The Mapoon Story

Mapoon is a small community on the Western coast of Cape York Peninsula, 200 km South of Bamaga (which is almost on the tip) and 100 km North of Weipa.

This is the story of Mapoon according to the Aboriginal people of Mapoon as they wrote and recorded it in the Dry Season of 1974 and the Wet Season of early 1975.

There was at Mapoon at that time about six families, pioneering the rebuilding of their destroyed settlement…

So begins the Introduction to the first of this pair of books, published in Melbourne in 1975 by an activist organisation. The second volume, much longer, tells the story of the “Invaders” largely in their own words, quoting extensively from church and government records.

As I observed some months ago, books are time capsules. These two are now fifty years old. That makes them historically significant in their own right as well as providing unusual, and therefore valuable, perspectives on affairs of the time. They were “edited and written by the [International Development Agency] team.” Three writers are named and at least one of them has been active in aboriginal rights in North Queensland ever since.

Back cover of The Mapoon Story by the Mapoon People
The back cover of Book 1 – drawings by a Mapoon resident
Mapoon history

Very briefly, the community was established as a church mission and school in 1891 in the aftermath of the frontier wars. It was closed and burnt down in 1963 to make way for the bauxite mines centred on Weipa. The people were shifted to Bamaga  against their will but made their way back in 1974 and eventually built a self-governed community.

Mapoon Shire Council’s short history of the community is good except that it somehow fails to mention bauxite (at all) and is too polite about the early (mission) years. The Mapoon Story leans the other way, as one might have predicted from the title of the second volume. Chapter titles include “The People’s Fight Against Invasion and Oppression” and “Co-operation in Oppression: Church and State Work Together.” The focus is on the 1950s and 60s, and the conflict with Comalco takes up half of the book.

History is not ‘what happened’ but ‘the story we make about what happened’ and the stories we make depend on who we are and who we’re talking to. This is a real problem in indigenous history. It’s one I’ve addressed in Singing the Coast and Landscape of Farewell, and it emerged again more recently during my research into New Norcia.

More time capsules

These books came my way along with several other ‘time capsules’ which were featured on Green Path some months ago. The one they have most in common with is this activist history of the Daintree blockade.

But is it Art?

abstract photo
The image in question

This is a bit odd but it’s mine and I like it so I’m going to share it anyway. It raises two good questions. I will deal with the simpler one first.

What is it?

The image is a photo – a very bad photo, technically – straight off my camera. Late in the evening, when there was just enough light to see it, something hopped into the ashes of a long-cold fire pit at the Alligator Creek Falls camping ground. Shooting first and checking camera settings later, this is what I got.

The camera (DSLR) happened to be set on aperture priority (f3.5) and ISO 400, so its exposure time automatically stretched to half a second because of the dim light. The camera moved in that time, of course. The loose ash may have contributed to that nice soft effect, too, but I’m not sure. The pinks and browns were mostly invented by the camera, its automatic colour balance trying too hard to make something out of a background which was nearly all greys (there were a few pinkish fallen gumleaves in the ashes). The fact that the composition was satisfactory was mostly luck, too, since I could barely see my subject.

Really, I’m surprised that anything at all was visible in the image, let alone that it was attractive.

But is it Art?

Purely as an image, it’s almost abstract and vaguely organic. The colours and textures have reminded some people of a chalk sketch. I would be quite happy to print it and put it on my wall, but is it art?

A ‘work of art’ is firstly a work, something made, and this is something found (on my camera, that is). Not that photographs can’t be art, but art also has an intentional aspect and this image was fortuitous from start to finish. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see,” according to Degas, and that doesn’t apply here either.

If it is art, then, my image can only be art in the same sense that Duchamp’s urinal or, more recently, the banana duct-taped to a wall are art: “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice,” as Duchamp said.

But if it isn’t art, what is it?

As a found object, however, perhaps my image is most akin to the pretty pebbles or seed-pods we pick up on our excursions and display on a window-sill when we get home. So yes, it’s okay to frame it and hang it on the wall (which automatically and in this case misleadingly makes it look like art) even if it isn’t art.

All of which says something about how we think about art.

But what is it? Really?

Oh, you would like to know what the subject is? That’s less interesting, but okay. Here’s a more documentary, less sketchy, photo of it a minute or two later after it had hopped out of the fire-pit and I had organised my camera.

Still dusted with ash

Yes, it’s a cane toad.

If that makes us respond more negatively to my top photo than we did before, that says something about how we think about depictions of the natural world.

Fantasy from the Dark Ages

The fiction we now call Fantasy is largely a mid-twentieth century invention with roots in older mythologies. Here I want to look at some novels from the Dark Ages of the genre, the 1960s and early 70s, rooted explicitly in the Dark Ages of Europe. All of them are far too good to forget.

Continue reading “Fantasy from the Dark Ages”

The early colonial period in Northern Australia

canoes in mangroves
Aboriginals and Canoes at Cooktown ca 1900 by James Cossar Smith

This post was triggered by the wonderfully evocative old photo above. It comes from the Fryer Library, University of Queensland, part of a large collection indexed here.

The page will gradually grow into an anthology-style post like People in Australia before Europeans arrived and The European colonisation of Australia but covering specifically the early colonial period in northern Australia, roughly 1850 – 1930 and anywhere north and east of a line from Bundaberg to Darwin. Like those two, it will be a collection of snippets from items that deserve to be remembered, from various online sources.

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What they don’t tell you about retirement

A few thoughts for new retirees from someone who has been there and done that recently enough to recall some unexpected challenges and rewards…

Relevance deprivation

Your job is a very large part of your identity. For years, a key step in getting to know people has been asking each other, “What do you do for a living?” and the answer was often, “I am a [teacher chippie engineer gardener].”

Note the “I am.”

Continue reading “What they don’t tell you about retirement”