, p. 3. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 23 August 1843, p. 2. 148

local newspaper, so within this society it is really not surprising that when the child disappeared the immediate local assumption was that the ‘blacks’ had taken her. Indeed the first notice in the paper was headed ‘The Blacks’ rather than the ‘Lost Child’ one would expect to read.53

THE BLACKS.—On the 8th instant a child of two years old, daughter of Mr. Abraham Ward of the Travellers’ Rest, suddenly disappeared, and it has been supposed was carried off by the blacks who frequent his residence. No traces whatever of the child can be discovered.

As was frequently the case in lost child situations, the sheer proximity of Aborigines was enough to render them worthy of suspicion.54 By the time of the next paper this had become a certainty. Both the lost notice and news item in that paper affirmed the guilt of the Aborigines. The ‘Child Lost’ advertisement made its call for assistance in finding the girl on the basis of clearly understood, if obliquely expressed, community understandings.55 After claiming that ‘it being ascertained almost to a certainty that it [the child] has been carried off by the blacks’, it expressed the hope that settlers and police would ‘use their exertions in endeavouring to save it from that cruel death which may be expected from the hands of its savage captors’. The given of a ‘savage’ nature of the Aborigines is at once a validation that they have taken the child (that after all, is what savages would do), and an evocation of a dark image against the pure vulnerability of a small, white child. A chilling notion as to what using ‘their exertions’ could mean for local Aborigines is reinforced by a further suggestion that

The blacks near Arindoovong would be the most likely parties from whom to obtain the information for the child’s recovery, and should every opportunity of enquiry from them be embraced, there is little doubt of success.56

A later news items showed what ‘every opportunity of enquiry’ could mean.

53 Portland Mercury, 16 August 1843, p. 3. 54 The belief that Aborigines were the most probable cause of a frontier child’s disappearance parallels the attitude in Europe towards Gypsies who, it was traditionally held, stole children. In an account of the disappearance of a young boy from the Bright area in 1883, the authors note that some of the locals ‘blamed Gypsies who were in the area at the time.’ Interestingly in view of the Azaria Chamberlain case—another lost child—’others thought he could have been taken by dingoes’ (Brian Lloyd and Kathy Nunn, Bright Gold, Histec Publications, 1987, p.116.) 55 Portland Mercury, 23 August 1843, p. 2. 56 Ibid. 149

However before examining that, it is worth considering an item in the news section of the same paper that carried the advertisement.57 By now the Aboriginal involvement was firmly established, supposedly by ‘the blacks’ themselves—‘There is now, however, no doubt that the child has been taken by the blacks, as some of them have so stated to those in search’. This is a theme common to Australian captivity narratives—the assertion of ‘facts’ based on the evidence of Aborigines under duress. We can justifiably infer the sense of threat under which the local Aborigines were questioned from the hostile tone of all references to them in the paper. In those circumstances it would be sensible to say whatever you felt would be best received—in this case the treachery of other blacks.

Fels makes the point, in another context, of the ‘well-known habit of Aboriginal informants of the time making their answers correspond to the story the white man is inclined to believe’.58 The contradiction of accepting the word of ‘savages’ goes unremarked—perhaps because they were saying what the searchers wanted to hear—as does the obvious question of why the Aborigines would take a child. There was no suggestion of antagonism between the Aborigines and the Ward family, though this is possible, so we must assume therefore that the acceptance of the desirability of white women and children for the Aborigines was so widespread as to make that question redundant. Certainly the savagery of the Aborigines was presented as an unquestioned given: ‘every person of the least particle of humane feeling must be anxious to be the means of rescuing the child from the savages’. Humanity was clearly regarded as a purely European perquisite and provides a contrast to the savagery of the aborigines. This appeal to humanity is another constant facet of the captivity narratives—to join in the searches was to affirm the individual’s humanity and nobility. The search as a whole affirmed the value of civilisation, and the captives—whether real or imaginary—became symbols of civilised values. I develop this point more fully in the following chapter, which examines some of the searches for lost children.

The search for Martha Ward continued with the aid of ‘Mr. Dana and a few of the aboriginal police’ and with ‘sanguine hopes of success’ based on

57 Ibid., p. 3. 58 Fels, Good Men, p. 119. 150

‘intelligence which Messrs. Edgar and Dana have received’.59 Mr. Dana was Henry Dana, Commandant of the Native Police Corps of Port Phillip District. This corps was established in 1842 and achieved greater longevity than the previous corps of 1837 and 1839.60 Fels argues that 1843 was ‘the worst [year] for clashes between the local Aborigines and the police’. This was due, in part, to the increased presence of native police in the area involved in the search for Martha Ward. The Corps’ report of seventeen Aboriginal deaths resulted in an enquiry by Governor La Trobe upon their return to Melbourne.61 At least one of these deaths was associated with the search for the Ward child. Fels records the contemporary use of the term ‘collisions’ to describe times of conflict between the native police and local Aborigines, and it is very evocative of the explosive meetings of two widely differing cultures each believing that they were fighting for their life.62

A detailed account of the Dana and Edgar expedition in the following week’s paper provides insight into the nature of these collisions and illuminates the type of questioning and pursuit regarded as appropriate by the colonial searchers.63 The searchers ‘came upon a party of those who frequent Lake Condom [sic], of whom they made three gins, or women, prisoners’. When the remainder of the Aborigines returned the next day to try to regain the women they were questioned about the child. This is an example of what I mean by questioning under duress. One obvious way for the Aborigines to win back their women and to move along the searchers was to point them in another direction thereby taking some control of the dialogue. It comes as no surprise, then, to read that ‘one of the men stated that it [the child] had been killed by another tribe in the vicinity, and a boy was able to speak English ... and thus became interpreter’. Quite possibly the assertion of the child’s death was an attempt to end the search.

Whatever the motivation this intervention resulted in the women being ‘liberated’ and ‘two men and two boys taken in their stead’. These were taken in ‘quest of the tribe who were said to have killed the child’ and who were

59 Portland Mercury, 30 August 1843, p. 3. 60 See Fels, Good Men, for a detailed account of the history of the Native Police Corps. 61 Ibid., p.138. 62 Ibid., p. 144. 63 Portland Mercury, 6 September 1843, p. 3. 151

found ‘at the Big Swamp’. Not surprisingly, these Aborigines fled into the swamp at the approach of the search party which followed them in. A Mr. Edgar, one of the main participants, just avoided being speared—‘nearly lost his life’—by an Aborigine he was pursuing ‘whom he had repeatedly requested to stop, as he did not intend to do him any harm’. This was surely a rationalisation of what was to come. It seems completely unlikely that an Aborigine, who in all likelihood spoke no English, being pursued by a man on horseback with a gun would understand that no harm was intended him, and yet the paper offers this account straight-facedly. That the Aborigine threw a spear, did not stop when requested and had more spears, was enough to condemn him and to justify Edgar’s next action.

Mr. Edgar, in self-defence, was obliged to fire, and struck the intending murderer, but not so effectually as to prevent him from raising another spear, but before he could get it thrown, Mr. Edgar stopped his career by another ball in a place more fatal than the former.

The vision of who is the aggressor who the defendant is firmly fixed—Edgar fires ‘in self-defence’, the Aborigine is ‘the intending murderer’. The notion of the threatening Aboriginal had such a strong hold in the frontier settler society of Portland that this behavior was not only accepted but highly lauded. The paper account praised Edgar’s ‘daring and patriotic character ... indominatable courage, and ... strictest honour ... ever ready in the service of any of the settlers who may stand in need of such a friend’. The dead Aborigine, on the other hand, was presented as a murderer. He was reported to have thrown away a blood-stained piece of coat belonging to a shepherd from the area. Sheep, some disabled and others slaughtered, were also found nearby. Soon word reached the searchers that the shepherd had been found brutally murdered, his wounds described in vivid detail to confirm the savagery of the attack. Thus the killing of the Aborigine was amply justified. Henry Dana followed a similar line of reasoning in his report on a different incident during this winter of 1843 in which eight or nine Aborigines were wounded, possibly fatally.

If these murderers escaped without punishment, there is no knowing when this work would stop. The same tribe of natives killed McKenzie and his man, Ward’s child, and now Bassett.64

64 Fels, Good Men, p. 148. 152

By rolling these separate incidents—some unsubstantiated but accepted, such as the murder of Martha Ward—into a reign of terror attributable to one distinct ‘tribe’ Dana translated the situation into terms recognisable to Europeans, which validated the settlers’ perception of being under calculated siege and therefore justified punitive attacks.

The reason for the excursion in which Mr. Edgar distinguished himself— the supposed captive child—was briefly alluded to at the end of the Portland Mercury article.65 The Aboriginal prisoner who had claimed the child was killed was freed on the understanding that he would return with her clothes and bones. The story then moved into a wider plaint against governmental failure to protect the settler, foreshadowing future violence.

The settlers cannot longer endure to see their all at the mercy of unrestrained savages, and instances almost daily occurring of that all being carried off and themselves in danger of their own lives ... [without] seeking ... revenge ...

Clearly the search for the captive child was seen as a symbol of wider issues with the Aborigines and a vehicle for voicing them with pure motives.

This episode appeared to have been cathartic for the searchers. Only one further paragraph appeared in the paper and it was almost cursory in its reference to the incident. Interestingly, the Aborigine killed by Edgar, and who was blamed for the shepherd’s death, was also credited with the murder of Martha Ward. On the basis of no real evidence the paper asserted that

there is little doubt it [Mr. Ward’s child] has been murdered, and probably, as is reported by the black who attempted to kill Mr. Edgar ... A gin, it was said, carried the child to a water hole when it began to cry, and was immediately put to death.66

The internal inconsistency—was it the male or female Aborigine who killed the child—is ignored, as is any question about the validity of the claims. No suggestion is made as to who could have reported that the child was drowned—‘it was said’ by whom?

65 Portland Mercury, 6 September 1843, p. 3. 66 Ibid., 13 September 1843, p. 3. 153

The story perpetuated The assumption that hearsay would be accepted as evidence enough proved a valid one. A history of the area published just over one hundred years after the incident, faithfully represented the settlers’ views as expressed by the newspaper.67

The blacks were not the gentle creatures we ... later took them to be ... Although it is not recorded it is generally believed that the setlers had to take the law into their own hands or give up altogether. In August, 1843, Martha Ward, the two-year-old daughter of Benjamin Ward, of the “Travellers’ Rest Inn” at Ardinoovong [sic] was taken away. It was found out afterwards from a wild lubra that they had killed the child because they could not keep it from crying. Mothers out in the bush and living near the thick scrub had an anxious time watching their children ...

The story had settled to accepted fact with circumstantial detail—for example the ‘wild lubra’—to support it. It had become a part of the larger story of the hard-won triumph of early settlers over the bush to establish civilised comfort.

Even at the time the supposed kidnap of Martha Ward did not remain only within the realms of local news. The story was related in two books published during 1845 in England that represented themselves as authoritative guides to the Port Phillip area.68 In the preface to his book, Charles Griffith acknowledged that he had written for potential emigrants.

The principal object of the writer of the following pages has been to lay before British public an unbiassed picture of Australia Felix ... to enable them to form a judgement as to its eligibility as a field for emigration.69

His description of the abduction of Martha Ward, which he ‘had on the best authority’, appeared within a section on the Aborigines, to whom Griffith attributed regular infanticide and cannibalism as well as the supposed kidnap and murder of the child.70 This type of material, presented in serious volumes, must have been a formative influence on generations of emigrants and created

67 W.J. Waters, From Portland to Harrow in the early days, written by special request for the Nareen Red Cross during the last War, 1946, p. 6. 68 Richard Howitt, Impressions of Australia Felix, during Four Years’ Residence in That Colony, Longman, London, 1845, pp. 196-7; Charles Griffith, The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales, William Curry, Dublin, 1845, pp.180-1. 69 Griffith, Present State. 70 Ibid., p. 150 and pp. 180-1. 154

a strong sense of the innate savagery of Aborigines, thus colouring their interpretation of events and Aboriginal behaviour once in the colonies. It would validate and reinforce fears already raised by the captivity narratives of North America.

More recently, this incident was referred to by Marie Fels in the course of her discussion of the Native Police in the Portland area of Port Phillip. She commented that the police records for that area showed that, ‘In August an Aboriginal group kidnapped the small daughter of an innkeeper named Abraham Ward, who lived fifty miles from Portland Bay’.71 Fels then asserted that, in the course of his search for the child, Dana ‘questioned a number of natives ... learning from them, that the child had been murdered by a black named Harry’.72 In spite of her earlier point about the Aboriginal tendency to give white interrogators the answers they thought they wanted, Fels has accepted this situation as unproblematic. Possibly this is an issue in utilising records as evidence; they have an appearance of detailed verisimilitude that makes it is easy to forget that records are compiled by people who were operating under the prejudices of their day, and can be mistaken or even deliberately misrepresent a situation. Records hold such an aura of authority that they can perpetuate unsubstantiated stories as fact. This is particularly well demonstrated by a paragraph in John Sadleir’s Recollections of a Victorian Police Officer (1913), in which he discussed the work of the native police.

An entry in the records tells of the native troopers searching for a child, never to be recovered, carried off by the Westernport blacks. I made the acquaintance of the father of this child many years later. He never quite got over the horror of so cruel a loss. I find three such cases recorded at Dandenong alone. The thought of such perils must have pressed heavily on many a lonely family in those early days.73

It is very likely that one of these cases was that of the Ward child for which, as I have shown, there was no substantive evidence of kidnap. But importantly people believed that it had happened, and not just once—`three such cases recorded at Dandenong alone’ implies considerably more of these incidents in

71 Fels, Good Men, p. 146. 72 Ibid., p. 147. 73 John Sadleir, Recollections of a Victorian Police Officer, facsimile edition by Penguin, Mebourne, 1973, first published by George Robertson, 1913, p. 295. 155

the whole of Port Phillip. Given that Dandenong was the base for the native police in Port Phillip and the central place to which requests for police tracking assistance would be sent, it is quite possible that this was the total of such cases. But the lasting image created by these accounts is of brave pioneers under siege, Sadleir’s ‘many a lonely family in those early days’.

‘More Outrages by the Blacks’ Other incidents of stolen white children reported in Port Phillip newspapers around the time of rapidly expanding settlement reflect some beliefs about ‘black’ behaviour that, given the lack of any verifiable incidents, could only be the result of trans and intra-colonial cultural prejudices. ‘More Outrages by the Blacks’ headed a long column about Aboriginal ‘outrages’ in an 1845 edition of the Geelong Advertiser and Squatters’ Advocate. It began with the story of a two-year old child lost from Fyansford (near Geelong) several months earlier.

Nothing satisfactory could be ascertained as to its fate, notwithstanding the enquiries and journeys of its father (Michael Reynolds, blacksmith at Fyansford), who never gave up the search. At length he heard of a white child being in the possession of the Pyrenees tribe; ... The settlers in the neighbourhood of the tribe ... determined to ... rescue the child; but before they could ... received intelligence that the child had been killed, eaten, and the remains burned.

The column’s writer used this reported savage atrocity as a call to arms both to government and the local settlers:

The occurrence of such atrocities, if not sufficient to arouse the attention of the government, will most assuredly arouse the inhabitants; and who, in such a case, can be answerable for the consequences.74

The supposed savagery of the Aborigines was being offered, not very subtly, as a signal for significant reprisal action by settlers. Three years later the story of this child reappeared with the accretion of circumstantial detail typical of these stories, also typically some of the details conflict with the earlier version. For instance the child, now established as a girl, was five years old, not two, when she disappeared, for which the mother now directly blamed the Aborigines. Once again the ‘Pyrenees blacks’ were implicated, but the cannibalism element had disappeared completely. Rather, the story went, the

74 Geelong Advertiser and Squatters’ Advocate, 29 October 1845, p. 2. 156

child was rushed away by the Aborigines when questioned by a local woman about her name. This was confirmed by ‘a man known as “Peter the hawker”’, who had seen the child and coaxed ‘some of the lubras to tell him where they got her’. They supposedly described the kidnap, and the magistrate hearing the mother’s appeal for assistance directed that mounted and native police should find the suspect Aborigines.75 This story took another turn a month later when the results of inquiries were reported. A Dr. Watton, ‘Black Protector’ in the area, had visited the child ‘now in the possession of the Wardyallock tribe’, and ‘found it to be half-caste’. His evidence was undermined however, by the story of a young man who claimed to have seen the child in question and had given it a wash, confirming his belief that it was a white child, thus triumphantly establishing both the accuracy of his assessment and the perfidy of the Aborigines. As further evidence of Aboriginal guilt he explained that

When the blacks saw the pains which had been taken with the poor child, they with characteristic cunning, bedaubed it with oil and paint, and very soon after decamped, and have never since come near the place—a matter, which in itself is calculated to excite the strongest suspicion.76

Even an apparent age-discrepancy was easily overcome—the young man thought the child was about five years old, while the lost child was around eight. But the writer of the newspaper report considered that irrelevant, because

a child, sharing the hard fate of the aborigines, and exposed to heat and cold for nearly three years, could not be expected to be so large and strong as a child of the same age, brought up and nurtured in a civilized life by its mother.77

After witnessing the mental gymnastics possible for settlers in the course of attributing blame to Aborigines, a comment attributed to Chief Protector Robinson takes on great resonance.78 When the disappearance in 1846 of ‘a fine little child son of Mr. Willoughby, of Arthur’s Seat’ was attributed to Aboriginal kidnap, purportedly ‘for the purpose of exacting a reward from the father for its recovery’, Robinson reportedly said that, ‘if the moon had been

75 Corio Chronicle and Western District Advertiser, 3 November 1848, p. 2. 76 Ibid., 1 December 1848. 77 Ibid. 78 Port Phillip Herald, 5 May 1846, p. 2; 8 May 1846, p. 3. 157

stolen, I verily believe you would accuse the natives of being the thieves’.79

We see this assumption that Aborigines kidnapped and ate white children repeated consistently throughout the nineteenth century in different parts of Australia during the early settlement phase. Another example, from outback Western Australia in 1875, is the story of Johnny Kearney, aged four years, who reportedly died at Aboriginal hands. After both parents died Johnny went to live with relatives, and family reminiscences tell this story.80

Grandmother took Nellie and Johnny to live with her at Badja and later Johnny, aged four, was lost or stolen and then eaten by the natives. Years later, a native told my father, a young man, where to find the grave and they found the skull and bones in it.

Clearly none of the family really knew what had happened to the child, except that he had disappeared. There appears to have been no evidence for claiming that Johnny had been either stolen or eaten. Implicit in the fact that the ‘native’ knowing where the boy was buried is the suggestion of direct Aboriginal involvement. Another equally plausible explanation is that the Aborigines found the child’s body and buried it, although this is never considered. The author of the work in which this story was related obviously found nothing problematic in it and she reinforced the image of ‘native savagery’ with her assertion that

This was not an isolated case. In the early sixties a small boy had disappeared from the mining settlement at Wanerenooka; nearly eighteen months later his bones and clothes were found at Maxwell Spring on the road to the Geraldine Mine.81

Yet again, there was no evidence for assuming that Aborigines had been involved in the child’s disappearance.

79 The effect of this incident upon the accused Aborigine was described to by Assistant-Protector Thomas during his pen-portaits of members of the Port Phillip Native Police. ‘Nunuptune.—Remained but a few months in the force. He was a good-tempered fellow, but as restless as a hyena in confinement. He subsequently was (unjustly) accused of taking Mr. Willoby’s [sic] child at Western Port, which so frightened him, that for years he scarce rambled further than along the coast from Mount Eliza to Point Nepean.’ (Thomas Francis Bride, Letters from Victorian Pioneers, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1969, first printed 1898, p. 408.) 80 Mary Albertus Bain, Ancient Landmarks: A Social and Economic History of the Victoria District of Western Australia 1839-1894, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1975, p. 166. 81 Ibid. 158

The extent to which a belief in Aborigines as kidnappers of white children was an artificial construct and difficult to maintain because of that, is measured in the scarcity of Australian literature depicting that situation, particularly in comparison with North America. The most significant of these, Younâh!, did not appear until 1894, and the kidnapping depicted in the novel was in direct retaliation for the abduction of a young Aboriginal girl. As Susan Martin points out in her study of the story, in the strictest sense of the term’s meaning this is not a captivity narrative because it is

Fictional and make[s] no specific claims to the sort of authenticity found in the North American captivity narratives which give rise to the term. Nor do they draw on a broad Australian historical record and cultural tradition around actual captivities of settler or invader peoples by indigenous peoples, though obviously there are actual tales and myths in Australia which inform them—Eliza Fraser, the White Woman of Gippsland stories, the story of William Buckley and others. 82

Martin uses the term in part, she explains,

to register the circulation of particular understandings of captivity or cohabitation with indigenous people which are informed directly or indirectly by the ideologies and forms of North American captivity narratives and their offshoots,83

These trans-colonial myths of settlement exhibit common themes centering around race and female sexuality. The story of Younâh!, as with the North American captivity narratives, deals with issues of racial superiority and degeneracy, and also raises—however distantly—the fearful possibility of miscegenation.

In this highly romanticised tale the stolen child, Keitha St Clair, is protected by her abductor (Eumarrah) and raised as a child of nature, only to be found as a beautiful young woman by two Englishmen. She is reunited in England with her family, marries one of her rescuers, and returns to Australia to find and ‘reward the noble savage’ who had looked after her. He has been forcibly

82 Susan K. Martin, ‘Captivating Fictions Younâh!: A Tasmanian Aboriginal Romance of the Cataract Gorge’, chapter 8 in Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn (eds), Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific, Routledge, New York, 2001, p. 154. 83 Ibid., p. 155. 159

removed to Flinders Island, where they finally discover him, dying of consumption.84 In essence this is more a story of the destruction of the way of life of doomed ‘noble savages’ at the hands of whites, than of a white abduction. By the end of the nineteenth century the perception that Aborigines were ‘dying out’ rendered them far less threatening for the majority of white settlers, and this meant that they could be depicted as romantic, tragic figures.

Into the Pioneer Legend The passing of time and consequent shift from the frontier mentality as settlement became established, also caused a shift in other attitudes. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the role of colonist was gradually transformed into that of venerated pioneer in both Australia and North America. The rationale behind this developing veneration is suggested by an early settler of the Portland District of Victoria who reminiscenced that:

There is something in the very word pioneer that commands us. The pioneer is the man who led. He was the first in the unknown; he must have dared, and daring exacts respect.85

There is a seductively compelling logic to this straight-line equation method of reasoning. The pioneer (always a male) was a leader, with the heroic connotations available to that term. Moses was a leader who took his people into the Promised Land. The pioneer was the first into the wild frontier, therefore he was daring (which equates to brave) and therefore deserves respect. However, whilst this was a central thread of the pioneer legend, it was not the whole of it.

The subsumption of the image of the lost or stolen child into that of the pioneer occurred gradually during the 1890s, which John Hirst identifies as the period in which ‘the pioneer legend’ of Australia was born.86 Initially the term ‘pioneer’ was used to denote anyone who had arrived in the early years of the colonies. However as the colonies headed towards nationhood, an increasing wish for national heroes, untainted by convictism or ‘Old World’ elitism led to the development of an image of pioneers as those who cleared the bush,

84 Mrs. W. I. Thrower, Younâh: A Tasmanian Aboriginal Romance of the Cataract Gorge, printed at ‘The Mercury’ Office, Hobart, 1894. 85 Benjamin Hoare, Looking Back Gaily, E.W. Cole, Melbourne, 1927, p. 1. 86 J. B. Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, Historical Studies, no. 71 (October 1978), pp. 316-8. 160

survived flood, drought and fire, and who withstood the Aborigines. In the absence of ennobling wars, the pioneer endurance of hardships earned them and their descendants the right to the land. Hirst identified the writings of A.B. Paterson and Henry Lawson as vital to the development of the pioneer legend—‘Pioneers as settlers and national heroes were the creation of poets and writers’—and examines the ways in which their writing shaped the national heroes.87 Central to this was an understanding that the pioneers worked for a greater good, not just the establishment of their own family. The refrain from Henry Lawson’s poem ‘How the land was won’ (1889), which portrays the pioneers’ suffering through drought, flood, loneliness and Aboriginal attack, affirms ‘And that’s how the land was won’.88 This image of sacrifice to a harsh land was reinforced by the threatening presence of natives

Where the scrubs were dark as the blacks that crept With ‘nulla’ and spear held low: Death was hidden amongst the trees, ...... They fought and perished by twos and threes — And that’s how they won the land!

Fighting the blacks was represented as a rite of passage, a necessary condition of winning the land. Just as important was the need to suffer, and it is here that Lawson evoked a very interesting figure. He described the anonymous settlers toiling,

Through wilderness, flood, and drought; ...... The white girl-wife in the hut alone, The men on the boundless run, ...... And that’s how the land was won.

The ‘white girl-wife’ conflates the child-woman image into one pure, vulnerable figure, subject to all the dangers of the land including ‘the blacks’. The moral loading of this colour contrast is unmistakeable. The stories of stolen white children, particularly girls, evoked very similar public responses to those of the reputed ‘Captive White Women’. That this was not solely Australian but part of an evolving, wider colonial psychology is suggested by

87 Ibid., p. 318. 88 Ibid., p. 321. 161

the inclusion of captivity narratives in local area histories. In America for example, the Minnesota Historical Society Collections, published in 1894, included several captivity narratives around incidents in the early 1860s. One of these was by Mary Schwandt-Schmidt who concluded her account,

In the hope that what I have written may serve to inform future generations what some of the pioneers of Minnesota underwent in their efforts to civilize our great state, I submit my plain and imperfect story.89

Captivity experiences were rendered as part of the activity of rescuing the wilderness, of forming it into a place of civilisation suitable for ‘proper’ living. To have survived such an experience rendered the person ‘a brave pioneer’90, worthy of respect, whose sufferings made a better life possible for future generations.

The notion of women’s stoic suffering forming an integral part of the pioneer experience almost automatically leads into the lost or stolen child stories, for what could be more painful to a mother? Examples of this linkage may be found in many works about pioneer women.91 For example, a pamphlet published in 1934 for Portland’s centenary celebrations as the ‘First Permanent Settlement of Victoria’ was dedicated to the memory of the areas pioneer women, ‘Whose self-sacrificing devotion to duty contributed so greatly to the Peace, Happiness and Prosperity of the State.’92 A selection of diary or letter abstracts, poems and anecdotes, the work offers ‘An Old Story Retold’—the loss of four-year-old Freddy Heazlewood. He disappeared from a group of children who, in 1850, ‘went out into the bush to hunt for butterflies, beetles, etc,’ at Lower Cape Bridgewater. Surprising to the modern reader is the comment that his parents were unworried by his failure to return with the other children believing that ‘he would be sure to come back before long’. It provides an inkling of the ease of people with the bush that was not

89 Francis Roe Kestler, The Indian Captivity Narrative: A Woman’s View, Garland Publishing, New York, p. 400, quoting from Minnesota Historical Society Collections, vol. 6, Pioneer Press, St Paul, 1894. 90 Ibid., p. 392. 91 A similar linkage was made in the United States with the Indian captivity narratives. For example Mary Schwandt-Schmidt wrote her story in 1894, over thirty years after the experience, for inclusion in a history of Minnesota (see Kestler, pp. 391-400). 92 Book of Remembrance of the Pioneer Women of the Portland Bay District, 1934, State Library of Victoria. 162

necessarily seen as a threatening environment. For the children it was a playground, and the parents’ confidence in Freddy’s ability to find his way home suggests that he spent much of his time in the bush. Eventually a search was made over several days but to no avail—only some footprints and one sock were found. This was not, however, the end of the story.

Some time after his disappearance a friend of the family, Mrs. Badnall, saw a light colored boy at the camp of the Mount Gambier blacks. She at once jumped to the conclusion that it was the lost child. “You have a white boy there,” she said to the natives. “Give him to me, so that I may wash the dirt off and and find out who he is.” The blacks forthwith raised a great hullabaloo. They picked up the child and fled from the neighbourhood. Mrs. Badnall reported what she had seen. Search was made, but without success, and no one ever knew what became of the poor little fellow.

The assumption by Mrs. Badnall that a light-coloured child was a stolen white child is an enormous leap, and one that displays an engrained perception of Aborigines as malevolent. The unproblematic relating of the story suggests that this view was shared by other inhabitants of the Portland area in 1934. The image of Aborigines stealing white children remained entrenched in the area long after the frontier period had passed.

Local histories, frequently published as part of ‘Back to’ celebrations, were also powerful mediums for conveying these kidnap stories. Told as they often were by family members, any attempt to interrogate the details of the story was to cast a slur on family truthfulness. They became part of the wider community folklore, transmitted unquestioningly and sanctified by a direct and identifiable line of story ‘owners’. The stories are often undated and without context, placed in near-mythical pioneer days. A 1931 ‘Back to Lilydale souvenir programme’ included an example of this with the story of a thwarted child kidnap.93

On the Hills’ property, near the cemetery, Fred. Hill, then a baby of two years, playing at the rear of the house, suddenly disappeared. A search was made, and tracks to the Yarra were followed by Mrs. Hill and a man with a gun. They eventually discovered two lubras with the baby, unclothed, and at the point of the gun Freddy was rescued.

This is followed by a story of two white boys caught watching a corroboree

93‘Back to Lilydale souvenir programme’, 1931, State Library of Victoria. 163

and chased off by Aborigines, so the general intent of this section seems to have been to show the dangers posed by Aborigines to pioneers.94 A very similar incident is recounted in three local and family histories involving the Aitken family who, in the late 1850s, came from Scotland to the Kyneton district of Victoria. The details of the story recounted in these publications vary slightly as to where the incident took place and to which child, but the central details remain constant. These are that one of the children born into the family (either the fourth or sixth) was the first white child born in the district (either Kyneton or Yarrawalla), and that, one day he was taken from the yard by blacks who dropped him when chased by the mother.95

The way in which the lost child image became attached to the pioneer legend is perhaps best illustrated through the story of the Duff children outlined earlier and told for many years in the Victorian School Readers as ‘Lost in the Bush’.96 The original incident had received considerable publicity because of the perceived womanly nobility of Jane, who was venerated for having looked after her two brothers during their ordeal. However by the early 1900s a correspondent to the Melbourne Argus was firmly linking Jane’s experience to the pioneering legend.

Sir - I claim your kind permission to revive an incident connected with the early pioneering days ... [and] one whose action a s above related will ever live in the annals of our early pioneering days,97

Interestingly this was the same year in which Frederick McCubbin painted the final panel of his iconic triptych, ‘The Pioneer’. This was a period of myth- making for the new nation, and pioneers along with explorers, were accorded a central role in the perceived process of ‘winning’ the land.

By the time of the unveiling of the Jane Duff memorial in 1935 the incident has become an integral facet of the pioneering life, symbolic of its hardships.

94 Ibid. 95 ‘100 Years of Community Living at Yarrawalla’ souvenir publication, 1975, p. 22; Ian Williams, The Aitken Family of Tandara & Cumberland’, undated typescript [c.1978], p. 3; Paula Shay, From Parakeets to People, Past & Present: Celebrating 125 years of Yarrawalla & District as a community, p. 19; letter to Richard Aitken from great-aunt Dorothy Aitken, 16 November 2000. My thanks to Richard Aitken for providing this information. 96 For a detailed examination of the story see chapter two. 97 Thomas Young, letter to the editor, Argus, 16 July 1904, p.17. 164

In his dedication speech the treasurer of the memorial fund, a Mr. G.T. Graham, presented the pioneer as the state (and therefore) nation builder.98

The State of Victoria ... is an incredible feat. The exploration, survey, fencing and working of it is an odyssey of deprivation, sweat and loneliness. We still await the day of literary achievement, when stories such as that of the Duff children will be enshrined in that achievement. We have fine traditions handed down by the pioneers.

At the time of her death Jane Duff was lauded by a local paper as one ‘Of “the women of the west” that Geo.[sic] Essex Evans wrote so admiringly about.’99 The poem (also included in the Victorian Reader) concluded: ‘The hearts that made the nation were the women of the West.’100

Thus the image of the lost or kidnapped white child became subsumed into the wider pioneer canon in which settlers were portrayed as suffering to ‘win’ the land. Stories of lost children joined captivity narratives, bushfires, flood and drought, as important facets of a validating mythology for the nation. I develop this argument further in my next chapter on bush searches. However, before leaving the topic of captivity narratives I want to consider an episode that embodies aspects of both the lost child and stolen child stories, this is the story of the lost child of Calandoon. If offers compelling evidence of the great strength of the cultural power of the captivity stories, despite there not being one confirmed incident of this actually occurring in Australia.

‘The lost child at Calandoon’ Bad enough to lose a youngster for a day or two, and find him alive and well; worse, beyond comparison, when he’s found dead; but the most fearful thing of all is for the youngster to be lost in the bush, and never found, alive or dead.’ (Stevenson in Such Is Life, Joseph Furphy).101

The story of the supposedly stolen white child from Callandoon on the Macintyre River west of Goondiwindi, Queensland, exposes the many-layered responses that could be experienced by the families of lost children including

98 West Wimmera Mail, 3 May 1935, p. 1. 99 Horsham Times, 22 January 1932, p. 1. 100 George Essex Evans, ‘The Women of the West’, The Victorian Reading-Books, Eighth Book, Education Department of Victoria, Melbourne, 1986, (first published 1928), pp. 69-70. 101 Joseph Furphy, Such Is Life, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1981 (facsimile of first edition, 1903), p. 196 165

despair, guilt and anger.102 The story also highlights the complexity of innate attitudes held by many settlers towards Aborigines, who could embody an image of fear as potential attackers, or hope as trackers of lost people. The driving need manifested by many people in this story through their urgency to ‘rescue’ the girl from her life with the Aborigines reflects the hysteria associated with other ‘captivity narratives’ in which the horror of the experience for a female white person is voiced with an often unspoken, but compelling, implication of sexual despoilation and degradation. Above all, the story of the lost child of Calandoon demonstrates the despair felt by the family of a child lost forever, whose fate remains unknown.

One of the many interesting aspects of this story is the way in which Mary Downing, mother of the lost child, turns to literature and print. Most of the ‘lost child’ narratives are told by people other than those immediately involved—reporters, ministers, local historians, writers, even descendants. It is difficult to know what to make of Mrs. Downing’s appearance in print. Why did she feel the need to turn the loss, the discovery and then rejection of her ‘daughter’ into literature? In part, I will argue, these publications represent an attempt at self-justification by a woman who felt some guilt over the loss of her child.

The story of the discovery and ‘rescue’ of a supposed white girl from the Aborigines who reputedly abducted her many years earlier is told in two phases by Mary Downing, initially in a letter and story, A Mother’s Sorrow: Recollections of the Mysterious Loss of Her Only Daughter in the Bush, published in The Queenslander (1873), in which she gave an account of the circumstances in which her daughter went missing. 103 Later, in a pamphlet entitled The Disappointment: Or the Girl Taken from the Blacks (1875), Mrs. Downing outlined the events of the previous year.104

In her letter to The Queenslander she explained that in 1867, seven years after her daughter’s disappearance, she had first published the accompanying

102 There is a variation in the spelling of Cal(l)andoon in the two published pieces. I have followed the spelling used in each one. 103 Queenslander, 4 October 1873, p. 7. 104 Mrs. M Downing, The Disappointment: or the Girl Taken from the Blacks, Examiner and Times Office, Warwick, 1875. 166

account of the incident in a pamphlet,

thinking that by sending a number of these to Goondiwindi and Calandoon they would be the means of reviving what perhaps had long been forgotten—the loss of my children; and that perhaps some shepherd or traveller might have seen something of my child’s remains, and that the suspense and anxiety I have suffered so many years should be taken away.

There was no immediate response, but in December 1871 she

received a letter stating that there was a white girl about sixteen years of age seen with the blacks at Watergah, a station on the Big River some fifty miles over the border from Calandoon.

The border in this case was that between New South Wales and Queensland. Further enquiries uncovered a stockman’s story of a white girl living ‘with the blacks in the Moonie scrub’. Horrific though this prospect clearly was to Mary Downing—‘I trust these reports are untrue, and that my child is in heaven since the time she was lost’—she asked that the story now be published in the paper so that the issue might be resolved, ‘it would be read all over the country, and might do something to relieve a poor mother’s deep sorrow’.

A Mother’s Sorrow: Recollections of the Mysterious Loss of Her Only Daughter in the Bush, is a convoluted saga of blame, criticism, self- justification and despair in which Mrs. Downing tells of the loss in July 1860 of her small son (Willie aged six years) and daughter (Bessie aged three and a half) while playing around their hut on an out-station called Biril on the Calandoon station near the Macintyre River west of Goondiwindi, at which the parents were shepherds. Ironically, they disappeared the day after the family moved to Biril from another out-station, Toleva, a cause of rejoicing for Mrs. Downing, who had found Toleva very isolated. The hut into which they moved was dirty and Mrs. Downing began the job of cleaning. Her description of the realisation that the children were lost is a vivid evocation of the abrupt transition from ordinary domestic life to a driven nightmare of searching which characterises many such stories.

the next morning I resumed my work. The children were in high spirits, and ran here and there as if overjoyed at the change. I was busy with my work, but suddenly stopped to listen—I did not hear the sound of their merry voices. I ran to look, but they had disappeared. I searched and

167

cooeyed for nearly two hours, but in vain; and overcome with terror I ran to the head station.

The station-hands and some of the shepherds began to search, as did the childrens’ father and eldest brother, Joseph.105 When no sign of the children had been found by the next morning, the help of Aboriginal trackers was sought. It was Joseph Downing who went the eight miles ‘to the blacks’ camp to try and get some black trackers’.

Mrs. Downing had earlier expressed her profound mistrust of the Calandoon Aborigines.

I ... had seen and been acquainted with many of the aboriginal natives, and found some of them kind and useful, yet none I had before seen bore so savage and artful a mien as those on Calandoon.

Although she referred specifically to the Calandoon Aborigines and described a supposedly threatening encounter involving ‘a blackfellow’ wanting food and scowling darkly when denied, this does not support the total damning nature of her judgement. It is clear that this was an internalised attitude that she had brought with her, and one that coloured her understanding of the events around, and subsequent to, Bessie’s disappearance.

Mrs. Downing’s fears must have been evident to another shepherd at the Biril outstation where the Downings first lived on Calandoon, who answered a question about who lay in the nearby grave with the assurance that it was ‘only a Chinaman’ killed by Aborigines. He then followed this up by asking how she would feel at ‘seeing big, wild, naked blackfellows coming to the hut’ when she was alone, thus reinforcing and playing on her fears.

Two well-publicised incidents of whites being attacked by Aborigines in Queensland had very probably contributed to Mrs. Downing’s suspicions. These were the Hornet Bank massacre of 1857 and the Cullin-la-ringo massacre in 1861. Both of these involved the murder of women and children. At Hornet Bank several of the females were raped and the male tutor castrated. The overtly sexual nature of these attacks suggests that this was probably

105 It is difficult to establish definitely the chronology of children in the family. Joseph was definitely the oldest, probably followed by John Jnr., then William (Billie), Martin, Bessie and Charley. Another daughter was born after the family left Callandoon. 168

retaliation for the behaviour of the whites, but for settlers hearing the story it would have reinforced a sense of the sexual threat inherent in the image of a wild Aborigine. Isolated white families on the edges of frontier settlement may have envisaged themselves as under siege, or at least likely to be under siege. Although the massacres occurred long distances from the Downings, they were covered in detail by all the local newspapers accompanied by vociferous demands for revenge. Although the area around Callandoon itself had seen quite strong Aboriginal resistance to the white invasion, this appeared to have been effectively dealt with by 1859 when the Downings arrived in the area. Callandoon had earlier been used as a base for the frequently brutal Native Police and the local Aborigines could have been in no doubt about the lethal response to any perceived misbehaviour on their part.106

When Joseph Downing reached the Aborigines to secure trackers, they were involved in ‘a big corroboree’ and reluctant to join the search, ‘though promised plenty to induce them to come and track the missing children’. Their attitude came to have sinister import for Mrs. Downing. Unable to understand that the men were involved in an activity that held social, cultural and spiritual significance and which made material reward irrelevant, she could not recognise the validity of their view. The cultural divide and an understandable anxiety about her children meant that she gave the Aboriginal reluctance her own interpretation. She concluded that the Aborigines had something to hide. Eventually ‘two old blackfellows’ accompanied the boy back to the search area with many mounted men from the head station. Mrs. Downing recorded that

as they rode through the scrub apart from each other, I could hear now and then the loud crack of their whips, which I knew to be the signal for drawing together. Then hope sprang up in my mind that they were found on the return of two horsemen—again to be disappointed. Surely at that time I drank the dregs of the cup of trouble, and wrung them out.

The missing son, William, was found the next day but he was alone. There was no sign of the girl. The children had parted under circumstances that were never clarified. The boy had found his way to a shepherd who sheltered him and with whom he was discovered. When questioned about his sister he took fright. His mother explained his reaction thus:

106 Maurice French, Conflict on the Condamine, Darling Downs Institute Press, Toowoomba, 1989, p. 108. 169

On being brought home the child looked wild and frightened; and I asked him where he had left his sister. He said by the creek; and tried to run away again, going round the sheep-yard. He had been afflicted with fits, and they had produced something strange about him; he was not intelligent like the others.

The fact that one of the family members knew, at least to some extent, what had happened to the girl but could not say, added another element to the tragedy. This sense of mystery was certainly a factor in causing the Downings to believe that some external forces in the form of the local Aborigines had intervened. There is also a definite implication in her outline of these events that, for Mary Downing, the wrong child was lost. Her only daughter, whom she described as having ‘wound herself around my heart’, was remembered as happy, loving and normal. William, one of several sons and, with ‘something strange about him’, appears to be less treasured. He was referred to as ‘the boy’ or ‘the child’, Bessie was ‘my dear little girl’.

After several days, signs of the girl’s movements were found by the Aboriginal trackers. The story adduced from the tracks bears a striking similarity to that of the three children from the Duff family outlined in chapter two.107 The Aborigines tracked Bessie,

nearly two miles from the hut; and for one mile she had her arms full of wood. She must have thought she was getting near her home, but on the top of a sand ridge, near a very thick scrub, she seemed to have dropped it in despair. There lay the little heap of wood;

Even though it was now evening Mrs. Downing was horrified that the trackers then returned to the hut and the other horsemen followed suit. She begged them to continue the following day now that tracks were found and her report of that day displays her mistrust of the Aborigines.

It was 10 o’clock when they [the horsemen] came again from the station; and the blacks at their camp were cooeying, and seemed to be answering the others in the scrub, and left their camp and returned back before the horsemen came from the station; and I could hear distinctly like a blackfellow cutting with a tomahawk. This made me think that there were more blacks in the scrub, and that they were consulting with the others how to act. The two blacks took ... [the searchers] to the place

107 See also Kim Torney, ‘Jane Duff’s Heroism: The Last Great Human Bush Story?’, The La Trobe Journal, no. 63, autumn 1999, pp. 46-55. 170

where the small heap of wood lay, and nothing they could offer would induce them to follow the track and go further on. They said they wanted to go to the corroborree, and they had lost the track; so the blacks left.

Clearly she was profoundly uneasy in the bush. There is a feverish quality to her view of the ‘blacks’ movements. She cannot account for their behaviour logically and becomes suspicious of conspiracy; her interpretation of the trackers consulting with other, unseen Aboriginals as to ‘how to act’ is dark with threat. The rest of their behaviour confirmed for her the dubiety of their motivations. Mrs. Downing’s sense of Aboriginal conspiracy was reinforced when an overseer at Calandoon rode to another more distant group of Aborigines to recruit a tracker, but none would come. She acknowledged that this marked the end of any real hope of finding the child alive—’I now tried to reconcile myself to my great loss’.

Mrs. Downing obviously had a high opinion of the Aboriginal tracking skills. One of the complexities of this story (and in many others of lost children) is that the Europeans’ firm belief in the abilities of Aboriginal trackers was held contemporaneously with a deep contempt for, and suspicion of, Aborigines. To have to rely on people you disliked and distrusted would create enormous emotional tension. The elevation of Aboriginal trackers to near-infallible status in their search for lost people, particularly children, remained a constant feature of the lost in the bush imagery.108 In writing on the portrayal of Aborigines in Australian literature, Leonie Kramer considers the possible influence of childhood reading on later attitudes through the title story of O. F. Timms’s Station Dangerous, and other Tales for the Young (1866). This story of an English family’s trek to their station on the Murray includes two incidents involving Aborigines—in one they attack the station, in

108 Aboriginal trackers have been brought in to seek for contemporary lost children after State Emergency Services and police searchers failed to find them, which suggests an extremely high view of the tracker’s abilities. One example was the search for a boy lost at Wilson’s Promontory in 1987 who was never found, (Age, 17 March 1998, p. 3). The extent to which Aboriginal trackers could be attributed with god-like qualities in popular understanding is captured by Dorothy L. Sanders (writing as Lucy Walker) in Joyday for Jodi (Fontana, London, 1970). Set in outback Australia of the 1960s, the romance story includes an incident in which a child goes missing. When the immediate search fails to find him and Aboriginal tracker is flown in and he is portrayed as a saviour—described as a magnificent specimen of a man he is received by the waiting people in awed silence, ‘To them, at this moment in time, this man was God. He had come to find Jacky Boy. He would find Jacky Boy.’ (p. 123). Needless to say, he did find Jacky Boy. My thanks to Juliet Flesch for bringing this passage to my attention. 171

the other they help find three children lost in the bush. Kramer’s characterisation of the Aboriginal figures ‘as both heroes and villains’ neatly encapsulates the role frequently accorded them by colonial settlers.109

Unfortunately for Mrs. Downing, as with many other parents of lost children, she could not reconcile herself to her daughter’s disappearance. Tangible death was something that could be faced, not knowing what actually happened to the child was agony. She contrasted this loss with an earlier one.

In England I had laid a dear child in its quiet resting-place in the country churchyard. I had attended on it, and supplied its wants in sickness, and had seen the last quiver on its lip as the spirit departed;

Poignant though this loss was, she at least knew the worst of the child’s suffering and could take solace in the knowledge that she had done all that was possible to give comfort. She had no such consoling thought about the lost Bessie: ‘Long years have passed away since the sorrowful event took place ... yet at the recollection my heart often bleeds afresh’.

Mrs. Downing’s sorrow was compounded by a sense of guilt, apparent in her comment that, ‘Some may be surprised at my not finding the children, as immediately they were missed I went in search of them.’ The explanation she then offers is lengthy and detailed. She explains that when last seen they were on the opposite side of the creek from the hut so that was where she went to look for them. She searched ‘an old basket yard’ near where she last saw them, and then,

down through a narrow belt of scrub that was in front of the hut very near the creek where they were playing, and on the other side of the belt of scrub there was a large plain, and as far as the eye could reach I could not see them.

She then went over to the back of the hut where

it was thick scrub mingled with cyprus pines, and on that day the wind blew very high and made a loud noise as it blew through the tops of the tall pines, and it would prevent the children from hearing my voice when I cooeyed and yelled to them, ... we found afterwards by the tracks they

109 Leonie J. Kramer, chapter 12 ‘The Aboriginal in Literature’ in Peter Stanbury (ed.) The Moving Frontier: Aspects of Aboriginal-European Interaction in Australia, Reed, Terrey Hills, 1976, p. 136. 172

had gone down the creek until they crossed at the end of the water hole, and instead of coming back to the hut they had gone into the scrub.

The realisation of just how nearly she may have found the children, or that they may have seen the hut, is a very poignant evocation of how easily children became lost.

They were but a short distance from the hut when they crossed the creek, but they could not see it for the winding of the scrub, so they must have parted in the scrub ... so while I was searching for them in one direction, they were making off in quite the opposite one.

This painfully detailed recreation of events is surely as much an attempt to convince herself as any reader that she had not been a neglectful or irresponsible parent.

Her guilt and the lack of tangible evidence of their daughter’s death were, I believe, contributing factors to Mrs. Downing’s persistent belief that Bessie was either killed or taken by Aborigines. It provided a focus for her anger and grief, someone to direct blame to, and allowed for hope that some day the mystery would be resolved. Mary Downing had earlier displayed her implacable dislike of the Calandoon Aborigines and the case she built up against them in relation to her daughter has this as its basis. This case is outlined in a letter written by Mr. Downing and published in the Moreton Bay Courier six months after Bessie’s disappearance.110 His letter to the editor, headed ‘The Lost Child At Calandoon’, began:

I would beg to relate to you the facts that have transpired since the loss of my dear little girl; facts that have led me to suspect that the blacks have either secreted her remains or taken her away alive.

What follows is a circumstantial and confusing account of the girl’s hood being found by a shepherd, then an ‘old blackfellow’ approaching Mrs. Downing with talk of finding more tracks and asking if he should ‘bring gown’. This was construed as meaning that he knew where the child’s clothing was, and therefore the body. The story is repeated of the Aboriginal trackers being reluctant to search and answering calls from others in the bush. Mrs. Downing considered that these individual incidents were part of a larger,

110 Moreton Bay Courier, 12 January 1861, p. 2. 173

suspicious whole. Whilst these suspicions are easily countered by a more sympathetic reading of the Aboriginal behaviour, it is impossible to discount the distress of the bereaved parents. They offer a huge reward for the child’s return or ‘rescue’ from the Aborigines.

If she is alive, and I could have her restored to me, I would gladly give all the money I am possessed of, and I would wish to offer £100 (one hundred pounds) reward in the ‘Courier’ for her rescue, should she be in the hands of the blacks.

Mary Downing’s conspiracy theory was fostered by other incidents. She interpreted later remarks by local Aborigines to mean that they knew more than they were telling. A comment by an Aboriginal woman that ‘You will not get her now, as you got picaninny plenty, and can give one to mine’, made her ‘think that they might possibly have my child alive, as their conduct from the first had been suspicious’. Just why the Aborigines would want to take a white child, particularly knowing the awful consequences that could bring, was never considered. A belief in the desirability of white women and children to Aborigines was unquestioned. It was the assumption that fuelled many of the other captivity stories that developed around the Australian frontiers.

The Disappointment; Or the Girl Taken from the Blacks moves the story on into the early 1870s when the Downing family had taken up a selection in the Warwick area. Mary Downing was resigned to her daughter’s death, accepting that when ‘God called me from this world ... I should go to her, but she would not return to me.’ This equilibrium was lost when she heard a report from a son working at the Canal Creek gold diggings that ‘his mate ... knew a girl among the blacks at Watergah who had been taken for a white girl’.111 She appeared about the right age to be the lost Bessie but there was one apparently insurmountable difficulty. Bessie had dark brown eyes, this Mary Ann’s eyes were blue. Throughout the whole of the sorry saga that followed, this apparently incontrovertible evidence that this girl was not the lost Bessie was ignored or rejected.

One can understand Mary Downing’s desire that this could actually be her daughter and that the long mystery be resolved would affect her judgement. The eye-colour worried her but she ‘thought that there might be a mistake

111 Downing, Disappointment, p. 3. 174

about them’ and proceeded to make enquiries through the local police. Nothing came of these enquiries but in 1873 further rumours of a ‘white girl ... with the blacks’ near Goondiwindi sent her off to see a woman visiting Warwick from Goondiwindi. She heard two disturbing accounts from this Mrs. Wallis—one confirming the rumour and another of the discovery of a child’s body in an old cattle-yard on the boundary of Calandoon and a neighbouring property, ‘in the corner of the yard in a pen lay the remains of a child. It was very old, as if it had lain there a long time.’ Mrs. Wallis promised to make further enquiries about the body but when she did write to Mrs. Downing she made no mention of it, asking instead for a description of the lost child.112 The emotional confusion and turmoil that these rumours would generate made the Downings susceptible to an absolute statement that their child was found, such as they received in a letter from a Harriet Droughton of Goondiwindi, and formerly of Callandoon.

My Dear Mrs. Downing,—We have just heard that your child is still alive. You had better go to the man at once. His name is Hugh Sullivan ... He got acquainted with a storekeeper named Clifford ... [who] was at Millie ... He often asked the black gin where she got the picaninny. She used to get cross when asked. An old blackfellow told Clifford that she stole it from Queensland. Now don’t lose any time but go to Clifford at once. He says he will go with you and show you the girl. When Sullivan left ... Clifford gave him a description of the girl. This is a copy. This is no false story got up. Write to me as soon as you know anything.113

The patent sincerity, directness and certainty of this letter is very powerful, though an objective reading (not possible for Mrs. Downing) raises issues for concern. These include the long chain of information—the story is passed on through several people, almost inevitably being changed or embellished in the process. Then too, there is the almost ubiquitous ‘old blackfellow’ whose testimony serves to provide critical information that happens to confirm the writer’s own belief about what happened. Similarly, the interpretation of Aboriginal behaviour is coloured by an assumption of guilt. It was just as possible that the Aboriginal mother found the constant questioning about her child intrusive, offensive or threatening. She may also have feared, with good cause, that the child would be taken from her.

112 Ibid., 2 November 1873, pp. 4-5. 113 Ibid., 23 February 1874, p. 5. 175

Clifford’s description of the girl, included with Mrs. Droughton’s letter, added to Mary Downing’s dilemma. Again the direct assertions of fact were compelling, ‘There is a yellow girl staying at Millie who when a child was fetched from Callandoon by an old black gin, who claimed her as her child’, with a strong implication of the unlikeliness of ‘an old black gin’ bearing a child. He described the girl as having ‘rich blue eyes and auburn hair ... [though] Some people call it light or fair hair’, and went on to assert that ‘The girl answers the description of your child lost from Biril Sheep Station in the year ‘59 or ‘60 last’.114 Although a clearly impossible claim—this blue-eyed girl could not answer the description of the lost child with brown eyes—Mrs. Downing chose to ignore the fact, as did everyone else involved. In an amazing act of common self-delusion, person after person discounted the one piece of solid evidence that this was not Bessie Downing, and one can only speculate about their motivation. Partly perhaps it was the desire to provide a happy ending to a distressing episode, but there also appears to have been such a strong sense of the urgent need to ‘save’ a white child, any white child, from the Aborigines that it became a crusade. The girl became a symbol of white civilisation and purity, and her identity became almost a secondary consideration.

As with other crusades, this one developed an impetus of its own. Mrs. Downing sought further information from Mrs. Droughton in Goondiwindi, who urged her to move quickly: ‘Don’t lose any time, but try to find her’. Outside forces increasingly came into play. Mrs. Droughton had already spoken to her local police sergeant and reported that ‘he says you ought to lay an information at the police court to have the station well scoured. That old Beranga is in that direction, so I am told.’ This oblique latter comment contained something of a threat for Mrs. Downing. She distrusted Beranga, who was one of the Aborigines who found the girl’s tracks initially but then returned to the corroboree. She claimed that he later came to see her asking ‘ if he should bring gown’, which she interpreted as him having found the body. The fact that he did nothing further, even though offered a reward, she regarded as suspicious: ‘this made me think that he wanted to conceal something’.115 The implied threat of the Aborigines spiriting the girl away

114 Ibid., p. 6. 115 Downing, Mother’s Sorrow. 176

combined with the re-iteration of the story of the ‘old blackfellow [who] told him that she took it [the child] from Callandoon’ was enough. Mrs. Downing decided that she ‘was assured this was indeed none other than my dear lost Bessie’. At this point her son John became involved.

Mrs. Downing stayed at Tenterfield while John rode out the seventy miles to Guph to see Clifford, who claimed to know where the girl was. John suggested that his mother return to Warwick and he would write there. As an aside at this point, she noted that Clifford had told her son that the girl

was about four years old when he first saw her and quite white. If this was the truth it was wrong that he did not inform the authorities, but see this white child ... growing up to womanhood among the blacks.

The description ‘wrong’ here is used in the sense of immoral or criminal. Again there is an assumed understanding by the reader of the degradation inherent in a white woman living in a black world. The whole drive to find the lost child was permeated by an unspoken fear of male Aboriginal sexuality and its threat to pure white womanhood. There is an element in this incident of the hysteria that characterised the search for the ‘White Woman of Gippsland’, supposedly held captive by Aborigines in Victoria in the 1840s. I believe that it was this hysteria that caused people to overlook the obvious fact that this girl was not Bessie Downing and was, in fact, part-Aboriginal. Otherwise it is impossible to explain the actions of many of the people involved.

Mrs. Downing, expecting to be sent for at any time to finally identify the girl, instead received a telegram from her son to say that he had ‘got my sister, and start home to-morrow’. With this came a letter from the police sergeant at Warwick saying that ‘I am glad to inform you that your long lost child is at last found, and has been identified by your son. She has got all the marks you described on her’. He enclosed a copy of the report from the Narrabri police that was unequivocal in its claims.

The girl Downing lost from Callandoon has been arrested at Millie by the Narrabri Police, brought before the Bench to day, April 1st, 1875 [sic], and ordered to be restored to her parents. She is identified with missing girl. Got marks on leg and arm.116

116 Downing, Disappointment, p. 12. 177

Mary Downing later claimed that that the girl came willingly, ‘The girl would have went with him [John] anywhere without troubling the Narrabri Bench’, indeed was prepared to offer herself.117 This description by the Narrabri police to the Warwick police negates any suggestion as to the eagerness of the girl to leave her home. She was clearly a captive, and the fact that the Narrabri police gave them a police escort, ‘for fear of the blacks following them’, also suggests that she was part of a strong Aboriginal community.118

The expected reunion quickly turned into a nightmare for Mrs. Downing. It must already have been a nightmare for the young woman involved. Understandably Mrs. Downing was deeply disappointed.

when I saw the girl’s face a cry of agony wrung from my heart by the disappointment of all my hopes and[sic] echoed through the bush. My son told me to restrain myself or she would run away. I felt very much for him, he had travelled so far. His heart was good; he meant to do well, but he had made a serious mistake. I saw on her features plainly the impress of the aboriginal race ... She had no marks whatever to correspond with those on my child.119

Now began a struggle within the family that is difficult to understand. The three sons present all accepted the girl as their sister. The father agreed when challenged by his wife that it was not Bessie ‘but said as Johnnie had brought her so far we must do the best we could for her; she might settle down and be useful to us’.120 The desire of the boys to claim Mary Ann as a sister was possibly the result of some kind of survivor guilt. Apart from John, the sons involved remain unnamed, so one can only conjecture as to the immediacy of their experience of Mary Ann’s loss. We know that Joseph, the eldest son, helped in the search. John was next oldest and, although described by his mother as ‘but a mere child when his sister was lost’,121 might well have felt some responsibility for not having looked after her. This would help to explain his continued insistence, described by his mother as ‘a mania’, that the girl was Bessie.

117 Ibid., p. 19. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., p. 13. 120 Ibid., p. 14. 121 Ibid., p. 19. 178

The tension of continuing the pretence that this was her daughter made Mrs. Downing ill. However the depth of her prejudice towards Aborigines so completely coloured her view of Mary Ann that the poor girl must have felt it relentlessly. Mary Ann’s behaviour was always read unsympathetically because of this prejudice:

The girl seemed very restless, and watched my every look and action. I saw plainly that she knew she was not my daughter … But the girl brought to me had all the sharp cunning of the aborigines.122

Well might Mary Ann watch her uneasily, as her removal had already demonstrated how completely subject she was to other people’s wishes. She may have known something of the intention to get rid of her that Mary Downing refers to in passing, ‘About this time an attempt was made to get her into the Brisbane Orphanage’.123 Since Mrs. Downing was the only family member who was unhappy at Mary Anne’s presence, it seems probable that it was she who tried to get rid of Mary Ann.

To the modern reader this story reads as a case of abduction and forcible detention. Yet to Mrs. Downing, despite her knowing that this was not her child, it remained a ‘rescue’, ‘During the six months the girl who was rescued was with me, I tried to gather all the information I could from her relative to her childhood’.124 She appears to have had no sense of the extraordinarily difficult situation of the young woman, but could only see her own suffering.

She [Mary Ann] treated me as her servant and seemed to imagine herself mistress of the house. I feared almost to look at her for fear of offending her, and getting blamed by my husband and the other members of my family; she always took her fits of temper after dark, when she would go and lay down by a log fire, and then some one would have to carry blankets to her, and stay with her all night, to keep her from going away.125

These clear manifestations of loneliness, homesickness and unhappiness were nothing but ‘fits of temper’ to Mrs. Downing, ways for Mary Ann to assert her control. Mrs. Downing failed to inform her readers that Mary Ann was married

122 Ibid., pp. 14-5. 123 Ibid., p. 16. 124 Ibid., p. 15. 125 Ibid., p. 16. 179

until near the conclusion of the pamphlet, she accorded this little importance, apparently regarding it as irrelevant .126 Mrs. Downing described her sons as being ‘very bitter against me’ and they pressured her to publicly acknowledge the girl as her daughter. Amazingly she did, justifying it later as due to family pressure. It is difficult to understand why she apparently did not consider returning the girl to Millie. Perhaps she felt that would have attracted the public criticism that so much of her writing was concerned to deflect. Her letter from this time to the editor of The Queenslander conveys little sign of her doubts about the girl.127 She refers to ‘my daughter’ and ‘my child’. The only hint of tension is in her comment that the girl is

very sensitive, and is so easily annoyed that I am afraid to be strict with her. Had we the means I would have her put under the care of a capable teacher for a year or two ... Still we trust all will turn out well.

During this period Mrs. Downing was making further inquiries about the girl’s background and these resulted in confirmation that this was not Bessie. By this time Mary Ann ‘again ran away’. The questioning in Narrabri caused the matter to be commented on in the local paper, a report picked up by a local Warwick paper. The attitude displayed by the Narrabri Herald appears typical of press opinion:

Maternal instinct failed to discover a daughter in the brown skinned hoiden [sic] forwarded for examination ... Altogether the proceedings in the case would seem to have done more credit to the hearts than the heads of those engaged in it. 128

From a rescued child Mary Ann has fallen to become ‘a brown skinned hoiden’. The fact that her life has been shattered by the incident went unremarked.

Mrs. Downing tells us nothing further of the fate of the girl. The remainder of her pamphlet is a farrago of accusation and self-justification. She criticised the runaway girl for spreading ‘many bitter falsehoods in connexion with some ignorant women who encouraged her in her gossip’, these being stories that she really was Bessie Downing and had been rejected by her mother for living

126 Ibid., p. 25. 127 Queenslander, 9 May 1874, p. 9. 128 Narrabri Herald, 8 October 1874. 180

so long with ‘the blacks’.129 Long sections were devoted to quoting evidence of the girl’s mixed parentage to avoid public censure and in an attempt to finally convince her son Johnny, who ‘seems to have a mania for believing the woman to be his sister’.130 The all-permeating, destructive nature of Mrs. Downing’s prejudice is encapsulated in a fervent outburst:

I would ask those of sound judgement if they think I could be happy and tolerate in my home the presence of one who assumed the position and name of my dear lost Bessie, and that one of the race who may have been the cause of those long years of anxious suspense and grief.131

There is no real doubt in Mary Downing’s mind that the Aborigines were guilty in connection to her child’s disappearance. She reiterated her reasons for finding suspicious the Aboriginal behaviour when Bessie was lost, concluding that

If there was no foul play why did they not show us were [sic] the remains were ... I think it is probable that for the bright silk handkerchief and showy necklace she wore, the blacks might have ended her life ... I think it is the duty of the Government, even now to take those blacks mentioned, and try if anything could be got out of them. I have heard many people expressing great sympathy with the blacks, but it is generally those who has never been exposed to treachery.132

Mrs. Downing was critical of the official bungling which allowed the girl to be taken without proper identification, a criticism that seems well-founded. Not as she means it, for the distress occasioned to the Downing family, but for the failure of the legal system to protect the girl. This was in no way a voluntary journey for the young woman. She had a family and a place to which she belonged, yet at no point is this recognised by Mary Downing or reflected in public opinion. An article in a Warwick newspaper of the time expressed sympathy for Mrs. Downing and characterised Mary Ann as, ‘another Frankenstein, a production that it appears very difficult indeed to deal with’. All sympathies are with Mrs. Downing in her ‘sorrow and disappointment’. While lamenting the lack of a suitable asylum for dealing with ‘a backward

129 Downing, Disappointment, p. 16. 130 Ibid., p. 20. 131 Ibid., p. 22. 132 Ibid., p. 21. 181

step in civilisation such as this is reported to be’, The Warwick Argus suggested that ‘the girl should be sent back to where she was taken from’. Not out of any sympathy for her or in recognition that she had her own home, family and life, but as away of getting rid of a problem.133

It is difficult to trace Mary Ann’s life after she ran from the Downings. A reference to the incident in the Australian Encyclopedia claims that she later died in hospital, an epileptic. 134 Even if she did manage to return to Narrabri the dislocation and emotional trauma would remain. Whatever her end, I believe that this experience made Mary Ann one of the Stolen Generations. In the course of looking for one supposedly abducted child, the Downing family and the wider settler community had created another.

While this is not typical of the Australian child lost in the bush story, it is not an isolated example. As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, there are similar stories from Canada and the United States. In most of these captivity/recovery narratives the wider community seemed to collaborate in wilfully ignoring evidence that suggested these were not ‘white’ children. One can understand the parents wanting to discover their children so badly, but why the whole community? I believe that it was part of the process of coming to ‘own’ the land—by recovering stolen children the colonists were winning the land, they were asserting the power of civilisation over their environment, including the Indigenous people. Through battling difficult circumstances and sorrows, they believed themselves to be earning the right to claim the country. Yet, as the incidents of lost/captive children examined in this chapter demonstrate conclusively, white captivity at the hands of Aborigines was simply not a feature of Australian colonial life, whatever the trans-colonial mythology. I believe that this left space for the development of another trope about children in the developing Australian colonial mythology, that of their being lost in the bush and needing to be saved. A feature of this mythology was the scenario of the bush search, which rapidly came to be considered a

133 Queenslander, 8 August 1874, p. 9. 134 Alec H. Chisholm (ed-in-chief), The Australian Encyclopedia, vol.II, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1958, p. 199.

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set-piece of Australian frontier life and is examined in the next chapter.

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Chapter Five Bush Searches

the Australian response to the environment has not been uniform. At one level the colonists took pleasure in the country they found and created. At another level they sought images which dramatised the process of colonisation and, ultimately, nation-building. (John Rickard, Australia)1

There can be few more dramatic images in the Australian context than that of a large group of searchers scouring the bush. Whether the choreographed movement on foot of carefully spaced lines of people, or the more peripatetic movements of mounted searchers, the image has inescapably theatrical qualities.2 Nor is this understanding open only to the outside observer, for the participants are also aware at some level of their role in a larger dramatic process. The bush search shares an epic quality with other dramatic national images, such as explorers disappearing into the vast, unknown centre of Australia, groups of men desperately trying to beat back raging bushfires, or even the quixotic bushranging figure of Ned Kelly. As an identifiable entity, the bush search provided just the type of image that Rickard describes; it was an admirable vehicle for Australia’s colonial settlers to dramatise their experiences and to represent them as serving that higher good of nation- building.

The bush search, the form of behaviour that is the subject of this chapter, was one facet of the community response to the incidence of lost children, the most immediate one. In the following chapter, ‘Commemorations of the lost’, I examine the more considered responses of the community, which took a multiplicity of forms including memorials, poems, stories, parks and even awards. While apparently different, these aspects are usefully considered in tandem because they are both reflections of the community’s view of itself.

Other searches The format of bush searches did not, of course, emerge fully developed in

1 John Rickard, Australia: A cultural history, Longman, London, 1988, p. 69. 2 The image may also carry much darker, sinister overtones in the Australian context—bush searches could easily turn into manhunts for Aboriginal groups with fatal consequences. The image found its most chilling form in the so-called ‘Black War’ in Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land) in the 1820s when Aborigines were hunted and killed. The war culminated in the ‘Black Line’, a chain of hunters stretching right across the south-eastern corner of the island. 184

response to the first lost child. Bush searches were an early and regular facet of the white colonisation of Australia. Cattle and other scarce stock wandered off and had to be searched for. Convicts became lost or deliberately went missing, and searches were instituted.3 There was early recognition of the tracking abilities that would bring Aborigines to the centre-stage of many bush searches. J.T. Bigge commented in 1819 on the keenness and skill with which Aborigines pursued escaped convicts

the native blacks ... have become very active in retaking the fugitive convicts ... by extraordinary strength of sight that they possess ... they can trace to a great distance, with great accuracy, the impressions of a human foot.4

Land exploration, itself a form of bush search, began very shortly after settlement at Port Jackson. Watkin Tench, an officer of the marines on the First Fleet, recorded Governor Arthur Phillip’s first journey of exploration in April 1788, when a party of ‘eleven persons ... proceeded in a westerly direction, to reach a chain of mountains which in clear weather are discernible’. In an experience that presaged so many to follow, the expedition found the mountains (later named the Blue Mountains) still far distant after four days hard travelling and had to return to the settlement.5 Tench himself led an inland exploration in 1791 on which he took two Aboriginal guides, Colbee and Bolanderee.6 Lost explorers themselves became the focus of search parties. The disappearance of Ludwig Leichhardt in 1848 generated no fewer than nine major searches.7

A level of community understanding different from that held about explorers led to the organisation of searches for the elusive White Woman of Gippsland. The publicly expressed motivations for the search included belief in the sanctity of white females and the perfidy and lust of Aboriginal males. However, many historians have noted other, darker reasons, including the

3 Watkin Tench, Tim Flannery (ed.), 1788, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1996, p. 67. 4 Henry Reynolds, With The White People, Penguin Books Ltd., Melbourne, 1990, pp. 41-2. 5 Tench, 1788, p. 64. 6 Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1961, pp. 225. 7 Michael Cathcart, ‘Exploration history’ in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds) The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 234-5. 185

desire to open up more land for settlement, and to remove the Aborigines from the area.8 As I mentioned in a previous chapter, the level of public hysteria over this ‘lost’ figure, reputedly held captive by Aborigines, resulted in 1846 in the formation of two competing search parties—one publicly-funded, one government. And, as we discovered in the case of Martha Ward examined in chapter four, a major organised search for lost people seemed to be read as tacit permission to attack Aborigines. The party led by Christian De Villiers and James Warman to locate the White Woman of Gippsland alleged a massacre of the Kurnai people against the group led by William Dana, based on the discovery of large numbers of human bones at a site on the Gippsland Lakes.9

Explorers in Australia Explorers played a key role in the development of the bush search as an Australian community experience. The role of explorers was two-sided, for on one hand their journeys of exploration were in themselves bush searches— they were acts of searching for a range of objects, including good grazing land, an inland sea, or a reef of gold. At other times the explorers themselves became the object of rescue searches, as I will examine later. Through the medium of explorers’ journals and other writings we see a developing understanding of the Australian bush and its demands, and a concomittant growing appreciation of Aboriginal survival skills. To understand the level of attention given to explorers and the importance attached to their judgements one must consider their role in the colonies.

Henry Reynolds points to the crucial position held by explorers in an evolving Australian society from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century. To a society lacking any history of warfare, explorers were its ‘war’ heroes who gave romantic colour to an embryonic culture.10 The language in which they were written about drew upon the images and emotions of battle. Examples abound, as Reynolds demonstrates—there was admiration for ‘those

8 See Kate Darian-Smith, ‘ ‘Rescuing’ Barbara Thompson and other white women: captivity narratives on Australian frontiers,’ in Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (eds), Text, Theory, Space, Routledge, London, 1996; Don Watson, Caledonia Australis: Scottish highlanders on the frontier of Australia, William Collins, Sydney, 1984; Julie Carr, The Captive White Woman of Gipps Land, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001. 9 Watson, Caledonia, pp. 173-5. 10Henry Reynolds, This Whispering In Our Hearts, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998, p.6. 186

who spent their lives in the service of discovery’, explorers who engaged in ‘warfare against the hostility of the wilderness’ and ‘fought and won over great natural difficulties and obstacles’. Another suggestion about the important role of explorers is made by Tim Bonyhady in the course of his examination of the Burke and Wills expedition and its consequences in Burke & Wills, From Melbourne to Myth (1991). He asserts that the drive to discover heroic explorers was an expression of

the preoccupation with heroes, which, as in England, was at its high- point in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century. Colonists were only too conscious that they had no William Tell or George Washington because they had not won their independence. Victorians, to their regret, had found no local men to celebrate … with the news from Cooper’s Creek, settlers immediately recognized their opportunity to make up for this deficiency. 11

It was this same need to find heroes that fuelled the later veneration of Pioneers, a broad grouping that included the figures of lost children and noble searchers.

The fictional representation of bush searches, such as those of Henry Lawson and Howard Willoughby from which I shall quote, depict large-scale searches, ones that were able to draw upon a wider community for support. These received much greater public recognition than the searches carried out solely by parents or immediate family members in more isolated settings, which suggests an assignment of value to the big search apart from the loss itself. They should be seen as tangible expressions of community values and beliefs. The search parties from South Australia and Queensland sent to look for the missing explorers, Burke and Wills, were very public expressions of support for exploration and the opening up of the country to settlement. They affirmed the value of conquering the land.

The need to produce local Australian heroes led to a sort of frenzy as people sought likely candidates. Bonyhady notes that writers bent upon establishing a national mythology seized avidly upon the explorers, predicting that,

11Tim Bonyhady, Burke and Wills, From Melbourne to Myth, David Ell Press, Balmain, 1991, p. 186. 187

when future generations of Australians ‘set about making up its roll of illustrious heroes, founders and martyrs, there will be inscribed on it the immortal names of all the GREAT EXPLORERS’.12

This anxious construction of national images and myths during the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth century included the creation of scenarios for both the ‘lost heroic explorer’ and ‘the lost child’. These scenarios contained significant overlapping features, including the protagonist doing battle with a hostile, empty environment, their being rescued or loyally supported by ‘good blacks’ and, not infrequently, the death or disappearance of the main protagonist. They were both part of a wider national propaganda about winning or earning the land. John Rickard concluded that the act of disappearing into the landscape carried a lasting resonance. ‘Ludwig Leichardt had the allure of mystery … as though in vanishing he had become part of the country itself’.13 Something of this allure was also attached to the figure of the lost child—the lost remained invisible but significant figures in the Australian colonial landscape, turning it into ‘classical soil’ in the sense delineated by Tom Griffiths in Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia.14 Griffiths quotes from Tasmanian explorer James Calder’s lament about the emptiness of the landscape because of its lack of associations:

The country we describe is as yet without a history, without traditions, and indeed without association. Its past is a veritable blank … There is no such thing as classical soil here …15

By linking the land to people through stories—by providing a history with which to fill the void—the lost figures helped to establish a European claim to the country. Those lost to death were similarly powerful figures of association. Dead explorers, the bodies of children in the bush, were both easily understood as sacrificial figures, lost in the cause of settlement and civilisation. Their loss provided not merely a rationale for taking possession of the land but romantic stories with which to clothe that possession, and to express its individuality. Those who disappeared or died because they entered into the bush—whether that was mallee scrub, dense mountain growth or

12 Ibid. 13 Rickard, Australia, p. 58. 14 Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 156-7. 15 Ibid., p. 104. 188

sandy deserts—earned their community the right to stay. Their suffering could be construed as one of the rites of ownership. The telling and re-telling of stories of the lost was a reaffirmation of belonging.

The mythologising of Ludwig Leichhardt and Burke and Wills shows just how powerful the missing figure could be.16 Their very absence allowed them to be portrayed as the populace wanted, rather than as they were. In that sense they became just as much a tabula rasa as the land represented in colonial settlement stories. Ernest Favenc, himself an explorer and writer of fiction as well as an historian of exploration, conveyed the appeal of the lost figure in this assessment of Leichhardt in his very influential work The Explorers of Australia (1908).

Leichhardt is the Franklin of Australia, around whose name has ever clung a tantalising veil of mystery and romance. Truth to tell, his claim as a leading explorer rests solely on his first ... expedition. But for his mysterious fate mention of his name would not stir the hearts of men as it does. Had he returned from his final venture beaten, it must have been to live through the remainder of his life a disappointed and embittered man. Far better for one of his temperament to rest in the wilderness, his grave unknown, but his memory revered.17

The Franklin referred to was Sir John Franklin, once governor of Van Diemen’s Land, who disappeared on an expedition to discover the fabled north-west passage to the Arctic.18 In linking him with Franklin, Favenc places Leichhardt—and by extension Australia—squarely within the European pantheon of heroic exploration, asserting a right to belong to an extensive and admired tradition. Favenc’s assessment that it was preferable to be a romantic lost explorer than a failed returned one suggests that romanticism was a very compelling force in the period of nation-building. Romanticism also came to be an element in many of the representations of searches for lost children.

16 Leichhardt disappeared in 1848 on his second attempt at making an east-west crossing of the continent. Burke and Wills died in 1861 on their return from making a south to north cross of Australia. Leichardt has many similarities with the explorer figure at the centre of Patrick White’s acclaimed novel, Voss (1957). 17 Ernest Favenc, The Explorers of Australia and Their Lifework, Whitcombe and Tombs, Melbourne, 1908, pp. 95-6. He also wrote a novel based on the fate of Leichardt, The Secret of the Australian Desert (1895). 18 Sir John Franklin was governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1837 to 1843. He died in 1847 leading an expedition to the Arctic, although it took twelve years and several search parties to establish his fate. 189

Throughout the course of all these other searches, patterns of behaviour and modes of relationships developed that fed into and shaped the searches for lost children that seemed inevitably to accompany the rapidly expanding settlement.

Lost children and bush searches Although not exclusively associated with lost children, the bush search was often the most visible feature of such an incident, and the two became inextricably linked in the popular understanding. It was in the context of lost children that the bush search became recognised as a ‘typical’ aspect of Australian settler life, something that was a means of affirming community values and an expression of the ethos of bush mateship. The search for a child lost in the bush seemed to encapsulate the best of Australian society. These understandings were quite rapidly given form in the popular literature, some of which I consider in the course of this chapter, as a set-piece episode of a child lost in the bush. This reached its apotheosis in the late nineteenth century, that period of rising nationalism that culminated in Federation in 1901. The image of the bush search for a lost child became a way of demonstrating both the particularity of the Australian colonial experience, and the strength of the Australian society with its moral centre of bush life and values.

An understanding from this period of just what the image of such a search involved is found in Henry Lawson’s moving story of two small children lost in the bush, The Babies in the Bush, which I examined in another context in an earlier chapter. While he was being told the story of the lost Head children, bushman Jack Ellis, visualised the scenario of the search for the children.

Horsemen seeming to turn up in no time and from nowhere, as they do in a case like this, and no matter how lonely the district. Bushmen galloping through the scrub in all directions. The hurried search the first day, and the mother mad with anxiety as night came on ... The systematic work of the search-parties next day and the days following ... The women from the next run or selection, and some from the town, driving from ten or twenty miles, perhaps, to stay with and try to comfort the mother ... The mounted police out with the black trackers. Search parties cooeeing to each other about the bush, and lighting signal-fires. The reckless, breakneck rides for news or more help ... All this passed before me ...19

19 Henry Lawson, ‘The Babies in the Bush’, Joe Wilson’s Mates, Lloyd O’Neil, Melbourne, 1970, p. 142. The story was first published in 1901. 190

The passage is more evocative than detailed, sketched in a way that suggests Lawson felt he merely had to remind the reader of something they already knew through newspaper reports or other literary representations. The search had become an integral component of lost children stories, but it also developed a status of its own that I will examine more closely later in this chapter.

The representative quality—in terms of the pioneer experience—attributed to the search for lost children is exemplified by its inclusion in the oeuvre of William Strutt. An Englishman who had come to the colonies in 1850, Strutt took an avid interest in the history of Victoria, and deliberately looked for events that he could represent in great works of art. His large, dramatic oil paintings of key moments of the Australian colonial experience include major national images—Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (1864), depicts small, heroic figures battling a hugely destructive bushfire, Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852 (1887), also based on an actual incident, is a romanticised view of picturesque bushrangers. Another monumental painting, glorifying the heroism of explorers, The Burial of Burke (1911), was based on sketches done fifty years prior at the actual time of the death of Burke and Wills on their popularly supported ‘Victorian Exploration Expedition’ to be the first to cross the Australian continent from south to north. The common theme to his work reflected Strutt’s perception of the centrality of the bush to any representation of Australia. All these works were painted following his return to England in 1862 after almost twelve years in the colonies, mainly Melbourne. In them he was painting Australia for a British audience and he presented each of his subjects as national icons.

It is within this context of national images that we must place William Strutt’s watercolour painting of the three lost Duff children lying huddled together in the harsh-looking bush, titled The little wanderers, which he painted for exhibition in the Royal Academy in 1865. His depiction of lost children in the course of his Australian paintings shows that he regarded it also to be a uniquely Australian theme, and one that defined the country as much as bushfires, bushrangers and heroic explorers.

When Strutt returned to the theme in 1876, and began to write and illustrate

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the manuscript of Cooeey, subtitled ‘A true Australian story’, his introduction drew upon the sentimental image of a child lost ‘in the great Metropolis ... piteously crying for its Mother’. There, caring strangers intervene and a policeman is available to ensure the child’s safe return to its family. But, said Strutt,

with children lost in the backwoods of some of our Colonies, it is a different matter indeed there for a child to stray away from the log hut ... bordering the dense, virgin forest. The result, not unfrequently, means death by starvation to the actual knowledge of the writer.20

He dramatically defines the intrinsic difference between the Colonial and British experience through a situation accessible enough to the home readers to trigger their sympathy, but also different enough to capture their interest and enable them to feel that they were partaking vicariously in a distinctive Australian episode.

Cooey, or, The trackers of Glenferry (1989), was based on the story of the three Duff children, outlined in chapter two, whose discovery after nine days lost in the bush in 1864 was widely reported in Australian newspapers; their story was also published in England in various formats.21 Strutt explained in the preface that his interest in the story was two-fold. He was concerned to produce the ‘permanent record’ of the story that he felt the lost children’s ‘endurance’ and ‘devotion to one another’ deserved. Equally Strutt saw Cooey as a memorial to a disappearing race, ‘the Australian Aborigines through whose persevering efforts the lost children were found at last’. His was very much an unproblematic view of the Noble Savage—‘these Sons of the Desert’— doomed to fade away as part of an inevitable natural cycle.

Much is to be regretted that these poor Aborigines, in many ways so keen and clever, should soon become only a memory in the land of their ancestors, notwithstanding all the benevolent efforts made to save their race from extinction.22

20 William Strutt, Cooey, or, The trackers of Glenferry, begun 1876 and completed 1901, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1989, p. 2. 21 The Times (London), 17 November 1864, p. 6; The Australian Babes in the Wood, by the author of “Little Jessie”, Griffith & Farran, London, 1866. 22 Strutt, Cooey, p. 1. 192

Other late nineteenth-century writers about the colonial experience also depicted the episode of lost children as part of the challenges from nature faced by settlers. Howard Willoughby in his Australian Pictures (1886), specifically linked the ‘episode in bush life’ of ‘the lost children’ with two other ‘enemies’ of the settler—drought and fire.23 Willoughby asserted that:

This is a drama that is constantly enacted in the one place or the other. Australian children are quick, and they learn in a wonderful way how to travel about country, but still, where there is scrub in the neighbourhood or much undergrowth of any kind, the younger members of the family are terribly apt to go astray.24

Becoming lost was portrayed as another challenge posed by the environment to be faced and overcome. Willoughby’s imagined recreation of such an incident proceeded reassuringly.

The policeman telegraphs all about for aid, but faster still ‘the bush telegraph’ spreads the intelligence that ‘Big Giles, of Wattle Tree flat, is in trouble. Two of his little ones are astray.’ Then it is that human fellowship shows to advantage. All business is laid aside. The sheep that were being bargained for are neither bought nor sold; the hay is left unstacked; the reaping is discontinued ... the morning will witness a couple of hundred men ready to be divided into parties and to take care that no portion of the country is unsearched.25

After the community set aside everything else for the search, the children were found—‘rarely does a second night elapse before the distracted mother has her children with her again, and one night in the Australian bush is not likely to have injured the little ones much’.26 However, Willoughby wrote from the comfortable viewpoint of urbanised Australia in the late 1880s, and his easy reassurance did not match many of the actual incidents.

Both Willoughby and Strutt portrayed idealised visions of community and childhood. In each story the surrounding community responded quickly and effectively, with stalwart bushmen instituting a search. The drawing that

23 Howard Willoughby, Australian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil, facsimile copy by AUSTAPRINT 1978, first published by The Religious Tract Society, London, 1886, pp. 212, 217. The book’s facing title page identifies Willoughby as being of the Melbourne Argus, and the prose reflects this journalistic background. 24 Ibid., p. 217. 25 Ibid., pp. 217-8. 26 Ibid., p. 218. 193

illustrated Willoughby’s story is of a very unruffled, ringletted young girl, asleep on a grassy bank edged with ferns, reassuringly on the point of being found by a mounted searcher. Roderick, Bella and David, the lost children in Cooey who were supposedly from a poor labouring family, remained resolutely proper of speech and behaviour during their nine days in the bush.27 Each night the children said their prayers—‘their little orisons’—taught them by their solid Scottish parents.28 The children’s prayers and the effort of the searchers were rewarded with their safe discovery and the story concluded positively, ‘Thus all was well once more with the Duncan family’.29 As I have indicated, many of the actual searches for lost children were neither so easily or neatly organised, nor so successful.

A small-scale search made by an isolated family was a very different experience. This description by Mrs. Edward Millett in her rather dramatically titled reminiscences of early Western Australia, An Australian Parsonage, or, the Settler and the Savage in Western Australia (1872), evokes the terror and despair of parents in this situation.

No histories of this kind are so full of misery as those which are told by parents whose children have perished in the bush. The details of such narrations vary but little, and one instance will serve as a specimen of them all. In most cases the home has been a lonely hut ... The cleared space about a hut is as it were an island in the vast surrounding oceanlike wilderness ... a child of three years old wandered away one morning from its home, and the mother, imagining that it was gone to watch its father work at home in the saw-pit, felt no anxiety until her husband came home alone at dinner-time and asked for “little Tommy” ... He and his half-frenzied wife examined, as they thought, every inch of ground for miles around their hut, and their search was continued through so many successive hours that, for a time, the father became blinded with the strain upon his sight. In his despair he persuaded a shepherd to drive a flock over the ground near the hut, knowing that the appearance of an unexpected object among the brushwood will bring sheep to a sudden halt.30

The child was not found and the parents could only hold onto ‘the dreary

27 Strutt, Cooey, p. 10. 28 Ibid., p. 12. 29 Ibid., p. 54. 30 Mrs. Edward Millett, An Australian Parsonage or, the Settler and the Savage in Western Australia, facsimile edition, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1980, first published 1872, Edward Stanford, London, pp. 263-5. 194

consolation ... that the heat was so excessive, on the day that the child was lost, that its sufferings could not have lasted many hours’.31 After several months the child’s remains were discovered ‘in a thicket but three quarters of a mile from ... home, and the father must, as he said, have often passed within a few yards of the very spot’.32 Two themes that emerge from this story are found in so many others—the searchers’ conviction that they have covered every inch of ground, and the eventual discovery of the child’s remains not far from home. They testify to the difficulty many Europeans experienced in navigating the Australian bush.

These parents were struggling, small settlers, and largely uneducated as the mother’s language demonstrates, yet it is this very inarticulateness which makes their loss heartbreaking. Months after her son’s disappearance, the sight of a neighbour heading towards their house carrying a small box was enough for her to realise that ‘Them’s my Tommy’s bones!’, so completely was she still grieving for his loss.33 In contrast to many fictional representations of the bodies of lost children that depicted the children as appearing asleep, often clutching a posy of wildflowers, Mrs. Millett faced the grim reality of death in the bush with the eventual discovery of Tommy’s body.

The body appeared to have been devoured by either pigs or wild dogs, and the tokens were few to identify, but a part of a little boot, and some scraps of a plaid frock, ennabled the poor parents to recognize the remains as those of their lost darling.34

There is no room in this story for Willoughby’s glib reassurance about the benign nature of the Australian bush or the near-certainty of finding lost children. Nor is there any hint of Strutt’s worthy, articulate Scottish parents with their finely tuned sense of social hierarchy. This is a real episode, not a fictional representation, and it comes from an earlier period of settlement than the late nineteenth century.35

31 Ibid., p. 264. 32 Ibid., p. 265. 33 Ibid., p. 264. 34 Ibid. 35 Mrs. Millett and her husband traveled to Australia in 1863, and these stories were related to her by, or about, settlers already in Western Australia. 195

The Bush For the explorers and pioneers to be viewed as conquering heroes, there had to be an opponent with whom to do battle. The bush itself took on a persona and became a presence, often threatening, in the developing Australian consciousness. The term (derived from the Dutch bosch ) transmuted from a simple and fairly specific descriptor of ‘thickly forested country’ to something that denoted all country beyond the coastal settlement. The various forms of the word that developed during the first half of the 1800s give an indication of the extent to which the bush and getting lost became associated. To ‘bush it’, meaning to camp involuntarily in the bush, was used as early as 1825.36 This was not the only meaning of to ‘bush it’. It could also be a voluntary excursion into unknown country or to live in spartan conditions. However to become ‘bushed’ specifically and solely meant to be lost in the bush.37

There is an enigma at the very heart of the portrayal of children lost in an environment that was at best uncaring, at worst threatening. This fear of the environment combined with the need to wrest a living from it, contributed to the condition that Ann Curthoys described as the need to see ‘the land as antagonist’, a condition that she delineated in her examination of the mythology of white Australia, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’ (1999).38 It was not only an Australian experience. Curthoys contends that this was also a feature in other settler countries such as Canada, and that national demons were geographically determined—Canadians battled with snow, ice and water, Australians with fire, heat and bush. She positions this view of the land within the context of the pioneer legend, arguing that the mythological settler-hero requires an adversary, and that an antagonistic landscape fulfils this role. ‘In the pioneer legend, the obstacles the settler-hero must fight are mainly the land itself. The desert and the bush become powerful adversaries’.39

However, the children who became lost were overwhelmingly in the bush because they were comfortable in it. Not for them Marcus Clarke’s depiction

36 Joan Hughes (ed.), Australian Words and Their Origins, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 96. 37 Ibid., pp. 96-7. 38 Ann Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 61, 1999, p. 8. 39 Ibid. 196

of mountain forests ‘funereal, secret, stern’ with ‘animal life’ that ‘is either grotesque or ghostly’. Any suggestion that the surrounding bush displayed ‘the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write’ would surely have been met with blank incomprehension.40 The stories I have recounted of the ways in which children became lost make clear that the bush was part of their everyday life. They played games in the bush, searched for flowers, pursued lost animals, went to visit fathers at work, gathered broom, rode horses—the bush was no alien, threatening environment for these children, whatever their ultimate fate. Becoming lost was actually evidence of the extent to which children felt comfortable in the bush. The view of the bush as monotonous, unvariable—‘an oceanlike wilderness’41—was very much an adult construct, and generally that of a non-native born adult. It was often also a perception that came after the loss of a child, it was then that the bush took on a threatening aspect. One of the most dramatic illustrations of the way in which the colonists’ view of the bush could change from idyllic playground to cruel antagonist is found in this story of the disappearance of Lewis Vieusseux.

Lost in the Dandenong Ranges “Oh my boy – my poor little boy – he is lost.” (Julie Vieusseux recorded by A.W. Howitt in letter to Annie Howitt, 15 January 1858)

The duality with which the bush could be viewed is exemplified in this most unusual incident of a child lost in the bush, one that involved a conjunction of city and bush. In January 1858 Lewis Vieusseux, the eight-year-old son of the proprietors of a very successful Ladies’ College in Melbourne, became lost during an overnight family picnic to the increasingly popular Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges of Victoria.42

The Vieusseux family had moved in the upper circles of Melbourne’s social and cultural life since their arrival in Melbourne in 1852. Julie Vieusseux was

40 Marcus Clarke, preface to 1876 edition of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Sea Spray and Smoke Drift, in Michael Wilding (ed.) Marcus Clarke, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1988, pp. 645-7. 41Millett, Australian Parsonage, pp. 263. 42Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 47. The child’s name is spelt Louis or Lewis in different accounts, I have used Lewis because that is the way in which Theobald noted it as having been entered by Julie Vieusseux in the family bible. Where quoting Howitt I have retained his spelling. 197

an accomplished portrait painter; among her surviving portraits is one of fellow-artist and friend, Eugene von Guérard.43 She became a friend of Georgiana McCrae, a member of Governor La Trobe’s circle, who was also well-known in the colony as a portraitist.44 In 1857 Vieusseux exhibited with the Victorian Society of Fine Arts, alongside recognized colonial luminaries including Ludwig Becker, von Guérard, McCrae and Nicholas Chevalier.45 The family were part of the city’s active cultural and social life, the development of which had been accelerated by the influx of people and wealth with the Victorian goldrushes of the 1850s. This was a rapidly urbanising society, the population of Melbourne rose from 29 000 in 1851 to 125 000 in 1861.46 The establishment of a grand Public Library (1851) and a University (1853), demonstrated that this was a community that took itself seriously.

Within this social context the Vieusseux family appear to have been well insulated against the vicissitudes of bush life. Most of the recorded incidents of children lost in the bush involved children of poor settlers—shepherds, small selectors, miners and timber-cutters. Either in the course of unsupervised play or work they wandered off into the bush. Lewis was lost in very different circumstances—while riding ‘an old stock horse’ down a track to the hut where the excursion party had previously spent the night; and with his mother and others of the party walking not far behind. It seems almost incredible that he could have become lost, but a detailed and vivid description of the incident is contained in letters written to family in England by one of the party, Alfred William Howitt.47

The immediacy of this account by an intelligent, perceptive and articulate participant provides a rare insight into the awful ease with which people, particularly children, could be lost in the Australian bush, and also illuminates the details of a bush search. These letters serve to demonstrate one of the ways

43 Ibid. p. 45. 44 Brenda Niall, Georgiana, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 214. 45 Ibid., p. 217.(Becker later died in his role as artist on the Burke and Wills expedition, Chevalier was best known for his landscape paintings, von Guérard was also known for his landscapes, as well as his paintings of the goldfields and homesteads.) 46 Chris McConville in Davison, Hirst, Macintyre (eds) Oxford Companion, 2001, p. 427. 47 AW Howitt came to Victoria in the 1850s and soon became known as a very capable bushman. He led the 1861 expedition to recover the remains of Burke and Wills and later published several studies of the Aboriginal people of south-east Australia. (Davison, Hirst, Macintyre eds. Oxford Companion, 1999, p. 329). 198

in which colonial experiences were portrayed and disseminated in the home country, to take their place in the rapidly developing mythology of Australian colonial life. Howitt, who also arrived in Victoria in 1852, soon became known as a very capable bushman. He led the 1861 expedition to recover the remains of Burke and Wills and was later widely recognised for his contributions to geology and anthropology. He published several studies of the Aboriginal people of south-east Australia, most notably The Native Tribes of South-east Australia (1904).48

In the first of these letters, written on 15 January 1858 to his sister, Annie, Howitt, explained that he had just collected his letters from home, having

only returned [to Melbourne] the day before yesterday from the Dandenong Ranges where having been a fortnight trying with ... others to find a poor little child that has been lost in the mountains but unfortunately without the slightest success. It has been a horrible affair 49

Howitt described the incident as causing something of a sensation in Melbourne—being ‘a very special topic of interest at present as is our search’—and devoted the rest of the letter (four closely written, crossed sides) to giving Annie ‘as clear an account I can’.

The early part of the letter refers to his friends ‘the Vieusseux who used to live in Brighton ... now living in Melbourne near the Markets’. This quintessentially urban couple were in the vanguard of excursionists to the Ferntree Gully, very possibly tempted by the work of another artist friend, Eugene von Guérard, whose widely-acclaimed painting Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges was first exhibited in 1857.50 Howitt’s letter makes it clear that the excursion party viewed the bush as a playground:

For some time Mrs. Vieusseux has determined to have a picnic about Xmas at the Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong and on new years day we started from town for the Liddiards station which lies immediately below the mountain. We had ... all kinds of good things both eatables and drinkables and set out in the highest spirits … 51

48 Ibid. 49 AW Howitt to Annie Howitt, 15 January 1858, MS 9356 1045/2b (9), Manuscripts, State Library of Victoria. 50 Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 107. 51 AWH letter to AH, 15 January. 199

Howitt’s descriptions of the all-day journey to their destination—the Liddiards’ hut on the mountain—and their overnight stay, accords with the notion of the bush as a place for recreation and rejuvenation, as well as the study of nature. In all respects it seemed an essentially benign environment.

About one o’clock we reached the Dandenong Creek and camped for the luncheon … and a merry time we had of it. The weather was glorious, the shrubs on the banks of the creek were loaded with white blooms and the air seemed to feel lighter and purer with every step we took from Melbourne.52

The party stayed overnight at ‘the Liddiards hut’ (which Howitt sketched for Annie to show what he meant by its having an ‘undoubted bush appearance’ – see Illustration 8), and the next day the group visited the Ferntree Gully and then separated, with several of the men including Howitt and Mr. Vieusseux heading off for the summit of the mountain, leaving Mrs. Vieusseux, Lewis and another man to rest before heading back to the hut. With the remaining group was ‘Taps’, an elderly horse belonging to Liddiard which, he had assured them, would walk straight home, thereby ensuring that they would not get lost. The tired Lewis headed down the track on ‘Taps’ with the adults walking a little way behind. What followed, as explained to Howitt by a distraught Julie Vieusseux, demonstrates just how easy it was to become lost.

When they got to Dodson’s hut Louis [sic] and ‘Taps’ were some little way in front and out of sight and most unfortunately Mrs. Vieusseux took the wrong turning - a road leading past the sawmill. Having followed this for a few hundred yards but not seeing Louis she “cooeed” and Louis answered her from the other track. She then sent the driver ... [to] fetch [him] but he misunderstood her and only went as far as to see Louis and then came back to tell her that he had seen Louis leading the horse. From this moment not the faintest trace of the little boy has ever been found. If he had been [carried?] off in the air or swallowed by the earth his disa p pearance could not have been more complete or mysterious.53

The tone of bafflement and frustration apparent in Howitt’s comment suggests why some people turned to the notion, examined in earlier chapters, of the lost children having been taken by Aborigines. This at least gave them a tangible

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 200

focus for their anger and sorrow, something capable of rational understanding.

Despite an extensive search over the following three weeks, Lewis’ fate remained unknown. The horse was soon found ‘quietly grazing not a few hundred yards from where she was last seen’, but there was no sign of the boy. It was two years before his remains were found. Evidence given at the inquest outlined a vigorous search:

We commenced a search for him, and in a short time, being rejoined by the party, all of them aided us in that search. ... We continued that search until night fall and lighted fires on the hill, and shouted in the direction we thought the child be. The search was continued next day with great additional help on horseback, and was kept up daily for a t l east a week, and at periods for three weeks, but without any success.54

Howitt’s more detailed descriptions fill in the gaps and also convey the human agony of the experience. In a letter to another family member he described lighting fires that night to appease the anxious mother, and of dreading to see her because

the terrible anxiety in her face exercised a sort of horrible fascination upon me ... she would start up and wring her hands - the tears streaming from her eyes - and exclaim in a tone of such heart rending misery “Louis-Louis, my poor little boy - why will you not answer your mother” - that my blood seemed to freeze, it was like a horrible dream become as reality.55

This is an unusually intimate insight into the experience of losing a child in the Bush. Most accounts detail the search with only a passing reference to the state of the parents. Howitt goes on to relate the searchers forming ‘a ‘cordon’ each man in sight of the others and and ‘cooeeing’ out with [every?] few minutes’, then checking through ‘thick scrub, along the creeks, over ranges’ with the area ‘full of snakes’. Horses were brought in but the country was so rough that one fell over on its rider and Howitt wondered ‘that he was not killed’.

In this letter Howitt provides more detail about the ‘blacks’ mentioned briefly in the earlier letter. They appear to have been called about a week after

54 Age, 17 January 1860, report of inquest, p. 3. 55 A.W. Howitt to family member, 25 January 1858, MS 9356 1045/2b (10), Manuscripts, State Library of Victoria. 201

the search began and rapidly realised that there was no hope of finding Louis. Howitt described going to see the ‘blackfellows’ after their first day of tracking and finding them

very sulky about something … after a great deal of trouble got them to talk. “Bale me find him at all” said Big Jim “plenty rain fall him down – no get him track – a little boy too much pull away all about – no look at that fellar (the sun) – tumble down along the scrub, … This was the substance of his conversation – the two others said nothing and although they knew that by finding Louis they would get ‘fifty yellow fellow’ they would not look, they believed that he was dead and that it was useless to look and went off to the Yarra.56

Howitt agreed with their assessment but still wanted to keep searching, giving as his reason a virtually universal driving force in the search for lost children:

Of course we had given up hope of finding the child alive so many days had passed by that we could only expect to find his body – bu t even his cap or a piece of his clothes would have been a satisfaction.57

It was the total disappearance of children that seemed so hard to bear, almost as if they had never existed. At least the finding of a body brought some closure to the parents, and generally provided a rational explanation of events.

Howitt outlined his own theory as to what had happened to Lewis in his letter to Annie and included a sketch map to show where the events took place (see illustration 9). He believed that Lewis, upon hearing his mother cooee, had attempted to turn the grazing mare back, which it would not do being so close to home. He thought that the child had then dismounted, left the horse and headed towards the cooee along a fence and then across an old bridge to the road his mother had just left, rushing towards where she had heard him. Then Lewis, hurrying along the road looking for his mother had reached the sawmill and been frightened off into the bush by savage dogs that

ran out at him open mouthed as they do at every one – and that he then either took a blind track leading part way to [Harbury’s] or that bein g frightened off the road he was unable to find his way onto it again.58

56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 A.W.H. letter, 15 January. 202

In a poignant allusion to a lost opportunity of rescue, Howitt describes a meeting several days into the search with Banbury, a carter of post and rails with a hut on the mountain (marked on his sketch map). He told them that:

On Saturday night he’d heard a child “a cooeing and a hollering” in the direction of his hut and had supposed it to be his little boy. On going home he found the child there before him and thought nothing of the circumstance. … on Saturday morning he had seen the prints of a child’s foot coming down towards the sawmill from Dobson’s.59

This episode emphasises the role of luck in these searches.

Given the standing of the Vieusseux family, the obvious public interest in such stories and the active and fairly lengthy search, one would expect to find some coverage of the incident in the Melbourne newspapers. In fact I have been able to find none, nor in any regional newspapers or journals. The family placed an advertisement in the Age offering a £50 reward for information about the boy, but there were no articles describing the incident or the search.60

One can only speculate as to the reason for this lack of publicity, but class certainly seems to be a possibility. There may have been some sense that it was inappropriate to intrude on an upper-class family, or even active intervention to prevent publicity. The family was, after all, running a Ladies’ College for a living and may have felt that public association with such a tragedy would affect their enrolments. However there was another very unusual aspect to this episode. Marjorie Theobald reports that among the personal papers retained by the family were several items relating to Lewis’ disappearance including, ‘a letter from the chief commissioner of police describing the search and regretting his failure to find the child ... [and] a semi-literate ransom note which attempts to extort money from the parents in return for the child’.61 This is unique in the annals of colonial lost child stories; poor families received neither ransom demands nor letters from the chief commissioner of police. The ransom attempt may explain any lack of publicity—perhaps it was considered that news of the search would endanger the boy’s life. Ransom seems a peculiarly urban crime that sits oddly with the

59 A.W.H. letter, 25 January. 60 Age, 7 January 1858, p. 1 (repeated 8, 9, 11 January). 61 Theobald, Knowing Women, p. 47. 203

necessarily rural nature of the image of ‘lost in the bush’.

Nothing came of the ransom attempt or the search. In a poignant admission that her son would not be found alive, Julie Vieusseux memorialised his life. She entered his name on the flyleaf of the family bible—‘Lewis Stephen Arthur Vieusseux … lost 2nd January 1858’—and painted his portrait, using her remaining son, Edward, as a model.62 Just over two years later some certainty was given the family with the discovery of a skeleton and clothing that served to identify Lewis. His remains were found by a wood-cutter in search of water. The paragraph in the Argus announcing this discovery concluded with a reminder to readers that

scarcely a month ago a trooper was lost somewhere about the same spot in those ranges, and up to this time has not been heard of, notwithstanding that, as we are now informed, a vigorous search was for several days instituted by the authorities.63

The message was clear—however apparently attractive, the bush remained a dangerous place. The coronial inquest on the remains concluded that

on the 5th of January, 1860, the remains of the deceased were found in the Dandenong ranges, that there were no marks of violence upon them, nor any evidence to show the cause of death.64

The disappearance of Lewis Vieusseux must have served as a chilling demonstration to the colonists of the power of the bush—neither money, nor education nor social status could protect the child. He was just as vulnerable as the child of the poorest settler. Nor was he the only child to be lost in the area. In John Larkins’ The Book of the Dandenongs (1978), there is a short account of an eerily similar incident. Whilst detailing the increasing settlement of the area and its construction as a tourist area Larkins noted that:

The mountains did not surrender without a struggle. In 1863 a six-year- old boy, out for a weekend riding visit, became lost in the bu sh near Ferntree Gully; his remains were found many years later.65

62 Ibid. Another son, Stephen, had died at the age of fifteen months in 1852, p. 45. 63 Argus, 17 January 1860, p. 5. 64 Age, 17 January 1860, p. 3. 65 John Larkins, The Book of the Dandenongs, Rigby, Melbourne, 1978, p. 76. 204

This boy too, had been engulfed in Howitt’s ‘impenetrable scrub’.

Aboriginal assistance in searches One of these patterns of behaviour in exploration and searches was the European use of Aboriginal expertise in the bush, which quickly became established as the norm. We saw an instance of this in the search for Lewis Vieusseux. Although the tracking skills of Aborigines evoked European interest from the early days of colonisation, there is very little historical work on the subject of black trackers in the colonial period. Gary Presland’s detailed account of tracking, For God’s Sake Send the Trackers … (1998), is the most comprehensive consideration of the tracking process and experience, although limited in scope to Victoria.66 In With the White People, Henry Reynolds positions the black trackers within the context of exploration expeditions and as police troopers. Other works tend to the anecdotal, such as Jack Bohemia and Bill McGregor, Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker (1995).67

In many accounts of the colonial settlement process, explorers and travellers alike testified to the depth of the Aboriginal knowledge of their environment, and to their generosity in sharing this knowledge. Henry Reynolds details many of these responses, including that of Major Thomas Mitchell who consulted local guides on one of his early expeditions. He reported that the Aborigines were concerned for ‘the safe passage of our carts’ and, after considering the direction in which the expedition was heading, led them to ‘an easy, open pass’, through a range which would otherwise have presented great difficulty to the explorers.68

A vital facet of this knowledge-sharing was advice given to Europeans as to where water could be found. Edward Eyre described chance meetings with Aborigines in both South and Western Australia, who had then gone long distances to show him water sources and help him extract it.69 Charles Sturt’s 1844 expedition to central Australia was assisted by a local man, Toonda, who drew a plan in the sand, ‘of the Darling for 300 miles, also of the Murray a

66 Gary Presland, For God’s Sake Send the Trackers …, Victoria Press, Melbourne, 1998. 67 Jack Bohemia and Bill McGregor, Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1995. 68 Reynolds, White People, p. 12. 69 Ibid., p. 13. 205

good distance both above and below its junctions. He drew all the lagoons and gave the name of each’. Burke and Wills’ stubborn refusal to enlist Aboriginal help with their expedition until it was too late was a critical factor in the debacle over which they presided. Many other explorers took Aboriginal guides with them as part of their expedition force. Some used force to capture and retain guides. Reynolds recounts the admission of L.H. Wells that, on his forays into the Gibson Desert in 1896-97, he captured two ‘natives … one of whom we chained up so that he could not escape before leading us to water’. On a similar expedition into the desert, D.W. Carnegie admitted to chaining captive Aborigines and refusing them water until they took the expedition to the nearest well.70

As well as showing European bush travellers the paths to follow and places for water, often Aborigines assumed caretaker responsibility for groups. Sturt described a process of being ‘literally consigned’ into the care of one tribe by another group who had taken him thus far.71 This concept of ambassadorship, of providing for safe passage of Europeans was also noted by other explorers. Many employed Aboriginal guides, whose role included all of these aspects as well as that of tracking, either lost stock, lost people or lost objects.72 This, of course, was the skill that brought Aborigines into the searches for lost children. With an objectivity rarely seen in colonists, Mitchell commented on the fact that a ten-year-old Aboriginal boy should be needed to find two lost bullocks when none of the adult whites could.

‘It must, indeed, appear strange to these people of the soil’, he wrote, ‘that the white man who brought such large animals as oxen with them into the country’ was unable to find them ‘without the assistance of a mere child of their own race’.73

The colonists’ bush incompetence must have been incomprehensible to Aborigines, who were certainly aware of it. However, apart from times when they easily escaped pursuit and then derided their pursuers, they were generally extremely helpful. 74 In her account of the early days in Western

70 Ibid., p. 14. 71 Ibid., p. 15. 72 Ibid., pp. 22-3. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., p. 44. Reynolds relates several accounts of Aborigines easily avoiding capture and derisively slapping their buttocks at pursuers before disappearing. 206

Australia, cited earlier, Mrs. Millett described several incidents of Aboriginal kindness, including an accident in which a woman alone on a bush-track overturned the cart she was driving and dislocated her hip. Before night she was found by an

old native woman ... [who] treated her with the kindness that characterizes the behaviour of the aborigines in all similar circumstances, who, if they meet a white person lost in the bush, will invariably do their utmost to assist them.

In support of this claim, Millett recounted another story told her by the lady involved, who,

having once lost her way on horseback, she tried a coo-ee on the chance of making herself heard by a fellow-creature, when a native, unseen by her previously, appeared ... and not only guided her into the right track, but also saw her safely to the end of her journey.75

Robert Lyon, who came to settle in the Swan River colony in 1829, described the initial kindness of the local people in a letter to the Secretary of State

whilst any of us lost ourselves in the bush and were thus completely in their power, these noble minded people shared with us their scanty & precarious meal: lodged us for the night and in the morning directed us on our way. 76

The Aboriginal tracker’s concern for children and delight at being able to restore them to their parents was frequently remarked upon in accounts of lost child episodes, at least until around the 1880s. One example of this is in an account that claims to record the first use of black trackers in Western Australia.77 The Australian Encyclopedia notes that ‘a boy of 5 years named Hall’ disappeared into ‘wild bush near Fremantle’ on 11th December 1834. Two Aborigines, Migo and Mollydobbin, offered to help and after a 10-hour search covering more than 20 miles they found the boy alive. This account notes that the police officer, Norcott, was so impressed by the trackers ‘perseverance’ and ‘delight at finding the lad’, that he commended them in his report. There is another version of this story that provides a revealing

75 Millett, Australian Parsonage, pp. 262-3. 76 Reynolds, Whispering, p. 71. 77 Alec H. Chisholm (ed-in-chief), The Australian Encyclopedia, vol.II, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1958, p. 199. 207

comparison to this rather sparse and factual account. In an example of cross- cultural transmission from an unusual angle—that is, from Australia to America—Parley’s Magazine, published in New York in 1843, related the story of ‘The Child that was lost in the Woods of New South Wales.’78 This was a magazine for children and its contents suggest that it aimed to be educational and morally uplifting through stories of the natural world and its peoples. The story is prefaced with this introductory paragraph:

We copy from a Newspaper printed in Australia, the following authentic narrative, written by one who lives near the spot where the fact occurred. It happened in an English settlement on Swan River, and sets the disposition of the natives in a very pleasing light. Swan River is in New South Wales, in the Pacific Ocean, a n d the natives are thought to be the most abject of any race of savages.79

Although the names and dates differ, the similarity of details strongly suggests that this is the incident described by the Australian Encyclopedia.80 The little boy, aged ‘between five and six years’ went missing on 11th December, in 1841 rather than 1834. His surname was Hale, very close to Hall. It seems that the article title was a form of translation, for ‘bush’ rather than ‘wood’ is used in the story itself, it is a way of catching the reader’s attention; and of course the cultural reverberations of the image of a child lost in the woods would be strong with its ‘Babes in the Wood’ connotations.81 The Parley’s account is very detailed, describing how the boy had disappeared from watching soldiers fishing on the beach. The ensuing search failed to find him and next day set out with ‘two natives, Migo and Molly-Dobbin’. Their achievement in finding tracks ‘lost by all but the natives’ and their determination in pursuing them through the most difficult terrain was noted and reiterated.82 When the boy was eventually found, both the achievement and pleasure of the Aborigines were given full measure by Mr. Norcott.

The joy and delight of the two natives is described to have been beyond

78 ‘The Child that was lost in the Woods of New South Wales’, Parley’s Magazine, New York, 1843. For further discussion of the process of cross-cultural transmission see chapters three and four which examine captivity stories in Australia and other settler colonies. 79 Ibid., p. 95. 80 The accuracy of the earlier date of 1834 is reinforced by an entry in the Journal of the Superintendent of Mounted Police (in Western Australia) cited in On This Side, Bookland., Perth, 1985, p. 23. This records his successful search for a settler’s child, with Migo and Mauley Dobbin. 81 See chapter two, ‘From ‘Babes in the Wood’ to ‘Bush-lost Babies’. 82 Parley’s, p. 96. 208

conception; and their steady perseverance, Mr. Norcott says, was beyond anything he could have anticipated from them: when it is considered that they walked a distance of nearly 22 miles, with their eyes, for ten hours, constantly fixed upon the ground, and at the same time showing the most intense anxiety to be instrumental in rescuing the child from its impending fate83

The magazine editor invokes the concept of the ‘noble savage’ at this point as part of the morality of the tale, but the Aborigines were certainly accorded a full part in the story.

In his Black but Comely: Aboriginal Life in Australia (1884), the Anglican missionary John Gribble recounted his experience as a child of becoming lost and being looked after by the local Aborigines.84 Others observers commented upon the kindness shown each other by members of the Aboriginal groups, and remarked on the gentleness and compassion with which children were raised—‘more [care] than generally falls to the lot of children of the poor class of Europeans’, noted German missionary, H. Meyer.85 The Aboriginal ability and readiness to assist in the search for lost whites became so widely recognised that it came to be taken for granted. As the Callandoon and Vieusseux incidents demonstrated, for many whites it was considered merely a question as to where black trackers could be found, rather than whether or not they would come.

The attitude towards trackers was ambivalent. They could be lauded and trusted for their tracking skills, but still not trusted outside of that sphere. Indeed, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, some literary accounts of searches for lost children tended to virtually write out the Aborigines, either by removing them entirely or reducing them to the status of animals, to whom little or no credit for skill or compassion was accorded. The changing role accorded Aboriginal trackers in various representations of the story of the Duff children, outlined in chapter two, demonstrates this shift in attitude over the second half of the century.

83 Ibid., p. 98. 84 Reynolds, Whispering, p. 138. 85 Ibid., pp. 26-7. 209

Aboriginal trackers in the Duff story In the period closest to the actual incident the valuable skills of the Aborigines were clearly recognised, the first newspaper article lamented the absence of trackers: ‘Unfortunately, no black-fellows could be got to assist in the search’.86 In his first-hand account based upon interviews with the parents and children straight after their return home –‘The Story Of The Lost Children’ (1864)—the Reverend Simpson described Duff returning to the, so-far unsuccessful, search for the children with ‘three blacks from behind Mount Elgin, Dickey, Jerry, and Fred.’ The men were accorded unqualified respect for their tracking skills:

At once the superiority of the blacks was apparent. They detected three tracks where at least only one had before been seen, and they travelled on at a greatly more rapid rate.87

There was nothing patronising about this description: the worth of these men and their importance to the search was fully recognised; their presence meant that, ‘Hope revived in every heart’. This description came from first-hand contact with the Aborigines. Compare it to the Reverend Fairclough's account , written in 1895:

Then someone set off to get some black fellows - Natives of Australia - to track the c h ildren … Now the blacks can find and follow a trail like a dog; perhaps better. They have very sharp eyes, and perhaps a kind of instinct too.88

In this version of the story the skill of the Aborigines was reduced to mere animal instinct, a quality of their race rather than the product of intelligence and training and the Aborigines were debased to animal status with it.

The Fairclough version marks the critical point at which the episode of the lost Duff children moves from factual account into something much closer to fiction. The characterisation of the blacks inherent in this shift reduces them to stock figures. Although always described in the plural, only one Aborigine is actually named, ‘Jimmy, the black’. The Aborigines’ speech is rendered in a sort of universal pidgin—‘Him no get cold’, ‘Him plenty tired’. They became

86 Argus, 27 August 1864, p.6. 87 Weekly Review and Messenger: a journal of politics, literature, and social and Christian progress.’, Alfred Mason and Richard James Frith, Melbourne, 3 September 1864, p. 5. 88 The Southern Cross: a weekly religious journal, Melbourne, 18 January 1895, p.66. 210

the comic relief in the story. For example, Fairclough related that when the children were found, ‘the simple blacks … rolled, danced, and cried with joy’.89 They were rendered as stereotypes rather than individual people. This reduction of Aboriginal people to the simplest level reflects the strand of thinking in late nineteenth-century Australia that in 1887 found a voice in the radical Brisbane weekly, Boomerang:

The Australian nigger is generally regarded as about the lowest type of human creature about … There are some splendid points about the Black and one in which he is far ahead of the Chinkie. He’ll die out, and the Chinkie won’t.90

This latter comment went to the heart of another belief at the end of the nineteenth century about Australian Aborigines, which was that they were ‘dying out’. William Strutt reflected this in his Preface to Cooey, dated 1901, in which he notes that he wanted to record the skill and intelligence of the Australian Aborigines because:

Much it is t o be regretted that these poor Aborigines, in many ways so keen and clever, should soon become only a memory in the land of their ancestors.91

His depictions are elegiac, the trackers are variously described as ‘Children of the Desert’, ‘Sons of Nature’, and even ‘sable pioneers’.92

Close examination of some of the search stories helps us to reach an understanding of the forces operating in the bush searches and the attraction for participants and onlookers. That there was often an element of the search as entertainment is undeniable. A reporter in the Melbourne Argus of 1864 described the beginning of the search for a missing nine-year old girl, lost while helping her father search for strayed goats in the Blackwood area of Victoria, with ‘one and all proceeded on a tour of exploration as exciting as it was humane’.93 It suggests a mixture of motivations in searchers that

89 Ibid, p. 67. 90 Boomerang, Brisbane, 17 December 1887, quoted by David Heaton and W. H. Wilde, ‘Aborigine in White Australian Literature’, in William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, Barry Andrews (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, second edition, 1994, pp. 5-6. 91 Strutt, Cooey, p. 1. 92 Ibid., pp. 46, 48 and 49. 93 Argus, 26 July 1864, p. 7. The girl was found alive after six nights. 211

undoubtedly included a genuine humanitarian concern for the lost child, but also encompassed excitement at the break in routine and a sense of self- dramatisation at being part of a group on a noble mission.

The lost boys of Daylesford—the story begins All these elements came together in the search for ‘The Three Lost Children’ in Daylesford, Victoria, during the winter of 1867. The incident was very closely documented in both local and Melbourne papers and provides useful insights into the mechanisms of a search and the motivating psychology of those involved.

The story began in early June with a paragraph in the Daylesford Mercury headed ‘Three Boys Lost’, informing readers that William and Thomas Graham (aged seven and four years respectively) and Arthur Burnam (aged five years) had become lost the day before while looking for some goats.94 There was no question in this case of the boys having been abducted by Aborigines, for this was a settled town far removed from the frontier environment. The search therefore assumed a less aggressive tone than that for Martha Ward.95 Some unsuccessful searching had been undertaken and was to resume that day, ‘when it is hoped a sufficient body of willing hands will turn out, and any one having seen the little wanderers is requested to communicate with the distracted parents’. 96 The following day’s paper included more details of the search, including:

Mr. McTavish, of the Specimen Hill Company, having seen the paragraph in yesterday’s MERCURY, mentioned the circumstance to some of the miners in the employment of the company, and to their credit be it told, the workmen to the number of thirty volunteered their services at the loss of half a day’s wages to join in the search.97

There are several important themes to be noted here, including the newspaper’s positioning of itself at the centre of events—it was, they note, their report that led to the miners becoming involved. Important in a way as yet undefined is the information that Daylesford is a mining area. This is linked with the approval accorded the miners for forgoing pay to assist in the

94 Daylesford Mercury, 1 July 1867, p. 2 95 See chapter four, ‘Lost Children and Captivity Narratives in Australia.’ 96 Daylesford Mercury, 1 July 1867, p. 2. 97 Ibid., 2 July, p. 2. 212

search. The notion of credit being accrued to the town and community through the search becomes a major theme in the recording of the incident.

The miners’ search method replicates something of the Lawson evocation in his story,

They [the miners] spread themselves out in a line, each being within cooeeying distance of his neighbour, and taking up the search where the wanderers had been last seen, followed the direction they were going for about four miles, till they came to almost impervious scrub.

Once again the paper called for help, explaining that today there would be two search groups: ‘one exploring party will be organised on Specimen Hill as soon after day-break as possible, and another at nine o’clock’. Every man (and organised searches were essentially a male province) was exhorted to join in ‘for the sake of humanity and the fair fame of the district’.98

The following day’s newspaper report evoked the excitement and camaraderie, the sense of being united for a common purpose that typified the large-scale searches. The scene portrayed was one of amazing activity, even a conventional reference to ‘the poor little fellows’ could not hide the carnival atmosphere.

The greatest excitement prevailed in the town last evening as night fell, and the hundreds who joined in the search returned in groups, each bearing the sorrowful tidings that nothing had been seen or heard of the poor little fellows. In every direction the people turned out with the most praiseworthy zeal, the great body of them assembling at the Specimen Hill works, and spreading out in the direction in which the boys were thought to have gone. All the workmen on the Corinella mine, the Telegraph Saw Mills, Clarke’s Mills, and nearly all the splitters in the forest, so soon as they heard of the search, laid aside their tools and joined ... as soon as it was known that another day’s search had been fruitless, it was resolved, as if by a spontaneous ebullition of public feeling, to hold a meeting of the inhabitants at Bleackley’s Hotel. The town crier went through the principal streets, and at 8 o’clock the fire bell was rung, immediately after which the large room in the hotel was crammed to suffocation, and more were standing outside than would have filled it again.99

98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., 3 July 1867, p. 2. 213

After a ‘short but earnest discussion’, the meeting decided that the search needed to be more organised and, to achieve that end, proposed that all places of business be closed for a day to free people for the search. The Mayor, a local minister and a Councillor would ‘wait on the few merchants and tradesmen not present’ to ask for their agreement. It would have been difficult indeed to resist such a level of public pressure. As a further aid to organisation, it was decided with the ‘utmost unanimity’ that the searchers be sorted into companies ‘under the guidance of captains to be selected, not from their position or status, but from their qualifications as bushmen’. This interesting resolution shows a robust determination to avoid a class-ordered hierarchy. William Strutt’s story, Cooey, which was based on the disappearance and search for the Duff children, might suggest the attitude they are resisting. Cooey included the figures of ‘the Master’ of the station, Mr. Dalrymple and his friend Mr. Macrae, ‘the beau ideal of a Squatter of the old school’.100 These men were infinitely superior in all respects to the other farm workers, who were happy to recognise that fact. They deferred to the two Squatters, whose social superiority included better bush skills. Obviously the men of Daylesford did not accept that assumption. Signals were arranged using the mine whistle to let searchers know if the children were found, and to help prevent them from becoming lost themselves. All was in place for the big search.

The black trackers Another element typical of searches was introduced by Inspector Smith who informed the meeting that ‘he had telegraphed to every place where there were black trackers to have them sent on’. As I discussed earlier in relation to the support Aborigines gave to exploration parties and other forms of search, the tenuous position of Aborigines within the rapidly spreading European settlement is readily apparent in their role as trackers. This is particularly true of their involvement in the searches for lost children. Pushed to the peripheries on most occasions they suddenly became essential to European endeavours and were desperately sought. Nowhere is Robert Berkhofer’s point about the colonising Europeans’ tendency to characterise indigenous peoples according to how useful they were to the colonial endeavour—as the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ North American Indian—more clearly displayed than in this context.

100 Strutt, Cooey, pp. 32-4. 214

Berkhofer argues that colonial attitudes towards the indigene were reflective of white attitudes and needs rather than Indian behaviour:

That Indians lacked certain or all aspects of white civilization c ou ld be viewed as bad or good depending upon the observer’s feelings about this own society and the use to which he wanted to put the image.101

The Australian Aborigine was a ‘bad’ figure in the context of captivity narratives, but became a ‘good’ figure when his native skills were used in the service of the white settler, particularly in saving white children who represented the vulnerable future of the community.

It is a measure of the destruction wrought by European settlement to the local Aboriginal population that Smith had to search as widely as he did for trackers to assist in the search for the boys. His telegram to the Chief Commissioner of Police seeking help shows how far-ranging his search has been, as well as how importantly the assistance of trackers was regarded.

Daylesford July 3 1867 Three children lost in the Bullarook forest near here since thirtieth June. Have asked for Black trackers from Ballarat and Creswick none to be had. Mr. Parker late of Aboriginal Station near here says that Mr. Brough Smyth might be able to get Tommy Brinbarrum or Harauyemine from reserve please say at once if trackers can be sent from Melbourne. Some tracks preserved. A. Brooke Smith.102

Five trackers did arrive over several days, but with the handicap of having potential tracks destroyed by earlier searchers and with further damage done by inclement weather.103 Their arrival precipitated a crisis in the community search, although not about them directly; a memo from Inspector Smith dated 8 July provides some insight into the problem. In the course of recording that he would be absent briefly from the search to attend the Circuit Court in Castlemaine and deputing Sergeant Whelan to ‘look officially after the black

101 Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, Vintage Books, New York, 1979, pp. 27-8. 102 PROV, Chief Commissioner of Police, Criminal Investigation Branch, Inward Registered Correspondence 1852-1893, VPRS 937/PG, Unit 104, File 3 1867, ‘Discovery and Remains of Three Lost Children’. 103 Daylesford Mercury, 5 July 1867, p. 2. The five trackers selected by the Central Board for Aborigines for the Police Department were James Millar (Colit), Davy Smith, Tommy Du William from Carngham, and Tommy Hobson (Merrin Merrrin and Tralenah) and Tommy Farmer (Beembarmin) from Coranderrk. (J.E. Menadue, The Three Lost Children, Daylesford and District Historical Society, 1967. Third, revised edition, 1999, p. 13). 215

trackers’, Smith noted:

As general instructions, I would wish that he [Whelan] would as far as possible keep them away from being in any way interfered with by other persons engaged in the search - as they state that they are useless when so interfered with.104

This indicates that a greater agency was accorded to the black trackers than might have seemed likely. That Aborigines could set conditions for their work and have them treated seriously makes clear that in these search situations they acquired a temporary high status, and knew it. Inspector Smith reiterated this point before one of the nightly meetings of searchers, to which he had been summoned to account for police activity, particularly the trackers’ findings. In a sign of the increasing dissension among the searchers, which I will examine later in more detail, Smith defended his non-appearance at the meeting by saying that he was busy with the search. Then ‘He also said ... that the search should be continued, but hoped they would not interfere with the trackers’.105 There appeared to have been no questioning of this dictum, but rather a general recognition of superior skills. William Graham, father of two of the lost boys, joined the black trackers at one point. The newspaper reported that he ‘returned yesterday from a fruitless search, part of which he made with the trackers, of whose mode of search he speaks with the highest praise’.106

A similar shift of status and power when Aborigines took on the role of trackers was recorded by Archibald Meston in outback Queensland. In the search for a lost boy, Charles Parker, Meston wrote that:

It was curious to note the demeanour of the trackers who recognise holding and looking after the horses as their particular work and a smile from the boss is much appreciated. The trackers made no bones about slinging their horses adrift for the whites to look after, they disregarded everything except the trail and the white members of the party took it in turns to attend to them. Mr. Arnott Tower was their first Lieutenant. He walked when they walked, rode when they rode and when the trail was lost he stood ... so that the point of commencement would not be lost. At such times when the trackers were laboriously finding their way, step by step, the whites would be scouting ahead looking for soft places. At times they picked up

104 PROV, VPRS 937/PG, Unit 104, File 3, 1867. 105 Daylesford Mercury, 6 July 1867, p. 2. 106 Ibid., 20 July 1867, p. 2. 216

the tracks in front and waited for the trackers to come on.107

This acceptance of Aboriginal authority by common if unspoken consent shows a general acknowledgement of their superior bush skills. After the boy was found Meston reflected on the group dynamics.

We all worked for one object, cheerfully and amicably, with might and mane, [sic] and the success achieved was the small and best reward. The case is only another instance of the coMr.adeship and generosity of the “bush people” of the wide colony.108

It is difficult to see where the trackers fit into this depiction of the ‘bush people’. The notions of coMr.adeship and generosity were more a reflection of Meston’s attitude towards the whites who allowed the trackers to take the lead. Once their task was completed, the trackers would slip back into community invisibility as holders and carers for horses. Nowhere is the ambiguous and slippery role of Aborigines in Australia’s settler community better exemplified.

The search as redemption A consistent theme in the newspaper reporting of a community search was self-congratulation. It became an event to prove the moral worth of the town or area. This was very clearly the case for Daylesford and its inhabitants. The following excessively disreputable portrayal of an earlier Daylesford by the local paper reads almost as a confession, a purging of guilt.

Daylesford, mad with the excitement of its newly discovered gold, was the temporary home of the roughs of the colony, and the outcasts of Victoria and the neighbouring colonies. The scenes then enacted outvied the wildest tales of the wildest excesses told of the early days of the gold discoveries ... without any rival in scenes of debauchery and crime, Daylesford acquired ... a most unenviable notoriety ... and thus many obnoxious characters remained on this diggings for a longer period than usual with that class ... till it became the fashion ... to hold Daylesford up as a God-forsaken place, given up to the practice of every sort of vice, rivalling and deserving the punishment of the cities of the plain—a Soddom and Gomorrah rolled into one.

However, the article continued, redemption was at hand in the form of a

107 Archibald Meston Papers, John Oxley Library, OM64-17, first box, envelope 2. My thanks to Nikki Henningham for giving me this reference. 108 Ibid. 217

righteous quest.

Adversity ... tries the heart, and often brings out the better qualities of human nature, and the fearful calamity which has caused such excitement of feeling among us during the last few days shows us that the hearts of the people are thoroughly sound, are, to use a common expression, in the right place. A people actuated by such a spirit cannot be a callous or depraved people, and conduct more creditable to themselves and to human nature we cannot well conceive. No man need blush for the fame of Daylesford. We have a right to feel proud of our townspeople. If in the former days of her goldfield we were charged with lawless excesses, the reproach has been wiped away, and Daylesford has spontaneously, and as if to relieve its pent-up feelings, sacrificed time, money, and personal comfort, to a sense of duty—aye, and incurred danger, for a day spent in the scrub and forest is not without danger.109

The concept of expiating guilt, of winning redemption through personal sacrifice and suffering, drew upon religious teachings and folk myths. The Daylesford Mercury delineated and celebrated the perceived unifying nature of the search, bringing together men of all areas of town and bush life.

Wherever the miner, men at the saw mills, splitters in the bush, and other working men heard of the object of the search they laid aside their tools and joined in it ... The minister of the gospel, the man of business, the merchant, the tradesman, the hardy miner, and the rough bushman, the man of wealth and position, and the poor man who had nothing but zeal and a willing heart to give.110

This disparate gathering united in a common, humane cause provides a symbol of the values of mateship and bush community spirit depicted in the Lawson story discussed earlier. The powerful unifying force of the search became even more apparent with a later report that ‘The Chinese also abandoned their usual employment, and for two days their camps were almost empty’.111

The expectation of the search as a redeeming experience for the town was fulfilled by recognition from the metropolis. The Melbourne Argus printed news of the lost boys and the extensive search, largely in the form of reprinted articles from the Daylesford papers. However, after almost two weeks of searching, the Argus acknowledged the town as it represented itself, ‘The

109 Daylesford Mercury, 4 July 1867, p. 2. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid., 6 July, p. 2. 218

inhabitants of Daylesford have persevered, with a spirit which does them great credit, in the task of searching for the lost children.’112 The credit accrued did not stop there however. An article written towards the end of July, ‘A Story of Lost Children’, related all the details of the incident—the boys’ disappearance and the strength of the community response—noting the commitment of time and money from the people of Daylesford. It concluded that:

Melancholy as this story is, it has a bright side in its exhibition of an unselfish public spirit, which we are convinced is not confined to Daylesford, and of which we as Victorians have good reason to be proud.113

The need to extrapolate out to all Victoria suggests a whole community searching for reassurance and tangible evidence of its worth. Perhaps this was a mark of all new communities, and that would help make comprehensible the common high value accorded the brotherhood of the search for lost children. It was seen as such an inherently humane act that it provided irrefutable evidence of the solid worth of the community. From their self-description they clearly regarded themselves as a border society, still on the edge of the lawlessness inherent in goldfield societies. That the Argus, in turn, should feel moved to claim credit for all Victoria based on the Daylesford search suggests how fragile the sense of establishment was in the colony.

The search continues The large, nightly public meetings and the community search parties that involved all business in the town closing continued for over a week, from 1 July until 9 July. This represented an enormous investment of community time, money and emotion, but eventually cracks began to appear in the sense of common purpose. There were arguments about who should pay for printing of reward notices and even over who had offered to donate reward money.114 Questions were raised as to whom the police and trackers were accountable. When, after two hours, Inspector Smith failed to attend a nightly meeting as he had promised, the Mayor had him sent for at the instigation of the crowd. His response was fiery:

Mr. Smith here entered and was received with a storm of disapprobation ... He said he had not forgot the search and was busy at his work. While

112 Argus, 11 July 1867, p. 5. 113 Argus, Supplement, 27 July 1867, p. 1. 114 Daylesford Mercury, 5 July 1867, p. 2. 219

they were abusing him behind his back, he was instructing three black trackers.

Denying that they had abused him, one of the crowd expressed the opinion that ‘it was Mr. Smith’s duty to have been present without being sent for’.115 Implicit in this is the assumption that Smith should report to the community carrying out and supporting the search. In these large volunteer searches the lines of command and responsibility tended to blur. There were actually two searches simultaneously carried out at Daylesford—one involving local inhabitants under the direction of the Mayor and other community appointed leaders, and the other undertaken by the police and trackers. This interchange between Inspector Smith and the meeting displays how each saw themself as being central to the search, pushing the other group somewhat to the periphery.

Although 9 July was the last day of the full search involving the closure of town businesses and a turnout of all the men, searching continued intermittently for months, on a reduced scale.116 However the eventual discovery of the boys’ bodies was accidental and bizarre. In mid-September 1867 a splitter living about three miles from where the boys were last seen realised that his dog was carrying a child’s boot containing part of a foot. He alerted a neighbour and they searched unsuccessfully for the bodies. That evening the dog brought home a skull. The next day he organised a small group to follow the dog, but it wouldn’t leave the hut. The men decided to form a search party and proceeded only a short distance before one member, in climbing over a log that formed part of a fence, found scattered bones and clothes. Another man went to join him, skirting around a large tree that stood at the corner of two fences. On coming to the other side of the tree he realised that it was hollow and contained the bodies of the two younger missing children. The remains of the third boy were found near the tree.117

While the account given in the local paper strove to find comfort for their readers, it did not deny the brutal reality of death in the wild. The bodies in the tree were thought to be the two younger boys, aged four and five, and who

115 Ibid., 6 July 1867, p. 2. 116 Ibid., 6 August 1867, p. 2. 117 Ibid., 16 September 1867, p. 2. 220

were described as having a

general appearance [which] would indicate that their spirits passed away peacefully and gently while in sleep. They were lying with their faces towards the inside of the tree, the smaller one farthest in, the larger lying outside him as if to shelter him, with his right hand under and embracing the other who lay partly on his body as if nestling there for warmth.

While this analogy of death with sleep and the image of one child caring for another are typical of much of the literary representations of lost children, other details are not. A police search was reported to have found,

The knee joint, locks of hair, ribs, and pieces of broken bones ... too surely evidencing that they had been gnawed by dogs. ... Mounted- trooper Daley found some bones 200 yards from where the first remains were discovered.118

Other grim details of the appearance of the bodies, published in the Ballarat Post and then reprinted in the Argus, appear ghoulish to the modern reader.119 Perhaps they seemed so to contemporary readers also, for it is very difficult to evaluate. However the fact that they were published reflects a community for whom death and decay were literally facts of life. People were born and died at home, those with illnesses were nursed at home by family members, infection and disease were ever-present threats. It was no coincidence that the increasing tendency from the late 1800s into the early 1900s to prettify the lost child imagery accompanied increasing urbanisation and improving public health and medical knowledge. In her study of death in Australia, Pat Jalland notes that,

From about 1880 to 1918 a significant demographic transition took place whereby the traditional pattern, marked by relatively high mortality, a short life expectancy and a high infant death rate, was replaced by a new pattern with a continuous decline in mortality, improved death rates for infants and children, and increased life expectancy at birth. 120

As people lost immediate contact with country life and mortality rates dropped, harsh realities could be forgotten.121 The construction of a golden era

118 Ibid., p. 2. 119 Argus, 17 September 1867, p. 5. 120 Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History, 1840-1918, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, p. 3. 121The rapid urbanisation of Australia is evident in the figure of one-third of the population living in ‘settlements of at least 10,000 residents’ by 1891. (J.M. Powell, An Historical Geography of 221

incorporating the pioneer legend, of which the lost child scenario is a strand, was more easily undertaken away from its basis. Two of the most persuasive creators of the pioneer legend—A.B. Paterson and Henry Lawson—were urban dwellers, writing for the Sydney-based Bulletin.

The need to make an affirmation of community that drove the search for the three boys found its final expression in shaping their funeral. The Daylesford Mercury reported that

The closing scene was in keeping with the self-sacrificing spirit which has distinguished the people of Daylesford in connection with the melancholy fate of the three lost children. The suggestion of the mayor that the inhabitants should show their sympathy with the bereaved parents by shutting all places of business from an hour before the lifting of the bodies, was complied with by all classes. By one o’clock all business was suspended, and the invitation by his Worship to the inhabitants to attend the funeral was responded to by the largest assemblage that ever attended a funeral in Daylesford.122

The funeral was very formal, with an air reminiscent of a state or military funeral. After progressing along several streets in the town the hearse bearing the coffins stopped outside the Borough Council Chambers where

the great bulk of the inhabitants fell in, the mayor and councillors taking their places in the procession in a coach drawn by four horses ... the parents of the children following the hearse in a conveyance; then came a long line of persons on foot, followed by a large body of horsemen ... the whole extending about three-quarters of a mile in length. It was calculated that from 500 to 600 followed the remains, and that not fewer than 1000 were assembled in the Cemetery.

This was clearly seen as a major event in the life of Daylesford and the paper was intent on flagging the importance of the episode. Its report concluded with the image of people filing past the graveside,

taking a farewell look in their last resting-place of the little ones whose wanderings had formed so prominent a part in the public mind for the past eleven weeks, and whose fate will be long spoken of, and probably be referred to in after days as the three lost children of Daylesford.

Modern Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p. 31). Infant mortality rates dropped from 116.9 in 1880 to 58.6 in 1918. (Wray Vamplew ed., Australians: Historical Statistics, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, Broadway, 1987, p. 58). 122 Daylesford Mercury, 18 September 1867, p. 2. 222

This flag to future historians did not go unnoticed. The centenary story of the incident, written for the Daylesford and District Historical Society, was titled The Three Lost Children.123 The importance accorded to this incident by locals was not questioned; in his preface Menadue noted that, after its formation in 1964, the Historical Society ‘quickly recognised the great significance of this tragic and extraordinary episode in the annals of Daylesford history’. This ‘great significance’ is never really elucidated, it appears to have lain in the fact of the search. This was to accept the judgement of the Daylesford people of the 1860s who, in keeping with their understanding that they had been involved in or witnessed a special event, were moved to commemoration, principally by the erection of a monument over the boys’ graves. I make a detailed examination of the ways in which successive generations of Daylesford people remembered the story of the three lost boys in the following chapter, ‘Commemorations of the lost’.

As discussed earlier, the extent to which lost children stories entered into folk mythologies appears to have a strong connection with whether or not they survived. The pattern of community action displayed at Daylesford appears frequently in accounts of lost children. One such is an account from the The Ararat and Pleasant Creek Advertiser of the search from Ararat (another community with mining origins) for little Johnny Mc’Neill, lost in September 1872 while helping his grandfather to muster goats.124 The details are very reminiscent of the Daylesford incident, with an increasing gathering of searchers, all businesses closed, and a public meeting at night ‘at which all classes were represented’ to organise the continuing search. The boy was found on the third day, a cause of general rejoicing and self-congratulation, which the paper gave in full.

Nothing could be more creditable to Ararat and the surrounding localities than the action which the whole of the residents, without any exception, took in this matter ... We question much if any other community in Victoria would have acted so creditably. The two days total suspension of business and of hard, wearying search which the people voluntarily undertook, will long be proudly remembered by all resident in the town and district.

123 Menadue, The Three Lost Children, was first published in 1967. A second edition appeared in 1975, and a third, revised, edition was published in 1999. 124 R. Allan Blachford, Anecdotes of History, privately published, Ararat, 1985, pp. 50-2. 223

Outside the immediate area this incident attracted little of the attention given to the Daylesford boys, nor did it achieve the longevity.125 There seems to be a strong correlation between the success of the search and its prominence. In general, found children did not receive the same public attention as those who remained lost. This was not, however, an absolute—the Duff children received unprecedented public recognition after they were found, partly because of the length of time they had survived in the bush, but largely because of the sentimental attention given to Jane, the only girl. The process of memorialisation—who was so remembered, how, and by whom—provides an insight into the range of colonial attitudes towards loss.

125 During the search for the Three Lost Boys the Daylesford Mercury carried small items about two other lost boys, but gave them little attention. They were Frank Wiseman (1 Aug 1867, p. 2), and Duncan Harris (10 and 11 July 1867, p.2).

224

Chapter Six Commemorations of the lost

This was ‘the antiquarian imagination’, a historical sensibility particularly attuned to the material evidence of the past, and possessing a powerful sense of place.

(Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors)1

This ‘powerful sense of place’, evoked by Tom Griffiths in an illuminating exploration of what he calls ‘the Australian traditions of amateur historiography’, has been a compelling force in the Australian process of commemoration. Griffiths argues, in the context of memorials to explorers, that it was the need to find a locus for this ’sense of place’ that drove the erection of markers to claim parts of the Australian landscape as ‘classical soil’, that is, ‘the visible and ennobling evidence of history’.2 Importantly, it was within this realm of the amateur historian with ‘the antiquarian imagination’ that the image of the bush-lost child thrived and was given tangible form. The commemoration of the incidents was not an imposition of values and judgement from above but the expression of emotions felt at the centre of the Australian community; this gives an indication of how strongly the lost child image had become established in the national psyche. The memorials to bush-lost children did not occur in isolation, they took place within the wider context of memorialisation of other events or aspects of colonial life deemed worthy of remembrance, and I will consider the lost children as part of the larger group. I consider what it is that memorials do— their purpose and effect.

Why memorials? The process of memorialisation is never unproblematic. Memorials present their observer with a culturally and politically specific view of the person or event being commemorated; at the core of their being is the desire to ‘fix’ a view of whatever is being commemorated. Their very existence seeks to establish in tangible, inarguable terms the ‘correct’ interpretation of an incident, person or a period. Many Australian memorials were part of the late- nineteenth century process of ‘Institutionalising the Past’, explored by Stuart

1 Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 1. 2 Ibid., pp. 156-7. 225

Macintyre in his discussion of the writing of Australian history for the bicentenary publication, Australians: A Guide to Sources (1987).3 This ‘upsurge’ flowed on into the twentieth century, and memorials to children tended to fit into the ‘semi-official’ category noted by Macintyre—both points that I explore more fully in the course of this chapter.

As Tom Griffiths recognised in his reference to ‘classical soil’, memorials are also a means of claiming space, of asserting control over an area as well as the episode commemorated. For example, memorials to pioneers, whether specific individuals or to the generic whole, implicitly affirm the rightness of European settlement. The question must always be asked as to whose interpretation or view the memorial represented—memorials are as telling of their builders as of their subjects. They give the observer an insight into the attitudes and understandings of those who erect them, what they valued and sought to convey to future generations. Therefore, to understand the place of the image to children lost in the bush in the popular imagination, we need to consider their memorials within the wider context of memorials initiated by the local community.

The public monument is the most obvious means of commemoration, and in Australia there are several ubiquitous forms of monument—those that mark the routes of explorers, pioneer memorials and war memorials. Graeme Davison discusses all these forms and others in his wide-ranging entry on monuments in the Oxford Companion to Australian History.4 Their presence tends to support Ann Curthoys’ claim that there is a particularly Australian fascination with the victim:

There is a special charge associated with the status of victim in the Australian historical consciousness, and it is notable how good non- Aboriginal Australians are at memorialising their own sufferings.5

This observation certainly has validity; while not all memorials were to

3 Stuart Macintyre, ‘The writing of Australian history’, D.H. Borchardt and Victor Crittenden (eds), Australians: A Guide to Australian History Sources, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, Sydney, 1987, pp. 16-9. 4 Graeme Davison, John Hirst, Stuart Macintyre (eds),The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, revised 2001, p. 235. 5 Ann Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies, 61, 1999, p. 3. 226

incidents of loss, these appear to comprise the majority. Soldiers killed in battle, explorers killed or lost on their journey, children who died or disappeared in the bush—these are readily understood cases of loss. However, pioneer memorials also conveyed some sense of loss as well as a celebration of pioneering achievement in that they reflected a sense of the pioneer past being lost to the community. They also often noted that the pioneering process had involved hardship and sacrifices for the early settlers, placing them within the nation-building process that glorified loss. Davison isolates some of the motivating forces behind the national erection of memorials, including their role as ‘aids to hero-worship’, and the notion of ‘Glorious death’ that found such focus in the lost and dead explorers. The war memorials that appeared in almost every Australian town after the World War I, however, had little to do with glorious death. They were as Davison explains, the concrete expressions of an ‘enormous outpouring of grief’.6 In his monumental study of Australian war memorials, Sacred Places (1998), Ken Inglis concluded that ‘the number of war memorials standing in public places is between 4000 and 5000’, of which at least 1 455 were for World War I soldiers.7 This represents an ‘enormous outpouring of emotion’ indeed, and one that found many and varied forms of expression.

World War I memorials The effect of the war on the Australian community was profound—about one in five of the men who embarked for overseas service were killed, 60 000 in total.8 Inglis gives this figure a family context to demonstrate how widely felt was the sorrow:

If we count as family a person’s parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, then every second Australian family was bereaved by the war. The most unusual aspect of this bereavement, in Australia as in all those belligerent countries where increased expectation of life had made death an event of old age, was that so many of the mourners were a generation older than their dead.9

The need to record and remember their loss must have been felt by every town

6 Davison, Hirst, Macintyre (eds), Oxford Companion, p. 440. 7 K.S.Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p. 485. 8 Ibid., p. 91-2. 9 Ibid., p. 97. 227

and community in Australia judging by the evidence of the memorials they constructed. Inglis notes the various forms they took, including arches, memorial halls, swimming pools, a carillion and municipal chambers.10 Overwhelmingly, however, the small towns of Australia turned to the obelisk or a statue of an AIF soldier as a means of commemoration.11 Financial constraints were probably a factor in this choice. The statues are remarkable for their simplicity; they generally represent a private standing rather loosely to attention, a thoughtful rather than aggressive figure. The figure of the Digger was also that of a bushman—a modest man with a straight gaze, not aggressive but ready to defend if necessary. The romanticised image of the bushman, depicted so powerfully by A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson in ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (1895), translated easily into the image of the Digger. It was so readily drawn upon because the bushman was an image that had found its way via Paterson into Australian cultural iconography, as shown by the large sales—7000 copies—of his The Man from Snowy River, and Other Verses.12 In looking back to the bushman pioneer figure of the colonial past, mourning Australians were linking their losses with the larger national enterprise. Within this, they could see their dead family members as part of the pantheon of earlier Australian heroes, including explorers and pioneers.

Burke and Wills Burke and Wills remain possibly the most memorialised lost explorers in Australia’s history. They were doubly lost—initially in the sense that nobody knew of their whereabouts, and later lost to life. Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills were the leader and second-in-command of the Victorian Exploring Expedition, an expedition funded by members of the Victorian public, intent on being the first group to cross the Australian continent. They left Melbourne in August 1860 and headed north. Poor decisions by Burke resulted in a situation where he, Wills and John King were left isolated and without supplies at Coopers Creek in South Australia. Only King, who was helped by local Aborigines, survived.

The 1863 funeral in Melbourne for Burke and Wills was actually their second burial. The search party that found their bodies, led by Alfred Howitt

10 Ibid., pp. 141-57. 11 Ibid., pp. 160-1. 12 Davison, Hirst, Macintyre (eds), Oxford Companion, pp. 501-2. 228

(mentioned earlier in relation to the Lewis Vieusseux story), had buried them in bush graves where they were found, each body wrapped in a Union Jack.13 The debate that ensued over the decision to remove the bones and give them an elaborate funeral, modelled on that of the Duke of Wellington, showed two different concepts of appropriate treatment of national heroes, as Jalland observes.14

Burke and Wills’ funeral provides the most extreme example of the great dichotomy between Australian bush burial and the traditional Victorian urban funeral.

The Argus argued strongly for the appropriateness of the bush burial:

They could not have lain better, in a fitter or more solemn tomb, than under the canopy of heaven, in the desert where the betrayed heroes lay down and died. A simple mound of stones was all the monument they required.15

This romantic view of the explorer’s deaths and bush burial is an example of the colonial desire to find ‘classical soil’ in their new country.

The argument for a simple bush burial failed to carry the day, and a funeral designed to honour national heroes was planned. This was Australia’s first state funeral, and it featured an enormous, black-draped funeral car drawn by six black horses. On it sat the two coffins, covered by an elaborate canopy reminiscent of a four-poster bed. Estimates of the watching crowd varied from 40 000 to 100 000.16 Monuments to both men were erected in many of the Victorian provincial towns, as well as in Melbourne. These included Castlemaine, Fryerstown, Beechworth (through the Burke Museum), Bendigo and Ballarat.17 So strong was the community need to find heroes that questions about the success or otherwise of the expedition and the quality of its leadership were quickly swept aside as irrelevant to the ‘heroic’ behaviour of the two men. Their experiences were used to represent Australian heroism to the wider world. Bonyhady notes that:

13 Jalland, Australian Ways, p. 112. 14 Ibid. pp. 112-3. 15 Argus, 5 January, 1863, in Jalland, Australian Ways, p. 113. 16 Tim Bonyhady, Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth, David Ell, Sydney, 1991, p. 241. 17 Ibid., pp. 255-72. 229

For a number of years, Burke and Wills became the Australian representatives in a small group of books about British heroes throughout the Empire. They also occupied a central place in the one general account of Australian exploration published in this period— Charles Eden’s Australia’s Heroes, which was expressly directed at English readers rather than colonists. First published in London in 1875 by the Society for promoting Christian knowledge, it was in its fifth edition by 1891.18

The statue unveiled in Melbourne in 1865 commemorating the two men was Melbourne’s ‘first public monument’, according to Ron Ridley in his informative guide to Melbourne’s monuments. In the Introduction to this work, Ridley comments that

It is striking that there is little evidence in Melbourne of the heroes of the Old World, the culture which the first settlers brought with them, not even the heroes of recent struggles on a world scale, such as Nelson or Wellington. This suggests two things: that the earliest arrivals here had no time for such thoughts as they struggled to survive in an alien environment, or that they saw themselves as consciously having shaken off the trammels of the Old World in order to build a new and better one.19

This suggests interesting possibilities about the nature of hero-making in Australia across many cultural mediums. While heroes appeared to be recognised within the perameters of a British understanding, Australian colonists looked for their own forms to frame that image. As I have demonstrated, this was certainly true of the transition from ‘Babes in the Wood’ to ‘Lost in the Bush’.

Important national anniversaries, such as that of European settlement (1888), produced works that maintained an awareness of the story of Burke and Wills. School papers and readers told tales of explorers to children in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria from the late 1800s.20 Yet had Burke and Wills returned, had they not been ‘lost’, indications are that the

18 Ibid., p. 274. 19 Ron Ridley, Melbourne’s Monuments, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 5-6. Ridley also notes that the sculptor was Charles Summers, and that the statue was financed by Parliament after a public subscription was abandoned, pp. 37-9. 20 Ibid., p. 276. As I noted earlier in reference to the story of the Duff children, school papers and readers were very influential means of promoting the heroic ideals, and deliberately used as such by educators. 230

reception would have been very different. Fellow explorers Ernest Giles and Alfred Howitt were critical of both Burke and Wills, describing Burke as ‘hopelessly ignorant of what he was undertaking’ and pointing out that Wills’s map of the expedition’s route was frequently quite inaccurate.21 Though these criticisms and many others were vented following the explorers’ deaths, they did not affect their elevation to hero status. Their non-return rendered them immune to criticism. Curthoys quotes from journalist and popular historian, Alan Moorehead who suggested

that the Burke and Wills story quickly acquired the status of an Australian myth because it ‘perfectly expresses the early settlers’ deeply-felt idea that life was not so much a struggle against other men as against the wilderness—the wilderness that made all men equal anyway. The quarrel, basically, was with nature.’22

This observation is pertinent to the development of the mythical status of the image of the child lost in the bush—it could also be seen to represent an aspect of the early settler’s struggle with the wilderness. Explorers and settlers were both engaged in the ‘quarrel … with nature’.

The poignant notion of unfulfilled potential was a powerful force in the development of a national identity, a force that created lasting, iconic images. The mystique of the disappeared or the young dead applied to both explorers and lost children, in the same way that the dead of World War I would soon be remembered—‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:/ Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,’ asserts the Laurence Binyon poem, For the Fallen (1914), recited at every Anzac Day service. The benighted explorer, the child lost in the bush, the young, dead Anzac were all part of an understanding that national character was created in adversity and through loss—loss of life with its inherent loss of future promise. Both lost explorers and lost children were depicted as victims of a hostile environment, sometimes in the form of aggressive Aborigines. In some renderings of the Anzac story the young Australian soldiers were seen as victims of British military incompetence and callousness. Stories of bravery, stoicism and suffering at Gallipoli and on the Western Front were told as stories of nation-

21 Ibid., pp. 281-2. 22 Alan Moorehead, Cooper’s Creek, 1963, in Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile’, p. 20. 231

building. Curthoys makes a powerful assessment of the emotional power that the Anzac held for a young nation struggling to define its individuality:

The narrative has its power as the story of innocence betrayed, the fittest young men of a young nation giving their all for their country and empire and shot down cruelly, endlessly, the fault not so much of the Turks as of the brutal idiocy, the criminal foolishness, of the British command who sent them there.23

This national perception of being a victim later found renewal in the deaths of two national sporting figures—the boxer Les Darcy (1917) and champion racehorse Phar Lap (1932). Their respective deaths in America, coming at times of national stress during World War I and the Depression, and just at the point when each (and by extension, Australia) seemed poised to achieve international recognition, led to accusations of poisoning amid a real sense of national loss. Curthoys makes a convincing claim for a referral of grief through national experiences, quoting novelist D’Arcy Niland’s belief that the widespread grief in Australia at Darcy’s death was in fact

a vast silent lament for all the dead and vanished boys, the generation that had gone away laughing and singing and just vanished into thin air. In some mysterious way he was one of them, not a soldier, but a battler, someone who did his best, came a cropper and didn’t whinge about it.24

My point here is that the image of a child lost in the bush, placed at the mercy of the seemingly insuperable force of the wilderness, was another facet of this national mythology of the heroic victim. Heroism in this peculiarly Australian sense was the small heroism of endeavour and suffering rather than the grand heroism of active aggression.

Memorials to children – the dead and the missing Memorials to a lost child tended to be more private than those to explorers or soldiers, but no less heartfelt. The high rate of child mortality, noted in the chapter on children and childhood, forced parents to recognise the possibility of losing a child but it did not prevent them from suffering great pain at such a

23 Ibid., p. 11. 24 Ibid. 232

loss.25 A headstone in the Roman Catholic Cemetery at Parramatta exemplifies this, with its reference to the death in 1834 of Samuel Barley,

Who was unfortunately drowned in a well on his parents premises ... [that was] left uncovered by a careless female servant who had charge of the unfortunate infant who was a beautiful promising child. 26

The anger evident in the characterisation of the ‘careless female servant’ gives way to poignant grief at the memory of the ‘beautiful promising child.’ This image captured the very particular grief caused by the death or disappearance of children—it was not just what they were that was lost, but the potential they held. The realisation that children frequently died may have led to some measure of acceptance, as perhaps did religious belief that offered promise of life after death, but pain was still evident. Memorials provided a way of voicing and thus easing this pain.

The image of the ‘lost’ child itself has an ambivalent quality— it could mean the child was dead from any one of the many causes that I noted earlier, or actually missing in the surrounding bush. An example of this ambiguity is the story of Harriet Crowhurst. The first reference I found to the story in an article on the Avoca district in the Victorian Historical Magazine (1971), left me unsure in what sense Harriet had been lost. It read:

In Avoca cemetery is a tangible reminder of the trials, hardship and sorrow of those stirring times. A mother lost her little child in tragic circumstances.27

These circumstances are not explained in the article, and so I continued to trace the story, thinking that I may have found another memorial to a bush-lost child. It was only after further research that I discovered that the four-year old Harriet had died of pneumonia. At this, my interest shifted to the power of memorialisation that this story epitomised. Perhaps the author of the article, A.J. Dunlop, could see no difference in the terminology of ‘lost’, thinking that whatever the cause the child was gone. However, I am certain that the child’s

25 See chapter one, ‘Children and Childhood in Colonial Australia’; also Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, in particular chapter 4, ‘Angels in Heaven’: The common tragedies of Babies’ and children’s deaths. 26 Siobhan Lavelle, ‘Parramatta’s Cemeteries: history in the dead centre of town’, National Trust Quarterly, no. 74, February 1995, pp. 29-30. 27 A.J. Dunlop, ‘Recollections of Mining: At Percydale in the Avoca District’, Victorian Historical Magazine, vol. 43, no. 1, February 1971, p. 521. 233

mother recognised the difference. At least the presence of a body allows for a defined site for commemoration and it was this driving force that Eliza Crowhurst acted upon. Headstones and memorial tablets were the most usual forms of commemoration of death. The importance attributed to having solid, tangible reminders of human existence remains deeply personal and not easily accessible to theorising—perhaps they seemed to offer hope that the beloved would not be forgotten. The effort Eliza put into creating such a memorial testifies to the value she placed upon the form. Unable to afford a purchased headstone she herself shaped and inscribed a piece of local sandstone,

TO THE MEMORY OF HARRIET, THE BELOVED DAUGH TER OF GEORGE AND ELIZA CROW HURST, WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE THE --- 1870 BORN 14TH OF OCT. 1866 AGE 4 YEARS.

On the back of the stone she recorded that this was,

WORKED BY HER MOTHER’S HAND.’28

The rough shaping and crude lettering are evidence of the effort involved in the creation of the headstone which Eliza then wheeled in a barrow the six miles from Percydale to the Avoca cemetery.

The episode remained an active force within local folklore, suggesting that the resonance of commemorations can be very strong. In an article on the Harriet Crowhurst memorial written in 1984, Helen Harris reported that ‘For many years now the local school children have visited the grave on Mother’s Day, while caring locals maintain it at other times.’29 At the foot of the grave is a plaque reporting and interpreting the act of motherly love this headstone represented. The plaque reads,

28 , ‘Some photos from the Avoca Area’. 29 Helen Harris, ‘Our Invisible Ancestors’, The Genealogist, December 1984, pp. 257-8. 234

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ELIZA CROWHURST A DEVOTED MOTHER WHO CARVED THE HEADSTONE ON THIS GRAVE AND WHEELED IT IN A BARROW FROM PERCYDALE TO THE CEMETERY TO ERECT IT THEREON.

THE MEMORY OF THE JUST IS BLESSED. MOTHER’S DAY AVOCA 1963

In her determination that her child should be remembered, Eliza Crowhurst unknowingly created her own memorial. For her, and her community well into the next century, this memorial marked a place of ‘classical soil’.30

Accidental deaths were frequently recorded by some sort of commemoration, perhaps intended as a warning as well as memorial. A grave at the mouth of the Erskine River near Lorne (Victoria) bears two plaques recording the deaths of William and Joseph Lindsay, aged eight and four years respectively, in January 1850. One of these plaque accords with the more formal memorialisations, reading,

In Memory Of William Firth Lindsay - Aged 8 years Joseph Southwell Lindsay - Aged 4 years Drowned in River Erskine 28 January 1850

The other conveys a more immediate, personal voice. It reads,

Two sons of a splitter whose hut stood on the hillside above - drowned in a quicksand at play and buried here next day

In fact neither account is accurate. According to the Lorne Historical Society, it was more that a sandbank into which the boys were digging collapsed and smothered them, rather than them drowning in either the river or

30 The newsletter of the Avoca and District Historical Society for July 1998 (no. 161) indicates that the headstone is still very much a valued piece of community history in Avoca. Visitors from the Woady Yaloak Historical Society were shown it and told its history on a tour of the local historical areas. 235

‘quicksand’.31 The story of these plaques has proved impossible to trace definitively. The Lorne Historical Society has incomplete records of the now- defunct Lorne Progress Association that suggest they were responsible for the erection of the plaques. When they were erected is difficult to ascertain; local papers of the 1920s noted the presence of the plaques, which were replacements for an old wooden board that was considered insufficient to mark such an important local site.32 Perhaps it was part of a move to develop tourist sites, a common cause of Progress Associations. Whatever the motivation these memorials convey an urgent sense that the boys should not be completely lost; that although lost to the living they not be lost from memory.

A private memorial on a family property, Black Mountain station, near Wulgulmerang in East Gippsland, Victoria, derives from a similar impulse. It comprises two memorial tablets to children at the base of a black marble headstone that records the death of two adult males of the O’Rourke family. This is an instance, unique in my experience, of memorials to children lost in both senses of the term. One tablet notes the death at the age of seven years, of a ‘beloved son’ of Edward and Anne O’Rourke of Suggan Buggan, William O’Rourke; the other records the loss of ‘Elizabeth Anne O’Rourke born 11-9- 1861, lost in the bush and perished at Wulgulmerang March 1864, infant daughter of David Ormel Digby O’Rourke, and his wife Mary R.I.P’.33 William’s body was moved from Suggan Buggan to Black Mountain to be buried close to other family members.34 This memorial demonstrates a strong desire to keep family together, and the form was obviously considered to be a tangible expression of family unity as well as statement of claim. The family grave at Black Mountain station became a piece of pioneer sacred soil, a statement of the cost of settlement. It encapsulates the ‘pioneering experience’

31 My thanks to Rhyll Nance from the Australian Centre, University of Melbourrne, for alerting me to the existence of these plaques. Details from Lorne Historical Society homepage. 32 Information provided by Jean Graham, secretary of the Lorne Historical Society, 14 October 2002, based on records held by the Society. 33 Victorian Memorials Database, record no. 61371. There is some variance between these details and those recorded by J.G. Rogers and Nelly Helyar in Lonely Graves of the Gippsland Goldfields and Greater Gippsland, (1994); their entry on Elizabeth O’Rourke notes that the plaque records her birth date as 14-9-1864, that she died in March 1866, and that her father was David Daniel Digby O’Rourke (pp. 93-4). 34 Rogers and Helyar, Lonely Graves, p. 94. 236

with the memorial referring both to the men who had died after settling and developing the station—Christopher O’Rourke, died 9 August 1844, aged 54, and Edward O’Rourke, died 12th Sept. 1902, aged 73—and the two young children who had died or disappeared in the process of settlement.

This bare record on the memorial plaque of a lost child hides a more complex story. Elizabeth Ann wandered away from her home on the North Gippsland farm one day when her mother was ill in bed and the family was being cared for by an aunt. Initially it was hoped that the child had gone with her father, but it seems that she probably tried to follow him when he rode out after lunch. When she failed to return people in the district joined her parents in a search but it proved fruitless, for she was not found. In a curious twist to the fears sometimes expressed by parents of lost children, local historians record that ‘her mother was in the hope that the local aboriginals may have found her and were caring for her’.35 As it was, Aborigines did find Elizabeth Ann’s body about a year after her disappearance. She had fallen over a cliff about a mile from her home and broken her neck. Her body was identified by the remaining fragments of a pink dress. In her discussion of this incident, Pat Jalland reports that the Aborigines’ action in letting Mary O’Rourke know of their discovery caused her to change ‘her attitude to Aboriginal people from fear and uncertainty to gratitude’.36 She, like many others including Mrs. Downing of Callandoon, appears to have carried a fear of indigenous people. The fact that the discovery of her child’s fate could apparently cause such a marked change in Mrs. O’Rourke’s attitude towards Aborigines illustrates the horror for parents of not knowing what happened to their child.

Other memorials including the unusual The two public memorials to lost children that I have been able to locate are also noted in the National Register of Unusual Monuments, a project that was developed under the auspices of the 1988 Australian Bicentennial Authority. Co-ordinated by historian Chilla Bulbeck, the project solicited information on monuments from Bicentennial Community Committees, local councils and individual ‘recorders’.37 To keep the size of the project manageable, several

35 Ibid. 36 Jalland, Australian Ways, p. 290. 37 Phillip Griffiths, ‘Monuments to Great and Small’, Bicentenary 88, Newsletter of the Australian Bicentennial Authority, vol. 8, no. 4, December 1988, p. 25. 237

types of memorials were excluded—including war memorials, pioneer memorials, gravestones and memorials inside buildings. In an overview of the project Bulbeck explained that

In order to distinguish the ‘unusual’ monuments from the more common public statues, I ... employed the four challenges to Australian history since the 1950s to define the category of ‘unusual’ monuments. These challenges have displaced from the centre stage of history the actions of white male leaders who made nations, and instead focussed on the activities of workers, women, Aborigines, and ‘ordinary people’ whose interventions were often more local, or even opposed to those of the nation-builders.38

She consciously moves attention away from memorials to people and incidents which were centrally recognised—that is, by the powerful forces of government, church or privilege—to those for whom recognition came from more humble sources. The results of the survey showed a strong desire in this group for recognition of the achievements of the extraordinary ‘ordinary’, presumably the social group with which they most closely identified. An analysis of the completed register suggested to Bulbeck that there had

been the attempt to inscribe such [ordinary] people into Australian history in the same terms as the governors or explorers: as nation- builders, as people who made sacrifices, as ordinary folk who achieved momentary greatness. This is particularly evident with pioneer memorials, which write a local version of national history: ... Monuments to ‘local heroes’ in the home-towns ... proclaim the fame of the town because a local son or daughter made national history.39

This understanding helps to define the context of monuments to lost children and those erected in recognition of the efforts of searchers. Local heroes or heroines, such as Jane Duff, provided a touchstone by which the surrounding community could define itself. As the contemporary newspaper accounts showed, the extensive search made for the three Daylesford boys was felt to have reflected honour on the whole town. Even the more personal tablets and plaques noted earlier can be read within this context as statements of the sacrifices made by ordinary people for the nation-building process.

The register recorded a wide range of monuments and Bulbeck delineated

38 Chilla Bulbeck, ‘The ‘Unusual Monuments’ Project’, Culture and Policy, vol. 1, no. 1, 1989, pp. 25-30. 39 Ibid. 238

some general categories, pioneers, sportspeople (generally men), inventors, animals, and recognition of the defeat of distance through road building or the construction of the Overland Telegraph.40 In another article on the project, Bulbeck argued that the history established by these unusual monuments was ‘the daily lives of the governed … the conditions of life in the family, suburb, community or region’.41 This is the level of folk history at which stories of children lost in the bush were fostered and remembered. Bulbeck also noted the significant presence of ‘cathartic’ memorials’ in which ‘communities remember local tragedies (floods, fires, industrial accidents, cyclones)’. Within this group of ‘cathartic memorials’ she placed ‘Two monuments [that] record the stories of children lost in the bush’.42 This ‘daily life’ history with its emphasis on families and popular culture, is, Bulbeck claims,

most readily recognised in monuments which commemorate local disasters, or brave deeds: for example the girl Jane Duff, who kept her brothers safe in the bush near Horsham for a number of days.43

As I showed earlier, this was the popular rather than factual characterisation of the incident; Bulbeck’s repetition of it demonstrates the powerful role of memorials in perpetuating stories and promoting myths. The emblematic status she accords this memorial and the story it relates further demonstrates the representational qualities of the image of children lost in the bush—it reverberates well beyond the immediate.

Indeed these two monuments, both in Victoria, move well beyond the scope of any other memorials to lost children outlined previously.44 They appear to be the sole representatives of their type, and I have not been able to discover any memorials to lost children in other states. Does this mean that there was a particular obsession in Victoria with the lost child image? This would be puzzling considering that, as I have demonstrated, children were lost in the bush across the whole country. It actually appears to reflect a greater concern in Victoria than other states with memorialisation as a whole; as Tom

40 Chilla Bulbeck, ‘The National Register of Unusual Monuments’, Heritage Australia, vol. 10, no. 2, Winter 1991, pp. 21-2. 41 Bulbeck, ‘Unusual Monuments’, Culture and Policy, p. 1. 42 Bulbeck, ‘National Register of Unusual Monuments’, Heritage Australia, p. 22. 43 Bulbeck, ‘Unusual Monuments’, Culture and Policy, p. 1. 44 Bulbeck did not nominate this as a separate category for the recorders, details of these memorials emerged from general data. She confirmed this for me in email correspondence. 239

Griffiths’s study shows, Victoria is replete with all sorts of memorials. Why this is so remains open to speculation—one factor may have been size. As one of the smallest states, it seems to have quickly arrived at a sense of being settled, unlike the larger states such as Queensland or New South Wales. This process of settlement was hastened for Victoria by the influx of people and money that accompanied the discovery of gold, impressive city buildings and institutions such as a university and the museum-library confirmed that the pioneering days were over. The speed with which the metropolis developed generated what Griffiths calls the ‘preservation impulse’. He discusses this in the context of David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985), in which Lowenthal suggests that ‘Nothing so quickens preservation sympathies as the fear of imminent extinction, whether of a building, a bird, or a folkway’.45 The perception of a rapidly disappearing past was very probably a major factor in the Victorian process of memorialisation. This occurred within what Griffiths also called the ‘evolutionary, scientific vision of history’, which he links with the spread of Darwinian theory. He argues that this

led to a premium being placed on tangible monuments and relics, on original and authentic physical sources that could be conserved as evidence of unique past experience.46

Griffiths is primarily concerned with natural history; but these forces are equally valid in the context of this discussion. Both the need to preserve folktales and images, and the urge to do that on the basis of actual sites contributed to the Victorian impulse to memorialise.

Bulbeck’s references to the two monuments to lost children do not convey the continuing nature of this memorialisation, nor the multiplicity of forms it has taken. These aspects demonstrate both the popular impact of the stories initially, and the way in which they continue to live within the community’s popular culture. I now consider the different phases of memorialisation of the two incidents noted by Bulbeck in her survey of unusual momuments—those of the Duff children and the three boys lost at Daylesford.

Jane Duff commemorated The story of the incident in which Jane Duff and her two brothers were lost,

45 Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 196. 46 Ibid. 240

searched for and found is told in detail in chapter two. As related there, Jane received by far the largest share of the public recognition and adulation for her ‘noble’ behaviour in caring for her brothers during their ordeal. Her death in 1932 allowed for a certain freeing up of the image; without her physical presence the adult Mrs. Turnbull could be completely subsumed by the image of the young Jane Duff.

However, the omnipresence of ‘Jane Duff, bush heroine’, and the commemoration of that figure existed long before her death. Her marriage to George Turnbull in 1876 was reported by various local papers with her in that persona. The St. Arnaud Mercury reported that,

It will be interesting to out readers … to learn of a pleasing event in the life of heroine of the ‘Lost in the Bush’ legend.47

The Hamilton Spectator noted the event in their marriages column,

TURNBULL - DUFF - George Turnbull was married at Horsham about 20/6/1876 to Jane Duff (of “Lost in the Bush” fame.)48

She appeared to cope quite well as something of a living legend, and actively participated in its continuation. One of her grandchildren recollected something very close to a shrine:

In the living room on a pedestal was the Tasmanian children's Bible and the piece of statuary from England; draped beneath was the famous lilac- coloured dress a little girl had worn long, long ago 49

These objects figured prominently in many references to the story and Jane Duff. On her sixty-sixth birthday the local paper carried an extensive article describing a visit to ‘Mrs. Turnbull, Jane Duff’, by the Mayor and Mayoress of Horsham during which she ‘showed the visitors several interesting relics’ including dress and statuette.50 The accompanying photograph showed Mrs. Turnbull standing in what looks like a patch of bush gazing at the ‘relics’. The dress, of course, was that worn by Jane during her time in the bush, which she removed to cover her younger brother, Frank, at night. It was described in

47 St. Arnaud Mercury, 28 June 1876, Country News. 48 Hamilton Spectator, 28 June 1876. 49 L. J. Blake, Lost in the Bush, p. 22. 50 Horsham Times, 2 February 1923. p. 6. 241

detail and shown in a photograph, in a tribute to Jane Duff published after her death.

The little lilac frock that she wore ... the day she was lost is a wonderful example of her mother’s care and interest in her brave daughter. It is cut bodice fashion to the waistline, has shoulder-pouched bell sleeves, with full, neatly-hemmed and tuck-folded skirt. One day, perhaps, this little frock will repose in Melbourne’s national museum.51

The notion that this relic was worthy of national attention and preservation was firmly established in the community that was ‘home’ to the incident.52

In an eerie replication of this preservation and veneration, the dress of another lost child is displayed in the National Museum of Australia. A black dress belonging to Azaria Chamberlain, made by her mother, forms part of the exhibition of ‘Eternity’ under the heading ‘Mystery.53 Azaria is possibly Australia’s most notorious ‘lost’ child, raising once again the issue of ‘lost’ or ‘taken’, but with a unique twist. She was a nine-week-old baby who disappeared from a tent in 1980 while the family was camping at Uluru (Ayers Rock) in the Northern Territory. Her mother, Lindy, claimed that a dingo had taken the child and the coronial inquiry finding supported this. Many people in the wider Australian society refused to accept this possibility, despite contemporary and historical evidence that it was entirely possible, and eventually Azaria’s parents were found guilty—Lindy of murder and her husband, Michael, as an accessory to murder. A later Royal Commission led to their release and eventual compensation. No remains of Azaria were ever found.54 It is difficult to know what to make of this whole incident, why the Australian people preferred to believe that a parent was capable of infanticide rather than accepting that a dingo was reponsible. The particular religious beliefs of the Chamberlains made them seem quite unusual, and therefore perhaps suspect. One can only speculate, but the public response suggests that an overwhelmingly urbanised society was so profoundly disturbed at the undermining of their feelings of security in this country posed by the image of a threatening bush creature, that they refused to believe it. A dingo that took

51 Ibid., 22 January 1932, p. 1. 52 A descendant of Jane Turnbull (Duff) has told me that another family member still has the dress and other items, but will not acknowledge this publicly for fear of losing them. 53 Eternity Gallery, National Museum of Australia, Canberra. 54 John Bryson, Evil Angels, Penguin, Melbourne, 1985. 242

children represented a bush that actively assaulted intruders. To believe in the dingo meant accepting that the white inhabitants were not in control of their environment.55

The contrast between the fraught story of Azaria Chamberlain and the universally accepted, unproblematic rendering of the story of Jane Duff could not be greater. This was perhaps at least partly due to the Duff children’s story fitting into what, even by 1864, was a recognisably Australian experience. It could be accepted and responded to within known perameters. This was certainly not the case with the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain. Had she been a toddler who wandered off and became lost, I believe that the public response would have been very different. Australians are prepared to accept the scenario of children lost in the bush without attaching blame to the parents. Not one of the many accounts of lost children episodes that I have researched, either colonial or modern, attributed blame to parents either for negligence or for actual involvement in the disappearance, though many parents blamed themselves. This reflects just how quickly and completely the experience had been absorbed into the Australian national consciousness as one of the inescapable natural hazards of the colonial process, analogous to drought or bushfire. When the accepted image was challenged however, as with Azaria’s disappearance, blame was very swiftly attributed.

Another of Jane Duff’s relics of the lost in the bush episode was a statue, a marble representation of ‘The Babes in the Wood’ sent to her from England by an admirer after the London Times published an account of the story. It bore a silver plate on which was inscribed:

Presented to Jane Duff, 1865, by one whose eyes never saw her, but who by this memorial would express his heartfelt admiration of the self- sacrificing love and devoted care evinced by her towards her little brothers during their woeful wanderings for eight days and nine sad nights.56

55 In an account of the disappearance of a young boy from the Bright area in 1883, the authors note that some of the locals ‘blamed Gypsies who were in the area at the time’, however ’others thought he could have been taken by dingoes’. There appears to have been almost a sense of the dingo and so-called ‘gypsies’ as interchangeable, both representing a dangerous ‘Other’. Brian Lloyd and Kathy Nunn, Bright Gold, Histec Publications, 1987, p. 116. 56 Horsham Times, 22 January 1932, p. 1. The Sunday at Home story noted in chapter two names the sender of the statue at Sir Percy Daniel, however LJ Blake names Sir Phillip Dalziel a the sender. Note that a transcription of the inscription given in The School Paper, Class III (1903), ends slightly differently, viz. ‘eight long days and eight sad nights, when lost in the 243

This trio was completed by

a big, handsome illustrated family bible bearing the following inscription: ‘To Jane Cooper (note that Jane’s mother was married twice). Presented by the children of Tasmania in appreciation of her heroic and sisterly love displayed towards her brothers when lost for eight days and nine nights in the bush of Victoria, August A.D. 1864.’57

These objects formed a local, or personal, shrine that became an integral part of the life of the local community. It served as a marker, a reference point by which to place the community as well as certain individuals. Jane’s older brother Isaac, who did not marry until his late forties, had a photograph taken of himself and his new wife Christina, standing behind a small stand over which was draped the dress, topped by the statue and bible.58 Possibly it was a defining incident in Isaac’s life as well as Jane’s, though he received very little of the public recognition and financial reward. Jane was the recipient of three separate financial appeals during her lifetime, as well as constant public veneration. Although Jane never exploited her situation, she certainly did not shun publicity, and the whole experience appears to have ultimately been positive for her.

In January 1932, Mrs. G. Turnbull (usually referred to as Jane Duff), died. This occasioned the fullest flowering of the myth of Jane Duff and its more overt memorialisation. The Horsham Times, in an article headed ‘Bush Heroine Passes’,59 described her as one 'Of “the women of the west”’ portrayed by Essex Evans in the poem of that name. Evans depicts the women, sacrificing youth, health and family to develop the land, and concludes 'The hearts that made the nation were the women of the West”.60 A writer in the Horsham Times accorded her an all-encompassing representative status, lauding ‘her indomitable will and courage, so characteristic of the Wimmera folk and of Australia in particular’. A poem published in the Horsham Times

Australian bush. “Without a guide, without a guard, except their God.”’, (no. 84, August, p. 100). Another account described the statue as being of Jane and her brothers, ‘depicted lying as found’, Horsham Times, 22 January 1932, p. 1. 57 Ibid. 58 In the possession of Isaac’s Cooper’s grandaughter, Mrs. Borgelt, Dimboola, Victoria. 59 Horsham Times, 22 January 1932, p. 1. 60 G. Essex Evans, Victorian, Victorian Readers, Eighth Book, Education Department of Victoria, 1986 (first published 1928), pp. 69-70. 244

article voiced the notion of self-sacrifice for the general good, which seemed to have become a necessary corollary of the concept of heroism, ‘And tho', alas, the heroine dies, who lived that we might gain’. The extent to which this had become an accepted view may be judged from the fact that no explanation was offered as to a connection between the sacrifice and gain. Presumably this was an oblique reference, felt by the poet to be self-evident and requiring no elaboration, to the heroic nature of the pioneers.

Jane Duff/Turnbull’s death gave impetus to the third appeal that was being made in her name. Her visit to the Natimuk State School in 1929 had prompted some of the parents to start an appeal to establish a permanent monument to Jane Duff. This was to be a public, formal memorial, as opposed to the private relics. The Education Department once again agreed to appeal to the state school pupils. Some of the money raised was made available to support Mrs. Turnbull before her death. Not surprisingly in this Depression period, the appeal progressed slowly. It was finalised in 1934, with most of the money being used to establish a granite memorial stone near the spot in the bush where the children were found (see Illustration 10). The inscription reads:

In memory of the bush heroine, Jane Duff, who succoured her brothers, Isaac and Frank, for 9 days, when lost in the dense scrub near this spot In 1864. Erected by the school children and citizens of Victoria, March, 1935.

In his speech to the large crowd attending the unveiling, the treasurer of the Memorial fund, a Mr. G.T. Graham, placed the incident firmly into the pioneering framework, ‘We have met here today to commemorate an event unique in the annals of pioneering days of this State.’ 61 The bush, pioneers and Jane Duff became welded together into an emotive, poignant whole.

The bush is passing away, and already some youngsters did not know it. Some of you older folk in your childhood days no doubt stood at the edge of the virgin bush, in the fading evening light looked into the ever changing shadowy vistas and felt creepy and full of wonder.

The nostalgia of this view highlights the constant duality of the way in which the past came to be viewed. They were seen as hard days but good days when great achievements were possible at great cost.

61 West Wimmera Mail, 3 May 1935, p. 1. 245

The State of Victoria ... is an incredible feat. The exploration, survey, fencing and working of it is an odyssey of deprivation, sweat and loneliness. We still await the day of literary achievement, when stories such as that of the Duff children will be enshrined in that achievement. We have fine traditions handed down by the pioneers.

The memorial itself was represented by Graham as forming at once a tribute to Jane Duff and the pioneering past she embodied: ‘Built of hard stone, it may be regarded as symbolic of the hard times of 71 years ago.’ The importance to a national self-image of the pioneering legend is evident in his development of the theme of a fine past, ‘It is time we got into our ears the beat of the Australian drum and marched to that beat. We have a proud history and a wonderful country.’ This perception of Jane’s actions as part of the wider contribution by women to the civilising process fits into a national move to position women within the pioneer legend. Curthoys notes some of the ways in which this happened:

Women were incorporated into the legend especially in the 1930s in the build-up to the sesquicentenary of 1938, in pioneer women memorials and gardens, and in histories and novels about pioneer women.62

The nation-building pioneer theme was echoed eight years later at the unveiling of the headstone over Jane Duff’s grave (see Illustration 11). Mr. J. E. Menadue, in his role of Chief President of the Australian Natives Association, gave an address in which he spoke of a lack of appreciation of ‘The great traditions we possess in our short but eventful history’. Menadue was a senior teacher with the Victorian Education Department, and he later wrote a booklet for the Daylesford Historical Society on ‘The Three Lost Children’. He was heavily involved with the Australian Natives Association, formed in Melbourne in 1871 as a benefit society, and which promoted Australian nationalism. Menadue was Victorian State president of the ANA from 1941 to 1943, and became Federal president in 1961. 63 In his grave-side address he described the story of Jane Duff as 'an epic' and went on to say that, in these memorials, ‘The people of this district ... have done much to give adequate recognition to this epic - the pioneering life of Australia’.64 The

62 Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile’, p. 7. 63 L.J. Blake (general ed.), Vision and Realisation (A Centenary History of State Education in Victoria), Education Department of Victoria, Melbourne, 1973, vol. 1, pp. 1327-8. 64 Horsham Times, 16 March 1943, p. 3. 246

images of ‘lost in the bush’, Jane Duff, pioneering and pride in Australia were telescoped into one. Nothing on the headstone erected over her grave in 1943 acknowledged any other family connections, it was not Mrs. Turnbull who lay there but Jane Duff.65 Essentially, to her surrounding community, she had been frozen in time as the young Jane, a reminder of the triumphant hardships of a pioneering past.

Later, another element of memorialisation was added to the Duff story with the establishment in the 1980s of the Jane Duff Highway Park (see Illustration 12). As the information brochure designed by the Publicity Unit of the Department of Premier and Cabinet explained, this was one of a system of highway parks established to offer drivers a place to rest and thereby reduce accidents. Importantly to this consideration of memorialisation, the explanation of the Victorian Highway Park Concept notes that ‘each park will have its own special style of development that enhances its character and appeal and reflects a regional identity.’66 In this context, the invocation of Jane Duff’s name demonstrates how powerful an image hers was in the area. It was a means by which the area continued to define itself in modern Australia. The highway park is on the road between Horsham and Goroke and incorporates the cairn erected in 1935. It is on land that was part of the Spring Hill station, on which the Duff family lived and where the children were lost, so the naming of the park drew upon manifold local resonances. In the rather curious way in which some memorials reflect the incident remembered (such as the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool named in memory of a drowned prime minister), the park incorporates a walking track, but it is unclear whether this was intended to replicate the children’s journey or display local flora. Tom Griffiths’ discussion of the way in which European colonists turned to the natural environment for history and culture provides a context in which to position this veneration of landscapes, although the flat Nurcoung scrub does not accord with usual notions of what is meant by the ‘monumentalism’ that he described as ‘a nationalistic way of appreciating landscape’.67

65 The inscription reads ‘In sacred memory of Jane Duff bush heroine who succored her brothers Isaac and Frank nine days and eight nights in Nurcoung scrub in August 1864. Died 20th Jan. 1932, aged 75 years.’ 66 Jane Duff Highway Park, Department of Crown Lands and Survey, Victoria. C 7/4. 67 Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 152. 247

Perhaps the most potent and influential memorialisation of this particular incident was its inclusion in the school readers. Robert Holden traces the story as far back as 1868 to its inclusion in Pitt’s Australian Second Book, as ‘a brief account of lost in the bush obviously modelled on the experience of the Duff children’.68 Subsequent retellings in school readers of the story in various guises occurred in 1877 (Second Reading Book), 1896 and 1903 (The School Paper Class III). The latter two specifically told of the experience of the Duff children and were adapted from the story published by the Reverend B.W. Fairclough in The Southern Cross in 1895. These were titled ‘The Australian “Babes In The Wood”’. It was not until 1908 that the story appeared under the title by which it is best known—‘Lost In The Bush’—possibly a reflection of a stronger sense of national cultural identity which needed no outside reference for context. ‘Lost in The Bush’ found a permanent place in the Fourth Book of the Victorian School Readers, first issued in 1930, and thus found a huge audience.

Some of the school readers for states other than Victoria also included material depicting a lost in the bush incident. The Grade IV Readers for Tasmanian and South Australian government schools both carried the A.B. Paterson poem, Lost, which is a rather sentimental story of a young stockman’s failure to return home from an excursion into the bush, and of his mother’s subsequent pining which led to her death.69 The smile on her face at death implied that she had finally ‘found’ her lost boy. The Grade V Tasmanian Reader also contained the ‘Pretty Dick’ story by Marcus Clarke.70 The story of the Duff children, as told in ‘Lost in the Bush’, appears to have remained primarily a Victorian interest as it does not appear in any of the other readers I have been able to examine.

This perception of the Duff story as being particularly apt to educational purposes is surely one reason for its longevity. This was made clear by the Honourable A.O. Sachse, Minister of Public Instruction, in his speech at the presentation of the proceeds from the 1904 Jane Duff Testimonial Fund. After

68 Robert Holden, ‘Lost, stolen or strayed’, Voices, Autumn 1991, p. 64. 69 The Tasmanian Readers, Grade 1V, published for the Education Department, Tasmania by Macmillan, Melbourne, 1933, also The Adelaide Readers, Grade 1V, Macmillan, Melbourne, c. 1925-6. 70 The Tasmanian Readers, Grade V, published for the Education Department, Tasmania by Macmillan, Melbourne, 1933. 248

the presentation of an address bearing quotations from Shakespeare and Wordsworth,71 Mr. Sachse outlined the aim of the Education Department. As well as

educating the children of the State to be useful citizens and the bread winners of the future, it also endeavoured to promote every good sentiment, and to inculcate the principles of honesty, truth, love, purity, and noble action.72

The Jane Duff story was admirably suited to such an intention, much too useful to be closely examined or questioned. This story appeared in the Fourth School Reader with ‘Simpson and His Donkey’ and ‘A Brave Australian Girl’, the story of Grace Bussell, often referred to as ‘the Grace Darling of Australia’. Self-sacrifice and courage was the theme of all these stories. Charles Long, editor of The School Paper from 1896 was part of the Victorian ‘memorial movement’. He considered, according to Griffiths, that

monuments caused one to pause and reflect, encouraged a sense of history, and also had a broader, national value: by the feeling of close relationship to the past and the recognition of race kinship that they engender, they aid in cementing together that race, and urging it onward to fresh efforts …73

He extended this philosophy to the stories published for schools which, with the enormously influential Victorian educationalist, Frank Tate, he regarded as ‘laboratories of good citizenship’. Through memorials and stories Long hoped to produce in Australian children the feeling ‘that history belongs not merely to distant countries and a long-dead past, but has been and is being made on the very spot where he dwells’.74 The story of the lost Duff children fitted these aims admirably.

The perpetuation of the ‘Lost in the Bush’ story through the education system served to reinforce its place in the ‘collective memory’ of the Victorian

71 The School Paper, May 1905 (no. 74), p. 60., “Modest and yet so brave, though young so wise, though meek so resolute;” - William Wordsworth, ‘Grace Darling’ and “How far that little candle throws its beams, so shines a good deed.” - William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. 72 Ibid., p. 61. 73 Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, pp. 158-9. 74 Ibid., p. 159. The School Paper was read by a large number of Victorian schoolchildren, Griffiths records a circulation of about 150 000 a month by 1906. (Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, footnote no. 51, p. 328). 249

community. In a discussion of memory as a social process in Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia (1994), Paula Hamilton considers the ways in which ‘group memory is passed on to other generations, providing a ‘living link’ between them’.75 She comments that the ‘mode of transmission need not always be formal’, suggesting that ‘gossip, songs, [and] jokes … also carry group memories’.76 Although a story in a school reader is more formal than these modes, it does partake of some of the quality of storytelling, the cosiness, that Hamilton evoked. In becoming an integral part of the school experience, the story of the Duff children with its focus on Jane’s nobility, was entrenched in the collective social memory. The strength of its hold on the collective memory is evidenced by the way that the ‘Lost in the Bush’ story retained currency within Victoria generally and the local area specifically. It was even inserted into the official history of the Victorian Education Department, Vision and Realisation (1973), under the guise of discussing early education in the bush, and the entry includes a photo of a centenary re- enactment of the incident by children from Natimuk schools.77 This may have had something to do with the general editor of Vision and Realisation, L.J. Blake, also being the author of the best-known history of the incident and its aftermath, Lost in the Bush: The Story of Jane Duff (1964).78

In an influential move for the continuation of the story in popular culture, the Victorian Education Department continued to disseminate the story of ‘Lost In The Bush’ through production in 1972 by its Audio-Visual section of an hour-long film version for children in primary and lower secondary classes. Based on the Blake book and filmed around Mt. Arapiles and in the Little Desert in the general area where the children were lost, many of the parts were played by local people including the three children, their parents and the search party, confirming that the story continued to be ‘owned’ by its immediate community.79 A sustained interest in the story from the wider community was shown by the number of schools wanting their students to see

75 Paula Hamilton, chapter 1, ‘The Knife Edge: Debates About Memory and History’, in) Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (eds, Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 19. 76 Ibid. 77 Blake, Vision and Realisation, vol. 1, pp. 130-1. 78 L.J. Blake, Lost in the Bush: The Story of Jane Duff, Whitcombe & Tombs, Melbourne, 1964. For an account of Blake’s educational and writing career see Vision and Realisation, vol. 1, p. 1393. 79 The Educational Magazine, vol. 30, no. 5, 1973, pp. 22-3. 250

the film; late in 1973 it was recorded that ‘inquiries for screening the film in Victorian school number thousands’.80 The film is still held in the education libraries of Victorian universities for student teachers to borrow, suggesting that it is seen to have a role in the education process of the twenty-first century.

The Victorian Education Department also had an influential role in the process of memorialisation of the other story of lost children noted by Chilla Bulbeck in her Unusual Monuments project, that erected of the three boys lost at Daylesford, the search for whom is detailed in the previous chapter ‘Bush Searches’.

Memorials to the Daylesford boys As with the Duff memorials, the process of memorialisation of the three boys who died while lost in the bush near Daylesford in 1867, occurred in several stages. After the discovery of the bodies in the trunk of a hollow tree, people from Daylesford and its surrounding area who felt that they had been involved in or witnessed a special event in the search for the three boys, were moved to immediate commemoration which took several forms. A public subscription was established to erect a monument over the graves in the local cemetery. When this was completed in 1868, it was a very formal piece of memorialising—a tall, solid stone engraved with the names and ages of the boys (see Illustration 13). This was correctly if somewhat tersely described by amateur historian (or perhaps in Grifiths’ terms ‘antiquarian’) J.E. Menadue, in his booklet ‘“The Three Lost Children” 1867-1967,’ as an ‘impressive headstone’.81

Rather more in keeping with the previously noted entertainment aspect of the incident was the paragraph published immediately beneath that announcing the establishment of the public subscription in the Daylesford Mercury. Headed ‘WHERE THE CHILDREN WERE FOUND’, this piece noted

two photographic views of the tree and the locality in which the lost children were found. One by Mr. Blundell … the other by Mr. Boldner

80 Colin Talbot, ‘Peter Dodds “Lost in the bush”’, Lumiere, October 1973, p. 18. 81 Daylesford Mercury, 18 September, 1867, p. 2. (See also J.E. Menadue ‘“The Three Lost Children” 1867-1967’, published by the Daylesford and District Historical Society, 1967, p. 12.) 251

… Both are very creditable works of art, and give a vivid picture of Australian bush, the tree in which the children had found their last shelter standing out among the others, not only conspicuous but remarkable for its size.’82

These were nothing more or less than souvenirs, and they were not the only ones. An item in the Melbourne paper, the Argus, in May 1868 announced a photograph, again by Mr. Blundell

in the shape of a carte, [of] a design for the monument to the three lost children whose fate is fresh in public memory ... The photograph is not only creditable to the artist, but a souvenir of the sad event in a very creditable form. 83

The writer for the Daylesford Mercury voiced a criticism of these ‘photographic views’ that provides a useful insight into the extent to which myth-making was already underway. He concluded that:

In both we find the same fault. The loss of the children, and particularly the place where they were found, is associated with the wild solitude of the bush, while in both photographs the neighbourhood of the tree is dotted with the figures of men, giving the place an air of animation and life at variance with our ideas of the scene of such a calamity.

His urge to construct the bush as a place of isolation, despite surprise at the time of the discovery of the bodies that they could have disappeared ‘in so public a place’ demonstrates the extent to which a constructed notion of the bush could be superimposed over the reality. 84

The importance placed on the tree in which the bodies of the boy’s were found is reminiscent of the attention given the relics associated with Jane Duff. The community clearly placed great value on places or objects directly involved in the incident, possibly more so than the formal memorials. This exemplifies Tom Griffiths’s description of the ‘antiquarian imagination’ of the nineteenth century, demonstrating as it does ‘a historical sensibility particularly attuned to the material evidence of the past, and possessing a powerful sense of place’. The hollow tree remained a focal point for remembering the incident. Menadue published two photographs of the tree in

82 Ibid., p. 2. 83 Argus, 6 May 1868, p. 5. 84 Ibid., 17 September 1867, p. 2. 252

his book. One, undated, has a caption claiming that it was taken at the ‘re- enactment’ of the finding of the bodies. The clothes and dense bush surrounding the still-standing tree suggest that it took place not long after the boys were found. The other photograph was taken ‘shortly after the tree fell, in the early 1950’s’.85 It shows a very dead, old tree stump, lying on cleared paddocks with only a few other trees in the distance. To the outside observer it is quite an incomprehensible photo of an old tree stump, to an intimate of the story it is an image imbued with meaning.

Commemoration of the incident remains a feature of Daylesford public life. In 1889 the father of the two of the lost boys instituted the Graham Dux Prize for the best pupils (boy and girl) at the Daylesford Primary School, which ensured that the story was known to generations of schoolchildren. This continues today, with the story forming part of the school’s study of their local community. The names of past winners of the prize are displayed on honour boards in the school’s foyer. A teacher at the school has noted that they are often visited by past recipients, keen to ensure that their names are still there or to show family the honour board.86 Education Department involvement has been a critical factor in the continuation of this story, just as it was with that of the Duff children.

Successive Daylesford generations have remained anxious to claim the incident as an important, active part of their community history. In 1967 the Daylesford Historical Society also marked the centenary of the event by erecting memorial cairns to mark the beginning and end points of the boys’ journey. This idea of charting the boy’s movements was extended by a 1988 bicentennial project that resulted in ‘The Three Lost Children’s Memorial Reserve and Walking Track’ (see Illustration 14). As with the walking trail in the Jane Duff Memorial Highway Park, there appears to have been some sense that it was useful or important to try to walk in the steps of the lost children in a peculiarly Australian pilgrimage. The Daylesford Museum also helps to perpetuate the story through the sale of the Menadue book and the distribution of a leaflet giving an account of the incident and a map of the Three Lost Children Walk. The museum also houses a framed story of the Three Lost

85 Menadue , Three Lost Children, p.10. 86 Information received from Daylesford P.S. Acting-Principal Chris Tsolakis in telephone conversation on 13 September, 2001. 253

Children, written by a headmaster of the Daylesford Primary School. The Daylesford and District Historical Society has in its collection an inscribed gun plate presented to one of the Aboriginal trackers, Tommy Farmer, ‘In recognition of intelligence, skill and fidelity in conducting the search for the lost Children at Daylesford, July 1867’.87

There were also other, less tangible, ways of commemorating loss. Poetry was one means, and the story of the Duff children generated at least three pieces of published poetry in the time immediately after the incident.88 Julie Vieusseux, whose son Lewis’s disappearance I examined in detail earlier, commemorated him in a way particularly relevant to her. A successful portrait painter, she painted Lewis’s portrait, using her only remaining son, Edward, as a model.89

These more personal, private memorials are of necessity little known and therefore difficult to draw any conclusions from. What is apparent however, is that the public memorials to lost children are a sub-genre of the wider movement that established memorials to nation-builders —pioneers and explorers—and nation-savers—soldiers— in response to an urge, as Michael Cathcart postulated in his consideration of the effect of deaths of explorers in Australia

to invest an an alien and unhistoricised land with a white-man’s dreaming—they gave white stories, a white mystery, to the cultural silence.90

Memorials to bush-lost children, whether or not they died, were part of the process of Europeans binding themselves to the land. Pat Jalland identifies the importance of having a loved one buried in Australian soil to the individual’s sense of belonging, and relates the response of an Adelaide man, Robert Gouger to the death in 1857 of his wife and baby son:

As for me, I am more a South Australian than ever. I shall never leave the remains of my dear and sainted wife; they are buried in an area of my

87 Menadue , Three Lost Children, 1999 edition, p. 13. 88 Geelong Advertiser, 14 September 1864, p. 2; Hamilton Spectator, 1 October 1864, p. 4; 11; January 1865, p. 2. 89 Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth-century Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 47. 90 Michael Cathcart in Davison, Hirst, Macintyre (eds), Oxford Companion, p. 235. 254

own … and there I shall spend, in all earthly probability, the remainder of my days.91

Memorials, like graves, served to bind settlers emotionally to the land, to create the links and stories by which to understand and interpret their experiences. Memorials delineated events or experiences that were felt to be important enough to the national experience to warrant concrete form to promote their remembrance. The presence of memorials to children lost in the bush affirms the experience as a central, albeit minor, part of the national experience of settlement/white settlement. Perhaps the most unusual commemoration of a child lost in the bush occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. The story of Stephen Walls, the ‘Little Boy Lost’, is a vivid demonstration of the extent to which the image of the bush-lost child and appropriate community response remains embedded in the modern Australian national psyche. The extraordinary power of the image as embodied in the story of the ‘Little Boy Lost’ is at the centre of my next, concluding chapter.

91 Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, quoting from a letter by Robert Gouger to George Fife Angas, p. 8.

255

Conclusion ‘Little Boy Lost’: An image for modern Australia

it is primarily the history of national culture, its politics and symbolism, that concerns me here … Legends are a way into this domain, and to understand a legend we must know the story of its making and remaking as well as we know the tale itself. (Peter Cochrane, Simpson and the Donkey)1

My contention in this thesis has been twofold: first, that the image of children lost in the bush was rapidly taken up by white settlers of the nineteenth century as a unique symbol of the Australian colonial experience; and second, that this image became so deeply imbedded in the national cultural memory that it has continued to affect the behaviour of Australians long after the colonial period, indeed to this very day. Obviously these two claims are closely connected—only a widely held image with strong roots in the national culture could survive the shift from a colonial society of to a settled, urban society. Images find shape in stories. As this quotation taken from Peter Cochrane’s examination of the legendary Australian image of Simpson and his donkey suggests, stories are central to an understanding of figures that are honoured in the popular national culture, and stories compose the backbone of this thesis. The many stories of bush-lost children—the way they have been told and re-told, shaped and represented through many different mediums— reflect just how potent a force the image was, and is, within the national culture.

The power of the image to shape the behaviour of even a city-based child of the late twentieth century is demonstrated in another story told by Anne Summers, best known as a feminist historian, in her autobiography Ducks on the Pond (1999).2 In talking of her childhood Summers recounts an incident in the early 1950s in which she and her brother, aged around seven and five years, wandered off from a family picnic.

Soon we were in the middle of a forest of scrubby eucalypts and serrated ferns, whose fronds scratched our bare knees as we brushed past them in

1 Peter Cochrane, Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. xi. 2 Anne Summers, Ducks on the Pond: an autobiography, 1945-1976, Viking-Penguin, Melbourne, 1999. 256

our increasingly anxious search for a way out. 3

Summers remembers that her attempt to comfort the younger boy with the assurance that their father would find them was tempered by her own doubts.

Underneath I didn’t feel so confident that Dad could find us. Even at that age, I knew the classic tales of children going missing in the Australian bush, and I had also seen a reproduction of Lost, the famous Frederick McCubbin painting of a boy who wandered off.

Her fears for their survival, based on written and visual representations of the bush-lost child image, show how pervasive it was. When the children heard a rifle shot and saw that, beyond an open paddock there was a road, their response was near automatic. Knowledge that Summers held at a subliminal level took them through the wheat field onto the hot road, shouting to announce their position. Summers ponders the basis for this response:

Nor do I know how a city child as young as I was knew these survival strategies; knew to make for a road, a findable spot, and stay there; knew a rifle shot was a signal to someone lost.

The answer to this lies in something that she has already told the reader in her comment that she had read the stories and seen the images of the lost child— the subject of lost children remained current in the national, collective memory of modern, post-World War II Australian society. The stories were still read, the paintings still viewed, and from these came an understanding of survival techniques, whether or not they were overtly taught. As I have demonstrated in the course of this thesis, the image had become an integral part of the communal understanding of what it meant to be Australian.

Anne Summers’ description of the experience from the perspective of the lost child demonstrates how the image affected her behaviour. An incident which took place some years later attracted national attention and demonstrated how the actions of the wider community were still predicated upon understandings of bush searches established in the colonial period. This incident became known as the story of the ‘Little Boy Lost’.

3 Ibid., pp. 61-2. 257

‘Little Boy Lost’ In the wild New England ranges came the word one fateful day, To every town and village, that a boy had lost his way. All the town’s folk quickly gathered and the wild bush horses tossed, As they went to search the ranges for a little boy lost, They went to search the ranges for a little boy lost.

A lad of just four summers, Stephen Walls, that is his name, And nobody doubts his courage, ‘cause he’s hardy and he’s game, But there’s danger in this country that man has seldom crossed, And they wonder if they’ll find alive this little boy lost, And they wonder if they’ll find alive this little boy lost.

Came the night, came the morning. Another night, another dawning, And a mother weeps in silence as she kneels before the Cross, As she prays to God in heaven for her little boy lost, As she prays to God in heaven for her little boy lost.

The little town’s deserted, no-one walks upon the street, For they comb the wild bush country on a thousand aching feet. They searched ev’ry hidden valley through his trail they never crossed, And their hopes are slowly fading for this little boy lost, And their hopes are slowly fading for this little boy lost.

The blazing sun beat down upon the earth that final day, With heavy hearts they prayed to God above to show the way. When from a scrubby gully came the voice they’ve ne’er forgot, ‘Where’s my daddy, where’s my daddy?’ cried the little boy lost, ‘Where’s my daddy, where’s my daddy?’ cried the little boy lost.

In the far New England ranges there’s a boy that’s known so well, There’s a story that the town’s folk and the bushmen often tell: How we fought a rugged country, where man has seldom crossed; And a mother’s prayers were answered for her little boy lost. Johnny Ashcroft

In the summer of 1960 this song commemorating a recent national experience was played on radio stations around Australia. ‘Little Boy Lost’ was a popular hit with its sentimental evocation of a contemporary version of the classic pioneer story of a child lost in the bush.4 The rugged bush in which he was lost, the speedy and wholehearted response of searchers, the vulnerability of the child, the growing despair alleviated suddenly by a plaintive cry of

4 Johnny Ashcroft, ‘Little Boy Lost’, 1960. Although attributed to Ashcroft there is some suggestion that the song may have been co-written or at least discussed with a Sydney disc jockey, Tony Withers. 258

‘Where’s my daddy, where’s my daddy?’—all seemed very familiar to the essentially urban Australian population for which it was front-page news.5 The enormous and immediate popularity of the song was a potent demonstration of the enduring power of the lost child image.

The depth of public interest in the story of four-year-old Stephen Walls, lost in early February 1960 for over three days in harsh country near Guyra in northern New South Wales after wandering away from the car where he was left while his father mustered sheep, shows that it touched a national nerve. The speed with which searchers swung into action, their search methods, the introduction of an Aboriginal tracker, women coming to the homestead to supply tea and food—these all seemed to draw upon understood rules for behaviour in such a situation. The striking similarities between this response and that of communities involved in the searches for lost children in colonial Australia, discussed in detail in chapter five ‘Bush Searches’, demonstrates the power and longevity of the cultural memory surrounding the image of bush- lost children. In fact searchers would have needed to look no further than a Henry Lawson story, ‘The Babies in the Bush’ in the Joe Wilson’s Mates collection, to find a pattern to follow:

Horsemen seeming to turn up in no time and from nowhere, as they do in a case like this, and no matter how lonely the district. Bushmen galloping through the scrub in all directions. The hurried search the first day, and the mother mad with anxiety as night came on ... The systematic work of the search-parties next day and the days following ... The women from the next run or selection, and some from the town, driving from ten or twenty miles, perhaps, to stay with and try to comfort the mother ... The mounted police out with the black trackers. Search parties cooeeing to each other about the bush, and lighting signal-fires. The reckless, breakneck rides for news or more help.6

Sixty years after Lawson wrote his vivid description, the Sydney Morning Herald’s account of the first day of the search for Stephen Walls conveys a mixed sense of recognition of the experience and wonder at the scope of the community response.

A chain of 600 people searched until dark last night for a boy lost in swamp country near Guyra ... One hundred experienced bushmen, aided

5 Age 9 February 1960, pp. 1, 3; Sun, 9 February 1960, pp. 1-2. 6 Henry Lawson, ‘The Babies in the Bush’, Joe Wilson’s Mates, Lloyd O’Neil, Melbourne, 1970, p. 142. The story was first published in 1901. 259

by a tracking dog, carried on the search through the night. Hundreds of new volunteers last night offered to join today’s search. ... Police yesterday described the scene at Tubbamurra, about two miles from the search area as ‘an extraordinary sight’.7

At the same time as recognising the connections with past searches—an Aboriginal tracker was brought into the search, a dog was tried and some searchers were mounted on horseback—the account records modern additions to the experience. Light aircraft were used to check the countryside, radio enabled rapid communication and motorised transport allowed for rapid movement. According to one reporter, volunteers ‘poured into the township in cars, taxis, Land Rovers’.8 Yet overshadowing all this activity was the haunting image of the lone, lost child. Under a very large headline of ‘Search team haunted by crying in bush – LOST BOY’, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that:

Searchers who returned to the base camp yesterday said that they had been haunted by sounds which were like a child’s cries. “We were certain it was Stephen, but every time we moved towards it the cry seemed to come from a different direction.” said one local resident. “It was eerie. Then suddenly the crying stopped. Maybe it was little Stephen’s cries echoing around the mountains.”9

A day later the paper recorded that ‘More than 3,000 men, aided by aircraft, armoured cars, and horses’, had failed to find Stephen. The search had assumed huge proportions with a ‘1,000-man arm-in-arm sweep’, five light aircraft, army units with armoured cars, and a field two-way radio network. The young, unmarried men at the nearby University of New England were called in as searchers.10 Even a nearby regional conference of the Australian Labor Party was suspended so that delegates could join the search.11

The front page of the next day’s Sydney Morning Herald triumphantly announced ‘LOST BOY BACK WITH HIS FATHER AFTER BUSH

7 Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 1960, p. 1. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 One of these men was John Ryan, now an associate professor in the School of English, Communication and Theatre at the University of New England. Professor Ryan is editor of Australian Folklore. He has written to me about his memories of the experience, details of which I relate a little later. 11 Sydney Morning Herald, 8 February 1960, pp. 1, 5. 260

ORDEAL ... BOY RESTS IN HOSPITAL AFTER LIVING ON BERRIES AND WATER’. His discovery was described as ‘a climax to the State’s greatest organised search’, and according to the ‘special reporter’, ‘when news of the boy’s finding spread through the record 3,500 searchers, many men broke down after the strain of the long search’. The emotional investment evident in this response was not confined to the searchers. People around the nation who had anxiously followed the story through a range of media now including radio, film (Cinesound Movietone) and the relatively new medium of television, felt a similar level of involvement.12 The scope and immediacy of the modern reporting meant that the whole nation shared a common experience and could participate, albeit vicariously, in the search and rescue. This emotional response found a focus in Stephen’s reported first words, ‘Where’s my daddy?’, that became a key refrain of the Ashcroft song. 13

In apparent recognition that the search represented something larger than itself the Sydney Morning Herald also published an editorial, ‘The Search for Stephen Walls’, which consciously linked the pioneer past with contemporary Australia and its advances in modern technology.14 The commonality of concern for a lost child is considered a given.

A search for a lost child never fails to touch the deepest chord of sympathy, and hundreds of thousands of Australians must have felt an almost personal joy at the dramatic news that young Stephen Walls had been found.

This particular incident with its ‘great community effort’, was placed squarely within the canon of pioneering and nation-building.

the pioneering of Australia is too recent not to invest this Guyra episode—and other like it that have ended less fortunately—with memories of harsh sacrifice in the making of a nation ...those who pushed the ‘frontier’ even deeper into an unknown continent could only hope to survive and thrive if they made the cause of each the cause of all when the common foe was flood, fire or isolation and the corroding

12 ‘Stop Press! [Lost Boy at Guyra Found Alive]’, Cinesound Movietone newsreel, 1960, ScreenSound Australia, title no. 128510. John Ryan commented that the area in which the search was conducted received no national radio broadcast because of the mountain barriers. The local Armidale commercial radio station (2AD) made the search ‘an almost total programme item, and probably played a large part in making the event into an instant legend’. 13 Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February 1960, p. 1. 14 Ibid., p. 2. 261

loneliness of an often desolate land.15

This is very much the view of the bush and settler life offered by late nineteenth-century writers such as Henry Lawson, discussed in chapter two. Instances of children lost in the bush are explicitly included by the editorial writer as one of the natural dangers inherent in this harsh land. ‘One of the ever-present dangers that confronted the pioneering family was the dreadful ease with which its members, especially children, could be lost in the bush’. The editor asserts a strong link between the representations of these incidents and the contemporary national psyche: ‘The balladists were haunted by such tragedies, and the sentiment of a great many Australians is still affected by the overtones of their elegies’. The depth of public response to Stephen Walls’ case suggests strongly that this assertion was still valid. However, this was now also a nation triumphant, where pioneering dangers could be met with assurance.

But Guyra today is a long way from the pioneering frontier. Where once stockmen gathered by the half-dozen to search for someone lost in the outback, the searchers now are numbered in hundreds, even thousands. Science and the blacktrackers join hands; the Army lends its help to the bushman; the helicopter above the hills keeps in close touch with the searchers on the ground.16

Growth and technology, combined with a pioneering response to helping others, were seen to have rendered the bush manageable.

Search participant, John Ryan, provided an interesting counterpoint to this eulogistic representation of the search for Stephen Walls. Certainly the army and CMF were called out,17 but as Ryan noted, there was a different experience for civilian searchers.

They were in trucks, but we plodded back and forth over a wide area to the east of the New England Highway, especially in/on/around the rocky slopes … The core group of the searchers was less than a hundred people – largely males, until the last day—and then as I recall I was quite disgusted that the couples who had sex in mind wandered away and left

15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 CMF is the commonly used abbreviation for Citizen Military Forces, the part-time, volunteer arm of the Australian Army. In 1980 the name was changed to the Army Reserve. (Davison et al., Oxford Companion to Australian History, 2001, p. 135). 262

great gaps in the lines. Also, we stopped again and again to kill snakes … It seems that the search itself was more than defective and that we must have passed him several times. The zeal of the last day was occasioned by the fact that there were found droppings that were human—i.e. he had eaten wild berries and these went quickly through him—and various science chaps maintained that their form was human, not animal. I have no recollection of any attempt by the family to thank those who struggled in burned by the heat, and torn by lantana. The pop song was very sentimental and not much liked up here.18

Apparently the official version of the search did not, indeed could not, convey too much reality, suggesting that the nation-building imperative still held sway. As I have shown in chapter six ‘Commemorations of the lost’, this imperative was a driving force in the memorialisation process in Australia.

The depth and range of public response to the story of Stephen Walls clearly indicated the extent to which the image of a child lost in the bush had become established in the national self-view. It was seen as an integral component of the pioneering past which had ‘won’ the land, and whose mores were still accessible and valid. The overwhelmingly urban nature of Australian society by the middle of the twentieth century had not obliterated a social understanding of ‘bush culture’ which may not have had a realistic base but which certainly held strong popular appeal. The enormous emotional pull of the ‘lost child’ and ‘bush’ comradeship imagery may be gauged by the success of the Ashcroft song. Released only two weeks after Stephen was found, ‘Little Boy Lost’ quickly reached the top of Australian hit parades, and stayed there. The record went gold three times in just over three months with sales peaking in June of that year at 12 000 copies.19 The song was also released internationally—in America, South Africa and the United Kingdom—with a film clip of Ashcroft singing the song against a background of the Cinesound Movietone newsreel footage of the search.20

In a short introduction to the text of ‘Little Boy Lost’ published in 1989, Ashcroft described his own personal response to the loss of Stephen Walls,

18 Information from John Ryan, email of 15 October 2001. 19 Sales dropped dramatically in July after the song was withdrawn from airplay in response to the kidnapping of schoolboy, Graeme Thorne. Eric Watson, Country Music in Australia, vol. 2, Angus& Robertson, Sydney, 1983, pp. 59-60. 20 Jazzer Smith (ed.), The Book of Australian Country Music, The Berghouse, Floyd Tuckey Publishing Group, NSW, 1984, p. 40. 263

and it is may explain forces driving the wider public response. After explaining that he had once worked in the bush near Guyra and so ‘understood the type of country in which the search took place’, Ashcroft added that ‘at the time that Stephen was lost, I had a boy who was almost the same age so the feelings of the parents were that much easier to understand’.21 With the immediacy available through modern media forms of radio and television this identification was possible for all Australians—Stephen could be any son, brother, nephew, grandson, boy down the road, or playmate. To the Australian community he stood for all of these, and the emotional outpouring that his story generated reflected the enormous value society placed on its children. This response reaffirms my conclusion at the end of chapter one, the examination of changing attitudes towards children and childhood in Australia. As I demonstrated, from the beginnings of British settlement in which the convict children were treated in much the same way as adults, children gradually came to be seen as vulnerable and in need of particular care. By the late nineteenth century children were valued and represented as the symbol of the emerging nation, Young Australia.

Ashcroft also reflected the values expressed by the wider community when he noted that the song was written ‘as a tribute to the 5000 people who cared enough about the welfare of one small boy to mount such a massive search’.22 In this he reflected the response given to many other searchers over many years—the praise accorded to the hundreds of searchers for the three lost boys of Daylesford in 1867, whose story was told in chapter five, could just as well have been directed at the men searching for Stephen Walls.

Wherever the miner, men at the saw mills, splitters in the bush, and other working men heard of the object of the search they laid aside their tools and joined in it ... The minister of the gospel, the man of business, the merchant, the tradesman, the hardy miner, and the rough bushman, the man of wealth and position, and the poor man who had nothing but zeal and a willing heart to give.

The shape and place of the bush search in Australian life, discussed in chapter

21 101 Songs for Australian Buskers: book 2, Wise Publications, Sydney, c.1 989, p. 86. 22 Ibid. This figure Ashcroft gave of 5000 people being involved in the search demonstrates a common tendency to enlarge involvement in major human activities, this accords with the point made by Graham Wilson, see footnote 781. The Sydney Morning Herald account of Stephen’s discovery numbered those involved in ‘the State’s greatest organised search’ at 3 500. (9 February 1960, p. 1). 264

five, has varied very little from the earliest recorded searches for lost children until today. In the early colonial period bush searches were part of ‘winning’ the land, as well as an affirmation of community values. Increasingly, as settlers became more comfortable in their relationship with the Australian environment, the former understanding faded. What has remained constant is the perception that the communal search for children lost in the bush is an expression of a healthy community. As I have demonstrated, this was how the search for Stephen Walls was interpreted by the observing media.

Although there are no official plaques or memorials commemorating the event, the search for Stephen Walls remains strongly etched in the minds of the local people. A local historian has noted that so many people ‘remember’ taking part in the search that it must have been much larger than actually claimed!23 This suggests the near-hypnotic influence that may be generated by a ‘local memory’. The strong emotional element of stories revolving around the loss of children in the bush and any ensuing search appears to result in its being internalised by those who participated vicariously, to such an extent for some that they came to feel they were involved in the search. Perhaps also, people want to feel that they were involved in such a large community effort that remains a source of local pride. In keeping with the element of popular folklore in the story, there is a local memorial in the Ampol Roadhouse at Guyra. It comprises a wall display with photographs and newspaper accounts of the incident, all with informative captions.24 This is a celebration of the community effort involved in the search for Stephen, rather than a celebration of an individual. The whole notion of memorialisation, discussed at length in chapter six, revolves around memory. The memorials to bush-lost children were expressions of the desire of the communities involved to have the incident remembered in the terms that they chose. Memorials were a way of establishing special links with the environment.

The extent to which the story of Stephen Wall’s disappearance and the search resonated with the larger Australian community is reflected in its subsequent representations via the mass media of film and television. One of

23 Graham Wilson in telephone conversation, 16 September 2001. 24 Thanks to Robert Smith of Southern Cross University for this information. 265

these was on the 15th of June 1975, when it featured in the popular magazine- format ABC program, A Big Country, as part of a show about Australian country music. A Big Country was a national show with a huge potential audience across Australia. The episode summary described the program as,

A look at the country people who are writing and performing their own style of music ... the program examines the future of country music with amateurs and professionals. They include Johnny Ashcroft, who recalls the true basis of his song ‘Little Boy Lost’.25

Implicit in this evocation of ‘their own style of music’ was the notion of a peculiarly Australian country music, as opposed to that imported from overseas, notably the United States. The Ashcroft song and the incident it commemorated were recognised as forming part of the quintessential Australian experience. The image of a child lost in the bush was a unique national vision, one which had been shaped by Australian experiences from the original British ‘Babes in the Wood’ into the ‘Bush-lost babies’, as I demonstrated in chapters two and three. Stories of lost children in Australia filled the place that captivity narratives took in other colonial cultures as the image of vulnerable youth.

Several years later the story of the search for Stephen Walls was portrayed in a film, Little Boy Lost (1978). The use of this title indicates how powerful a hold the phrase had taken on the Australian imagination. Produced by the National Library of Australia, the summary of the 92-minute long film explained that:

In February 1960, people across Australia waited, hoped and prayed for the safe return of a four-year-old boy lost in the bush. [This film] Tells the dramatic story of the search that took four days and three nights.26

The expectation that the story still had currency eighteen years after the original incident demonstrates that it drew strength from a more extensive and deeply engrained cultural mythology about the experience of children becoming lost in the bush and generating a widespread community search. It was a mythology enriched by continuing occurrences, many with similar scenarios. This remains true today: a recent incident involved two young girls

25 A Big Country: Sounds of Country Music, ABC Archives and Library Services, accession number 84590. 26 ScreenSound Archive, Little Boy Lost, 1978, cover title no: 441461. 266

who wandered away from a farm in central Victoria in late winter of 2001. When the father of one of the girls, who had been working in a shed on the farm, failed to find them he called for help, which came in the form of police and volunteer searchers. By the following morning when the search resumed there were 150 searchers including dog squads. The girls were found that day by a man searching on horseback—they had slept the night under a log, huddled together for warmth.27 In so many respects—the searchers on foot and mounted, the dogs, the children using a log for shelter—this account could have come from any time in the history of European settlement of Australia. Once again, this demonstrates the point that I have made throughout this thesis, that this is a timeless image, as current today as it was two hundred years ago.

I believe that it is this timelessness that contributes to the strength of the image, it encapsulates a strong continuity of human experience from the earliest days of colonial settlement to the most recent. There are few other Australian images of which this can be said, and they are all from the natural world—fire, flood and drought. Indeed, the image of the lost child has acquired something of the force of a natural disaster, because of its association with the bush. The bush, the land, was the major elemental force with which the colonists had to contend—both surviving in it and making a living from it. Julian Croft catches something of this elemental quality in the relationship between the bush and lost children in his discussion of the lost children stories in Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life (1903). Croft suggests that these stories, in particular that of Mary O’Halloran,

reveals a much darker pessimism than we might expect. A pessimism which expresses itself in the folk-belief that in the centre of white Australian society lies a vacuum which with regularity but unpredictability takes its tithe of the lives of the young. The vacuum is just that—an absence; it is not malign, nor vengeful, nor understandable, but merely a vacuum into which children disappear.28

Yet, although this reading evokes the elemental power associated with the lost child image, it is problematic. Croft fails, as do many commentators on representations of bush life, to recognise the bonding of young, white colonists

27 Age, 27 August 2001, p. 5. 28 Julian Croft, The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins: A Study of the Works of Joseph Furphy, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1991, p. 143. 267

with the land. Mary O’Halloran, at around five years of age, walked into the scrub looking for her father, because she was worried that he was in trouble out there. She was comfortable enough in the bush herself to feel able to help her father. Clearly the bush was not a vacuum to her.29 As I showed in chapter two in my account of the way in which the image of lost children altered from being British-focused to having an Australian basis, this love of the Australian bush and ease in it, was evident in children from the early days of settlement.

A positive feature of the lost child experience, as with other natural disasters, was the opportunity it offered people to participate in generous communal activity. This, particularly in a society that considers itself modern enough to look back on earlier periods of the settlement process, is a powerfully nostalgic experience. It can be seen as a confirmation that the ‘traditional’ Australian values of mateship and bush kindness are still present in the community. A search for lost children offers people the opportunity to participate in a larger quest that allowed participants, for however brief a time, to see themselves as part of the extended settlement process. The search for nationhood is an evolutionary process. It did not cease with Federation in 1901, and the shaping forces are both cumulative and shifting. Australians still question what it means to be Australian, and in doing so review their past. It is within this context that I want to position the assertion made in the introduction to Text, Theory, Space, that ‘the journey towards nationhood infuses the narratives of explorers, pioneers and bushmen with the potency of the quest’.30 As I demonstrated in earlier chapters, the image of the bush-lost child with the attendant bush search was subsumed into the larger pioneer legend, and thus shared in the power of the pioneer narrative.

Another indication of the strength of the general nostalgic, emotional appeal of ‘bush’ life for the modern Australian was the popular success of the documentary The Back of Beyond, produced by the Shell Film Unit in 1954, which accompanies an outback mail-truck driver on his delivery run along the Birdsville Track.31 Directed by John Heyer, and with verse narration by poet

29 John Barnes (ed.), Joseph Furphy: ‘Such is Life’, stories, verse, essays and letters, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1981, pp. 187-8. 30 Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (eds), Text, Theory, Space: Land, literature and history in South Africa and Australia, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p. 11. 31 John Heyer, The Back of Beyond, Shell Film Unit, 1954. 268

Douglas Stewart, the film was an attempt to ‘project what he [Heyer] saw as the essential Australian character, with Tom Kruse the outback mail-truck driver as its representative’.32

The film won several awards at international film festivals, but more importantly in this context, it also achieved a very large audience within Australia, being seen by 750 000 people in its first two years.33 There is an odd vignette in the film (one of those described by Sylvia Lawson as ‘awkward, even grotesque’) when Kruse arrives at one of the few remaining cattle stations on the Track, and the story shifts into what Peter Pierce aptly describes as ‘a threnody for a lost way of life’.34 It is with this nostalgic, emotive vision that The Back of Beyond tells one of the stories of the Track. Moving away from its earlier straight documentary style, the film becomes a haunting, timeless re-enactment of the disappearance into the desert of two young girls who had lived on the station. With the father away mustering cattle, the two girls were left stranded when their mother died suddenly. Unable to operate the wireless, their only contact with the outside world, they decided to walk along the Track to get help. They set out pulling a billycart that held food, water and their dog, and headed straight into endless shifting sand-dunes. Their isolation and vulnerability was rendered even more poignant by their unanswered cooees and the trilling on a little pipe carried by one of the girls. The viewer’s worst fears are realised when the girls come across their own tracks—like so many others lost in the desert, they had walked in a circle. The children continued walking until they disappeared from view in the totally inhospitable desert environment whose threat was made clear by the animals bones they trudge past. When the father returned and searched for the girls he followed their tracks far into the desert before they disappeared, covered over by wind-blown sand. The girls were lost forever, and the image of their loss was, and remains, a haunting one.

These scenes are rendered in a dreamlike manner. Everything happens rather slowly, with little conversation or emotion. It shares this quality with a

32 The Australian, 26 June 2001, obituary of John Heyer by Sylvia Lawson, p. 17. 33 Ibid. 34 Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999, p. 154. 269

later film involving lost children, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).35 Here too, girls simply disappear, in this case into the rocks on a hot afternoon at a fashionable picnic area. Only one of the three is found, eventually, and she cannot explain what happened—it remains a mystery. It is in these types of representations that the image of the lost child acquires something of what John Rickard called ‘the allure of mystery’—their vanishing, never to be found, somehow renders them part of the actual country.36

The narrative of disappearance is a strong thread in Australian history— convicts, explorers, shipwreck survivors, gold-seekers, adult settlers as well as children—all are recorded as having disappeared. Even those who disappeared from the land rather than into it, such as the young soldiers who sailed away to die overseas, have reinforced this sense that disappearance is an innate part of the national experience. The loss of the two girls in The Back of Beyond accords with the image that Croft delineates of children simply disappearing into the ‘vacuum’. He expands upon that notion to consider the emotive power of the phrase itself.

‘Lost in the bush’ is the trope which may be seen in countless stories, poems, and lectures, and the ‘bush’, whatever that might be, is the power which consumes the future generation.37

The story of Stephen Walls and the image of the disappearing girls in The Back of Beyond —each with a very strong visual impact—operated on two levels. They reflected and reinforced a national perception that the Australian environment, whether bush or desert, was harsh and potentially life- threatening. As the frontier of white settlement moved, the nature of the surroundings changed, but bush and desert both demonstrated the same awful ability to swallow children up, rendering them invisible, often forever. Tracks and bodies could be covered by shifting sand or by the all-encompassing scrub—it made no difference. The desert or the endless bush serve as metaphors for the land in general, a land into which children disappeared and rarely returned. Each of these manifestations of lost children served to confirm

35 Directed by Peter Weir, the 1975 film was a close rendering of the novel of the same name by Joan Lindsay (Melbourne, Penguin, 1967). 36 John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, Longman, London, 1988, p. 58. 37 Croft, Life and Opinions, p. 143. 270

to the modern Australian the validity of the pioneer mythology—that is, white settlers had earned the right to live in the land by experiencing its harshness and surviving its threat. There could be no more poignant suffering imposed on a family and community than to lose its children.

The image of children being lost to the land confirmed an understanding which developed through the early twentieth century that nation-building was not only the province of explorers or soldiers. This is the area explored in the Unusual Monuments project which I discuss in chapter six. The pioneers, the early settlers had also made a contribution, often at great personal cost. Public response to the story of ‘The Little Boy Lost’ demonstrated that the pioneer image still holds sway in modern Australia and that the bush-lost child remains an integral, unique and powerful part of that larger imagery. As this thesis has argued, the image of ‘Bush-lost babies’ is one that developed with the nation and which rests upon values of compassion and mateship.

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Torney, Kim Lynette

Title: From 'babes in the wood' to 'bush-lost babies': the development of an Australian image

Date: 2002

Citation: Torney, K. L. (2003). From 'babes in the wood' to 'bush-lost babies': the development of an Australian image. PhD thesis, Department of History, The University of Melbourne.

Publication Status: Unpublished

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/38877

File Description: From 'babes in the wood' to 'bush-lost babies': the development of an Australian image

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