There is nothing quite like the Pilbara. It’s Australia’s high-viz FIFO Mecca; a broad expense of red country dotted with mine sites, thundering road trains and sprawling pastoral stations, all sitting – sometimes uncomfortably – against a backdrop of spectacular gorges, glorious beaches and ancient traditions carved into iron-rich rock faces. I was very fortunate to travel there recently, to a little town of Cossack. It’s a fascinating place, full of stories – although you have to listen closely, for those who tell them are all long dead.
Today, Cossack is a tourist ghost town; it is home to crumbling ruins, a few restored buildings, and a smattering of weathered graves. Yet, this is the place where Pilbara as we know it started.
The town sits at the mouth of the Harding River, surrounded by muddy salt marshes and low, rocky hills covered by a carpet of spiky spinifex. Most importantly, Cossack boasts a small beach that is clear of mangroves, upon which, in the 1860s, entrepreneurial men with white, freckled faces, could unload both their stock and their hopes for wool, cotton, and other riches. Once there, some of these men did, indeed, find their fortune. But it’s an unforgiving country, so the rest had to be content with the more common fodder of pioneering conquest: blood, sweat, and sunburn.
The road into Cossack, which goes past the old school building.
For my part, I arrived in Cossack at the end of the day, when the sun’s final rays set the dirt on fire and made shadows long. A man stood on the wharf, waving to me excitedly with one arm and pointing with the other towards the water, phone camera in hand.
“They are there!” he yelled. “But I can’t get them. I can’t see them!”
His enthusiasm was due to dolphins, I soon learned. Three of them. We watched together for a while, he hopping form foot to foot in excitement, I a bit more restrained, since the said creatures never re-appeared. What I did see, however, was a mass of circular ripples upon the water which more than hinted at the menagerie that must lie below.
Cossack today is a popular launching point for recreational fishing.
After a while the man gave up and flipped his phone shut, shrugged at me happily, and left. I found myself alone. I turned around, grabbed the luggage from the back of my hire car and walked up the road in search of the town’s caretaker. I found her locking up for the night, and she led me into her stiflingly hot office.
“So you found us all right then?”
I nodded, a little guiltily. It wasn’t particularly easy to get lost along the only road going in and out of the settlement, but I made good effort at it, getting side-tracked into an overgrown dead-end lane near the boarded up school house.
Once the paperwork was done, I followed the caretaker to my accommodation, which was inside the town’s former police quarters. My room was basic, but clean, and mercifully air-conditioned. Being the tail end of the summer, the tourist season hasn’t started yet and I was the only guest. I had spent the morning researching Cossack at the local library, and now, with no one else to talk to, I settled down and started reading what I started earlier: a pile of notes about the history of the town.
Some of the buildings now serve as tourist and caretaker accommodation.
The essence of that history is ugly, heartbreaking and uplifting in equal measure, for the extent of suffering and hardship faced by many who passed through here is matched step by step with remarkable human resilience. Starting with the countless indigenous generations who have lived here since before forever, I cannot help but admire the local people who survived in this harsh country, with its brackish water, its furious cyclones, its crawling midges and flies and blearing heat – and later, with its onslaught of foreign settlers.
The Ngarluma people, on whose land Cossack was founded, were less warlike than their neighbours, a characteristic that the new arrivals perhaps took advantage of. For these incoming settlers, there was much to. They were used to a much different way of life, and their privations were many. It wasn’t long before the local Aboriginal population was compelled to assist the foreigners in any which way possible. At first the work was linked to the land – and the back breaking work of clearing it, fencing it, and taming it – but when some sharp-eyed settlers noticed Aboriginal people wading out at low tide and coming back with glistening pearl shell, a whole new wave of fortune seekers arrived, and a whole new form of torment dawned.
Cossack as it once was. Image source: SLWA.
Soon, Cossack became a booming port town. In its heyday in the late 1800s, up to 80 pearl luggers crowded within the inlet, and aboard each stood men desperate for what was the most precious commodity in the northwest: labour. Crews of them went further and further inland, alternatively cajoling, conning and kidnapping Aboriginal men, women and children into servitude. The poor recruits got paid with tobacco, alcohol and foreign germs, plus food and white man’s clothes that until then they had never needed. Then, at the end of the season, they got dumped wherever convenient, often away from country that was theirs. And so started the endless cycle of dispossession and deprivation that still haunts many indigenous communities today.
As rules relating to the use of Aboriginal labour were introduced, new recruits arrived, this time hailing from across the ocean: from Malaya, Timor, Philippines, Japan. Along with their arrival a new sort of diving apparatus was welcomed with much excitement, allowing the divers to go deeper and deeper still, each taking more risk than the other. These Asian divers were important, but far from socially equal, and they, too, suffered from racism, discrimination and white condescension. Still, some did well, and returned home better off than they started. Others are buried in the Asian part of the cemetery in Cossack, but many more were lost at sea, with not even a marker to remember them.
Asian cemetery.
Eventually, the Cossack pearl beds were raped clean and the pearling industry moved north to Broome. Discovery of gold brought an influx of Chinese and other migrants, but that also soon came to pass. Cyclones regularly ravaged the town, the inlet was silting up and a new port nearby took over the bulk of the shipping traffic. Cossack was dying. Two more valiant, if somewhat quirky, efforts were made to keep the town going: one was the introduction of a turtle soup factory and the other the establishment of a leper colony, but neither initiative lasted long. Finally, in the 1950s, having done its job as the founding port for the northwest, Cossack was abandoned and left to watch as the rest of Pilbara took off.
Now, the old wooden and corrugated iron buildings have turned to rust and dust, but the few stone buildings have since been lovingly restored. They stick out, incongruously, amid the red earth, mangroves and spinifex. One of the buildings is the said police barracks, in which I spent the night. Others include a beautiful old post office, a store, a lockup and a bakery. The old customs house now serves as functions venue and the courthouse is a museum.
The Court House, which now houses the Shakespeare Hall Social History Museum.
During my stay, I woke up at dawn. A steady buzz of insects drove the birds into a sing song crazy, and a couple of fishermen were already at the wharf, discussing barramundi. The town was draped in fresh glow of morning light. I grabbed my camera and went for a walk, and wherever I went, I kept hearing voices from the past. My own freshness didn’t last long, as by 8 o’clock I was already dripping with sweat.
“It was like that for us too,” the voices told me. (“Except there was no deodorant,” they added, in giggly embarrassment.)
I stopped off near the overgrown patch of land that marked the former Chinese gardens, and kicked the stony ground. “It was back breaking to dig in that, but we were desperate for fresh food of home,” the voices said.
In the museum, I caught a glance of a piece of jewellery. “Aye, it was hard to be a lady out here, back then” I heard.
And so it went, on and on.
Ruins of the North West Mercantile Store.
In the middle of the day, I drove out to get a coffee and lunch at nearby Roebourne, and then retreated back to the bliss of my air-conditioned room, emerging out again after night fell. My footsteps crunched along the ground and competed with the high strung chirp of crickets. Above me, a few stars peaked though yeasty, white-grey clouds and the town ruins were nothing but faint silhouettes.
I was still the only one in Cossack, and I felt little in this vast country. But, small and alone does not mean lonely. It was those chatty ghosts, you see. They told me how they, too, once stood under the same moonlight at night, and how they watched the rich Pilbara colours moult into a palette of grey. And it struck me then, as it had already a few times before, that it’s really no surprise that our first people were storytellers, or that so many yarns are spun from the bush – for this amazing country, now, as it was then, is made for nothing if not storytelling.
Sunset over the Butcher’s Inlet.
It wasn’t my fault either
The new law appeared as a short notice on page 10 of the West Australian, sandwiched between a section heading and an unrelated paragraph clarifying some aspect of the Vermin Act.
That’s it. One sentence, written in March of 1927, advising that Aboriginal people were to disappear from the city centre. Not much in literary terms, but a sentence indeed for the indigenous population living and working around the northern banks of the Swan River. A sentence that could still be heard loud and clear as recently as 1954 – the same year as Marilyn married Joe DiMaggio and the young Queen Elizabeth visited Australia, when Bill Hayley recorded Rock around the clock and the first nuclear submarines were launched.
The prohibited area stretched roughly from William Street to the west, Bennett Street to the east, and south to the river from Newcastle Street. If you stood today on the corner of Barrack and William Streets in central Perth, enjoying a burger from nearby Macca’s, you’d pretty much be slap bang in the middle.
What the rule meant, in practical terms, was that any person of Aboriginal descent caught within this area after a six o’clock curfew could be arrested, unless they held a special exemption certificate. It brought distinct hardship and disadvantage to those who lived in the slums of East Perth, and had to cross the city each day to their employment (usually as domestic servants) in the leafy western suburbs, or for people who migrated towards the city during the Depression in search of work. Those who worked in the city could apply for the exemption certificate, of course – but they would usually only be granted one on the proviso that they abandoned all aspects of their traditional lifestyle and their aboriginal identity.
The proclamation was made under Section 39 of the notorious Aborigines Act of 1905. It was the very same act which allowed the appointed – and very white – ‘Chief Protector’ of Aborigines to deny indigenous Australians the right to marry outside of their race, restrict their rights to own property and thus vote, and most famously of all, to remove children from parents without a court order or proof of negligence or abuse. What I find interesting is that over the years so many Australians expressed distaste over South Africa’s apartheid – without really realizing that we had our own special version of it here.
Despite its obvious racial discrimination, the rule restricting Aboriginal access to Perth city was broadly supported, no doubt particularly so by the hard working shop owners and businessmen, people who often would have made tremendous sacrifices to find themselves where they were. It was a move to clear the area of vagrants, an attempt to rid Perth of the drunk, the dispossessed and the angry Aborigines who loitered around the city. Let’s put political correctness aside for a moment, and acknowledge that antisocial behavior can – and obviously was – a significant problem, and the lawmakers, shaped by the attitudes of the day, simply acted in good faith to keep the city civil and safe.
What the law didn’t acknowledge at the time, of course, was that the city itself was built upon those ‘anti social’ vagrants’ land, upon an area where they formerly hunted, met and celebrated. Their dispossession started when their spiritual links to the soil where shattered and fences put up as replacement, and white man’s alcohol no doubt filled the void of anger, helplessness and lost identity.
Still, it’s all in the past now, so we need to move on, right?
Our current generation can hardly be held responsible for what happened in the years gone by. So many times I’ve seen people bristle when past mistreatment of Aboriginal people is brought up, resentful of the implication that seeing as the ‘whites’ were behind it all, they themselves, by the virtue of their white blood and heritage, are thus also somehow tainted. And others, the non-white, non-European migrants, perhaps those who arrived here on boats, or flew in from war ravaged lands, they may shrug their shoulders and say, “well, you know, I’ve been through shit too, but you don’t see me going on about it, feeling sorry for myself for what happened and using the experience to get drunk and disorderly”.
Yep, I agree. I bristle sometimes, too. It wasn’t my fault either.
But in accepting this country, I am bound to its history. I am a white Australian, born in Poland, married to a New Zealander. This is not particularly unusual in the context of our multicultural society.
What is unusual, perhaps, is that Australia’s indigenous history interests me more than it does many other migrants. See, I am more than a member of a migrant family. I am also a foster parent to a little Yamaji boy. He, his past and his future matter to me – and because he matters, he connects me to his indigenous world. Not through blood, but through my thoughts and my heart strings.
And so I find myself trying to learn more. Although I’ve had partial schooling in Australia, it was at a time when Aboriginal history and culture were rarely acknowledged. Certainly, my old Social Studies textbook barely went as far as to say something along the lines of ‘they were here first’. It was only later, working as a humanities teacher and then a museum educator that I started to learn about indigenous history, starting with the very basics such as the difference between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, the name of our local indigenous groups and the impact of colonization.
It just so happened that I had printed off the article which included the map of old Perth, the Aboriginal restricted area marked in red. I read the story over breakfast and thought nothing of it as the printout lay on the table.
I didn’t think it would grab my boy’s attention.
But he saw it. “What’s this?” he asked.
Such a loaded question. How much, what, how do I even begin to explain to a six year child the complexities of history, of indigenous policies which ultimately affected his own life history?
I decided on the truth; he will learn it soon enough anyway, and in my experience children appreciate honesty and are more resilient than we give them credit for.
“It’s a map of our city. White people often unfairly treated people who weren’t white. The area in red shows where Aboriginal people weren’t allowed to go, simply because they were Aboriginal”.
He looked at the map again and furrowed his brows. “That’s mean”, he said.
“I agree, but I don’t think they saw it that way back then”. I gave him a hug and he ran off to play.
I am hardly naïve enough to think that this simple exchange will solve all the issues this young man will one day have to deal with, once he starts exploring the past and confronting his identity. But sometimes, the starting point for the future is simply acknowledging the past.
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