Arsenic, Mining and the New England Pastoral Industry

Photo: Gordon Smith, Ottery Mine Remains.

Gordon Smith recently toured the mining areas on the westen side of New England's Northern Tablelands. You will find his photos here, here, here, here and here.

Gordon notes that tin and arsenic were mined at the Ottery Mine, not far from Emmaville, from the 1880’s. Here we see the remains of the brick condensation chambers where arsenic solids formed on the surface of brick walls (see pink substance at the lower right hand side of the photograph). Workers then scraped the arsenic from the bricks.

Arsenic was used quite extensively in gold mining to help extract the ore.

At Hillgrove east of Armidale, the soil around the old mine processing plants is still heavily impregnated with arsenic, as are the waters of Baker's Creek at the bottom of the adjoining Hillgrove Gorge. Traces of arsenic can be found in sediments along the Macleay River all the way to the river mouth.

Arsenic was also extensively used as a sheep dip.

My grandfather who came to Armidale as a farm labourer in 1907 described the practice this way.

"The next three years were spent partly on farms around Armidale but mainly on a sheep station south west of Uralla. It was my first experience with sheep and the primative means of combating worms in sheep. The one and only practice was to muster a mob of sheep in the late afternoon and starve them in the yards till early next morning. On the previous evening, up to 30 poor and wormy sheep were separated and given a drench. This consisted of arsenic boiled in water, the sediment being drawn off and the selected sheep were drenched. If not more than half were dead in the morning the drench was at the right strength. It was a crude and drastic treatment, but some years elapsed before an effective drench could be found for the greatest scourge of all Fluke (liver worm) and the Lung worm."

New England is dotted with small sites with arsenic impregnated soil where this practice was carried out.

The End of Armidale's Club Hotel

Photo: Gordon Smith, Armidale's Club Hotel has undergone a major refurbishment and is now the White Bull.

My thanks to Gordon Smith's New England photo blog for this story.

All those growing up in Armidale or who went to school or university there will remember the Club Hotel in Marsh Street.

Well, after a complete refurbishment it has now emerged as the White Bull. Gordon wonders, fairly, why White Bull and also why the Bull is red.

I must find out one day.

New England's Chinese - Introductory Post

Photo: Chinese miner testing wash for tin, Great Britain Mine, Emmaville, 1899. By 1899 tin mining in the Emmaville (Vegetable Creek) district had passed its peak and the number of Chinese had dropped from around 1200 to 200. The posed photograph was a conscious commemoration of the Chinese role in tin mining.

Growing up as a kid, I used to play in the Armidale cemetery. There, in the "other denominations" section I found a number of Chinese graves. I was curious because I knew no Chinese. Later I found out that the Chinese had played a significant development role in New England.

According to the Australian National Museum's Heritage Scroll, a small number of Chinese settlers arrived quite early. Numbers then increased significantly after transportation ended in 1840 as Chinese were brought in as labourers. According to Geoffrey Blainey's Tyranny of Distance early people movements were facilitated by a quite complex web of trading and shipping links between Australia and China.

From the discovery of gold, Chinese numbers increased very rapidly. The Chinese immigrants referred to the Australian gold fields as 'Xin Jin Shan', or the New Gold Mountain as compared to the now declining California fields, as 'Jiu Jin Shan', the Old Gold Mountain. By 1861, 38,258 people, or 3.3 per cent of the total Australian population had been born in China, a number not reached again until quite recently.

Chinese diggers quickly appeared on all the new New England fields from the Hunter to the Queensland border. As other minerals and especially tin were discovered, the Chinese moved there too. Those visiting Uralla should visit McCrossin's Mill Museum which has a major Chinese display, including the pictured Joss House.

The rapid increase in immigration caused tensions and resentments among the European population There was intermittent violence against the Chinese, including the famous Lambing Flat (now Young) riots of 1861 when, in the worst outbreak, 2000 European diggers attacked the Chinese, injuring 250 and destroying their possessions.

I know of no equivalent violence on the New England fields, although that may simply mean I haven't found it yet.

The pressure of public opinion against the Chinese caused the New South Wales Government to pass the Chinese Immigration Restriction and Regulation Act in 1861 to restrict the numbers of Chinese in the colony.

As the level of mining dropped, some Chinese returned to China. Those staying could not bring in wives from China because of immigration restrictions. Some found local girls, others died alone far from family.

Many Chinese went into retailing if which Inverell's still surviving Hong Yuen business is an example.

By 1900 there were at least 5 Chinese owned stores in Inverell - one of these was Hong Yuen. Hong Yuen began its life in the 1890s as a small business trading from a wooden shop. By 1899 the adjoining land had been bought and in that year the first part of the store as it is now known was built.

The first town outside of Inverell where Harry Fay established a venture was Moree in 1926, which began as a general store. In Texas, Harry Fay was encouraged by the local community to open a store and by 1932 he had a thriving business up and running. In 1936 a store in Warialda was to follow. Harry Fay also set about expanding his business back in Inverell.

When he originally purchased the store it consisted of a grocery section. To this he added a drapery department and showroom in 1925. By 1935 a men's and boy's wear department were also established.

Hong Yuen has always been a family owned and run business. Most members of the family have done their fair share of work. Two of Harry Fay's brothers were employed in the business, his children and grandchildren have also played their part. In 1974 Harry Fay died, and his sons became the governing directors (the business was already jointly owned by the eight Fay children).

Two years later, a massive fire destroyed all but the oldest part of the building in Inverell. Despite the tragedy, the community effort which went in to helping the cleanup reaffirmed that Hong Yuen was there to stay

Photo: Gordon Smith, Emmaville Post Office undergoing repair from hail damage.

Today some of the once thriving mining settlements in which New England's Chinese once lived are ghost towns, others sleepy settements.

Today Vegetable Creek, now Emmaville, north of Glen Innes has a total population of around 350 as compared to a peak Chinese population of 1,200. Yet the village still retains links to its Chinese heritage.

Postscript

New England Australia's Chinese - Reference Post provides a list of posts on New England's Chinese along with some supporting references.

Labor's Newcastle Woes

In an earlier story I referred to the problems created for the ALP by the decision of three adjoining mayors in the lower Hunter to run as independents. In Newcastle itself, ALP problems were further compounded by the decision of the dumped ALP sitting member Bryce Gaudry to run again as an independent.

In a story next day on my personal blog looking at NSW as a whole, I said that my best election guess at that point was a hung parliament because of the independents.

I understand that polling shows a strong vote for Bryce Gaudry, a substantial vote for Mayor Tate, creating real problems for ALP candidate Jodi McKay. Definitely one to watch.

Pause in Posts

I apologise for the gap in posts.

I have been tied up on a major project. Regular transmission will begin again later in the week.

NSW Elections - New England Seats

I see that Antony Green's usual valuable election guide is up on the ABC web site. This will make it a lot easier for me to analyse the elections from a New England perspective.

New England and the 2007 NSW State Elections - more independents

Photo: Three mayors to stand as independent candidates in the coming state election - Greg Piper (Lake Macquarie), John Tate (Newcastle) and Peter Blackmore (Maitland)

Back in November I did a preliminary analysis of the New England seats in the NSW State Parliament. Following the 2003 election, the New England party distribution was ALP 9, National Party 8, independents 3.

The ALP's hold on the New England seats is looking shakier following the decision by the mayors of Lake Macquarie, Newcastle and Maitland to stand as independents in a regional alliance.

Adding to the Party's woes in Newcastle, the dumped NSW Labor MP Bryce Gaudry who currently holds the seat will stand as an independent candidate against the former television newsreader Jodi McKay who was picked to replace him at the March 24 state election.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma last year persuaded Labor's national executive to replace Mr Gaudry with Ms McKay as part of a push to bring new blood into state parliament. While the ALP presently holds Newcastle with a very substantial margin, its chances of holding the seat are now looking shaky.

In Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Maitland, the Party is also dogged by the the fact that former Aboriginal Affairs minister and Swansea MP Milton Orkopoulos is now facing 30 drug and child sex charges. In Maitland, too, the ALP has a new candidate in Frank Terezini trying to establish a position in the electorate following the retirement of popular local member John Price.

Postscript:

My apologies to those who get two feeds on this. I made a gross error in the first post by misreading a date on some information I was using.

The Poetry of Judith Wright - Bora Ring

Judith Wright is probably New England's best known poet.

Her poetry, especially her earlier writing, has always resonated with me because it says something to me about the world in which I grew up, a world still deeply imprinted on my soul. I thought therefore that it might be fun to take some of her poems and use them as a window to look at different aspects of New England.

I suspect that many Australians still think of Australia's traditional Aborigines as simple hunter gatherers living in an ancient and unchanging landscape, although there is growing recognition of the complexity of their social and spiritual life. In fact, within the limits set by their tools and available food supplies they were also sophisticated builders.

The Bora Rings of New England and south-eastern Queensland are examples. As Sandra Bowdler pointed out, these earthen rings of eastern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland are significant ritual structures and are probably unique in the world as hunter gatherer constructions of known function which constitute notable monuments in the landscape.

Sandra goes on to describe them:

The earthen rings known as “Bora” are usually part of a complex of two or three rings, linked by a path or paths. They were used in what Sutton calls “man-making ceremonies”, that is, male initiation ceremonies. In the literature, we find that the large ring in the complex was usually part of a relatively public ceremony, with women looking on; the smaller ring was the site of the major initiation rites, for initiated men and initiates only. The purpose of the third ring is not as well documented in the literature. It has been suggested that these are women’s rings, but it is not clear to me that this was always the case. Bora sites were often (always?) associated with carved trees.

The average size of a large ring is about 25 - 30 m across, and a small ring 10-12 m. There is a wide range of variation however. The earth is mounded up to a height of c.25-50 cms. Usually there is a path, often to the south-west from the large ring, connecting to smaller ring.

Judith's poem starts by painting a picture of a Bora Ring now alone in the landscape:

The song is gone, the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.

Only the grass stands up
to mark the dancing-ring, the apple gums
posture and mime a past corroboree,
murmurs a broken chant
The hunter is gone, the spear
is splintered underground, the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still

The rider halts, feeling that the ghosts are still present.

Only the rider's heart
halts at sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain.

It is a wonderfully evocative poem. But it is also a very European perspective with its emphasis on the vanished Aboriginal past. In fact, that past was still present.

I am not sure when Judith wrote this poem, 1946 I think, but at the time there were almost certainly New England Aborigines alive who had passed through traditional initiation at one of the Bora sites. Further, the knowledge of the sites and their significance has continued to be passed on.

Here we can compare Judith's words with the much later 1996/1997 Aboriginal description of a site near Bellbrook quoted by Sandra:

“This site is known as the passing out ground for initiates of the Thungetti tribe. It is one of several initiation Grounds in the Bellbrook area where different stages of the Bora ceremony took place. As such, it is still highly sacred to the Aboriginal elders residing at Bellbrook Mission, and is considered to be one of the most important of the initiation sites in the area”

Entry Page for Posts about Judith Wright's poetry

Aeropelican - Anthony Lawrence's poem

On 15 January I outlined the history of the New England airline Aeropelican originally established to fly between Sydney and Belmont, Newcastle. I mentioned that I had flown this route, one of the most beautiful in Australia.

I see that the New England born poet Anthony Lawrence has written a poem, Aeropelican, that describes this flight. The plane takes off:

All seats on this fourteen-seater have windows,
the portside view a brief slideshow
of Sydney's northern beaches and beyond --
Broken Bay with its sea-going lion's headscrubbed green with altitude,
then to an entrance of lakes,
where silt makes a dye-fed film of arteries threatening closure

The plane comes in to land:

The rest of the flight is unfocussed
as a Newcastle skyline when Newcastle smoked.
The landing, like takeoff, is all loom and fade.
Coming in over Belmont, three boys stand by their rods
to wave from the end of a breaking wall.

Malcolm Calley, Anthropology and Australia's Aborigines

The predominant role of anthropologists from 1929 to 1945 (and indeed, to the present) in interpreting Aboriginal society, analysing its ills, and in recommending ameliorative policies, is remarkable. In fact, the Canadian historian K.A. MacKirdy commented in 1966 that ‘[Australian] historians generally have been content to leave the study of Aborigines to the anthropologists and then to ignore the anthropologists’! Adam Shoemaker

Any anthropologist who has worked on Native Title claims, or similar activity, in south eastern Australia is likely to have come across the anger of indigenous groups confronted with "academic" interpretations of their rights interests, customs and traditions which differ from their own view of these important aspects of their lives ....

Indigenous groups, not surprisingly , are highly indignant about having their claims, and the primarily oral traditions on which they are based, judged against the writings of the initial colonisers themselves and on occasion react even more strongly against later "academic" interpretations of territorial interests best epitomised perhaps by the work of Norman Tindale. Rod Hagen

I was browsing around to try to find out more on New England's Bundjalung people when I came across a reference to the papers of Malcolm Calley. This took my mind back.

Back in 1966 while I was doing my honours thesis on the economic structure of Aboriginal life in Northern New South Wales at the time of European intrusion I read Malcolm Calley's PhD thesis on Bandjalang Social Organisation with fascination.

My thesis was a study in ethnohistory, using historical records to try to understand the economic structure of aboriginal life. These were necessarily written from a European perspective. In writing I was also influenced by the conflict between Karl Polanyi and my cousin Cyril Belshaw on the applicability of economics to non-money using societies.

So while I was a member of Isabel McBryde's pioneer prehistory group at the University of New England, I was still writing very much from a European, anthropological and historical perspective. As an aside here, I was going to insert the link I had used before to a story about Isabel's work, but find that for some reason the Australian Archaeological Association has taken the page down. I must say that's a real nuisance.

At the time I was writing there was great suspicion among historians about the role of oral history and tradition as an evidence source. There was also a view that the Aborigines of Eastern Australia were too far removed from their tribal past for current memories to be a valid guide to traditional life.

To me, the striking thing about Malcolm's thesis was the way it demonstrated that oral tradition was still in fact worthy of study as a way of understanding past Aboriginal life.

The details I have on Malcolm's life are skimpy and I wish I could say more.

Malcolm John Chalmers Calley was born in Sydney around 1932. In 1955 he gained an M.A from Sydney University with a thesis ‘Aboriginal Pentecostalism', completing his PhD thesis in 1959. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Queensland during which time wrote extensively about Indigenous Australians. He died in February 1983.

Malcolm's work with the Aborigines is typical of the important role that anthropologists as compared to historians played in academic Aboriginal research as well as the promotion of new views about Australia's indigenous peoples.

I can attest to this from my experience when I was doing my own limited work on the Aborigines over the period 1963 to 1966. All the academic writing I used came from anthropologists and, to a lesser extent, prehistorians.

I can also understand the Aboriginal position as summarised by Rod Hagen in the second of the introductory quotes. However, that quote also links to something that concerns me at a personal level, the nature of the interaction (at least as I perceive it) between the Aboriginal community and certain parts of the academic and intellectual elites in the broader Australian community.

There is no doubt that the treatment of Australia's Aboriginal people has been quite awful. This needs to be and is being addressed in research and writing. But it has led, again as I see it, to a kind of cringe on the part of certain researchers and writers that is adversely affecting both the subjects selected for study and the research itself. It is also leading to a negative response in parts of the Australian community that is equally distorting in the opposite direction. The net outcome is bad for all sides.

In saying this, I am not making a comment about political correctness, simply expressing a continuing practical frustration.

In writing about the history of New England I need to talk about the history of New England's Aboriginal peoples. I want to understand and express the sweep of New England Aboriginal life past and present. I cannot do so. The basic factual information is simply not there - or at least not easily accessible - because everything is being twisted by and to fit differing perceptions of Aboriginal-non Aboriginal relations.