SPOILER ALERT
I don’t think that I’ve ever started a review of a history book with a spoiler alert, but in the case of Alice’s dreaming, I do. You might think that there could not possibly be spoilers in a history, but when a history is as multilayered and reflective as this one is, you’re best off reading it yourself without knowing what’s going to come next. A master historian- one of my favourites- Tom Griffiths takes us on a journey through anthropology, history, literary production, detective work, personal biography, family history and historiography all in one book. Like Griffith himself in writing this book, I found myself alternating between having my eyes opened, and then stepping back with skepticism and disillusionment, until being persuaded to join Griffiths where he sits historically now.
So don’t read my review- read it yourself, and then come back to me.
SPOILERS
As a fourteen-year-old, the future historian Tom Griffiths came across a dusty book on the ‘Australiana’ shelf of his school library called Where Strange Paths Go Down. It was written by Alice Duncan-Kemp, drawing on her childhood memories from the 1900s growing up among the Mithaka people on Mooraberrie station in the Channel Country of outback south-west Queensland. Little was Griffiths to know that the information in the book that he held in hands in 1971, and the other volumes published by Alice Duncan-Kemp, would be drawn upon when the Mithaka people finally gained Native Title over 33,752 square kilometres of Mithaka Country in 2015 on the basis, among other things, of some of the information contained in Duncan-Kemp’s book. Nor could he have known that he, himself, would be writing about Alice’s work in 2026.
Alice Duncan was born in 1901, one of three sisters and one brother who died of diphtheria in 1903, aged four. Her parents were Scottish-born William Duncan and Laura Davis, the daughter of a Sydney solicitor. William had managed pastoral properties in the outback, and in the early 1900s purchased Mooraberrie. Although he owned Mooraberrie, he always considered the Mithaka as the rightful owners and referred to them as the ‘landlords’. He died in 1907. Although Laura considered selling Mooraberrie after her husband’s death, she instead stayed there with her daughters. The children were brought up by First Peoples nursemaids, particularly Mary Ann who, with her head wrapped in a scarf and her long skirts, took the three girls on Country, with the other children who lived around the station where their parents worked either as domestic labour or as stockmen. When she was older, Alice joined the pastoral workers, both Black and white, camping out during mustering. Thus Alice was imbued with a strong sense of Country that never left her: observant about plants and animals, alert to colour and landscape, free to accompany the station workers on mustering work around neighbouring stations and waterholes, curious about the stories, practices and lifestyles of the Mithaka people but aware that some knowledge was kept from her.
The Mithaka considered Alice to be ‘twice-born’ because as a two-year-old she escaped drowning in the flooded Bulloo River when the buggy in which she was lying collided with a bauhinia tree in the swirling waters. When she was a little older, she was given a secret name ‘Pinningarra’ in a ceremony on a sacred flat-topped lookout, and she was called ‘Mingari’ in everyday life. At the age of five, she experienced a vision, with an authoritative voice declaring ‘You must go among these people and learn from, and about them, before it is too late’. She believed that she ‘was endowed with the breath of the Dreamtime’. (p. 60-61) She was to have a third revelation when she returned to Mooraberrie after two years schooling in Sydney and saw it all afresh (p. 159)
Part One of the book, titled ‘Alice in Wonderland’ draws on Duncan-Kemp’s writings to describe the world of Mooraberrie. In three chapters ‘Walkabout’ ‘Mustering’ and ‘Dreamings’, Griffith has crafted an integrated picture of Duncan-Kemp’s childhood from her works. The world that Alice describes is, indeed, a ‘wonderland’, with a bounty of food available, full of birds and studded with plants that burst from the soil when the water arrived, and criss-crossed by people. She describes the goose corroboree of the Pelican people at Kingadurka Lagoon, where 1000 magpie geese were killed as part of the ceremony- but importantly, only 1000 birds as these were breeding birds. She is told the Dreamtime stories, particularly that of Yammacoona, who Mary Ann told her was “Mother- all the same- you and me” (p. 65)
This Wonderland was not to last. In Part Two ‘War and Peace’, Griffiths steps into his Historian Shoes to locate Duncan-Kemp’s books amongst the historiography of Indigenous/Settler relations. Chapter 4 ‘Invasion’ places Mooraberrie station among the spread of cattle, “the shock troops of empire” (p. 56) as pastoralists followed the footsteps of white explorers who were themselves following the Aboriginal routes pointed out by their guides (p. 89). There was a link between the pastoralists of the Western District of Victoria and the Channel Country as the sons of the 1840s Port Phillip pastoralists followed their fathers’ example in ‘opening up’ the outback in Queensland and northern NSW. In fact, one of the Mooraberrie workers, Moses, had been taken down to Victoria and educated there (possibly at Scots College?) and could break into a clipped, English accent when he wanted to. Along with the pastoralists came frontier violence. There had always been violence on the frontier, but “on the Australian frontier, early violence was often intimate and personal. You generally knew who you were killing” (p. 95)
This wasn’t the case with the Native Police, described variously as a ‘paramilitary’ or ‘counter-insurgency’ (p. 95) force, comprised of men drawn from other districts, under the control of white commanders (see David Marr’s Killing for Country review here) who acted under the direct control of the Executive Council of the colonial administration (p.95). More than a dozen massacres are known and remembered in the Channel Country, targeting large ceremonial gatherings, transforming the waterholes -‘the precious jewels of the arid country’- into a grim rollcall of places of death.
Massacres are not bullet points on a map with great blanks in-between in spite of the ubiquitous settler folklore that ‘there were no massacres here.’ Rather, they were rivers of blood flooding the whole landscape, braided streams and channels of violence greater than we know and more horrific than we can imagine. War was everywhere at once and more than human, desecrating the Dreaming and eviscerating the ecology. Massacres were epicentres of disruption that generated aftershocks that are still felt today. (p. 100)
Into this tragedy, Alice Duncan-Kemp brings us two points of light. The historian in Tom Griffiths takes both these events, and locates them amongst other similar events that took place in other places in Australia.
The first event is the Debney Peace, a gathering that took place on a tract of Country, the ‘Common Ground’ of the Pharmaleechie Channel in May 1889, some twelve years before Alice’s birth, and thus unwitnessed by her. George Debney, the white leaseholder of Monkira Station rode 100 kilometres to participate in a Mulka-mukana, meaning ‘the vow of peace and the seal of goodwill’ orchestrated by First Nations people, and grafted onto an existing event in the Aboriginal calendar. It was possibly as much about the relationships between various First Nations clans as about dealing with the white intruders (p.109) but Debney played his allocated role in this highly orchestrated and ritualized ceremony as a pastoralist who was known for his protection of local people from the Native Mounted Police.
The second event was her description of Kooroongoora, a resistance cult that emerged around the turn of the century, where First Nations workers who had been ‘taken in’ by the pastoral stations were challenged to return to traditional practices and to resist the power of white culture and white law. There is no ‘smoothing of the dying pillow’ here: instead it is an act of rebellion and resistance, drawing on traditional law rather than the white man’s weapons.
The Kooroongoora sang and danced its way across Country; it was a cult, a millenarian movement anticipating social change; a travelling series of storytelling performances that strengthen the Law. It brought bird and wind corroborees and vivid historical pageants that were practised and perfected in secrecy among the sandhills and then performed with power and precision. (p.146)
Part 3 ‘Stranger than Fiction’ returns us to Alice and her writing- and here, things take a strange turn. Alice began writing her first book Our Sandhill Country in 1910, carrying a notebook with her, and creating a “midden of fragmentary scribblings” that she left for her descendants (p. 162). It was a book that would not be published until 1933, just before and as part of the wave of interest in outback Australia, exemplified by Walkabout magazine (1934-1974) whose tattered copies lingered in the doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms of my childhood. By now she was married, with her own children, and there was talk of selling Mooraberrie to Sidney Kidman, who had coveted it for years. Her next book did not appear for nearly twenty years, although she had conveyed her knowledge through correspondence with Dr L. P. Winterbotham, the honorary curator of anthropology at the University of Queensland, who peppered her with questions about rituals, ceremonies and beliefs. She was aware of the work of pioneering white women anthropologists like Daisy Bates, Olive Pink (see my review here), Ursula McConnel, Phyllis Caberry and Catherine Berndt. She was also part of the lineage of daughters of pastoral families who became champions of Aboriginal people, like Jessie Street, Mary Bennett (see my review here and here), Mary Durack and Judith Wright. Where Strange Paths Go Down was printed in 1952, followed by Our Channel Country in 1961. In 1964 a large combined volume of Alice’s first two books was released, with a rearrangement of the chapters and the insertion of drawings and illustrations drawn from all over Australia, mixing up rare photographs of Mithaka people that Alice would have known, with generic portraits from anywhere.
But it was her next manuscript, submitted to Angus and Robertson, that was to change the course of her career, and Tom Griffiths’ research. Although originally accepted for publication, it was then returned to her and her contract cancelled when similarities were noted between her work and that of the Laurens Van der Post (much admired to Prince and now King Charles). Duncan-Kemp did not challenge the claim and said that she had not understood copyright. Griffiths provides samples of Van der Post’s and Duncan-Kemp’s work side by side, and it’s quite clear that there are identical phrases in both. But who copied whom? Van de Post has himself been described as a serial plagiarist, liar and fabricator (p. 194) Did he draw on Duncan-Kemp’s work, or did she draw on his? Here Griffiths turns detective, looking at the circulation of Duncan-Kemps’ drafts. It seems that she drew on other authors here in Australia too, and the uncertainty about the provenance of her work has led to it occupying an ambiguous position: dismissed by some as scribbling, yet by others including Dr Winterbotham who described her letters to him as “the fullest and most scientific knowledge that I have received from any correspondent”.
So what is a historian to do? Griffiths, who has been deeply influenced as a historian by what came to be known as the ‘Melbourne School’ of ethnographic history could not be further from the Keith Windschuttle-led History Wars of the late 1990s, where errors and infelicities were seized on with glee. But parts of Duncan-Kemp’s work do lie at the intersection of history, politics and legal process. If her work is fraudulent, then that matters. As Griffiths points out “Detail matters very much in history…No detail, no history:
It is detail that imprints the story in memory and song. History, like ecology, is grainy and organic: it is earthed in locale and it’s about intimate communities and relationships, both visible and unseen. To glimpse an understanding of history’s workings, you need to build a whole picture, detail by detail. A single detail can change things, releasing chaos in the system. So yes, detail matters. (p.248)
And so, in Ch 9 he embarks on a slow reading of the whole of Alice Duncan-Kemp’s writings- published and unpublished, working page by page, with pen in hand. He draws maps; he records minor figures, he looks for collaborations, he checks again meteorological and astronomical data, and verifies Alice’s observations against more ‘scientific’ observations.
Part 4: The Way Home draws together family and country history. In a way, these chapters seem a little out of place- particularly the ‘Family’ chapter, but as Griffiths points out:
Under Australian law, the winning of Native Title requires family history. It requires proof of social and geographical continuity in a landscape of savage dispossession…In 2015 Native Title was awarded to Mithaka people after a decade and a half of hard work in archives and the bush, much of it documenting family history, discerning genealogies and mapping connections to Country. (p. 286)
Chapter 10 ‘Family” starts with Griffiths visiting Channel Country in 2000, hoping to meet Aboriginal residents of the district, only to be told that they had ‘disappeared’ and that any Aboriginal people who might happen to be there had drifted in from elsewhere. (In fact, we had a similar experience in Cobram in Victoria about 10 years ago when we were told with a straight face that there were no Aboriginal people there). In a rather stinging rebuke, he takes aim at the commemorative histories written by Peter and Sheila Forrest, including one for the Barcoo Shire Council in 2014, which Griffiths sees as a
…third wave of dispossession, following murder and removal: a tsunami of white history commissioned by government. Just as squatters seized land in a flood of registered documentary claims, so have shires consolidated conquest by publishing official histories (p.260)
And so Chapter 10 is a counter to these commemorative histories and the family histories of pastoralists by bringing forward the parallel family histories of Mithika families as a counterpoint to that of the Duncan-Kemp family. In these ‘other’ family histories, we see the history of Indigenous policy writ large. Bill Gorringe, who probably would have known of the Duncan family on Mooraberrie and possibly even met young Alice, was born under a giant coolibah tree near Eyre Creek at around the same time as Alice was born. His father, a white boundary rider on the rabbit-proof fence, had to struggle against the state authorities to marry Nuncaleer, a Mithaka woman who was removed from him several times. Bill was educated at Birdsville, and boarded at the Bluff, a station managed by young Celsus Morton, known for his casual violence and cruelty (whose story was told by his great-great grandson Rick Morton in One Hundred Years of Dirt– my review here). Within Bill’s extended family we see removals and exile to Palm Island, the fractionalization of identities into ratios of blood, and the geographical and social separation of pastoralists from their workers. Uncle Bill and his second wife Aunty Ivy became important teachers of culture to the Aboriginal diaspora, and the Gorringe family was interlinked with the Debney family of the Debney Peace.
Chapter 11 ‘Country’ returns to where Alice started with her descriptions of plants, insects, water and humans. Griffiths had visited it in 2009, when
I had to look at everything out of the corner of my eye. Every historical fact and insight had to be gained against the inclination of the pastoral landholders (p.306)
But by 2019, he visited at the invitation of Josh Gorringe as part of a research team led by Mithaka people, and he found that his “eccentric private interest had become a vital common quest” (p. 306) Alice’s identification of the numbers of original Aboriginal populations had been supported by records of Europeans visiting the regions; her archeological reports had been bolstered by archeological studies on Mithika Country. And so how does Griffiths himself locate Alice’s writings?
Alice was trying to write a world outside the text into text, and a world outside her culture into the history of her country- and, indeed, into the history of the world. It was an act of translation, fraught and difficult, imperfect, a labour of love (p. 235)…Alice struggled all her life to deal with the strangeness and immensity of her childhood experience, which was so out of kilter with her society and so readily denied by it. She wrestled with ways of understanding and depicting the Mithaka world and was in awe of its majesty. She was not in control of her material: it overwhelmed her. Every thread of culture she tried to follow was unending and so intertwined with other threads that she became entangled- not in a mess, but in a deeply complex, cohesive world undergoing traumatic change. A world she knew only partially and was challenged to encapsulate (p. 238)
Yes, she drew on other works, especially those of Lauren van der Post as a stylistic device to ‘improve’ her own writing; and yes, she co-opted the work of other anthropologists without attribution. Yes, she included things that she did not witness herself, although others did. But
…Alice participated in the most profound and important of Australian conversations: that between extraordinary First Nations individuals and curious newcomers like the Duncans who were identified as potential brokers of knowledge under threat. For Alice it was a respectful conversation about everything that matters- about life, cosmology and Country, about the earth and the stars, the past and the future (p. 320)
This is beautifully written, restrained, reflective book invites us into this conversation as well. I fully expect to see it up there next year on the various prize lists for Australian history. Read it.
My rating: 10/10
Sourced from: review copy from Black Inc.
Read because: I love Tom Griffiths’ writing.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 