Tag Archives: Goat Island

On the wharves

18 Saturday Aug 2018

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Many years after Bennelong’s time, as Bill Gosling told me, Goat Island was the source of a strike.

I tell you what, they had a lot of sheep roaming loose on Goat Island. That was the cause of another disruption, because they had sheep on the island. One day the boss issued an instruction to the men to shear the sheep. They said we’re not bloody shearers and so they all sat down and went on strike.

… Talking about strikes, there was one occasion over Redfern they had a bit of trouble over the lack of repairs to the housing, which they complained they couldn’t get the corrugated iron needed to repair the roofs on all the houses.

And these were wharfies’ houses were they? I asked him.

No, this was general trouble. And a local parson had taken up the case to try and get supplies. There was a ship down in the Darling Harbour and it was loading steel, corrugated steel and that, to go up the islands and this parson chappy went down and addressed the wharfies, told them that the stuff they were exporting was needed at home here. So the wharfies went back to work, and instead of loading any more, they took out what they’d already put in. Of course, that caused a strike. But most of the things, when the wharfies went on strike, they usually had a very good reason and the way the waterfront was being run at the time gave them plenty of reasons. [i]

Bill Gosling was a senior inspector in the shipping branch, and his work covered everything on the waterfront: revenue, services, supplying ships with water, power supply from the shore, checking cargoes and dangerous goods. He was stationed at Glebe Island which, before containers took over shipping, was the main general cargo section of the waterfront.

I was Senior Patrolman, policing regulations, making sure that everyone had done the right thing … [One] time, I was working on a tanker at Balmain. One of the men that was working there said, you’re over here breathing down our necks, look across there. And I looked across the water to the other wharf where the wheat silos were, they were pouring wheat and the air was filled with wheat dust. And somebody was using an acetylene, a blowtorch on a winch, preparing a winch right alongside where they were pouring the wheat. Now, if a spark had ignited the dust it would have set up a chain reaction, like an atomic bomb. As soon as I saw it, I dived for the phone, rang up the boss of the silos and told him immediately to hit the emergency button which closed all the doors to stop the wheat from running until he’d investigated and stopped them alongside where the wheat was pouring. That chap had a reaction afterwards – that was the last thing he ever did. He had a heart attack at his desk that night.

[i]Interview with Bill Gosling, 9 April 2005.

Bennelong (part 2)

13 Monday Aug 2018

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Judge-Advocate David Collins clearly acknowledged that it wasn’t just Bennelong who could lay claim to a particular area of land:

Each family has a particular place of residence, from which is derived its distinguishing name. This is formed by adding the monosyllable Gal to the name of the place: thus the southern shore of Botany Bay is called Gwea, and the people who inhabit it style themselves Gweagal. Those who live on the north shore of Port Jackson are called Cam-mer-ray-gal, that part of the harbour being distinguished from others by the name of Cam-mer-ray[i]…

But Governor Phillip, the man who had carefully observed the Aborigines, had, within his own limitations, been positive about their courage and generosity, and in nearly every altercation assumed that the whites had been the aggressors; the man who had said, “Conciliation is the only plan intended to be pursued”[ii]returned to Britain in 1792. This left Major Francis Grose, as lieutenant-governor, in charge of the colony for two years, then Captain Paterson as administrator until John Hunter arrived as governor in September 1795. Grose “displayed no desire to follow Phillip’s practice of maintaining a close personal watch over every aspect of the settlement”.[iii]He encouraged members of the NSW Corps to trade, and to farm the land that he granted them. He opened up the Hawkesbury River area for settlement, taking the colony’s survival out of the hands of the governor and into the hands of private enterprise. It worked as a means of motivating trade and agriculture, but it removed the protection and respect for the Aborigines afforded by Phillip’s inclination, and instructions. By the time Hunter arrived the damage was done. The NSW Corps was accustomed to rule, and their rule was for personal profit. Land was for farming and making money from the proceeds – not for the Aboriginal people.

So although no-one in the very early days of the colony disputed Bennelong’s claim to custodianship of Me-mel, that claim wasn’t honoured. Me-mel became Goat Island, and it went the way of all colonised land. In the 1830s it was quarried, and the stone used to build a wharf and gunpowder complex by convicts housed firstly in the hulk Phoenix, and then on the island, in wooden ‘boxes’. They wore fetters around their ankles for the first two years and were controlled by the threat of the cat-o-nine tails. One convict was chained to a rock for several weeks in 1837. A number of Aboriginal people were also imprisoned there, separated from the whites. In 1900, during the outbreak of plague in The Rocks, Goat Island was used by the Health Department for bacteriological research. (Twelve years earlier, Rodd Island had been used for a similar purpose when a laboratory was set up to find a biological agent to combat the rabbit plague. From 1890 the laboratory was used to produce a vaccine against anthrax.) As the gunpowder complex neared completion on Goat Island, Cockatoo Island was selected as the next prison and workplace. Convicts dug silos out of the rock with hand tools, quarried sandstone for building Sydney’s edifices, and excavated the dry dock. From 1871 to 1887 there was an Industrial School and Reformatory for Girls on the island, and from 1888 to 1908 an overflow prison for Darlinghurst Gaol. Convicts also toiled away at Spectacle Island, building a Powder Magazine between 1863 and 1865 as Goat Island’s became inadequate.[iv]

These days Goat Island is a little green mound with a row of pretty stone houses. You’ll see it if it’s daytime as you come round under the bridge towards Balmain, Hunters Hill, Meadowbank or Parramatta, and you might dream of a life in the middle of the harbour.

[i]An Account of the English Colony of NSW Vol 1 by David Collins, Appendix 1. http://gutenberg.net.au/first-fleet.html

[ii]The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, London 1789 (facsimile edition Hutchinson 1982, p140).

[iii]ADB online. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010444b.htm. Francis Grose.

[iv]The Islands of Sydney Harbour. Mary Shelley Clark and Jack Clark. Kangaroo Press, 2000.

Bennelong

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Bennelong must have been a very adaptable man. Captured by the British in November 1789 he stayed in captivity, learning the English language and customs and teaching some of his own to the British – an act that seems voluntary as the man captured with him, Colbee, was able to escape almost immediately. In May 1790 Bennelong went back to his people, but returned to the settlement after Governor Phillip was speared at Manly in September – an event that Inga Clendinnen convincingly argues was a ritual spearing, designed to redress the many wrongs that the colonists had committed since settling the area.[i]

Not only was Bennelong willing to change from a life within the only framework that he and his relations had ever known – he was then willing to sail, with Phillip, and Yemmerrawannie, to England. They left Sydney in December 1792. Bennelong was presented to King George III in 1793, and didn’t return to Sydney until 1795, with Governor Hunter. Yemmerrawannie succumbed to respiratory disease in the damp British climate, but Bennelong survived, adopting the new clothes and customs that he found.

It’s hard to imagine a more courageous act than the steps taken by Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie onto the Atlantic, sailing with strangers, on a strange vessel, to a completely unknown land, when only five years earlier their physical world had been defined by what could be walked or travelled in a canoe.

Bennelong was from the Wangal people – most sources say that their territory extended from Goat Island to Auburn and Silverwater, although other sources say it starts further west at Leichhardt.  He told the colonists that Goat Island (more tunefully called Me-mel) belonged to him and his family. Judge-Advocate David Collins noted:

… Bennillong, both before he went to England and since his return, often assured me, that the island Me-mel (called by us Goat Island) close by Sydney Cove was his own property; that it was his father’s, and that he should give it to By-gone, his particular friend and companion. To this little spot he appeared much attached; and we have often seen him and his wife Ba-rang-a-roo feasting and enjoying themselves on it. He told us of other people who possessed this kind of hereditary property, which they retained undisturbed.[ii]

Bennelong’s understanding of ownership would have been very different to ours. Heather Goodall explains it as:

In Aboriginal societies, individual men and women hold particular relationships to land, inherited from parents and arising from their own conception and birth sites … Yet despite the specificity of these relationships, they do not allow automatic rights. Instead they confer obligations and responsibilities … It is the fulfilment of one’s obligations, the active embracing of responsibility, which allows a custodian to be accorded the fullest benefits of their landholding role …[iii]

So if you were barred from carrying out your responsibilities, by a fence or a gun, you would lose your whole heritage.

[i]Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Text Publishing, 2003.

[ii]An Account of the English Colony of NSW Vol 1 by David Collins, Appendix 1X. http://gutenberg.net.au/first-fleet.html

[iii]Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales 1770-1972, Allen & Unwin in association with Black Books, 1996, p9.