THE WILD MISSIONARY
“ … allegations of slavery and the … sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women …”
Anglican missionary, John Brown Gribble, went to the West Australian outpost, Carnarvon, in 1885 to establish the first Anglican mission in the area.
Within six months the religious radical had upset the pastoralists, the media, the church authorities and the government with his very public allegations of slavery and the blatant sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women.
Prior to his arrival in Carnarvon, in September of that year, the 37-year-old Englishman had gained a measure of fame at Jerilderie, in New South Wales, when the bushranger, Ned Kelly, and his gang held up the township and Gribble’s watch was stolen. Boldly, the indignant cleric faced Kelly eye-to-eye to demand the immediate return of his personal property. Kelly obliged without argument.
Employed by the Church of England Diocesan Missions’ Committee, the Rev. Gribble sailed from Perth to Port Gascoyne on the “Otway.”
Later, in a pamphlet he called “Dark Deeds In a Sunny Land,” the visitor recorded his observations: “Nothing … could be more unprepossessing to a stranger than Carnarvon … Ridges of raw sand bearing stunted scrubs, the same thing as being alive with natives in a state of nature … Including two hotels and three stores … With natives as guides and porters, I made my way to the professedly most aristocratic of the … hotels – The Carnarvon Hotel …”
Having settled in, Gribble rode a borrowed horse “about two and a half miles up the river” to a site that had been recommended for his mission base.
Two and a half days later, having obtained the use of a police horse and cart, the missionary re-visited the site, recording the experience thus: “I got my luggage and materials to a pool (Yanget Pool) … where, with the help of a native … I pitched one of the military tents … and there erected a small corrugated iron hut.”
He added the note: “I moved my effects to the ‘Galilie Baba’ (the name he ga ve his mission) on the north side of the … Gascoyne River … where I began the erection of a house, consisting of three rooms and a verandah … and I sank a well, and found a great supply of fresh water … I conceived the idea of building a comfortable hut for my worthy natives … I set to work enclosing a garden area … Commenced school house …”
Accompanied by an Aboriginal guide, “Bullocky,” the out-spoken missionary set out on horseback to see for himself the plight of the tribal folk on the sheep properties and reserves for 400 miles along the upper reaches of the waterless Gascoyne River. He was not at all impressed.
“It surprised me at first,” he noted, “to find men with professed Christian instincts being in such disorder and dirt …”
Neither did the observant clergyman condone the manner in which Aboriginal women were openly used and abused by the white station owners and employees, or the unabashed slavery of the Aboriginal men.
“Australia …,” he wrote, “the new home of liberty and light (had) become the theatre of the dark deeds of oppression and cruelty … I saw and heard things in relation to the treatment of the natives by the white settlers which caused me much pain and disgust … I saw a young native girl being debauched by a white man on the ground … the girl having been assigned to him by the police …”
On the return journey, while camping en route at the Gascoyne Junction police depot, Gribble observed “several unfortunate natives chained like … dogs … round the neck … They were quite nude … If ever I pitied poor creatures in my life I did those unfortunates …
“One of the native women had just buried her half-caste child … The father … was a young man … now in a government office in Perth …”
Along the upper Gascoyne track the Rev. Gribble passed wool teams, the white drivers always accompanied by “the inevitable native girl or woman”, many breast-feeding their half-white babies.
Observing life in the Gascoyne from his Carnarvon mission, Mr Gribble saw Aboriginal men and women who had been horribly flogged with stockwhips by their “white masters”, noticing that the European settlers seemed to have an hereditary ownership of natives attached to their pastoral holdings.
One day, hearing the cries of two Aboriginal women along the riverbank near his mission, the Englishman discovered the victims had been subjected to extreme violence by “cruel monsters” at a nearby bush camp. The women had been “thrown down and … held by both arms and legs.”
At the end of three months, John Gribble had surveyed the situation of Aborigines over 400 miles of the inland, had constructed a mission house, native hut, a school house, established a garden, sunk a well and gathered around him a small community of tribal people who were in sore need of sanctuary.
Genuinely puzzled, he noted in his diary: “The whole district was against me. Why?”
The Carnarvon establishment, in those times dominated by pastoralists (the “Squattocracy, as some called them), bitterly resented the intrusion of the righteous newcomer. Gribble’s public efforts to free the Aboriginal people and to Christianise them was interpreted as a challenge to the landed authority and wheels were set in motion to run the missionary out of Carnarvon and to reduce his mission to rubble.
At a public meeting Gribble’s character and works were angrily denounced. A petition calling for his withdrawal was circulated among the woolly-minded residents. To reinforce their action against the missionary, the pastoralists and local businessmen prevented the off-loading of Gribble’s building materials, boycotted his store supplies, and broadcast the information that anyone in Carnarvon who assisted him would share in the wrath being aimed in his direction.
At another meeting attended by Gribble he was openly subjected to threats and insults. One resident challenged him to a fight, while another promised to have him kicked out of Carnarvon. A second petition, circulated house to house, sought to have the rabble-rousing Englishman removed from the Gascoyne by his Bishop.
Gribble wrote: “They want to be a law unto themselves … They cannot tolerate the advent of one who comes with the Gospel of Peace and Goodwill to the poor black man.”
Travelling on the State ship, “Natal,” to Perth, the maligned cleric was again subjected to threats by a mob of Gascoyne men. A group of them man-handled the missionary, struggling with him and attempting to do him physical harm.
Freeing himself, Gribble sought the refuge of a cabin. The door was forced open by his attackers and he was treated again to violent abuse. One man threatened to shoot him. Another taunted him for interfering with the natives. He would not reach Fremantle alive, they warned. They would murder him, either by “hanging, drowning or shooting.”
Reporting this treatment to his Bishop in Perth, the missionary was duly instructed by his Mission Committee to take the proper legal action against his persecutors, but “at the very inception of the proceedings (he) was hindered.”
The Acting Attorney General, S. Burt, himself a pastoral lease holder, refused to represent Gribble and neither could he engage anyone to serve his summonses. Everywhere Gribble turned, his path was blocked by the far-reaching pastoral influence, their very well-organised conspiracy denying him liberty and justice.
In a published statement, Mr Gribble claimed: “The conclusion of the whole matter is that the settlers in (the Gascoyne) district are afraid of the improvement of the natives by Missionary agency … They are striving by all means in their power to crush the work at its very inception.”
The “Fremantle Herald” commented at the time: “The colony should be purged of such a foul disgrace, if true, by the public condemnation of the culprits … a story equal in atrocity and horror to any told in the worst days of American slavery.”
Along with the pastoralists, the owners of pearling luggers along the North West coast were accused by a David Carly of kidnapping Aborigines to work without pay on board their vessels.
“I have reported two cases of bribery on the part of the police at Roebourne,” he said. “In the one case, two constables were bribed with pearls to condone the murder of a native boy … I saw … no less than 24 natives handcuffed together and … conveyed to Delambre Island, and there detained until they were required for pearl diving …
“I have seen numbers of natives brought in from the interior … and they were compelled to put their hand to a pen and make a cross … they were then slaves for life, or as long as they were good for pearl diving …”
The Rev. Gribble published even more damaging information: “At a (Gascoyne) station I was informed by a white overseer that … the choicest bit of hospitality that could be tendered to a visitor was the finest looking black girl. At another station … I stumbled over a white man in the act of debauching a native girl … on the verandah of his master’s house.”
In a letter to the editor of the “West Australian Inquirer”, a correspondent who signed herself as “An English Lady”, wrote: “Mr Gribble has right on his side, and even though his own side (the Church) are pusillanimous and chicken-hearted to an extreme, God will not desert him … The way the mud has been stirred up in this matter, and all the filth come to the surface, shows in an unequivocal manner that Mr Gribble is no milk-sop, no namby-pamby Christian … but a man willing to lay down his life in the cause.
He has been persecuted in the cruellest manner by men who dare not plant themselves on his side because interests are so mingled. The settlers have growled at him like a dog, because he wants to interfere with their bone – i.e., the native; the good folk in Perth, even the dignitaries of the Church, tremble at the rage of the dog.”
In May, 1886, the Carnarvon Church Committee held a meeting during which the participants, G. Lefroy, C. Foss, R. Cleveland, and G. Baston Jnr. collectively resigned.
The following month, in Perth, Gribble was banned by the Dean from preaching at the Cathedral or elsewhere in the city. On July 1, 1886, the Bishop’s Commissary formally curtailed Gribble’s missionary license and abolished his little mission on the bank of the Gascoyne River at Carnarvon.
A leading article in “The West Australian” in August of that year condemned Gribble as a “lying, canting humbug.” Gribble at once initiated legal action against the Perth newspaper in a libel writ claiming $20,000.
The trial lasted twenty days, the court being crammed with spectators, and accounts of the daily proceedings appeared in all newspapers.
Alarming admissions were revealed. The well-known Gascoyne pastoralist, George Gooch, himself an Anglican, admitted to the court: “There are about 100 natives on my run, about 40 of whom are in my service … I have heard of natives … being run down and unlawfully taken (and) chained up … I have heard that nigger hunting in the northern parts of the colony has been a profitable employment … I have sent (Aboriginal) women off to the white man myself. The probably consequences of such is that the women will be used as the white man wishes.”
Oddly, the outcome of the trial came down on the side of “The West Australian” newspaper.
Only the “Inquirer” stood by the oppressed missionary, stating: “The public at large will regard the Rev. Gribble as neither a liar or a canting humbug … Let the Squattocracy say the colony is cleared! But of what? Not of anything Mr Gribble has said respecting their cruelties towards ‘niggers’, but cleared of a missionary effort that would have made the colony what a vigorous Church and good Government should strive to make it …”
Broken-hearted and penniless, the Rev. Gribble left West Australia for New South Wales where he established an Aboriginal mission station on the Darling River near Brewarrina. Later, although desolated by his treatment in West Australia, Gribble, his wife and eight children moved to North Queensland to develop the Yarrabah Mission for Aborigines at Cape Grafton.
John Brown Gribble died on June 3, 1893 at the age of 45 years. His gravestone at the Waverley cemetery, in Sydney, carries the legend: “Blackfellow’s Friend.”
Today the site of the Rev. Gribble’s mission in Carnarvon is forgotten.
No relics in the way of rusted metal or decayed timber are to be found where the courageous man pursued his dream. Tall grasses obliterate the place, grey and dead, bending always to the relentless Nor’ West winds.
Yanget Pool itself, once a broad stretch of fresh water, is silted over; one has to pull aside the few remaining bullrushes to locate a small pocket of water – roughly, the size of a bucket – and all along the river bank is an infinite peace, sometimes broken by flights of screeching cockatoos whirling overhead.
One cannot help but feel that the abandoned landscape should at the very least carry a monument – nothing ostentatious, of course-but a rude cenotaph, or even a rocky memorial, to the memory of yet another brave man who fell victim to the wisdom of the mob.
-B.J.C.
Thanks for telling this story. There are many lessons in it.
— David Pankratz · 7 July 2008 · #