Part Two: How Eliza Fraser Survived a Shipwreck and Sparked a Genocide

Robert tells Jack about the 'rescue' of Eliza Fraser and how her lies about what happened on K'gari Island helped to fuel decades of colonial war and genocide.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Oh holy do it's Behind the Bastards a podcast where
I finally learned how to open my podcast. I think
we figured it out. I think we get it locked down.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
Oh who do we do as a keeper?

Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's a keeper, that's a keeper.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
I think yesterday was Duberger.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
That that that one was. That one was a fuck up.
It was a disaster, not calamity.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
I just think it would be hard to remember to
how to do it. And again, you're doing.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Great, Yeah, because I have to get every syllable right, obviously, Yeah,
yea do much easier, easy to remember. I can see
it on T shirts. People are going to be getting
tattoos of this in like a month.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Sounds like something you would say if like a fancy
person corrects you.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, now speak of things that are going to be
on T shirts in a month. Look, I don't know
how that actually leads us into part two. When we
ended part one, Eliza Fraser and her husband were taken there.
I have no I don't know, Sophie. I just I

(01:14):
just transitioned sometimes when I'm speaking, and it just usually
doesn't work very well. We mostly edit in the ones
where it did. But that one was a failure. You know,
I could admit that Jamie.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Did send me that send me that picture of the
two of us when we did that one live show
when we wore each other's shirts with each other's faces
on it and didn't acknowledge it.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah, that was good. That was a good move. But
you know, it's a visual joke. I tried to do
too many of those because most people listen to the podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Well, who do he do? Look, who's a professional podcast?

Speaker 2 (01:46):
All a sudden, that says the guy you hired me
to do podcast?

Speaker 3 (01:52):
All right?

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Now, speaking of getting hired, Eliza Fraser has kind of
gotten a job, which is trying not to die while
living as part of a civilization that survives off the land,
a thing that she doesn't know how to do, and
it's not going well.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
She doesn't understand and they don't understand her.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Right that no one speaks to each other's language, right, right,
it's not going great. So we should probably peel back
a bit more to talk about the Bachilla's contacts with
European civilization outside of Captain Cook and the odd Ausy
prison escapee. Right, we talked about that last time, their
first contact. The fact that these prisoners have been like

(02:32):
coming in like individually for a while and getting adopted
too often. When we discussed kind of the ethnographies of
indigenous people being colonized, we sort of dropped like, here's
what they believed about the world pre contact, and then
we kind of leave it at that. But again, these
are not static civilizations, right, no more than you know
the Europeans themselves were, and they adapted their beliefs many

(02:54):
times in light of new knowledge about how the world worked.
As I noted in the last episodes, the natives of
what was at that point known to the Europeans as
Indian Head Island and was called Gari by the people
then and now, they interpreted their first sights of white
people to be spirits returning from the dead. But whiteness
symbolized death in every way, right, and so they didn't

(03:17):
just respond to white people as if they were returning
deceased relatives. Sometimes that would happen. You'd meet someone in
like a member of the tribe, would get good vibes
from them. Basically it'd be like, oh, you know what,
I think, that's like my dad or whatever, you know,
my kid or something like that who died recently, But
that is not the only way they reacted. Death was
always involved in their reaction, but it wasn't always like, oh,
this must be a member of the tribe returned. As

(03:38):
doctor Peter Lower wrote, their whiteness was symbolic of death, mourning,
and apprehension, and so sometimes people were like, oh, no,
it's a bad omen that there's white people here, right,
because that means like the dead, or like it's this
is this is a dark thing that's happened.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
It was always my interpretation, and it's why I'm always
so nervous right in America.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yes, yeah, yeah, it's really terrible place for you to live.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Like, ooh, I feel like the vibes are off everywhere.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Looking in the mirror. Oh no, the go dear God,
it's me in August of seventeen. I mean, looking in
the mirror does make you think of your own mortality sometimes.
But in August of seventeen ninety nine, which is about
thirty years after Captain Cook's voyage, an English boat called
the Norfolk put ashore on the Great Sandy Island. Captain
Matthew Flinders went ashore with a party of men to

(04:26):
find water and food near a place called Wootomba Creek.
As was usually the case, Flinders was mixed up and
believed he'd found Australia and the Highland was just a promontory.
That's constantly they have no idea where they are. These
people the maps are shit, they're bad at reading them.
They're all drunk. Now they're not just drunk, they're heavily armed.
And while it's a lot of fun to be heavily

(04:47):
armed and drunk, it's also very dangerous for the people
around you. And Flinders and his crew were part of
like the shoot first and never asked questions ever, like
school of being a colonizer who's drunkenly landed on an island.
And so when like a group of Nogoulungbara tribes people
who's like I think they with the people who live

(05:08):
in the south of Ghari Island, they like come up
to see these new people have landed, and they do
what normally happens, like okay, well let's go look at this,
and Flinders and his crew just start shooting, like they
just they just start blasting immediately right, They like fire
a cannon at the tribe for no apparent reason, and
the tribe runs away, which is a reasonable thing to

(05:29):
do when someone shoots at you. Now, this we don't
know if this was, you know, anyone on the island's
first experience with gunfire, but it's the first recorded one
we have, And we have a record of this from
one of their songs, which roughly translated states that one
of the white men quote two times, held up something
and made loud noise and smoke Kong kong. I think

(05:49):
that's how they onum on a pia the sound of gunfire,
which is you know, not bad perfectly. Yeah. So one
thing that's so interesting to me about this story is
that it's a really good example again of how much
accurate historical information can be passed down through the centuries
in an oral tradition like this. Because the captain's men
also reported firing twice. So you have both this song

(06:11):
and like documentation from the sailors that they shot twice.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
I find them down across history, totally unrelated from one another.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
It's so interesting, yeah, because usually when you're like, well,
these people have an oral tradition of storytelling, it's discussed
as like storytelling, it's like myth, but like, no, this
is no this is not really necessarily less accurate than
like a fucking newspaper in London at the time, right,
which is also a lot of times wrong or filled
with lies, right like. And I'm not saying the songs
are all like the songs. Clearly, this is people recording

(06:41):
their history. So people always have an agenda when recording
their history. But it's also a lot of very very
accurate grain gets through in the history as a result
of this, these oral these songs, which I think is
really interesting.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
I mean, we made up Paul Revere just because of
name rhymed right right. Song is not always the our
best way of recording things, right, So it's kind of
impressive that they're getting the right number of shots down
through tons.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
It's often very good and so that's all I'm saying.
It's not that like you shouldn't view you know, these
oral like stories that the people on Ghari are surely
is like one hundred percent you know, accurate history all
the time, but you shouldn't view it as just like mythology,
right right. This is an attempt at recording history, and
like all attempts, like herodotus, it's not perfect, but you

(07:31):
shouldn't see it as like less accurate than herodotus, right.
And the term for this mix of singing and dancing
and storytelling to preserve history among the people of Ghari
Island is called a corroboree. That's the term I found
for it. So yeah, After one of Flinder's men fired
upon the Nagoulungbara, Peter Lower writes, one of their number, women, Gala,

(07:54):
who hid in the nearby bushes, watched the whites collecting
water and killing some wild fowl with their terrible weapons
returning to the ship. Their heads are like Dingo's tails,
the corroboree continued, impossible reference to the sailor's plaited hair
or the kerchiefs they wore as head covering like the
ceremonial Dingo tail headbands of the adult males of the tribe.
The paddles are woods or like wood shaped by the fire.

(08:15):
They're ongoing attempt by the Aboriginal people to relate the
inexplicable to what could be culturally comprehended is thus most
apparent in these careful observations. And again like yeah, you
get like these recordings of how they looked, and they're
trying to kind of comparing their appearance to like their
own appearance, right. Like, it's this really the amount of
like fidelity you get in this attempt of one culture

(08:38):
to comprehend another in some ways, in a lot of ways,
much better than the European accounts of the same thing
I find really interesting.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Yeah, the European account being like they're basically animals. Now
you tried to like shoot at them where they ran
away like animals.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
The Nagoulambara are trying to kind of do their own anthropology.
They're trying to get in these people's heads to understand
like why are you doing what you're doing? What are right? Which, yeah,
it's just really interesting to me. So Flinders returned to
the island in eighteen o two, which is three years later,
with a party of scientists to collect plants, and an
aboriginal person from the mainland named Bongaree like was brought

(09:17):
with them. So they take this indigenous person from like
the mainland with them because he can probably talk to
these guys, and they manage to make some sort of
friendly contact with the Nagoulungbara, who are understandably nervous because
the last time they saw this guy he shot at
them and they could see guns like in the hands
of men on the island and know what they mean. Now,

(09:38):
Flinders tried to bribe them with an offering of blubber
from porpoises, and he's like, well, this is a valuable
gift by my standards, because like animal fat is useful
for cooking. But the islanders didn't hunter kill porpoise because
they to them, the porpoise drive the mullet and whiting
fish into their nets, so they see them as allies,

(09:58):
like we work with the Porpoise's really fucked up for
you to kill them. They're like our friends who help
us get food. Why did you murder one?

Speaker 3 (10:04):
They're like the fish shepherd, Yeah, he just killed him.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, but he's useful.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
Hey, we killed your friend. Do you want some of this?
Do you want some of the stuff in their body? Man?

Speaker 2 (10:15):
Why don't these people like this stuff?

Speaker 3 (10:16):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (10:16):
It's it's yeah anyway, So for the next about that's
like kind of the last well documented contact between the
Europeans and people on the island for like thirty years
or so, right, even though there's some ships that semi
regularly stop and obviously some convicts who find their way.
This is like when Eliza Fraser lands, they're like last contacts,

(10:37):
detailed contacts with Europeans that they had stories of were like, yeah,
they tried to kill us and then they killed one
of our friends. So it's kind of amazing that they
treat her and her fellow shipmates so well given that history.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
And it's kind of a less of the white Gods
descended from the sea and more of a these assholes again,
yeah type situation.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
And it you know, this is something I don't think
we have perfect texture on, but it does kind of
seem like by the time they take her in, they
have moved on to like, yeah, these probably aren't the
dead return. These are like some kind of assholes, some
species of assholes, specific assholes they're clearly willing to be like,
but maybe not all of them suck. Well, we'll try
to stop these people from dying, right, So again, we'll

(11:21):
discuss further how Eliza described them as cruel and vicious,
But it is also important to note that other survivors
of this shipwreck talk very differently about this people. Robert
Darje is often considered the most dependable and reliable source
of first hand accounts from the Sterling Castle survivors, and
he described the locals as treating them very hard and stated,

(11:42):
we had to work severely to get fish in kangaroos.
But it's also clear he understood that this hardness was
a product of the difficulty of survival on the island,
and added, I cannot call them a cruel people. So like, yeah,
they we had to work. It's difficult, but like they
weren't mean this is just the only way to live there.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
Fucking doarj Dargy, great last name. It does sound like
somebody I used to get ship faced with. Yeah, Dargy Dargy.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
You might compare Eliza's situation in this to like a
post apocalyptic story where some Instagram influencer flees the city
and finds refuge in an off grid farm and they're
like taken care of, but like they have to learn
how to work, right. It's it is kind of like
this that sort of situation. Right, This is like a
middle class person who's now having to learn how to
live off the land, and she seems to have taken

(12:32):
grave offens to this. Peter Lower notes in his excellent
History of the Island. It was later reported that Missus
Fraser was compelled to dragon wood for the fires and
fetch water with as much cruelty as the Gins themselves.
This is from like a piece of reporting at the
time that's obviously a on the like on the slur spectrum.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
Right Gins themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that seems bad.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah, And as she herself claim, she was constantly beaten
when incapable of carrying the heavy loads they put upon me. Now,
Lauer does go into some detail about how hideously traumatic
the crew's experiences before this had been, and when they
came upon the Bachola it was late winter, the most
meager season of the year, which means that not only
were Eliza and Ufellow's starving, but everyone kind of was.

(13:20):
The shipwrecked survivors had gone through a shipwreck, so they
were ill. They're not good for a lot of work initially,
which means they're being supported by the resources of people
who are hungry themselves. When interviewed later, surviving Islanders described
the shipwreck survivors as being incapable of foraging, quote at
which even small children were expert. So like, even our
little kids are better at living than you, guys, Like,

(13:41):
what the fuck is wrong with you? And their incompetence
was galling enough that it may have provoked VI.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
She just would have been so easy for them to
if they were even to die, if they were as
cruel as like any aspect of this universe asks us
to believe, it would have been so easy for them
to just kill them like they they are not useful
to them.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
You know, they're not helping, they're not making anyone's life
better right now. Robert Darje also came to expect uh yeah,
And this is what I find Diars interesting because like
he's not like sugarcoating the situation. He's like, you know,
I did face hostility from some of them. Some of
them even like tried to do violence to me, and

(14:22):
I think it was because the last time they met
Europeans they'd been shot. Quote. I believe that the reason
some had such a hatred of me was that soldiers
had wounded them. I observed lost his leg had a
desperate hatred of me, and he tried to kill me
three or four times.

Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah, man, the guy a leg off. But the guy, yeah.
Did they were they armed at this point?

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yes? They still they have some sort of arms. It's
unclear to me how well they're able to use them.
There are reports that they had guns, but obviously I
don't know how much powder they got away with. I
don't know how damaged the weapons were by the water
and the shipwreck, so they may not have been and
super usable, right, got it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's
interesting to me that, like again, like these shipwrecks also

(15:08):
are not a monolith. You know, you've got Eliza who's
gonna tell these fucked up stories, and you got Dars.
She's like, yeah, this guy tried to kill me, but
he had his leg blown off by a cannon, So
like I get it, you know, like, yeah, I'd probably
be pretty pissed for.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
Literally no reason. Like they were doing our favorite pastime
at that time, which was watching a ship come in
and like what's happening those basically the movies back then. Yeah,
we'dn't go down to the dock and wave at a ship.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah, people shot them.

Speaker 3 (15:35):
Yeah, and they had shot with a fucking can Jesus.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
And so that's probably when we talk about like some
people were like would have been violent when these folks
like failed to do their choice. Well, maybe some of
the reason why they were forceful is that they'd had
friends and family killed or been injured themselves by European guns,
you know, not the craziest scenario wild take. Yeah, So
you know, there's some other things happening here. There's all

(16:00):
this kind of lingering belief that these people have something
to do with return to spirits, and like when someone dies,
you burn their shelter because it's bad luck to have
the shelter around the spirit might get stuck there. And
so there was this attitude that like, well, they don't
need to sleep indoors, right, which is bad for them,
you know, like it doesn't make this any more comfortable, sure,

(16:20):
but they're not trying to be assholes by doing that.
Probably the kind of darkest matter of conflict here is
the matter of what happened to Captain Fraser. We don't
know exactly, but Eliza's husband was killed or died soon
after they were taken in by the tribe. Eliza would
later claim that about after about five weeks with the Bachola,

(16:41):
she saw her husband trying and failing to drag a
log for like the fire, and he was in bad
health and not able to do this very well. And
as she described it, a hunting party returned home empty handed.
And for some reason one of the men stabbed Captain
Fraser in the chest.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
I was horrified to see it emerge several inches through
his chest. I pulled this fear from his body and
from his mouth. An immense quantity of blood spouted, and
he died. She furthermore claimed that after this two other
survivors were tied to stakes and executed by sun exposure. Confusingly,
she also claims that several crewmen who escaped were burnt,
but others were taken to the mainland. There is no

(17:18):
evidence of this but her account, and in fact, there
is no evidence that any survivors of the shipwreck died
on Fraser Island at all. The chief officer, Charles Brown,
who Eliza claims was burnt at the stake, died on
the Australian mainland. Her husband died at Lake Cutharaba, which
is also on the mainland, and he was in fact

(17:38):
stabbed with a spear at some point, although this did
not kill him immediately like she claimed. Instead, it seems
like what happened is like someone slapped him in annoyance
with a spear which caused like a superficial wound, but
he was sick and it got infected, and so two
weeks later he dies as a result of the injury, right,
which is a very different story on the mainland. Yeah,

(17:59):
on the mainland. Also because they take them to the mainland.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
He was so annoying that somebody spar spear slapped him.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
Yeah, to death.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
That's kind of what it sounds like. We don't know,
because again she lies about all this, Like she says
it happens on the island. They are taken off the island,
like by the Butchola. It doesn't happen there. The guy
she claims is burnt to death definitely isn't burnt to death,
And her husband isn't just like impaled and bleeds to
death immediately, like he suffers a light wound that gets

(18:30):
infected and he dies two weeks later.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
This is a big episode for the women. Lie guys,
Yeah maybe, I mean I didn't trust her from the beginning.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Okay, speaking of lies, that's kind of what advertisements are.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Sure, beautiful lies.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yeah, beautiful lies. Believe them, just like Australian people believed Eliza.
Ah ah, and we are back. So in all, Eliza
spent about three months with the Batchola and By the
time she was rescued by her fellow Europeans, she'd been

(19:09):
moved to the mainland. Her rescue was affected largely thanks
to an Irish convict named John Graham, who's another one
of these really cool guys you hear about in this
story that I want more about. Yeah, he had previously
wound up on Fraser Island, so he was he was
a convict who had like escaped to Fraser Island and
he had been taken in by locals who adopted him
as Moilo, the spirit of an elder who had died recently,

(19:32):
And he basically been taken in by the old man's
wife and sons and spent six years living as part
of the family and then headed back to the mainland.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
What is happening in this?

Speaker 2 (19:43):
In this, I mean people could just do stuff back then,
Like there was it was really easy to die doing stuff,
but you had a lot of options for you know what,
I'm going to live a completely different kind of life
now for like six years.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Bye, I'm still stuck on you're annoying. I'm gonna spear
you in.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
The I have definitely met some people that had I
had a spear in hand. I would have slapped them
with it. Now, thankfully, we have modern methods of cleaning
spear wounds here, so every time I've done that, I've
been able to stop them from, you know, dying of
an infection.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
It would have been a friendly spear slap to the chest.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Oh, it wouldn't have been friendly. But so anyway, this
guy John Graham, right, he'd spent six years or so
living with the Batola, and then he had returned to
European civilization and he had gotten imprisoned again. Right, so
he's he's in custody. But when members like folks from
the Pinnis who had like left, get back and are like, yeah, there's.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
Spelling, by the way, I just have to ask.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
The pennis p I n n acee.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
Okay, got it.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
So when they get back, people are like, hey, there's
more shipwrecked victims that are out somewhere near this island,
you know, off the coast. We should go get them.

Speaker 3 (20:56):
They tried.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
They start to, like local authorities start to put together
a rescue party, and someone's like, well, there's this dude
in prison, John Graham, who like lived on that island
for a while. He probably knows how to talk to
people and can probably find them right from the rock. Basically, yes, yes,
this is a this is this is the Yes.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, well there's only one man who knows in there.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
He's in the island is where he went to escape
from prison as the prison.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
Was in its complicated but yeah. Basically.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
In his book Irish Convict Lives, author DJ mulvaney describes
Graham stripping himself as soon as he's like, yeah, I'll go,
I'll go rescue these people. He strips naked, greases himself up,
and then leaves with bread and a potato.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
And which is what you did immediately after accepting my
offer to work at a at iHeart.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, yeah, I stripped naked, he creased myself bread and
a potato and we're out the door. Yeah. I know
it sounds like I'm being like racist to Irish people,
but that is what the history says is He's just
march up with your Brendona potato. According to Fianz, who's
like one of the authorities at the time, Graham stripped
off his close, greased himself up with charcoal and greece,

(22:10):
and set off to seek information, armed only with some
bread and and a potato. He was soon welcomed back
among his people, observing customary ritual by sharing his carbohydrate
rich food with them around the fire. That night, he
learned of the presence of two young ghosts across Lake Kurobora.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
He offered tomahawks to those who brought them to him,
for he's stressed. They were my sons. So maybe he's
not working like he's looking for like two men who
were among the shipwrecked people. He's not really thinking about
Eliza for whatever reason.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
Oh, those are the ghosts, are the white Yeah, shipwrecked victims.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Right, That's how he's talking about it to his people
on Fraser Island and they're like, well, we already actually
took them across like the strait to the mainland. They're
over you know, by this lake now.

Speaker 3 (22:53):
Yeah. Just a world class bullshitter who's like yeah. And
then I told them that they.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
Were ghosts and they're my sons, my other kids, the only.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
Way they could possibly understand.

Speaker 2 (23:03):
He's got the he's Irish, he's got the gift of
gab and he and he brought up potato, so you
know they're endeared to him. You bring me a potato
and some axes. I'm going to be your friend.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Based on his behavior and having nothing to do with
his Irish heritage, I'm going to be forced to assume
that he was shitfaced this whole time.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
One has to guess, right, I'm not. I'm not going
off on this mission sober.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
Was the taking all of his clothes off and greasing up.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
And I don't know, maybe he does this like on
the boat when they get him near the island. But
the way the story is it like he's like in Sydney,
had just stripped naked.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
They're like halfway through giving him the assignment and he's
already taking his clothes off.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
This guy got his dick out immediately. He was down. Anyway,
to make a long story short, Graham saves the day.
He rescues a couple of the remaining crew members and
Eliza Fraser, for which he was rewarded with his freedom,
and he went on to live an apparently law abiding life.
There's a book about him called John Graham, Convict eight
teen twenty four that was published by Robert Gibbings in

(24:02):
nineteen thirty seven. Grandma, but he doesn't really seem to
have done much after this. He at least doesn't wind
up in trouble again, So good for you, John Graham.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
Fucking Grambo, guys, a legend.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Granbo. Yeah yeah, loves being naked and covered in grease.

Speaker 3 (24:16):
Yeah, fucking animal dude.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Thanks to Grambo, Eliza wound up back in Sydney, where
she spent several months recovering physically from the trauma of
the journey and crafting the first versions of what will
soon be her famous story. Her exact motivations after this
point will forever be unclear. There are many things we
know that she lied about, such as the nature of

(24:41):
several of the deaths of her crewman, But then there
are things that may be down to interpretation. For example,
perhaps she interpreted the behavior of the Bachila as cruel
when it was not, and felt a need to punish
them by lying and exaggerating what had occurred. The idea
of an English lady living among Aboriginal people on an
island for months tidillated white society, not just in Sydney
but around the globe. And we kind of we have

(25:03):
global media by the mid eighteen thirties. Newspapers and stuff
get around, so this story doesn't just stay in Sydney.
For very long. In addition to that, like people are
leaving constantly Sydney on boats and they're spreading the story
around the whole British Empire. Eliza gives her first version
of events when she's still in Moreton Bay in September
of eighteen thirty six, and this was noted by Peter Lower,

(25:25):
the historian, as being the least sensational version of the
story she would provide. He writes that this version of
events was quote gradually embroidered with new horrors in Sydney
and London for the titillation of eager audiences and anticipation
of financial recompense.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
Right like basically a stand up routine that like they're
just like working on their material. They're seeing what gets
a reaction, they're steering it in that direction.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
And yeah, it's also and there's a little bit of
like a go fundme situation here where she's like because
she is raising like donations to help her for this,
and she's kind of like the original story, I got
to if I'm going to really get donations, I gotta
make people feel sorry for me, if they're going to
open their pocketbooks.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
Here. It's a good system. Capitalism it's great love. I
love the way it works. Oh my husband is dead.
I'm going to have to tell enormous, harmful lies in
order to get people to give me their money, because
otherwise I'll starve to death.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
It's simply the only way to succeed. There is some
debate that she may have been coaxed along injuicing up
the story by her second husband, the man she married
not long after be like within weeks of being rescued
another captain. She's got a type John Green, and at
least one version of Evince is that Green helps her

(26:43):
massage and maybe even written the second version of the
story into something that was more fit to win sympathy
and money from the English citizen rate, because he takes
her from Sydney to London, right, and they get a
bunch of donations in Sydney with the first version of
the story enough that she's doing well. She's got like
enough money to start a new life, and she's also

(27:03):
now married to a captain. But he takes her to London,
where they publish another version of events and they start
raising money again to compensate for Miss Fraser now missus
Green's trauma. Eliza again she's like has done pretty well previously,
which may have had something to do with why Green
married her in February of the next year. But we

(27:26):
don't really know that he wrote her version of events.
The best evidence for this is that when they land
in London, they published a more embellished version of the story,
and the signature on this was different from how Eliza
had signed her first account and how she'd signed documents
in the past, and people wonder, oh, was Green just
kind of forging her signature? Did like he do this?

Speaker 3 (27:46):
Right? We'll never know because I mean it's being written,
so it must be the man right.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
Right, right right. And that's also a woman could never
lie about things that happened to her for money.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yes, too ingenious. I also wonder like was there so
element of like when people find out that she lived
out there with this tribe for so long, Like is
there some like looking askance and being like, uh, she
went savage or you know that was like a big
term at the time, Like.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yes, a wild European I think was another way they
put it. A wild white person. Yeah, wild white man.
That's what they call these convicts.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah, she's having to like do some reputation, like by
acting like she was that they were mean to her
and not that she was like accepted into the tribe
as like helping her kind of save face a little bit.

Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yes, I think that's part of it too, because there's
also all these myths or these rumors about like well,
did she sleep with any of them or did any
of them like rape her? Right, Like that's a that's
a thing that people talk about, and she kind of
plays into to an extent because again, it it increases
the sympathy of the story a little bit, but you
also can't go too far because it's bad for your reputation. Right,

(28:59):
there's like a lot of patriarchal norms in the society
that also play into how she's received and what she says.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
Yeah, that makes sense, Like that feels like that's something
that's got to be playing in there. That's got to
be like at least a consideration for her and her
new captain husband as they're like deciding. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, And the version of the story that she disseminates
in London, the natives of Fraser Island, which had been
named Fraser Island at that point. Again it's always called Gari,
but people now call it Fraser Island because her husband
had died there, even though he didn't die there, he
died on the mainland. The people there are depicted as
nightmare savages. She called her time with them a fate

(29:41):
worse than death. She described them as cannibals, and she
of course raised money from the people of London offer suffering.
Now again, global media does exist by this point, and
so as soon as she starts telling this story in London,
there are people who had been in Sydney and traveled
on different boats, maybe even on the same one, and
we're like, well, she teared it. First off, she's raising
money here. She just raised money in Sydney and she

(30:03):
got a lot. And second it's a different story. Now
is she telling you guys she doesn't have any money
like this? This kind of seems fucked up, And so
some people go to the London press, to journalists and
are like, this lady might be a grifter, right, which
actually causes a scandal, Like there's articles about this because
she comes and she's initially everyone's really sympathetic and giving

(30:26):
her money, and then there's stories that like she's she's
raising money a second time off this story and it's
different now, right.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
Which probably also doesn't really hurt the virality. The old
timey virality of the story is.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
Controversy sells baby, no bad pr.

Speaker 3 (30:44):
Yeah, controversy. So now, yeah, the story isn't doesn't have
like more legs if it's just like and that's messed up. Yeah,
well there goes that story. Now it's like, wait that
she might be the villain, yeah, the story actually and
then yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
This is why periodically I'll just make up a bastard
to do episodes on. For example, Hitler, not a real guy.
I just I just came up with him, you know,
Joseph Stalin.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
There's a lot of people who want to believe that
you did make that one.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah, yeah, you're right.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
He's actually a normal guy who gets a bad rap
a lot.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Just a painter, right, Yeah, look, Sophie, they can't all
be Unfortunately, not all the bits are terrible. Actually, I
don't know, they have to be bits. So this causes
a scandal and there's a formal inquiry in London, which
is where she gives her third and final version of

(31:47):
her story. Right, so the third version of this story
is like she hands gives out in court when she
is questioned as to what happened. And this is the
first version of the story where she claims she was
forced to nurse a child by the island and that
she had given birth to a baby who died. And
maybe so part of why people say she may have
lied about these things or even likely did is that like, well,

(32:09):
she's in trouble when she first starts telling people about this,
and maybe like that's why she brings this up, is
she's like she doesn't want this inquiry to be meet
like to judge her too harshly, so like, well, if
they feel like my baby died and I had to
like nurse this baby, who I am going to She
describes the infant as subhuman. She calls it quote one

(32:29):
of the most deformed and ugly looking brats my eyes
ever beheld. She is very racist.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
It's also just like you made the point earlier that
this it becomes like a Marvel cinematic universe of like
multiple stories, like it is the writing process of a
film where they're like the protects baby in there. Yeah,
she's not like sympathetic enough and like they're not scary enough.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
So we're gonna make does she captain more likable.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
She captain lost a baby, and then she has to
nurse basically like the alien from the Alien movies. You know,
like that would really make things scary.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Why didn't she try just stripping down in pouring grease
all over herself and grabbing a potato. People seem to
really like that.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
See, I mean, first off, Sophie, who wouldn't like that?

Speaker 3 (33:17):
That's that only works for men. Yeah, women who do
that go to jail. Sorry, is she captain?

Speaker 2 (33:24):
She captain who does that would go right to jail.
So disgust is also a major part of her narrative,
and that is, like, you know, a major motivating factor
for conservatives, like the kind of people who are going
to be running a board of inquiry for the British Empire. Like,
you get a reaction out of people by making them disgusted.
So I don't think it's coincidental that she dials that

(33:46):
up to ten for the version she gives when she's
in trouble. Ultimately, the whole situation seems to have ended
well enough for Eliza. She made a sizable amount of
money off of her story and retires, probably with her
second husband, to New Zealand, where she lives out the
remainder of her days. So unfortunately she's one of yours.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
Now, Yeah, so we're good here, we're good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
No, there's a there's a genocide. We got to talk
about it. Yeah yeah. Yeah. So she disappears oll Eliza
as a public figure not long after this point, but
her story continues to spread about as fast as a
story could spread in that period of time. In fact,

(34:28):
variants of the Eliza Fraser story become a cottage industry
in their own right for like a century or so,
and I guess in a way, I'm continuing that tradition.
The story first enters North America in eighteen thirty seven
as a pamphlet titled Narrative of the Capture, Sufferings and
Miraculous Escape of Missus Eliza Fraser. Scholar Olaine Brown writes

(34:49):
that quote for American consumption, the illustrator dressed the Aboriginal
people in loincloths, tunics, hose, and feather headdresses and gave
them tomahawks, daggers and bows and arrows. So we just
they just like are depicted as like a racist drawing
of like indigenous American people because like otherwise American audiences
won't get what the fuck they're looking at. Yeah, and
also i have no idea what these people look at.

(35:11):
I'm not doing any research before I draw this cover. Yeah.
The first attempt at a serious historic account of the
whole deal was John Curtis's The Shipwreck of the Sterling Castle,
which gets published in London in eighteen thirty eight, so
like a year after Eliza comes to London. Now Curtis
is the closest thing to a journalist that existed in

(35:31):
that era. And he had attended the inquiry in person
and taken notes using the system of shorthand he'd invented himself.
So he is. He's there for like her court appearance,
and he takes notes on the story she tells. He
reports on the case for the London Times, and he
doesn't just listen to Eliza.

Speaker 3 (35:49):
He does.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Scholar Olaine Brown describes what he does is quote a
little research of his own, so not a lot. It's
good for him.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
Do your own research, bro.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, the equivalent of like he glances at wicked for
like fucking Frasier Island is what it's called now. She
describes his book as sympathetic to the survivors quote, Curtis
made the most of his opportunity to produce a new
Robinson Crusoe. He was dealing with a true story of
shipwreck and an exotic setting on an unexplored Pacific shore,
A cast of exceptional characters, the crew of a merchant's ship,

(36:20):
the captain's lady, cool savages, red coated soldiers, and a
heroic runaway convict. A story with unlimited possibilities for conflict, tragedy,
and pathos.

Speaker 3 (36:29):
Sounds like he's thinking like a real journalist.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
Guys, right, right, right, right right, yeah, in that you
journalists at this point are basically structure. Yeah, we talk
about again this method of oral storytelling that you know
is common on the people of Ghari in a lot
of ways better than journalism at the time. So that
quote comes from a paper that Elaine Brown wrote in

(36:52):
nineteen ninety three titled The Legend of Eliza Fraser, A
Survey of the Sources, which I would describe as useful
but also too sympathetic to our grant Brown. The fact that,
as we kind of discussed, a lot of misogyny is
rooted in stories by other survivors that like called Eliza
a liar and a she captain, but also the evidence
strongly suggests that she did lie a lot, or at

(37:14):
least let herself enter story be used by someone else
who lied. Now, there is still a potentially sympathetic version
of Eliza in this, a physically and mentally traumatized woman who,
by several accounts, was not quite sane after her rescue
and was easily manipulated both by this new husband and
by a public hungry for stories of savage natives and
a man who promised her some kind of security in future. Right,

(37:37):
that is maybe what's going on here. We'll never really know.

Speaker 3 (37:41):
And at a time when yeah, like women are just like.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
There's not a lot of options, treated like.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
Shit, not a lot of options immediately like view a
you know, she captain, Yeah, she captain.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
And again she's just got a barrel of PTSD from
this whole situation, and.

Speaker 3 (37:57):
There's gotta be so many like sec assistant sinuations happening.
The fact that she survived living with these you know,
religious tribe for that long. Right, Yeah, it's just a
she captain. Sure, sure, sure, Sophia is really luxuriating in this,
and I feel like it's good like going to become

(38:17):
a new sound drop and then a T shirt and yeah, sure,
whole brand of yeah merchandising.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah, we're really going to squeeze more water from the rock.
That is the Eliza Fraser story. So her lies were
just what got the ball rolling right, whether or not
you want to see her as like sympathetic and in
some way a victim herself, or is fundamentally malevolent. What
happens next is entirely out of her hand and is
a malevolent process, Elaine Brown writes back in Sydney Press.

(38:47):
Accounts of the shipwreck were synthesized for a chapter in
Australia's first children's book, A Mother's Offering to Her Children,
written by a lady Long resident in New South Wales,
imprinted by the Sydney Gazette in eighteen forty one. The
text is in the form of a rather mannered conversation
between missus S and her children, Julius, Emma, Clara and Lucy.
The dates and events mentioned are tediously detailed, but some

(39:09):
idea of the tone of the work can be gained
from Claria's exclamation on hearing of the death of the
mate mister Brown. Such wanton barbarities fill one with horror
and indignation and a wish to exterminate the perpetrators of
such dreadful cruelties. So this is from a part of
the book where they talk about one of the shipwreck
survivors being murdered by the people of Gary Island and
the response of one of her children to this is kill,

(39:33):
we should exterminate the people who did this, right, Oh,
we should exterminate the brutes.

Speaker 3 (39:38):
Right.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Like that's that's literally a ligne in a children's book,
you know, kid stuff, when we're talking about the way
in which this story influences the genocide that's happening in
this period. Literally, like the first major publication in Australia
to use this story is like, yeah, we should murder
the people who did this, all of them, right, So
to continue with Brown's writing, thus emerged the third problem

(40:01):
historians have faced in dealing with the fates of the
Sterling Castle survivors. The mutually hostile attitudes subsequently assumed by
both the White Bay Aboriginal people and the Europeans who
learned of their supposed wanton barbarities through the worldwide publicity
given to Eliza Fraser's story. An undercurrent of what poet
Judith Wright calls the fear as Old as Kane runs
through most European accounts. So you know it's bad. This

(40:25):
is all going to be bad. Now, before we move on,
I should note a coda to the Fraser story, which
is that well, the early stories that went viral were
very much focused on her as a heroic victim. The
most popular early American account was an article for Knickerbocker
magazine by Henry Yolden, who is the crewman who survived
and hated Eliza and maybe stole everybody's water. He is
the guy who goes viral in the US for a

(40:48):
version of this story, and he describes her as a vixen.
So again, maybe not himself the best source God.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
Also, everybody's just so horny back then.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
Oh, you're just like they cloak it. Yeah, the only
fans is very primitive at that point.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
On the kid book front, I would just on Daily's Like, guys,
we were just talking about this book written by Mike
Huckabee called Kid's Guide to President Trump.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
That yeah, I don't think kids need that, okay.

Speaker 3 (41:17):
Yeah, And one of the things one of the quotes
was when people come to take This is him describing
illegal immigration is when people come to take money and
jobs without paying taxes, sneak in to sell drugs, commit
other crimes, and in worst case commit acts of terrorism.
So you know, as wild as continuing y.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
Is any of the current US ambassador Israel.

Speaker 3 (41:43):
And this is how one of the ways that it's
actually like a weirdly popular way to uh kiss up
to Trump is making a children's book about him, because
I also I think it he likes the idea of
being indoctrinating children, and it's also at his reading level,
so he's like hell yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (42:01):
Again this book, this is the first like children's book
published in Australia, comes out in eighteen forty one. A
lot of the genocide we're talking about is like in
the seventies and eighteen seventies, eighties, nineties, So it's going
to be perpetrated and orchestrated by men who would have
grown up as the generation.

Speaker 3 (42:17):
That was like, yeah, this was their green eggs and ham.

Speaker 2 (42:20):
Obviously that's not the only thing, right, It's not just
this children's book makes them all do a genocide. But
it's not like a non factor.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
Yeah, right, background noise for their growing up.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Yeah. So long after that account spreads in the US,
in the eighteen eighties, another account is published claiming that
an entirely different convict, a guy named Bracewell, had actually
rescued Eliza, and Bracewell is the source of this. There's
no evidence of this. There are some claims that maybe
he's sexually assaulted Eliza. That's also not based on anything,
and it's mainly just I only bring this up to

(42:53):
note that, like fucking forty years later, people are coming
with new versions of this story based on very evidence
because it still sells. There's a book written about Bracewall's
claims right by a guy named Russell in eighteen eighty eight,
because there's still money in this shit, right.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
Like the jfk assassination. It's like, yes, people will keep
telling and retelling the stories. Yes, and also everyone's so horny. Yeah. Oh,
then there's this guy Bracewell who comes in and he's like.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
It's not really worth getting into. He may have had
some involvement, but like it's not really worth talking about.
What is worth noting is that Russell, the guy who
writes this book about Bracewall's Claims in eighteen eighty eight
describes how in the eighteen eighties, decades after Eliza left
for New Zealand, there are side shows on the London
streets featuring an Eliza impersonator recounting her story. Right, so

(43:44):
like someone pretending to be her telling her story.

Speaker 1 (43:47):
I think she captain what's happening here?

Speaker 2 (43:50):
Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. Quote from Russell's book. Walking from
Hyde Park down Oxford Street, I observed a man who
was carrying over his shoulder one of those show advertisements.
A large wooden square for nailed at the to the
end of a long pole. On the calico with which
it was covered was a bright colored daub which represented
savages with bows and arrows, some dead bodies of white
men and women which other savages were cutting up on

(44:10):
the ground, and another squad was holding on spits to
a large fire. It was amusing enough to stop me
in my walk, horrible enough to impress the writing beneath
this picture on my mind. Sterling Castle wrecked on the
coast of New Holland Botany Bay, all killed and eaten
by savages. Only a survivor, a woman to be seen.
Sixpence admission and there's a lot there, right, Both that

(44:32):
at this point the story has turned into all of
these people were eaten by these savages, right, which like
just is not a part it is not even like
a part of the original versions of this story, right,
it's just something people have admitted to make it more racist.
And also you can see the old lady if you're
just pay she'll talk to you about what happened, which
is definitely not Eliza. We know that she is in

(44:53):
So it's got to be assuming he didn't just make
this up. I don't think he would. This has to
be like a show where someone's like, we'll just get
some old late to pretend to be Eliza make some
fucking money.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
Which was like a popular thing back in the day
all the time, Yeah, touring people who are like I
was George Washington's.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
You know neu Yeah yeah whatever.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
Yeah. Also, like this the idea of like a you know,
white woman who is under attack from you.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Know, uh, like only a survivor of this cannibal holocaust.

Speaker 3 (45:23):
Right, Yeah, that's that's also like the birth of a nation,
and like that's a powerful like that that will start
wars across the history of you know, white supremacy and
racism in uh you know the history of the world.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
Your dash gum tutin, so we know that. In the
US and the UK there were also stage productions of
the story of the Sharling Sterling shipwrecket gets turned into
a play. There's like versions of this play up into
the mid twentieth century, and of a licensed castivity with
savages right, And the verbiage that Russell uses here is

(45:57):
in keeping with like Leaflet's advertizing popular republications of the
story from around the same time, like this Eliza Fraser
who existed seven days without food or water, the dreadful
sufferings of miss Fraser, who with her husband and the
survivors of the ill fated crew are captured by the
savages of New Holland and by them stripped entirely naked

(46:18):
and driven into the bush. They're dreadful slavery, cruel, toiled
and excruciating tortures inflicted on them. A horrid death of
mister Brown it was roasted alive over a slow fire
kindled beneath his feet. Meeting of mister and Missus Fraser,
and the inhuman murder of Captain Fraser in the presence
of his wife.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
It's like meeting of mister and miss so we get
to see the meet cute and his uh.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
Yeah, yeah, I guess there's no maybe they start with
I don't knowl But this is how the story has
been summarized now right. It's just completely separate from what
we know of the reality.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
And they're bringing in like the iconography that we've all
seen in like old like fifties and sixties movies where
somebody is captured by camp and like they're tied to
a post and there's a fire around them that you know,
like all of those images are like, oh yeah, that's
the familiar cannibal imagery.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Yeah, and the reality is like, yeah, you've got someone
who's like starving and frustrated and maybe like hit, someone
who's not able to who's like just can't learn a
simple task, Like that's not ideal. But it's turned into
like they were tortured and cooked over fires, yes, yeah,
burnt alive. Yeah. So what really matters here is that
the story became a huge and prominent part of the

(47:30):
white Australian and European conception of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.
This would contribute to some pretty disastrous things in the
coming decades. There's no one massacre or atrocity you can
point to and say, well, they did this because of
what Eliza said. But I think I've established how popular
this account was and thus influential. A supplement put out
by the Fraser Island Defenders Association notes that Fraser Island

(47:52):
Aboriginal people gained international notoriety through the stories of Eliza Fraser,
and one of Eliza Fraser's legacies was that there would
be many men massacres of the very people who had
helped her. In eighteen forty two, white Australians established a
head station called Tiaro near Moreton Bay, which is in
the bay that's very close to the island. This was
attacked so vigorously by local tribes that the forces manning

(48:15):
it were withdrawn and the station abandoned mere months later.
The Commissioner of Crown Lands from Moreton Bay noted in
eighteen forty three that twelve white people had fallen as
sacrifice to the Aboriginal peoples of the area. And he's
not saying they were sacrificed by those people, saying that
those people were a sacrifice for the cause of colonialism right.
It's also he notes twelve white people died. He did

(48:36):
not bother to recount how many indigenous inhabitants were killed
by white settlers in the same time period.

Speaker 3 (48:41):
Not important.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
Rome No and Peter Laura's History of Fraser Island says
that this was the norm, right, They just didn't talk
about that quote. So successful were what was aboriginal resistance
activities against isolated white settlers in this period that those
moving into the Mary River area by the late eighteen
forties were taking up the country abandoned two even three
times before. The pattern of warfare escalating upon this pastoral

(49:02):
frontier by the late forties is well exemplified by developments
at Richard Jones's Bowie Station on the Merry River. In
late November eighteen forty eight. Jones experienced two successive raids
upon his flocks, and a large number were carried off,
not for many reasons of hunger, but as a guerrilla
resistance technique, or as the Moreton Bay Courier saw fit
determin it in the mere wantonness of patriotism. Hollanders. A

(49:24):
reprisal party of ten whites led by station manager mister
Clements and assisted by a collaborative black guide, then attacked
the Aboriginal camp, firing a volley into it and dispersing them.
And again there's no mention made of how many people
were killed in this barrage of gunfire. Right, but this
is kind of the nature of the conflict for a while.
There's both like murders when you've got these these white

(49:46):
folks at stations, but also, oh, they've got like a
couple thousand sheep here and there's not enough of them
to guard them. Will either kill or capture take the
sheep for ourselves, and that will render this unprofitable for them,
because we've started to gain an understanding of how they're
xiety works and that if we can make this costly enough,
they won't be able to afford to keep taking our shit, right.

Speaker 3 (50:06):
And that's the one thing us whites cannot abide is
taking our shit. Yeah, yes, taking our shit, that's our property.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yeah, that's well, And that is very much like however,
things get dressed up today and you can find some
articles made by conservative white Australians today about like, oh,
you know, there really was a lot of you know,
horrible violence done by these people to these settlers, and
you know these settlers were just trying to make a living.
Evidence at the time from the way these settlers was

(50:36):
writing paints a very ugly picture. The Courier, which was
a local paper, wrote published an editorial during this period arguing,
we hold this country by the right of conquest, and
if that right gives us a just claim to its
continued possession, we must be empowered to enforce our claim
by the strong arm when necessary. The Blacks have just
the same claim to the restoration of their decayed nationality

(50:57):
as would the principality of Whales have if it rose
in open rebellion against the crown. One law must apply
to all conquered nations so far as the rights of
the conqueror, order and rule must be maintained, And if
this cannot be done by kindness and indulgence, it must
then be affected by the iron rod.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
Sound like cool people. Feel it's so nice. They sound
like nice people who shell would be easy to get
along with.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Jesus Christ, I don't see why anyone's fighting back against them.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
Why are they being so mean to us?

Speaker 2 (51:27):
Yeah, well, they don't want us to just take their stuff.
Over the next several years, until eighteen fifty, different groups
of Aboriginal warriors continued. This is and this is another
thing that's worth emphasizing. This is a very successful insurgent campaign.
They are planning, They're like, they're thinking this through, and
they're they're winning for a while. They take thousands of sheep,
they destroy a lot of infrastructure, and they kill a

(51:49):
number of settlers. And the effect of all this is
to stretch the already insufficient local white labor supply and
renders settling in the area financially unviable. Just describes this
incredibly successful, vigorous defense as partly a response to the
absolute shattering of the worldview many of these peoples had
held for since time immemorial.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
The dawning realization that whites were not explicable spirits but
unknown usurpers whose guns and horses induced terror and whose
imposed presence demanded utter forfeiture of territory must have emerged
as a dreadful, almost inexpressible revelation. The traditional verities of
a complex, orderly pattern of existence were rudely shaken, spiritual
values were partially falsified, and the formerly authoritative explanations of

(52:32):
tribal elders were increasingly undermined a people who had totally
believed in a certain right mode of behavior for every person.
The sacrisanct nature of individual family and tribal totems, and
all the rules of residency, hospitality, and reciprocity were rapidly
confronted by incomers with new unstated rules and behavioral modes,
who were no respectors of totems or territorial boundaries, and

(52:54):
who were ready to impose an exclusive hegemony by force
of arms. Tribal society here faced the most critical impasse conceivable,
for to lose land was not simply to lose livelihood,
but to abandon the meaning of life itself. The sudden
onset of an unprecedented invasion situation demanded from the indigenous.
Therefore new patterns of adaptation and resistance and encourage the

(53:15):
emergence of new leaders capable of meeting the onslaught and again.
So this is like a culture that is changing and adapting,
And one of the things they're doing is like, Okay,
the people who told us these white folks were one
thing were wrong. We probably shouldn't listen to them about
how to handle this situation. We need like a new
plan because what we were doing doesn't work now. Ultimately,

(53:36):
after several years of this, Australian authorities call the Native
Police into the situation, which are like Aboriginal people who
are taken in and trained and armed as police and
led by white officers. Through the early eighteen fifties, there
were a number of bloody clashes between tribesmen and these
colonial forces that killed enough warriors to force their retreat

(53:57):
to Fraser Island. Right. They basically use it as a
natural fortress, that's how Lwer describes this, so that they
can avoid like European reprisal raids. And you know, this
seems to be something that goes on for several years
from the end of the eighteen forties up to the
beginning of the eighteen fifties, and there's a lot of
talk with like officers of the Native Force and local

(54:17):
authorities that like, we have to actually land people on
the island to quote finally put a stop to collisions
between blacks and whites. And there's an interesting line here
in Lawer's writing. Although the Native Police acted as a
paramilitary body engaged in border warfare while in the field,
no legal recognition of this role could be given for

(54:37):
officially the territory of others was not being conquered. It
was merely seen as Crown land being settled. Resisting natives
were therefore held to be British subjects behaving criminally, rather
than being accorded status as the legitimate force of a
warring people opposing the invasion of their lands. Thus, in
order to invade Fraser Island, the required legal procedure was
that the execution of warrants. Basically, well, we can't like

(55:03):
this island even though none of us, no white people live,
there is crown land.

Speaker 3 (55:07):
Right, yeah, just land on it and be like I
hereby declare that this is yeah your trustpassing, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
You're trustpassing. And we have a warrant, right, we have
to write out a warrant before. So they go around
to locals to get like descriptions of some of the
men who had been leading raids, and some of them
are just known by like descriptive names that settlers give them.
But they actually have a bunch of warrants in hand
for thirty five Aboriginal men for murder and felony of settlers, right,
and that's when they invade Fraser Island. This force of

(55:36):
Native police, it's with all of these warrants. So they
commence an assault on August fourth, eighteen fifty one. Police
engage and slaughter locals and withdraw several times, but raids
on mainland sediments continue. So in Christmas Eve of eighteen
fifty one, the Native police engaged in a final clearing
of the island. A mix of two dozen Native police
under several white officers and an undisclosed number of random

(56:00):
armed white volunteers quote, all armed and sworn in as
special constables, run rampant across the island, killing whoever they can.
So like these police get together with a bunch of
just like local militia, basically like angry white farmers, and
they do an ethnic cleansing on Fraser Island, right on
Angari Island, right they're calling it Fraser Island. And that's

(56:23):
how like a lot of these people get like forced off.
That's kind of it's not entirely the end of habitation
of the island in this period of time, but it
is sort of the beginning of the end. In official reports,
this is always described as a police action. And again
you can still find conservatives saying like, well, they were
just trying to arrest people who had committed crimes, and

(56:45):
there were several men taken into custody and apparently tried,
although there's no evidence that any sort of judicial procedure
was followed. They were just like, yeah, we tried and
convicted them, you know, yeah, maybe they just shot them
where they stood and lied about that. Later. One local
reporter at the time wrote, rumors are afloat that the
natives were driven into the sea and kept there as

(57:06):
long as daylight or life lasted. So basically, we drove
these people into some say the sea, some say it's
the Susan River, and waited until they drowned. Like that's
how this massacre finishes, and somewhere between fifty and one hundred.
But Schalla people are killed that way right.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
Now.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
Again, you can find a lot of argument. I found
a whole book by this Australian conservative commentator arguing that
this massacre never happened. I should note that the publisher
of that book, Connor Court Publishing, also publishes works of
climate change denial and books by famous right wing shitheads
like Cardinal George Pell, who has been accused of covering
up and ignoring child's sexual abuse in the nineteen seventies,

(57:46):
so maybe I don't consider that the best source in
the world. Fiona Foley, who I quoted earlier and Isobachila
woman artist and writer, heard stories of the massacre from
her relatives growing up as a child, and she created
a sculpture based on these stories titled Annihilation of the Blacks,
which became one of the National Museum of Australia's first
major acquisitions by an urban Aboriginal artist, Aboriginal person artist.

(58:11):
And this is Soviey's going to show you this work,
Annihilation of the Blacks by Fiona Foley, who we quoted
from earlier. It's a pretty striking.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
Yeah, yeah, Do you want to describe it, Robert.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Yeah, it's I mean, you've got two like what look
like trees basically, I mean, I think they're made from
like branches, but there's supposed to be trees with like
a branch lying in between them. They're sort of like
y shaped at the top and there's a branch in
between them and strung up on the branch are let
me count here, nine like black human bodies like strung

(58:45):
up and hung while a single white person stands below
with a pretty deep shadow cast like looking over them.
So ultimately, the Aboriginal peoples of Fraser Island were forced
out of their homes for generations. The displacement was justified
by the whites, not only by the violence of the
years of raids, but by the legacy of Eliza Fraser's account.

(59:05):
In your twenty sixteen book Finding Eliza, Larissa Barren writes
that stories like Eliza's provided fuel for British fear of
cohabitation with Native peoples and quote once these anxieties found
expression and form and narratives such as Eliza's, they justified
the mechanisms for surveillance of Aboriginal people through policing practices,
legal control, and government policy. And in her own article,

(59:27):
Folly adds the unspoken fear in Eliza's case was that
this white woman could be sexually violated by Aboriginal men
if not rescued. Racialized anxieties have formulated many patterns of
structured behaviors used to subjugate Aboriginal men, women, and children
in Australia. And you know, yeah, it's fucked up, and

(59:48):
it's made all the more frustrating by the fact that
while this deplaced, displacement and slaughter was at its height
near the end of the eighteen hundreds, clear evidence arose.
And this is while we're still in the eighteen hundreds
that the whole phrase your story had been a lie.
In eighteen seventy four, a colonial official named Archibald Meston
spoke to several elderly men at Noosa and Fraser Island

(01:00:09):
who had been alive when Eliza and other members of
her crew were sheltered. These are members of the Bachola
who had known her then, right, And so this colonial
officer official like, who's you know, probably may himself have
kind of grown up or as a young person at
least new young people who were raised on these stories,
as like, I'm gonna see if I can talk to
anyone else who was there, right. And here's how lower

(01:00:31):
summarizes that. Concerning Eliza Fraser, Meston wrote, she must have
either had a serious quarrel with truth or else her
head was badly affected by her experiences. Certainly, she gave
a wildly improbable tale in Brisbane, accusing the Blacks of
deeds quite foreign to their known character and quite unknown
before since an Aboriginal annals Bracewell and Durham Boy both
declared that miss Fraser's tales in Brisbane, Sydney and London

(01:00:54):
were evolved from her own imagination. The old men in
the seventies told Meston a story very different from that
of the Lady, the effect that the Europeans were received
in a friendly manner and passed on in canoes to
the mainland. It didn't skip point to be forwarded to
the white people at the Brisbane convict settlement, and we
know they were sent to the mainland. That version of
the story that like, yeah, we sent them there because
we were trying to get them back home, is totally

(01:01:15):
consistent with the objective evidence that we have, and this
also comports orally with the story of the Batchula themselves.
I found an article in the Courier Mail which interviewed
Auntie Francis Gala, who's an elder of the tribe, who says,
of Fraser's story, it isn't true for two very sound reasons,
and never came down our oral storyline, whereas everything else
of significance that happened in the past few hundred years

(01:01:37):
did come down, and there's no dance about it. If
James Fraser had been murdered, we would still know that
dance today, Like we gotta fucking made a dance about
killing that guy if we'd done it right, Like we
have that for other people, you know, And it's a
good point, Like there's all you know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:52):
Yeah, we don't skimp on. Yeah, that's like an important
we want to dance about this, right, we wanted to.
It would have been fucking great, but we didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Yeah, And now I should also note here that although
Meston is kind of a hero in this part of
the story where he's helping to break this myth, or
at least attempting to, he's also not what you would
call a kind man to the Aboriginal people of Queensland,
even though his official title was Southern Protector of the Aboriginals.
It was Meston who carried out an experimental attempt to

(01:02:24):
stamp out opium use among the population of Aboriginal people,
which is generally described by their descendants today as an
excuse to govern and control the lives of their ancestors.
Per Foley quote, the Opium Act contained thirty three clauses
governing Aboriginal lives, with its tentacles reaching into my traditional
country and the lives of fifty one Bachalla people living
in Maryborough who are forcibly removed to the mission on

(01:02:47):
Ghari under Archibald Meston's direction, and ultimately the peoples who
had inhabited Ghari for many thousands of years were dispossessed
of their home right. They eventually get kicked entirely off
of the island, and this is kind of part of
that process, and the whole situation was not remedied for them.
This happens at the end of the eighteen hundreds and
there don't start to be remedies to this until nineteen

(01:03:09):
ninety three when the Native Title Act is passed in
Australia and actually final. Fole's great aunt is the first
Bachola person to lodge a title claim on Gari Island,
which itself is officially renamed in twenty twenty three, so
it is known legally as Fraser Island until twenty twenty
three when it is renamed Ghuri, which is what it

(01:03:30):
was originally called. So that just happened, that's crazy. Twenty
twenty three, they finally get their name back.

Speaker 3 (01:03:39):
The wheels of history turn very slowly when it comes
to naming things, but we go. We go pretty fast
and check the check things out later, fact check later.
When it comes to killing people, we're pretty quick on
that front.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Yeah, yeah, great, Well that's the story you got any
blog ablest club.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
I mean, I don't know. That does sound shockingly familiar
with like people being driven off again. There's just like
all sorts of these things from history where that seem
somewhat familiar if you pay attention to the news, which
is something that we cover over on the dailies like

(01:04:21):
me and my co host Myles Gray, which you can
go check out anywhere fine podcasts are given away for free.
You can find me on Twitter at jack Underscore Obrian
and on Blue Sky at jack ob and then the
number one.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
Jackie oh, which is not what we call you.

Speaker 3 (01:04:38):
No, not at all. My cousins should be a Jackie.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
Yeah, although, like JACQUELINEO Nassas, you also were present when
JFK was assassinated and.

Speaker 3 (01:04:50):
Not a lot of people know that, and because I
don't want them to.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
Yeah, because.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
Is still not up.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):
Well that too, Yes, the vampire thing, yes.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
Yes, that is the first thing you told me.

Speaker 3 (01:05:04):
You know, yeah, I know it's a you think that
would be Oh, nice to meet you. You think i'd
be more discreet, and yet I just Usually when I
meet somebody, I brag about having seen the life train
from Kennedy's eyes. Take up my clothes, cover myself in Greece,

(01:05:24):
grab a tater and sea bread, and run out the
door and listen.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
Folks you listening at home, don't keep listening to the news.
The podcast is over. Come back and listen next week.
But take some time off the internet, do a little
digital detox. Strip naked yourself in grease, grab the potato
and some bread, and run off into the woods. You know,
see what happens to you. It'll probably be fine.

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
I feel like that is better than like most of
the advice that you get.

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
That is, it's also healthier than being on social media.
Sometimes naked in the woods, covered in Greece good shit.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
Or just peta dog if they want you to, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Or peta dog, I don't know. Naked, grease, potato, petta dog, both.

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
Good things if they want you to.

Speaker 2 (01:06:09):
Mm hmm, if they want you to. But strip, nake
and cover yourself in grease, whether or not anyone wants
you to, Yes, you do that, no matter what. Do
not listen to anyone who says, don't get naked and
covered in grease, all right, great advice.

Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:06:47):
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