TWELVE
Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf ’s letter to Dr George Cross,
2nd August 1915, continued II I was once a simple clergyman and almost thirty-five years ago, in 1880, I opened Prosperous Lutheran Mission for the Native inhabitants of that particular cattle town, and its surrounds.
Officially our Mission will now come under the authority of the Aborigines Protection Board where I believe it will be run as a Station, and no doubt run in order that the child of God become useful and where the teachings of the Bible, Mathematics and English instruction might be put aside for other economic practicalities, as is the case at Stations and Reserves I know of in the district. On learning of the impending change I might have left the Mission then, having done little to unburden the Natives for whom I have come to care deeply. I might have returned to a small cottage and lived the rest of my days on an acre of peace, though with scant peace of mind. Alas, it seems the past is not dead and I am being made to suffer for this war that Britain has declared against the place of my birth – a situation I had no say in. Yet it is not my fellow countrymen of German and Prussian descent that suffer this war at a distance the most. It is, as I will detail in this letter, the Natives – mere children! – who have been forced into servitude because the Government wishes them to fill the gulf in the industrial labour force. I challenge you to scrutinise what I will detail on these pages and not agree.
As I mentioned previously, my family arrived on The Skjold from Sachsen, Prussia in October 1841. My Father was to join the vinedressers with his abundant knowledge of tilling the earth and producing table wine.
My mother, in the role of homemaker and with the backbone of an immigrant, another set of working hands. We rode on the bullock wagon on that first journey through the inland to the south, my mother and father
leading me towards our destiny. On that voyage I saw vividly – through young eyes perhaps – the Natives in a state of nature among the verdure and plenty of the land. It made a quaint impression on my mind. When we finally reached our new home there was already an established community of good people who spoke our language. The townspeople were made up of those who had escaped religious persecution from Prussia and Germany and were willing, and able, to begin new lives in this great country, a country that promised opportunity and safety to the dispossessed.
In our new homeland we were assigned fifty acres and Father worked the land of the rocks, cut the trees and dug up the stumps until the ground was flat and workable. Having no dray, his work was laborious, and yet he was full of faith that our small family would increase, and that this country would be his beloved and final home. Mother conducted her own business in town on Wednesday afternoons, when the wives brought their homemade butter, cheese and honeycomb to sell. In that way the week was measured twice by nourishment, from Sunday morning mass until the produce market, and I, I was preoccupied always by my study of the Bible.
We settled very amicably into the town’s life. My early years consisted of learning English at school and speaking it at home with my parents; only on special occasions, with vinedressers and their families gathering for particular meals or prayer, did we employ the language of my homeland, or ever discuss the politics of a place that all agreed remained in the past.
Perhaps fifteen good families were known to my own. All were very fluent in the English language, and their interests at all times were to be enfranchised in the fine country where we’d settled – where we had pledged beneath Britain’s flag – and with full hearts, the laws under Queen Victoria.
As a further show of respect, my parents soon made the arrangements to anglicise our name – our passage had been inscribed on the ship’s logbooks as we had been known: Grünblatt, and on the 1st day of June 1844, we had officially and henceforth sworn ourselves as the Greenleaf family. I say all of this particular information because it is the truth, and because one must be reminded of this given the circumstances we are now facing.
By the time I had grown and was ready to pay heed to the Word and face the world beyond, I had become a religious man. Owing to the vastness of Australia, and as with most young apprentices of God, I had been travelling from Station to Station in the wilds of the interior. Myself alone covering great distances of thousands of miles, scattering the incorruptible
seed of the Word amongst the white settlers, when, unexpectedly, I came into contact with the Blacks of Massacre Plains. There I found them in a condition most shocking to behold. I visited their camps and entered their wretched bark and bough gunyahs where they slept in cramped and vulgar conditions. I went from place to place, a spread of shambles a mile deep and wide, and each time I met with the same wretchedness and woe. In some instances, on making a first visit to a camp, the children ran away from me, terrified at my presence, whilst their mothers – some of them, alas! only children themselves – cowered in their little dens like so many wild beasts, doubtless afraid of my ghostliness. Such helplessness, such woe, caused by Christian White men! Yet this situation, I soon learned from good authority and from personal observation, was but an index to a ponderous volume of inequity existing throughout the interior. I believe it was then, having seen those depths of desperate subsistence, that I felt sincerely compelled to help the Aborigine of the camps. I was as sure of this as I had been of the Holy Spirit, my calling guided there by St Jude himself.
The camps I speak of were run along the outskirts of the town, where nothing, I suspect, in the shape of a township, could have been more unprepossessing to a stranger than the province of Massacre Plains. The town of low biding hills covered in gray volcanic boulders, sparse of vegetation except for the great white trees that appeared muscular from the hundreds of miles surrounding, marked purely for pastoral endeavours. In drawing comparison from the wet southern Colony it had given me the impression of sheer and onerous squatting country. What great difference I had witnessed from the bustling towns of the south; there hills and mountains were lush and many, and a crop took to the sun and frequent rain with the knowledge there would be continued good weather. Yet in Massacre Plains only a small number of houses had been established; two hotels and three stores, each bathed in the dry heat and endless clear skies.
On strong recommendation I made my way to the most aristocratic of the two hotels, where a room had been engaged for me by the resident police sergeant, which was all that could be desired in being clean and comfortable.
I subsequently reported myself to the indisposed Bishop of the Uniting Church, whom I soon judged to be a gentleman in the true sense of the word. My first duty was one connected with my functions as a clergyman
when I was called away to visit a dying lad. After which, with a Native police guide, I rode two and a half miles down the Murrumby River to a Station where I was engaged to hold service. On returning to my accommodation I told the lady of the house what I had heard and what I had seen earlier in the day. She replied, ‘Reverend Greenleaf, I have often thought what a sin it must be for Christian ministers to pass through these parts and never to speak a word to the poor Blacks. I can assure you that of all the clergymen who have called here, you are the first who seems to care anything about them. If some earnest and kind-hearted minister would only take the matter up, something might be done to induce the Government to take steps to alleviate their condition.’ A long conversation followed, in which this lady, a resident of Massacre Plains for twenty years, drew a picture most sad to contemplate. The conversation sent me to my room filled to overflowing with the wants and woes of these unhappy people.
I threw myself upon my knees, and wept before God, and said: ‘O Lord, show me Thy way, teach me Thy path, tell me what to do for these perishing Aborigines.’ The answer did not come freely, though I knew that if I followed the right and just path I would be instructed. I rose from my knees calmly resigned to the Divine will; but not even then for a moment thinking it was my duty to become a Missionary. If I had known then what great burden would befall me, would later exhaust me, then I think I wouldn’t have rested on my knees that night at all. If I had known the dark deeds, and if I had heeded the words of the apostle John when he said: ‘Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.’ And if I had realised that in the vertical sun of the interior, in all its dazzling light, that none shone from the Great Sun of Righteousness; instead, hidden within the blinding light were beliefs opposed to the principles of justice.
Rife here are the darkest deeds ever performed by man upon his fellow man, which makes countless thousands mourn. That vile inhumanity practised by the white-skinned Christian on his dark-skinned brother in order to obtain land and residence, for ‘peaceful acquisition’ – that includes capture, chains, long marches, whipping, death on the roadside, or, if surviving all these – the far more terrible fate – being sold like brutes of the field as unpaid labour to the highest bidder.
How could it be that Australia, professedly the new home of liberty and light, had become a theatre of oppression and cruelty? A land not only blessed by the Great God, with cloudless skies, and widespread prosperity and happiness to those who have been privileged to make it their own. And moreover a land that professes to reflect the noble institutions of Great Britain, those Godly and philanthropic fabrics, which are not only England’s glory and boast but the envy of all the world beside – is shrouded in dark deeds? That a land so circumstanced and blessed by Divine Providence, had become the nursing mother of injustice. That deeds of infamy should be encouraged. What I have seen constitutes the foulest blot to rest upon the emblem of Australia’s fame. If I had known I would not have knelt that evening. I would not have called out, O Lord!
