FREO StreetWise Fremantle’s independent street magazine Issue 14 - April 2020 Depuch Overlooked SF Visions Pages 2-3 Pages 16-19 Midgegooroo Pasta time Pages 4-13 Page 24-25 www.streetwisemedia.com.au INDEPENDENT publisher StreetWise StreetWise readers can explore the Media was launched in Fremantle in hundreds of stories and images 2015 to showcase the unique stories showcasing Fremantle, its coverage and images of WA’s much-loved extending to parts of the state port city. visited by StreetWise over the past year including Geraldton, Carnarvon, Thousands of print and online Shark Bay and the Pilbara. readers have joined the growing StreetWise acknowledges the StreetWise community since the sponsors and supporters of the launch of its flagship magazine Freo online magazine including SCOOP StreetWise. Property and Finance, FreeDB Car StreetWise builds on its publishing Stereo, Homestyle Salads, Portorosa success with this first ‘digital’ Fremantle, the Hair and Barber Room and Warren’s Menswear. edition since the publication moved to its own dedicated website at Print and online advertisers can streetwisemedia.com.au. The contact [email protected] StreetWise Facebook page serves as or call 0468608503 for rates and a gateway to the new site. promotional packages. - 1 - StreetWise Media Stay streetsafe Publisher THIS is a difficult time for everyone. Carmelo Amalfi The streets are empty. Businesses Designer are having to adapt or perish. And Beau G’Froerer our sense of community has been replaced with social separation. Life Freo StreetWise is a free indoors, life online, until medical independent publication produced authorities can contain COVID-19. in Fremantle. At StreetWise Media, it was decided Supported by local businesses and to replace the Easter print issue community groups, the magazine with the publication’s first digital launched in 2015 is distributed in edition since the launch of www. cafes, bars, hotels, restaurants, streetwisemedia.com.au. We libraries and select sites in thank sponsors and supporters Cockburn and Melville. of StreetWise as we adjust to the StreetWise also is available at impact of the pandemic on the way www.streetwisemedia.com.au. we live, work and think. Contact: We explore the life and times of Carmelo Amalfi 0468608503 Noongar warrior Midgegooroo email: [email protected] or and alternative names for the new visit our Facebook page. Kings Square; why the proposed World Heritage listing of WA’s Burrup Mailing address: Peninsula rock art does not include 18 Norfolk Street, Fremantle Depuch Island, whose engravings are WA 6160 out of this world; the evolution of the human hand; and the confirmation All content/images (Copyright 2020) of Australia’s newest cat species, an All rights reserved. Amalfi Publishing extinct marsupial ‘lion’. Pty Ltd (ABN 65 151 624 378). Reproduction in whole or part French illustrator Gustav Dore without permission is prohibited. enriches the Easter message in a series of biblical images including Every effort is made to ensure The Last Supper, the Crucifixion and content including prices, offers and Resurrection. SF art legend Peter information is accurate at the time Jones offers visions of the future. of publication. We also celebrate pasta’s twisted The publisher reserves the right journey from myth to modern menu. to change editorial content and Enjoy. advertisements. Carmelo Amalfi - 1 - DEPUCH Depuch or ‘Womalantha’ consists of thousands of rock engravings with, “probably a greater concentration DEPUCH Island is separated from the of Aboriginal engravings than any ghost town of Balla Balla by three other place in Australia, comparable kilometres of shallow water and with the Burrup Peninsula”. mangrove mudflats. In 1964, the WA Museum wrote The 5km by 3km oblong-shaped to Education and Native Welfare block of dolerite 26km north of Minister Edgar Lewis: “The engravings of the island Whim Creek was first Why is Depuch described by French have become widely navigator Nicolas Baudin Island not known in anthropological in 1801, the island named included in the circles. after Louis Depuch, World Heritage They have become the mineralogist of the List nomination of justly famous and have expedition. the Burrup rock been hailed as the most A small overgrown art at Dampier important collection of Aboriginal engravings in cemetery at Balla Balla Peninsula? conceals the final resting Australia.” place of the 1912 Crown of England Greens MLC for Mining and and Clyo shipwreck victims (pictured Pastoral Robin Chapple told below). StreetWise the Burrup contained up to one million individual In 1962, moves to establish a port engravings which dated back tens here were abandoned, “on the of thousands of years. grounds of its exceptional Aboriginal heritage”. The Depuch engravings number more than 5000 and are only a few Today, the former town established thousand years old. in 1898 is pegged for a new port to service Todd Corporation’s proposed View a selection of unique rock art $5 billion iron ore export facility. at www.streetwisemedia.com.au. - 2 - “A repository of Australian prehistory no less significant than such world-renowned prehistoric art galleries as the caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne, and Altamira in northern Spain.” - WA Museum chairman of trustees Sir Thomas Meagher, 1964 - 2 - - 3 - MIDGEGOOROO Square. Porcelli witnessed the arrival of Europeans Place. Curtin Court. Having before he was executed in 1833? renamed the new civic building and library, ‘Walyalup Civic People also will be asked whether Centre’, Fremantle council deferred they prefer a non-indigenous renaming Kings Square after name to reflect the diversity of Aboriginal warrior Yagan’s father cultures in the port city? Italian, Midgegooroo until the wider Portuguese, Indian, Irish, Welsh. community is consulted. As StreetWise reports the answer So who was Midgegooroo? Can is not so black and white. Here, we any other historical figure fill the profile alternative names starting shoes of the revered Noongar who with Midgegooroo. First Days - 4 - MIDGEGOOROO MIDGEGOOROO was a Whadjuk News of Midgegooroo’s death was Noongar leader of his country kept from his other son Yagan, who Beeliar south of ‘Derbal Yaragan’, the promised to kill three white people in Swan River, and west of the Canning retaliation. River to the sea. Yagan would be killed two months His descendants, traditional owners later, his head hewn off and sent of the Swan Valley region, are direct to England as an, ‘anthropological links to the turbulent colonial past curiosity’. Midgegooroo endured in the first More than 20 vessels arrived at the few years after the British flag was colony in 1833, the civilian population raised over Fremantle on May 2, at the beginning of the year 1829. WA’s ‘first fleet’ arrived in June. estimated to be 1511 people. The Noongar elder with a Newspaper reports were filled with ‘remarkable bump’ on his forehead reports of theft and violence. In 1832, was about 50 years old when he facing scarce provisions, “the usual was captured during a ‘punishment allowances of flour, etc. were denied raid’ and executed without trial at the natives, and hence the increased Perth Gaol on May 22, 1833. number of instances of thieving. The original fear of white weapons, Midgegooroo’s son ‘Billy’, believed too, had worn off, and having to be five years of age and also successfully murdered some men, referred to as ‘young Midgegooroo’, they more readily murdered others. was sent to the Government schooner Ellen off Garden Island, “It was murder on both sides”. removed, “out of sound and hearing of what was to happen to his father”. Midgegooroo, the most significant Indigenous man in the Fremantle area, “yelled and struggled fiercely to escape. He was pinioned and blindfolded, and bound to the outer door of the gaol”. He was shot dead in the only execution by firing squad in the history of Australian colonisation. - 5 - MIDGEGOOROO was a Whadjuk Noongar leader of his country Beeliar south of ‘Derbal Yaragan’, the Swan River, and west of the Canning River to the sea. The late Herbert Bropho, a member of the Swan Valley ‘River People’, said, “most Noongar people are related to Midgegooroo”. This image, Bushman by Lance Chadd Tjyllyungoo, courtesy of Merenda Fine Art Gallery. MIDGEGOOROO and Yagan were The settlers were killed in retaliation declared ‘outlaws’ by Colonial for the shooting of a Noongar administrator Lt-Governor Frederick man who reportedly broke into a Irwin after a string of violent Fremantle storehouse the previous incidents culminating in the killing of day. two settlers by Noongar men near Bull Creek in April 1833. From a modern standpoint, Midgegoroo is a historical treasure For Midgegooroo, this was the last of who very likely witnessed the several well-documented episodes British explorations of the Swan of early WA colonial confrontations River in 1827, the foundation of leading up to the deaths of the Fremantle port in 1829, and then Noongar elder and his sons. Perth. - 6 - RETRIBUTION FROM day one, Midgegooroo after On August 3, 1831, a man named whom a national park an avenue in Smedley said he discovered, “a Cockburn Central are named was no native (a relative of Midgegooroo) stranger to British violence. stealing potatoes from Mr. A. Butler’s garden on the banks of In May 1830, the Melville Water … He fired Noongar elder was at and killed him. Shortly found and beaten by afterwards a party of a military detachment natives surrounded the while plucking two house of Mr. Butler, and turkeys stolen from a brutally murdered his farm on the Canning servant Entwistle”. River. Erin Entwhistle’s son, The same month, aged about 10, later Captain Irwin gave a deposition attacked a Noongar identifying Midgegooroo camp in North as the principal offender Fremantle in in the ghastly killing: retaliation for a raid “They thrust spears on a house owned by a man called through the wattle wall of the house Paton.