A dark chapter of history is tied up in the name of the Canning electorate
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Version 0 of 1. Everyone’s talking about Canning. It’s a federal electorate in Western Australia that will host a byelection in two weeks. Apparently Canning could change political history. History – there’s a lot of it tied up in that name, Canning. Related: Canning byelection: Labor pins hopes on Matt Keogh, a local hero of the deepest red The Australian Electoral Commission notes the seat has its etymology in Alfred Canning, a “surveyor who pioneered stock roads . . . in Western Australia”. But that’s just a small part of the Canning story. Australia, its national imagination captive to that vast, hostile centre, mythologises frontiersmen just as it does soldiers. No more so than in the Northern Territory and Western Australian where the white men who surveyed the frontiers, who took on the “savage blacks”, ripped the minerals from the ground and grazed their stock fat on native pasture, are history’s untouchable heroes. Monuments, buildings, streets, whole suburbs – federal electorates! – are dedicated to them, even though many of the most esteemed pioneering and civic names are also synonymous with cruelty and acts of barbaric hostility against Aboriginal people. Which brings me back to Alfred Canning who, at the behest of the WA government in 1906, surveyed a 1,850-kilometre livestock track across the continent’s western deserts, linking 54 wells between Halls Creek in the Kimberley and Wiluna on the edge of the Gibson Desert. Others were chained and fed salt so that maddening thirst would force them to lead Canning and his men to water. The track was designed to open the southern beef markets (monopolised by the Kimberley graziers) to the farmers of the far north. To the white eye it was ostensibly arid, inhospitable, near impossible country. But to hundreds of families from numerous Indigenous clans it had been home for tens of thousands of years, a country punctuated with soaks that attracted animals for hunting and where the mystical jila (rainbow serpents) dwelt. For them the waters were home – the focal point of family, social, spiritual and economic existence. They were – and remain – part of a continuum of the Dreaming and the story and song lines that criss-cross the water and stretch back to creation. For Canning and the graziers, however, water was a vital commercial asset that was theirs for the taking. Some of the desert people agreed to help Canning blaze the track and find the water so that as many as 800 stock could be watered at each well, a day’s walk apart. Others were coerced – chained by the neck and fed salt so that maddening thirst would force them to lead Canning and his men to the water. Maltreatment of the black people was endemic. This week, with the name Canning ringing in my head, I paid a visit to Kaninjaku – stories from the Canning Stock Route, an exhibition at the National Museum of Australia. Kaninjaka, drawn largely from the NMA’s extensive stock route collection, is based on a larger museum exhibition about the Canning track that toured Australia a few years ago. Not only is Kaninjaku the Indigenous take on what happened after Canning began carving his track (the violence, displacement and dispersal, the interconnection of different tribes of desert people, the social, spiritual and cultural upheaval, and the dawning of arts communities across the desert). It is also the story of a rich past, of the enduring memory from the Dreaming and of ancient daily life that Canning’s road dissected. John Carty, Australian National University historian and anthropologist, curated Kaninjaku. He explains that the exhibition title, Kaninjaku, is inspired by one of the featured works by desert artist, Kumpaya Girgaba of Martumili Artists. “Kaninjaku” is a phonetic pronunciation of “Canning stock route” in her Manyjilyjarra tongue (say it – you’ll hear it!). “When we set out to tell this story, I thought I’d be recording an Aboriginal history of that road [the stock route]. But that was a really limited, and very whitefella, way of thinking about it. The stories that the artists told are far bigger and far more interesting, than the story of that road. Desert people tell the story of the world that road cut across: stories of family, of ecology, of the ancient songlines, stories of their home. The stock route is just a scratch on the surface of that story - that longer, deeper version of Australian history,” Carty says. Kumpaya Girgaba’s Kaninjaku – a linear orange, yellow and white painting – is the exemplar of that. There is no sign of the stock route here amid the sand hills. After the track was opened, desert people attacked the first drovers at Well 37 at Lipuru in 1911. A punitive expedition was launched to bring the killers to justice. The leader, a Sergeant Pilmer, captured none of them but instead killed 10 other people. It was among the first of many violent acts – massacres, revenge killings, resprisals – that marked the early years of the track, which then went largely un-used until the early 1930s when a new generation of white drovers began re-opening the road and worked it with the help of Aboriginal stock men and women (yet another story). We went there lately and saw there was hardly any water. Only a little, enough for birds to drink. Before it was big. The clock-watcher’s time is subservient to place in Indigenous culture. For place is where the stories of everything that matter are incarnate. Kaninjaku, then, is the point at which early white postcolonial history intersected and clashed with the Dreaming. Here’s one story drawn from hundreds about why. Of the 200 or so permanent springs and soaks (kulyayi) on the north-western side of the stock route, about 30 were home to creationist rainbow serpents – jila. Canning and his men used dynamite to sink the wells in the Kulyayi, killing the Jila in the process. According to other stories, some rainbow serpents were shot. Kulyayi, a painting by Milkujung Jewess James of Ngurra Artists, tells the story of the serpents’ demise on the track. He explains: “They killed that jila for that water. They found him at his own waterhole and killed him. My people always used to see him outside the waterhole. Long time ago. We went there lately and I saw that there was hardly any water. Only a little bit, enough for birds to drink. Before it was big. Water was full.” Mayapu Elsie Thomas, also from Ngurra, said of her painting Natawalu: “At Natawalu an Aboriginal man speared a kartiya [white man], then that kartiya got a rifle and shoot him. Right [at] Natawalu. Before there was a well there. That’s the place I painted now. He was just coming to get water ... then he saw that kartiya. He speared him then, near the water.” Related: Myall Creek: here, in 1838, a crime that would not be forgotten took place Here is another perspective: “We saw a native running towards us fully armed. He was watching Tobin all the time ... and just as the native moved with his spear Tobin raised his rifle and fired just after the native had discharged his spear which entered Tobin’s right breast. The native fell...” This was part of Alfred Canning’s testimony to the royal commission in 1908 that was called to investigate the mistreatment of the desert people during the survey. The commission cleared Canning. That’s one history. Other stories carry different verdicts on Alfred Canning. |