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.
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.
