Goodbye Bussamarai

This episode of Frontier Wall Stories is part of a 10-part special series made with the support of Courier Mayall, the voice of Indigenous Australia. Courier Mayall is 100% Aboriginal-owned and 100% self-funded. Visit CourierMayall.com for more information. Frontier Wall Stories is edited by Awesome Black. Before I go any further, I'd like to pay respects to the country on which this podcast is being made. I'd also like to pay my respects to all the listeners who are listening from different parts of this beautiful continent and from around the world. I'd also like to pay my respects to all Aboriginal people across this continent that fought in the Frontier Wars, which began as early as 1788 and lasted until the 1930s. That's roughly 140 years that Aboriginal people continue to fight and resist. I'd also like to pay my respects to all our mob across this beautiful continent today. Each episode I speak with different Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people about research, books and oral histories which document the first 140 years of conflict and resistance. These times are the Frontier Wars and these are our war stories. [Music] [Music] Buzamari was a First Nations resistance leader. His influence spread across five Aboriginal nations. Like legendary Pemawayi, Gagan and Jendamara, he fought for the survival of his people. About the Menendangi land walls of southern Queensland from 1842 to 1852. My guest for this episode is Patrick Collins, author of Goodbye Buzamari. Well, my interest in Australian history really, I think, started with my Irish family. They were Berks and O'Brien's and that's the mother side and my father. His name was Collins when of course Michael Collins was the leader over there in the big uprising. And he got out of Ireland in 1921 during the black and tan rubbish that was going on. So history sort of evaded the place and then when I went to primary school, I loved what they call social studies and did very well on that. When I later, I became a teacher and did my degree part-time. I did Australian history at University of Queensland. And so from there it sort of always sat in the background. But my personal interest was in psychology rather than history. I mean history dominates it, but that's a hobby rather than a profession. And so eventually I taught primary, secondary, guidance work. Student councillor QIT and ended up a registered psychologist and running student counselling centre at Brisbane CAE and I lectured there too. That's when we retired. After that we decided we're going to do some stuff and we toured. And one of our tours took us out to our son's hotel which is at Muckadilla near Roma. And we stayed there for a while and we ended up, we would go out there each Christmas to give him a break. That was in the period 1990, 1994. And when we were there we said, "Well, okay, he's renovating the pub. So why aren't we putting a display of the local people?" You know, we took the land and all that stuff. So what about a display in the restaurant? And that's what we set out to do. So I started researching it because I couldn't get any sense out of the locals. I mean the local white people I'm talking about. The best I remember, one incident there when I was running the bar, a local property manager came in and I said, "What do you know about what happened to the Aboriginal people here?" "Oh, you know, the old Schneider." And I said, "Yeah, what about the old Schneider?" "Oh, you know." And that's it, you know. No facts, just the old Schneider. So I decided to find something about it. And so six years later I wrote good books and that's what happened. Research, research, research, and you can see across here the shelves are all full of stuff. I toured everywhere, went down, spent time at Mitchell Library, at the Archives in Sydney and Bathurst. I think it was Bathurst. And out here, of course, Oxley Library Fryer and all the other sources you can get. And if I could find it, it's there. It's basically it. Now what it was about, one lovely discovery was that when we were doing it, I kept reading stories about these different people who do something to attack, to defend themselves and stuff like that. And like Robin and Healy, he hired a book that he called Old Billy. It was a guide to go out and look for like art. And another fellow, Gideon Lang, he did the same. He hired a, he didn't hire Old Billy. He called him Old Billy and he said he had another name, Eagle Hawk. But he hired a fellow called Richard Walker and Wussamari tried to get the both of them when they were out there looking for properties. And there was those two. And then I read a book on the rifle and the spear in which they referred to Blok, who was a Murray, and he was doing the same stuff that these were selling. Robin and Healy said something, Gideon Lang said something, and the historian Blok said something. This has got to be the same Blok. And eventually people did it with me. It was the same fellow. And so I tried to get everything I could on him. But it wasn't just him. It wasn't a biography. It was actually what happened to the Aboriginal people who lived in the vicinity of Mukadilla and Roma. And it grew from that. And so really it ended up being an expose of what happened to the man on Danji, the bingam bull, the barring gum, and a couple of the groups a bit further out, the Kuma, and also the St. George one there. Yes, St. George. We got into St. George, yes, and the Camillere people came up that way too. But the centre of the book was Sarat, because that's where the land commissioner came to. And that's where Musa Murray, his centre was from there. So I guess at this point, you go to the, you know, he's a worker at the pub and, you know, you're asking locals about the local history, and nothing's coming out. You start doing your own research. When you start doing your own research, and I guess, you know, poking your head maybe per se, are locals, you know, getting anxious and sort of, you know, worried about, oh, you're going to make us look bad? I don't think so. In that period, I think they're quite proud of what they've done. Nowadays, there's a conscience, but there wasn't much conscience about it at that time. And sort of, I think, the look on the guy's face, when he said the old Svanada, it was a smart ass look that's what he really had on his face. I mean, yes, there were some very concerned people. And I don't want to paint white people as bad, you know. But there was certainly a racist group amongst them. Definitely. I remember, for instance, one day, I was looking for a contact with some of the local Aboriginal people, and I can't remember the surname, and they lived south of Northus of Rat, but not as far up as Roma on that road there. Anyhow, I was in Brisbane, and I rang the pub looking for someone who might be able to put me onto them. And one of the local guys took the phone from my son and put him on. I said, "What can you tell me and so and so that they all should be shot?" That's what his statement was. Something like that, just as bad as that. So there were some pretty nasty people amongst them, but there were some lovely people amongst them too. You're finding out more about sort of the local area through some of the trips to the local libraries, some of the archives and stuff, and you're compiling stuff about Bussamari now, and also, like you said, more so about the local mob as well. What time period was this, and then what was, I guess, the main sort of occupation around this time as well? I said the parameters had been to start with when the so-called explorers arrived until every last acre of land had been leased by white people. That was the frame. And it turned out to be from 1847 to the end of 1852 that covered it nicely. And in fact, nearly every acre had been leased by late '51. 1851, you know. And I've got all the records here to back that. And there was a particular land commissioner out there called Roderick Mitchell. And he died in 1851, but on his way down to Sydney, he was going to come back up to conduct the search for Leichhardt that was that Healy did. But he fell off a boat on the way down to Sydney, so Healy took over. But Roderick Mitchell, he pretty well closed his books on local leases in August 1851. They kept on going after that, but there wasn't much left to be taken over by then. Of course, most of the stations were occupied, so some were. But of course, the problem was the gold mines hit 1851 and '52 in particular. And so nearly everyone in the district shot down to the goldfields. And so a lot of stations just -- they died until 1859 about when Queensland became a separate colony and they broke up these places. And people came in with the leases of smaller properties and brought in sheep and cattle. But certainly, up to the end of 1852 is what I think at that stage, most of the man in Angie at least and the baron gum and bingamal, they had pretty well been -- the word 'defeated' is not quite accepted anymore. But in those days, they were, you know, in a sense of the way they were treated. They were defeated. They lost their land. What do you do, you know? How early in sort of, you know, taking the land did the conflict start between the local mob and the partialists and squatters and whoever's coming through? Well, nearly all of the workers out there lived in a former complex. Yeah, because 1852 wasn't much in the way of conflicts coming into the country anymore. A lot of them were still on tickets of leave. And it was roughly the same group of -- -Mile Creek? -Mile Creek, yeah. And it's much the same sort of people on the stations as were active around the Mile Creek area. Very similar. In fact, some of the station owners owned properties in both areas. -Danga? -Yeah, Danga. He had land up here. He had seven brothers on the Danga family. And the area around, just west of Miles in there, there's a place called Wollong Creek. Wollong Creek was, I think it was John Danga that was there, but he died while he -- back in about 1850, I think it was. And so a couple of the brothers took it over as trustees. But it was a Danga property. And the Dangers had another one just besides George. Yeah, I think between them all, yeah, they had quite a lot of land. I think, yeah, you know, the one that -- I think the Danga that owned the one in Miles Creek, I think, -when he passed was very wealthy. -That was Henry. Yeah, Henry, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of stuff. Whether it's not enough for him or his brothers, there's quite a few, you know, Danga streets and Danga floors. So, yeah, it was very -- that's a similar thing. And in fact, there were no resident station owners in the area that I was studying until -- I felt the first one to move into the northern region, let's say, moving out from Surat, from George River, was a fellow called McPherson, you might have heard about him. His father -- it was Alan McPherson who came up there, but his father, William, was the colonial secretary. And so he got all the insights. When Mitchell, Tomas Mitchell came through, he was the first explorer out there. He came back, there was reports. And so William McPherson got hold of it, and he told his son to get up there and get some land, basically, and that's what he did. He didn't even come out there and look at it. He just put his sheep and cattle together and a big team of fellas, and they came out and set it up. But the locals drove them out. They were there from '87 to '49, when he gave it away. But one of his white workers, a fellow called Paddy McEnroe, he -- well, first, when he left his sheep, he took them with him, but he left the cattle around. And Paddy McEnroe kept the cattle, rounded up the cattle in the district, and so he stayed there looking after the property, but running his own cattle. And so he was the first resident squatter, in a sense, in that region. And the others, they just had the convict and ex-convicts workers out there, that was it. There were public servants, of course, like the land commissioners from 1849 on, surveyors, Bajo or Bagot, some people call him. And in your findings, how early does Bizomari and that sort of appear in the scene as soon as they come up? Yeah, basically, Healy is one of the good sources. He didn't call him Bizomari, but on his way, on his trip looking for Leichart, he had this guy with him as the guide. And the trip's nearly over, and he's on his way back down to Sarat, and he's sent in his journal, which is over there if you want to see it. I've brought the... I've paid Mitchell Library to give me a copy of it, and I've typed the whole thing out, so it's all... So on his way back down to Sarat from... He got out as about what we'd call Tambo, as about as far as he'd gotten, that that stage Bizomari cleared out from it. But he cleared out because this white bloke, Richard Walker, was giving him a hard time, and threatened to kill him. So, holding Healy, he decided this was pretty hot, so he decided he's got to terminate and go home. But on his way back, he spoke of him, and, well, let's say he spoke of Bizomari under the name of Old Billy, and he referred to him as the greatest scoundrel that had ever been in the district, responsible for all the deaths on McPherson Station and others in the district. And that was one of the key things that said, "Oh, no, we've got something to really..." This is a number one, a government explorer. Got this bloke as a guide. The guide was recruited by Richard Walker, who was a local frontiersman, and knew what was going on, so it had to fit. And then in Gideon Lang's book, The Average of Australia, published in 1865, Healy's thing came out in 1952. So in that, but he was out there. I mean, Gideon Lang was out there from the end of 1850 to early 1851. It was there four months. And he used, say, Richard Walker as a guide, and he referred to as Old Billy as... He said he, also known as Eagle Hawk, was reputed to have combined five different tribes into one group to keep the whites out. And it was Gideon Lang that recorded Busamari's opera or the corumbary that was held and serrat. And in it was Busamari's way of showing the whites. This is what's going to happen if you hang around here. Do they describe how old or young he is? It's hard to say. They used to call him Old Billy, which was a difficulty. And when Thomas Mitchell came through, he talked about an old man who had some young sons who were, it was a bit beyond. It was out towards just in the vicinity of Mount abundance area. And he spoke about these. And one of them for a little while, I thought, might have been him. But then when he got onto the old factor and he was old enough to have had old sons, I said, well, that's got to get him, say, up around the '50s. And so I took a punt on it that because he was so active and the fact towards the end of the healing trip, when he left the Tambo region, he ran all the way to serrat and did it in, I think we have many days, but he was running the equivalent of, I think it was two or three marathons per day to get down. And it was a hell of an effort. Now, you couldn't be too old. I mean, there's an eye. We'd do park runs every Saturday morning. We're flat out walking five times. He's just run 300 odd times to get back to serrat. He wasn't too old. He wasn't fit anyhow. I'd say fit like in the area of 55, 60. That's my impression. Yeah, that's amazing. Any stories of the conflict, like obviously, once I want to move the mob off to set up the land, and obvious thing to do is to react to that as well. So was it more so reacting to the massacres or the mob sort of more so reacting to getting them off the land? Well, the very first ones was to get them off. I mean, what we can't know. I suspect, having read other stuff, that there must have been a lot of stealing of the women by the white bloke, the white sedentation. Given what I've read later on the Belon River, that I would be very surprised that wasn't happening. The Muckadilla area, there was Muckadilla Creek was there, but I also called it, or they gave it a river name, but it's not a river, it's just a creek. Anyhow, there's no record of this sexual stuff going on, but for some reason, one night, they came over a period of time, the local land people, they moved in onto the first station. He had another station down on the Guida, and he'd gone home to the Guida station, and he left his workers in charge. But they hit the place, and they killed a couple, and all the workers got off, and they moved over to the Belon River to get away from it. And when McPherson came back, he wrote over, he had a chameleloid bloke that was using as a interpreter and guide, and those two went over to the station and had a good look at it, and they assessed what was going on, and he talked them into going back out there. And then he went home again, and the same thing happened again, and then the same thing happened again, and eventually they'd killed off nine people. McPherson said, "Look at this, he took the sheep, and so he's got his men to take the sheep," and he left. He went back over to England, and he's a Scot. He went home, married a woman, came back here, and then sold his station to a family called the Spences, and that was the end of him there. But the same sort of thing was happening on the Belon. It was happening right along, well, the Belon is the southern, which you probably know, the Condomine River at Warwick changed its name to the Belon near Dove, and so it was happening right along that area, but there's no shortage of violence going along, and there was several, there was one guy in a white bloke called Bennett, he was a station manager, and he was on Wollin, and he would, every so often, he'd get the Native Police to come up, and this was later on, the Native Police didn't get that late in '49, and we're talking the first, so we had three or four years there, of the whites on their own, and they were doing what they pretty well liked, and then so when the Native Police turned up, they were based down at, you may have heard of, where Walker was based, his first station was near Gondwindi, and so they came, they'd stay there, but they'd send their Native Troopers up to the north, and so when this man-up bloke led an attack against the locals, Walker sent his men up there, and there was a couple of bad massacres that went on at that time, and this fellow Bennett seemed to figure in just about all of them, it was just like a, it was, I think it was probably Goodie and Lang that talked about it, some of the stations just had fellows on there that seemed to be there for no other reason, but to lead the white workers in attacks if they had to do it, and our experts at running them, you know, just about. Yeah, yeah, now I remember chatting with Noorai and Ray Kirkove and him saying, you know, a lot of the police who had, you know, were Native Mounted Police sort of higher ranking officers were, you know, seasoned sort of veterans in Napoleonic War and other parts of the world, so coming here, one of the first things that they would do would be to train the convicts and the spotters and whoever were on sort of the other land and how to, you know, search, corral and, you know, practically massacre the mob and stuff as well. Is Bizamari, like, is he popping up leading any of these resistances and any of these sort of conflicts? You get these statements or general statements that old Billy led all the attacks, basically like that. And then occasionally, when he first came up and he found his station had been abandoned by his workers, he went off and he found that in a new station that was being set up on Blythe Creek by a bloke called Blythe. It had been hit also, they killed a station worker there and Blythe, he took off and he went off into the region of the Condomine, town of Condomine, that area. And Blythe first went across there and he mapped it on the way. You were saying that Buzamari was, you know, was said to be, you know, key part in some of the actions taken, you know, back at the sort of settlers. Well, in The Rifle and the Spear, that was sort of a historical novel that was based on a lot of the stuff I'm talking about. And in that, they just set straight out that Buzamari led the attacks on here and also the one at Blythe Station. And so they all, they credit the same bloke with these, but on his way back, on their way back to when McPherson turned around, he's only had a couple of workers with him, he had two Aboriginal workers and a white bloke, they all went back to Mount Abundance at his station. And the Aboriginal people who'd gone off, they turned around and they came up behind him. They, in the book, in his book, which is, I transcribed into my book, he had them lined out in a, you know, sort of a big, sort of a chevron. And they attacked him from the sides. And three spears from great distances and stuff like that. He's two black workers and McPherson and a fellow called John Jackburn, I think, went back to McPherson's place and he went home then. So you get stories like that, but you don't get the name Bussamari, you get the formation. And then you get another bloke saying that it was led by Bussamari. Or led by somebody, Bussamari by another name, or Billy or whatever. And it's interesting, you know, when you mentioned, they'd call him Eagle Hawk as well. Yes, yes. Because I know Ray Kirk over in his new book, he spoke about sort of the formation of these, like, sort of military detachments that, you know, local sort of, you know, black fellows would have, that would lead these resistances from multiple different tribes and stuff as well. So it's interesting to hear, like, that's what they called him. And, you know, like, we hear of these sort of formations in different parts of the country. And, you know, their groups are called, you know, Eagle Hawk, or they go by this sort of tag name as well. You hear it as far as, you know, Toowoomba with Maltagor and all this stuff. And even back down home as well, like, you know, in Goomarai Country, we sort of hear these stories as well of, you know, this sort of alliance between, you know, nations and stuff as well. So it's amazing to sort of see it, you know, being put into books and, you know, acknowledged in different parts of the country. Yeah. And Ray was very good with that. He introduced me to this group called Eagle Hawks from it. Out on the Channel Country. And he thought that maybe the name Eagle Hawks was actually a rank rather than his name. So it's hard to say. But I corresponded with a black who, I can't remember his name, that's in the book, in the introduction of the new book. And he put together, he's very interested in the Aboriginal languages. And he came up with a version that he thought that Busamari could be close to the name, but you're probably aware that white linguists believe that there were, there were no s, there were no sibilant sounds in the Aboriginal languages. And so if that was the case, Busamari couldn't have been a genuine name. And the Saddleback thought, well, maybe it was something more like Busamari, rather than Busamari, you know. And he came up with a name a bit like that. And he thought it was, could have meant something like elder with a spear or elder that throws spears, something like that. So, you know, I'm not convinced. I don't think that Busamari was the exact translation. But I think from listening to what this guy says about the languages, I'm fairly convinced that his name was something like it. Definitely, definitely, yeah, yeah, yeah. Getting towards sort of the end of the research and sort of end of, and the title of the book being, you know, Goodbye Busamari, how does his life sort of live out? Does he, you know, live his life out or does he sort of, you know, get captured? No, unfortunately. No, in 1852, again, it was a terrible year for the locals, a native police sergeant called Dempster came out there and it was pretty clear his job was to wipe out the elders and the rest. There were three named elders that got it and nowhere else in any of the stuff do you get a named elder and the three that were the leaders. There was, and Busamari wasn't one of them in there. It was one was a guy who had been a native policeman and he absconded as they called it from the native police and so they shot him. Dempster went right down the below and killing people and it's terrible to read what he did. There's plenty of records of it. The native police records are pretty detailed and it's all in the book there. Anyhow, when Dempster had finished, it happened coincidentally that when Dempster arrived out there, he went through the rat going down the river at the same time Hobban and Healy arrived going up looking for Icar. And we got Busamari gone off with Healy looking for Icar while this other bike's gone down the river killing other elders. And so it's hard to know but I hypothesized that maybe Busamari got word on the grapevine and that's why he might have absconded from the search and came down. Anyhow, he came down and then he went across. By that stage Dempster was back at his camp. Busamari was involved in some other skirmishes between Sarat and about, probably, Jalaka, some in that region in there. But when he was on Yulbar Creek, he went up to a station near the Paddy McEnroe, the one I said before that McPherson left behind. McEnroe was living there and he had an Aboriginal family. And the Busamari and some other guys who were from the locals, but a few of them had come down from the human land where they'd been got away from the tax up there. And they were giving McPherson, sorry not McPherson, Paddy McEnroe a hard time at his hut. And along comes the native police from around Sarat turned up and they shot him. And that was him. They shot him in the hole on them. They shot six of them together and one of them was Busamari. And that was around probably, well, my reasoning based on what the instructions to the native police were, to me it had to be November 14 or very close, 1852, when they got him on Yulbar Creek. And what were the sort of scenes after that, you know, there were less sort of reprisal attacks from the local mob? It settled. They had just about wiped. I mean, they missed him when he came down in 1952. He killed so many people, you know, he just went through the place and sorry to the others, but one particular thing that happened was just before that in late 1851. The native police commandant, Frederick Walker, he made his first patrol out to Sarat. But at around the same time, he had gathered every native policeman who was in Queensland in the last half of 1851, and they all patrolled throughout the scrub, taking in the land roughly between Gundawindi, St George, Sarat, and what became Ramah. They went right through there over and over and over, and the idea was they would leave as many hoof marks and stuff like that, and they wanted to scare people into believing that there was far bigger, where that's what it was. When he did that, it seemed like he went back to Gundawindi and sent Dempster out to finish the work. And he got out there, I think, April '52, and I think he did, like he killed so many people. Walker said after that that there were a lot more people came in, as they used to call it, came into the stations. But certainly the amount of violence just died right down, at least the recorded violence. I don't know what did happen, but the recorded violence just died out, personally, and certainly there was more of it further west. Does that sort of where you end your sort of studies and findings for yourself before you put the book out, or do you still sort of look at what's happening in the area? Yeah, I still read and so forth. Yeah, I look at it all the time. Yeah, you can't stop once you start. That's it, yeah. So I guess you bring a book out, you spruce up the local pub with a bit of local history. What's the reaction to the book, but then also locally as well? Unfortunately, I had a bit of an incident last year. Part of my colon died, and I had lost a big section of my colon, and I have a lot of trouble travelling now because of what they call a stoma. So all our trips to go out there just fell apart. So I mean, it was published, and the revision was done, came out in 2022. And we wanted to get a bit of publicity first before we went out there, and then, lo and behold, this hit me, and so that's over a year ago. What about the original, sort of the before the revised version came out when you first... One thing I was disappointed about, when the first book sold out, I didn't reprint it. And so I got the rights to the book back from University of Queensland Press, and I produced CD copies, and I sold them for a while, and then after that, it was a lot of mucking around. Do you have another audio version online? Not online. Which is CDs, because like a lot of people now, they'll pick the audio book up, or a hard copy as well, yeah. Yeah, well, what I did was I decided, well, there's no more money going to come in, I'm not going to wreck my own sales or anything that I can't do because I only... And so I just gave the book away, I put it online free. The text of the book is online free, on the first volume, and has been now for over 10 years. But when this thing came up with this Jonathan Walker, with the errors, and they wouldn't stop it, I said, "I'm going to revise this," and so I revised it. But I've added some stuff that I found out in the meantime. Like I said, I didn't stop back in, say, 1999 when it was ready for publication. I kept on going, and so there are some new things in the new book that weren't in the old book. So that's my sales pitch. This part of the conversation is more so about the impact that these stories have, and how important they are, not just to now and the future, but what has come before us as well. There was a great silence when it came to the truth of this country. And I guess, yeah, for yourself, wanting to put the truth out, well, yeah. That was on all the way. I think that had to do with something with the background and the Irish history, I think. But the biggest impact, or the most important impact at the time, I got very friendly with an Aboriginal bloke out there. And he thought that Bussamari was one of his ancestors. And I think from listening to him, I think it could be right. Yeah, there's a lot of talk now, especially coming from places like the War Memorial. Yes. You know, they want to feature, they're open to a discussion of featuring, you know, frontier figures, you know, in the War Memorial. Your thoughts on that, you know, it's definitely, has been a huge discussion for quite some time. Yeah. I think I could draw an analogy. Could you imagine Irishmen not wanting to have Michael Collins mentioned anything to do with the history of Ireland? It's the same here. Of course, they should be. Yes, all of the elders that were important in the wartime thing. Yes, they should be. Definitely been a question, you know, and then we see, you know, lots of people pushing it. You know, Kim Beese, he really wants, he's asking for it as well. So on that part, I guess it's good as well that, you know, they've decided to open up the dialogue on that side of things as well. I guess just sort of in this back end of our conversation and in wrapping up like any final thoughts on sort of the book and, you know, your work and, you know, is there much in the future that you're looking to do in this area as well? Well, I made you five. It might not be up to me. And that was Patrick Collins, author of Goodbye Bizzamari. And thank you for tuning in and listening to the latest episode of Frontier War Stories. Just remember, you can listen to the podcast on all your favorite streaming platforms, as well as the Courier Mail, which is this new partnership that I am doing with them. And also, as always, Awesome Black. It's always been a pleasure. Yellow.