On the utmost verge: race and ethnic relations at Moreton Bay, 1799-1842

Queensland Review, Feb, 2008 by Raymond Evans

Similarly, both Matthew Flinders in 1799 and John Oxley in 1823 reported well-constructed buildings on Bribie Island (yirin), made from slender wattles and vines, intricately interwoven with 'strong, wiry grass' and roofed over with ti-tree bark, 'compactly laid in, as to keep out wind and rain'. Flinders considered these structures--able to contain up to fifteen people--substantial enough to term them 'houses', (17) while a visiting naturalist to Bribie later described similar domiciles as 'fixed habitations', grouped into 'little villages'. These were not the hastily constructed whirlies of meandering itinerants, but rather solid, semipermanent constructions sometimes individually 'extending upwards of eighty feet [in length] and covering a considerable space of ground'. 'One of them,' the naturalist Frederick Strange reported,

   was in the form of a passage, with two apartments at the end. The
   arches were beautifully turned, and executed with a degree of skill
   which would not have disgraced an [sic] European architect. In one
   of these apartments the chief of the family resides; in the other
   the married people, and the young men claim the passage as their
   proper dormitory. These habitations ... serve their purpose
   admirably. (18)

Visiting the Redcliffe 'kippa-ring', or bora ground, with a party of some 30 Ningy-Ningy people in November 1823, Finnegan found that the number of commodious huts was 'so numerous I could hardly count them; and each tribe ... appeared to have their huts distinct from the others'. Several years later, the botanist Fraser recorded 'much variety' in such edifices, some of these buildings being 'different from anything I have seen'. He also stumbled upon a high oval grave site built from 40 large felled trees, with banksia branches laid across it near Greenbank, and a 'remarkable battle circle' at Scrubby Creek, some 33 yards in circumference, edged by a pathway 3 feet broad and etched 10 inches deep into the earth, leading away from the ring for an additional half a mile. (19)

Finnegan attempted to impress upon religious leaders and government officials in Sydney in the mid-1820s that 'at Moreton Bay the blacks were in thousands ... they were far more advanced in civilised life than the Aborigines about Sydney ... [and] dwelt in regular built huts, forming a sort of village'. (20) Such evidence alone should have offered pause to the convenient European rationalisation for territorial usurpation--that Aborigines simply 'ranged over' land, rather than 'possessing' or 'residing within' designated territories, according to Western requirements for legal ownership. And to such arresting material manifestations might also be added the myriad Aboriginal pathways, much like the well-made one Fraser observed, tool sites and quarries, stone ovens, 'dense shell midden complexes'--often in the vicinity of the small fishing villages--along with gladiatorial, initiation and burial centres, as well as other ritual circles, bora rings and sacred sites, substantial beacon fires, fish traps, complex weirs and dams, along with a wide range of implements and weapons that facilitated an intricate exploitation of the natural environment. Flinders at Woody Point souvenired an elaborately woven fishing seine 14 fathoms long, while Fraser at the Logan River found a huge kangaroo net 'as fine as any fabricated in Europe but much stronger', stone chisels edged with flint, dilly bags of great durability, fighting shields as light as cork, as well as a fishing net of 'beautifully fine mesh and dyed black'. Later, in 1836, both Foster Fyans and James Backhouse were to write in wonderment of Stradbroke Islanders' rapport with the blue-nosed dolphins (talobilla), which they utilised to drive shoals of fish into their waiting nets at Amity. (21)