Terribly Wild Man

A TERRIBLY WILD MAN

Christine Halse has a life-long fascination with the social, cultural and psychological forces that shape identity, and has been immersed in the life and work of Ernest Gribble for more than ten years. An Associate Professor at the University of Western Sydney, Christine is married, revelling in life with her teenage daughter and currently working on a biography of a young woman with anorexia nervosa.

A TERRIBLY WILD MAN

Christine Halse

First published in 2002

Copyright © Christine Halse 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Halse, Christine.

A terribly wild man.

ISBN 1 86508 753 X.

1. Gribble, E. R. B. (Ernest Richard Bulmer), 1869–1957. 2. Church of England—Clergy—Biography. 3. Clergy—Australia—Biography. 4. Aborigines, Australia—Missions. I. Title.

283.42092

Index compiled by Russell Brooks

Maps by Ian Faulkner

Typeset in 11.5/15 pt Caslon by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough

Printed by South Wind Productions, Singapore

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Martin and Sarah

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A note on language

1 Mostly of tears

2 Clasping their children tightly

3 Porridge for every meal

4 Horse-thieves and harlots

5 When native fruits are ripe

6 Dark deeds in a sunny land

7 Ghosts crying in the dark

8 A complete outsider

9 Punishment place

Endnotes

Sources and a select guide to reading

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people encouraged the writing of this book. They generously shared memories and stories about Ernest Gribble and mission life, and gave me permission to use papers and photographs in their possession. Many have since passed on. They are not identified in A Terribly Wild Man, in accordance with the custom of many Aboriginal communities, but the insights they provided into Ernest Gribble’s private world continue to help illuminate his public life.

The account of Gribble’s life and work presented here may not correspond with the views of everyone or with the image of Gribble they would like to see portrayed for the public. It is hoped, however, that this account sheds light on the life of a man who had a profound impact on the lives of Aboriginal Australians and on Australian race relations.

Special thanks are due to the people of Yarrabah, Oombulgurri (formerly Forrest River Mission) and Palm Island for their hospitality and kindness during my visits, and to the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) for granting permission to use material from its archives. A particular debt is owed to Joan Hunter, former ABM librarian, who first urged me to write Gribble’s biography. I would also like to thank the staff of the Mitchell Library and Sydney University Archives in Sydney; the Oxley Library and State Archives in Brisbane; the diocesan offices of the Anglican Church in Brisbane and Townsville; the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra; the Battye Library and Departments of Aboriginal Affairs and Community Services in Western Australia; and Columbia University, New York, home of a valuable collection of early Australian anthropological publications.

Noel Loos always believed that Gribble’s story was an important one that needed to be told and encouraged me from the start. Psychiatrist Sarah Mares provided invaluable help in understanding Gribble’s psychosocial profile. Doctors Michael Skinner and Judy Kirk shared their medical expertise to help diagnose Gribble’s ailments. Bishop Arthur Malcolm and his wife, Colleen, kindly arranged accommodation on Palm Island, and Bishop John Lewis’ generosity in allowing me access to the Townsville Diocesan Archives is greatly appreciated.

Linda Lawson, from Koombal Park near Yarrabah, was both a guide and a mentor through Gribble’s years at Yarrabah. Susan Hunt and Dr Bill Louden provided friendship and moral support in Perth and when serendipity had us all living in North America at the same time. Duncan Waterson and George Parsons introduced me to Australian History at Macquarie University. The scholarship of Raymond Evans from the University of Queensland provided invaluable guidance during the PhD research on which this book is based. Henry Reynolds read an early version and urged Allen & Unwin to publish Gribble’s life, but the book would not have been written without the sustaining encouragement of publisher John Iremonger and the gentle but meticulous efforts of editor Emma Cotter.

Permission to reproduce photographs from their collections was generously provided by Gwyn Gribble, Linda Lawson, the ABM, the Battye Library and the North Queensland Diocesan Archives.

For their advice at different stages, I am grateful to Neil Baumgart, Geoffrey Bolton, the late Brian Dalton, Rob Dixon, Neville Green, Annette Hamilton, John Hay, Rob Hinxman for his knowledge of James Noble, Christopher Kelen, John Lewis, Dawn May, the late Stephen Shortus, Mary-Louise Slattery, Tom Stannage and Peter Yeend. Vicki Fox painstakingly formatted the book and relieved me of many administrative burdens during the final stages of production. Martin Debelle’s unfaltering forbearance and faith in the project was a precious, sustaining force, and my daughter Sarah’s patient acceptance of a life filled with ghosts from long ago has been both motivating and inspiring.

As is custom and obligation, my deepest apologies to anyone who deserves acknowledgement but has inadvertently been omitted. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of Ernest Gribble’s story—any errors of fact or interpretation are mine alone.

INTRODUCTION

The stale, pungent odour of musty paper eclipses my earliest memories of Ernest Gribble. Buried deep in the basement under the offices of the Australian Board of Missions (ABM), adjacent to the elegant forecourt of St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney, were fragile journals, aged letters, sepia photographs and stacks of records bundled together with tightly knotted red cord. Cemented by decades of dust, the personal papers of Ernest Gribble had been deposited and deserted. The gracious librarian with a canny eye for history asked hopefully: ‘Can you do something with this?’

Sifting through the disarray brought more questions than answers: Why would someone write six autobiographies? How could a solitary priest inflame such intense national and international controversy? Whose lives did he wound and heal? What happened in the years when the records abruptly ceased? Why were there so many contradictions and inconsistencies in the vast, chaotic collection?

As the riddles unravelled so did the poignant, passionate themes of Australian history, and the consequences of combining noble intentions with human frailty in forging an identity in the blurred boundaries between culture and race.

Humanitarians are often naively portrayed as saints or sinners. The life and work of Ernest Gribble exposes the private traumas and secrets that haunted the public persona of a prominent humanitarian who challenged the moral conscience of white society. Gribble embodies both the virtues and sins of the past. In doing so, his life presents an opportunity to salvage perspective in the current historical debates about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations, and to mould a future framed by the hope of reconciliation, rather than the ruin of repression and retaliation.

A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

The word ‘Aboriginal’, rather than local terms like Murri or Koori, has been used because it best reflects the terminology used by the elderly Aboriginal people interviewed for the book to describe themselves and their ancestors. For the sake of brevity, ‘Anglican Church’ is used rather than the more correct but cumbersome ‘Church of England in Australia’. The spelling of Aboriginal names and words varies widely. For simplicity and consistency, the spelling that appears most frequently in the written sources has been adopted. In accordance with the practice of the day, and to make Gribble’s story easier to follow, several other naming conventions have been adopted. Gribble’s missions are described by their geographical location rather than their religious title, for example, ‘The Mission of St Michael and All Angels at Forrest River’ appears as ‘Forrest River Mission’. Ernest Gribble’s father, John Brown Gribble, is described by his nickname, ‘JB’ Gribble. Amelia, the name preferred by Gribble’s wife, is used rather than her birth name of Emilie, which she loathed.

1

MOSTLY OF TEARS

Ernest Richard Bulmer Gribble died on 18 October 1957, a month and five days before his 89th birthday. Wizened, wasted and worn out by life. He had been fond of historical parallels and would have liked the neatness of ending his life’s work where it had begun, in the Aboriginal community of Yarrabah, near Cairns on the Queensland coast. The wife of the mission Superintendent nursed him as he waited for death, and she later wrote to Gribble’s wife in Sydney, describing his final weeks:

I think everyone at Yarrabah came to see him and knelt by his bed as if it was an altar. At one time about 50 young boys and youths passed through his room noiselessly bowed to him or kissed him softly and whispered ‘Good-night’ or ‘God bless you Dadda Gribble’. There couldn’t have been more reverence if it had been a church. Indeed it reminded me of the passing of the late King George VI in England and his subjects coming to pay homage . . . It would take pages to describe the grief and sorrow of Yarrabah and yet all were glad that his sorrows were over and knew of the glory awaiting him on the other side . . . It would have taken a Cathedral to hold all the people who came to his funeral mostly coloured people.¹

The Reverend Ernest Gribble was laid to rest with full Anglican rites in the graveyard buried in the hills behind St Alban’s Church, Yarrabah, but in death, as in life, peace eluded him and Gribble continued to inflame passion and controversy. Was he a kindly and conscientious man who tempered zeal with tact; or a reckless, tortured tyrant who ruled his remote kingdom with a Bible in one hand and a whip in another?² Loved like a saviour and despised like the Devil, the enigma of Ernie Gribble lived on in the public mind.

The legend of Ernie Gribble began soon after he was born. It was a well-worn fable that his parents plotted the future of their first born while he was still in the cradle: he would follow in his father’s footsteps and become an Anglican clergyman and missionary to the Australian Aborigines. The fact that John Brown (JB) Gribble was still a coalminer when Ernie was born in Geelong, Victoria, on 23 November 1868 was irrelevant. It was a family trait to spice up a story when spinning a yarn.

In truth, the Gribble past, unlike its future, was unremarkable. The family sprang from solid, Cornish mining stock and escaped to Australia when JB was nine months old and barely old enough to justify the sacred bond he later imagined for ‘mother England’. His father found and quickly lost a fortune after the family settled in the disarray, ruined dreams and revolutionary fervour of the Victorian goldfields. JB, the youngest of the brood, was a voracious reader with a natural talent for turning a phrase. Later in life his writing would menace the soul of colonial society but in his youth the brutal necessity of surviving outweighed book-learning, and he followed generations of Gribbles by going down the coalmines young. JB’s spirit found liberation in his evangelical zeal. He was barely a teenager when he started honing his skills as a preacher on the street corners of Ballarat, and bailing up thirsty patrons outside pubs to harangue them to abandon the drink that would lead to perpetual hellfire, brimstone and damnation.

JB grew into a tall, strikingly handsome man with a patrician profile, a thick mane of swarthy dark hair and a luxurious beard that swept down over his chest. He exuded a sensual, magnetic charisma that drew women to him and was almost indecent in a preacher. His weedy son did not inherit his manly, good looks. Even at his best, Ernie never managed to cast off the air of a skinny kid who never got quite enough food. There was a touch of his father’s nobililty in Ernie’s high forehead and aquiline nose but it was ruined by unnaturally heavy eyelids that gave him a misleading look of indolent self-indulgence. His eyes were what everyone remembered. They were the intense, icy, blue of a flawless Ceylonese sapphire. They penetrated your very core.

There was little of his mother, Mary Ann (née Bulmer), in Ernie’s looks nor in his childhood, which was ruled by JB’s devotion to the noble Victorian icons of duty, family and work. Ernie’s first memory of his father was receiving a sound whipping, for JB’s dauntingly rigid puritanism would not tolerate human weakness or neglect of duty. Two foes menaced JB’s world and Ernie’s destiny. The first was the Church of Rome. According to JB the Pope was the Anti-Christ. At the age of ten, Ernie’s father conscripted him into the Orange League and the Protestant fight against Roman Catholicism. The second peril in JB’s world was carnal desire. He was only twenty when he married the goodly Mary Ann and they had thirteen children—nine survived to adulthood— during their 25-year marriage, but JB lived his life in constant vigilance against women. He considered them temptresses who plotted to injure the spiritual life by stirring men to lust and sin.

Young Ernie was nearly eight in 1876 when his father abandoned the coalmines to become a Methodist minister. JB’s flock was scattered between Melbourne and the New South Wales border, and Ernie’s childhood unfolded as a nomadic blur of rural settlements, homesteads and schools. Life was slightly more settled after JB left the Methodists and joined the Congregational Union of Victoria. Mary Ann and her young family set up house at Rutherglen on the Murray River, while JB spent much of his time traversing rural Victoria and New South Wales in a rickety horse and buggy, forming temperance societies and ministering to the souls of squatters and selectors.

In nineteenth-century Australia religion was a pervasive presence that was both revered and disdained. The Anglican Church was the dominant faith and the Roman Catholics and Protestants battled it out for a distant second place. Most people pledged allegiance to one creed but the number of genuine faithful was less certain. Not infrequently, religion was merely the reason for Sunday socialising and a family lunch, the expected routine for commemorating births, deaths and marriages, and there the matter ended.

Ernie got his first taste of the contradictory place of religion in the Australian psyche soon after he started school. A parson’s son was easy prey for the scorn and contempt of irreverent youths. The experiences during these formative years burned deeply, and even as an old man, Ernie recalled that his:

little life was made miserable by the bigger boys putting me up on a stump and compelling me to preach a sermon before allowing me to proceed home after school hours. The sermon could hardly have been called ‘dry’ for it consisted mostly of tears, until I was rescued by the girls and by them escorted home. No wonder I grew up with a distaste for the ministry, a distaste which took a very long time to disappear.³

JB worked hard to instil his own religious zeal in his eldest son and insisted on taking Ernie and his brother Arthur, younger by two years, on his trips around the countryside to minister to the faithful. It was their job to leap from the buggy and open the massive gates that guarded the properties of JB’s rural congregation. For the boys, these expeditions meant weeks of endless plains, scorching summer heat and rain, mud and boggy roads in winter. The experience battered their spirits and bruised their souls. At night, all Ernie could dream of was ‘gates and mud’.⁴

JB’s ministry lay amidst the sheep and parched, blond grasses of the Riverina plains of southern New South Wales in the upper reaches of the dominion ruled by Ned Kelly and his gang of bushrangers. In 1879, JB was the minister of Jerilderie when the Kelly gang laid siege to the sleepy, rural township. The exploits of the larrikin band were already legendary and wildly romanticised in popular wisdom and the collective imaginings of 11-year-old boys like Ernie: skilled horsemen, reckless rebels and courageous champions of the oppressed rural poor. The gang won the instant veneration of Ernie and his mates by taking their schoolmaster hostage. The children of Jerilderie spent their welcome burst of unexpected freedom ogling the gang as they put on a flamboyant show of talented horsemanship. JB did not share the children’s admiration. He considered the gang’s flagrant disrespect for authority, property and life inexcusable, and gave Ned Kelly a stern dressing-down for his ‘unmanly behaviour’. When the outlaw Steve Hart relieved JB of his pocket watch—on loan from the local watch maker—the spirited bush parson strode up to Kelly and demanded its return. The leader of the gang obliged. After all, Kelly said dismissively, the timepiece was a ‘bloody turnip’.⁵ For a long time afterwards, bushranging was the favourite game in the Jerilderie schoolyard and the role of Ned Kelly was greatly coveted. Ernie never got to play the part of his cherished hero, and was always relegated to the pitiful role of the protesting parson whose second-rate watch was pinched by the daring renegade.

It was in the same year, 1879, that JB announced he would forsake the comforts of the ‘civilised’ world and become a missionary to Aboriginals. He liked to attribute his evangelical commitment to a formative childhood experience when he got lost and was befriended by local Aboriginals, but a visit to Maloga mission, run by the renowned missionary Daniel Matthews, had fired his humanitarian zeal. Life as a missionary would mean sacrifices: quitting his job as a Congregational minister, forgoing a steady income and taking on the task with £5 in savings and five young children. JB weighed up the implications, searched his soul and decided to forge ahead, oblivious to the hardships and firm in his faith that the Lord would provide. Thus, Warangesda mission was born. It lay on the wide, muddy Murrumbidgee River, surrounded by sprawling sheep stations, eucalypts, kangaroos and endless skies. The local selectors quickly decided that JB was a bit mad: ‘he had blacks on the brain’.⁶ They shook their heads and mostly kept their distance.

For Ernie, town life had been a distasteful period of disagreeable regulation and mortifying humiliation by schoolyard bullies. Warangesda could not be more different. He loved the space and the isolation. At last he was free. He and his younger brothers, Arthur and John, ran wild and unfettered in the open spaces and filled their days with endless, boyish adventures—exploring the crevices and she-oaks that lined the Murrumbidgee, fishing for Murray cod and shooting kangaroos so that Mary Ann could make kangaroo-tail soup, the mainstay of the family diet.

The fun could not last forever. Within a month, Ernie’s father had organised his offspring into a well-disciplined army of labourers. JB was a stern task-master with an insatiable passion for work and complying with his orders was compulsory. The first task was to build a family home. Trees were felled by hand and the children stripped them of bark before the sap dried so they could be placed upright and saplings nailed alongside to make slots for stacking the logs for the walls. A bark slab sufficed as a roof, held down with timber and tied with strips of untanned bullock skin, known as green-hide.

The children replicated this lengthy process for each building on the mission: the school, huts for the married people and a dormitory for the Aboriginal girls. Ernie was still only a child and it was monotonous, back-breaking but gratifying work. This was the labour of men but he found satisfaction in the rewards of hard work well done, in watching a community materialise from the untamed landscape and in the fellowship of working alongside his father.

Mesac Thomas, the first Anglican Bishop of Goulburn, visited Warangesda twelve months after it was established. He was moved by JB’s humanitarianism but horrified by the primitive conditions endured by