Diogenes Stopped at Borroloola — Dark Emu Exposed - And the Assault on Australian History

In 1962, The BBC’s David Attenborough arrived at Borroloola, in the '“middle of nowhere” in the Northern Territory of Australia, where he visited three men who had chosen to cut themselves off from the civilised world.

To the observant viewer, there is much to contemplate in this half hour film, first broadcast in 1963.

Superficially it was about an “old Australia”, of the booms and busts, as the pastoral and mining settlements rolled out across northern Australia over a period of about a 100 years, from 1860 to 1960.

But there were deeper narratives to be found in the film - stories about the human condition, the colonial encounter, what this land of Australia means to us as a people, as well as the inherent transience of human cultures and civilizations and indeed, even thoughts on what really constitutes a meaningful life.

Attenborough was able to expose glimpses of these narratives to us, through the lives of these three hermits, with his unique film-making skill and an ease of commentary that, as we all now know, would serve his audiences well for the next sixty years.

Random Further Thoughts and Themes

The Library of Borroloola - this hints at the transience of civilizations: a library housing the great literary works of a society that no longer values them, its teachers lose the will to ‘profess’ and hand the culture on, its young wander off distracted by other things, and thus, the books are left to rot and be slowly eaten away by white ants. Sounds like campus life in 2024 perhaps?

Maybe, just like Aboriginal societies, who were said to have collapsed after their youth failed, or even desired, to learn and carry on their tribe’s cultural traditions and lore after the coming of the ‘white-man’, modern Australia is facing a similar, existential crisis for which the Library at Borroloola offers a neat metaphor - the great works and the ‘blue-prints’ for our cultural achievements are remembered and revered only by a few old codgers who will take that knowledge and appreciation with them to the grave.

Sounds overly dramatic? Maybe, but consider this: when Geoffrey Blainey and his ‘Library of Australia’ finally passes, who will we reach out to and consult when answers to the great questions of our history and culture are required?

Give me a list of the names of the respected historians who will take Blainey’s place as our trusted historian elders? Now you see my point.

Australia, the Great Leveller and Moulder of Men - no matter where we come from - descendants of 50,000 years of aboriginality, Irish, English or more recent immigrants, or ‘native-born’ sons and daughters - this country melds us together like multicoloured clay.

Overtime, the whites became more like the blacks - the Irishman in the film-clip, Jack Mulholland, walks around barefoot, lives on flour, tea, sugar, tobacco and bush-foods, and works hard enough to survive, but is not so financially ambitious that overwork impedes his search for the contentment he derives from having time for contemplation.

The blacks too become more like colonial whites, Biddy undergoes ‘rehab’ and is rescued from the life of an opium addict [see below]. She dons a flora dress and settles-in as a home-maker to Roger, while invariably her tribe’s menfolk are off working hard on cattle stations somewhere, or even adopting that convict heritage of ‘bludgernomics’ - the cadging of a living on government handouts while doing the minimal amount of work necessary, a lifestyle that seems to still have much currency in Australia today, amongst blacks and whites. Assimilation, the great leveller, works both ways.

One of the great pieces of evidence for this observation of the melding of Australians is the loss of dialects and even full languages in Australia, not just by the aborigines but also by the immigrants whose descendants invariably lose their mother-tongue after the second generation or so. This country just swallows-up foreign cultures, keeping some of the bits it wants and, in the process, moulds the nation ever so slightly into a new direction, spitting out a “new-Australia”. It is as if there really is an indigenous Rainbow Serpent sliding across the ‘country’ swallowing and moulding any person it can find as it goes.

There is a reason as to why, when you go to any Australian primary school nowadays where, in the faces of the kids, you can see the world’s ethnicities, but out of their mouths comes one sound, one dialect, one Australia. Not an Australia that is the same as the one of twenty years ago, or the one of twenty years before that, but a sound that is recognisable to all of us and around the world as ‘Australian.’

And that is all that our politicians and social planners really need to do to keep this country on track - go to the suburbs, towns and cities and especially the primary schools of Australia and listen. If there is Strine in the air, our immigration and social policy settings are correct; if not and ‘ethnic ghettos’ are potentially developing, it is time to reset social policies and re-adjust immigration back to what is probably about correct - 200,000 or so immigrants per year or, as a rule of thumb setting, an immigration rate of about 1% per year of the country’s population. Not enough workers? Business needs to modernise and automate. Think smarter. Don’t handball your production problems onto an underclass of overseas, immigrant serf-workers from un-Australian cultures that wont assimilate with us.

The Hermits - Mad Hatters, No-Hopers or Constructive Self-sufficient Citizens?

It is said that Roger Jose walked into Borroloola in 1916 after walking from Cunnamulla in Queensland, some 2000km away to the south.

Later on, after a trip 700 km further north to Pine Creek, it is said that Roger found two Aboriginal sisters, Maggie and Biddy, who had become opium addicts. Roger persuaded them to leave Pine Creek and the Chinese influence with their opium, and to live with him at Borroloola. [Source]

This is a further indication that interactions between whites and blacks were often voluntary and mutually beneficial - Roger freely married an Aboriginal woman and may have even adopted the aboriginal custom of having more than one ‘wife’; and Maggie and Biddy relied upon Roger to rescue them from that colonial import, the destructive addiction of Chinese opium, a vice that was rampant in many Aboriginal communities.

Contrary to the views of some of our institutuions, the official government response to Aboriginal Affairs in Australia has not been genocidal [Yes, this false claim is what our very own Australian Museum promotes]. If our governments had wanted to hasten the demise of the Aborigine, why did we go to all the trouble and expense of prosecuting those who promoted the use of opium within Aboriginal communities, as excerpts from a Queensland government report of 1901 indicate? (Figures 3)

Figures 3A,B&C - Excerpts concerning opium use amongst Aboriginal people in one area of Far North Queensland; from the 1901 Queensland, Annual report of the Northern Protector of Aboriginals for 1900, Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command. *Source*

Roger Jose may have been thought of as being a ‘no-hoper’ by some, but I just wonder whether he may have done more overall good for this country, and those around him, than many of the do-gooders on the public payroll in Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra today?

By all accounts, Jose changed the lives of Maggie and Biddy for the better - he saved them from opium addiction and it is said that Maggie, Biddy and Roger lived happily together for many years. Roger earned the little money they needed by undertaking casual work around the district, such as road maintenance, fencing and performing general labouring jobs.

Folklore states that he was careful never to earn more than £100 in any year so that he did not have to pay income tax [neither take, nor give, to the government anymore than what you, or they, are entitled to!]

Maggie died in 1957 and after Maggie's death Roger married Biddy. When she became so obese she couldn't walk, he pushed her around the town in a wheelbarrow. She died in 1959 and was buried beside Maggie.

Roger also, from the ‘middle of nowhere’, found the time to engage in civic discourse by sending ‘Letters to the Editor’ on topics such as opium addiction amongst the aborigines, offered his own, first-hand advice for obtaining more publicity to improve aboriginal health outcomes.

Frontier Conflicts - Roger Jose’s Poem

The following is a transcript of Roger Jose’s poem, taken as best as we can from his rendition of it, despite his fading memory, in the film clip.

UNTITLED [inspired by “raiding the blacks and shooting them up”]

by Roger Jose

Here doddering in senile decay, my memory harks brightly away

to pink dawns when I'd creep, on blacks fast asleep

and knock them hell West and all of a heap

a bravo? just hired to slay

That their weapons could scarcely compare

didn't cause me much care

nor the fact that they slept, while shear? men murder crept

by red embers guided and no sentinel kept them apprised

of the sinister shapes lurking there

And any who prone to declare this one-sided fight wasn't fair

should have seen the bold bids, made by women and kids

who we slew for the benefit of opulent Yids

reclining in far Belgrave Square

[Transcribed from Roger Jose interview with David Attenborough from 22:53]

We are preparing some future posts on the conflicts between the aborigines and the settlers, as alluded to here in Jose’s poem. Suffice to say at stage, one wonders whether these conflicts were one way genocidal warfare of settlers versus the hapless aborigines as many would claim, or were the settlers once again providing an example of the melding of us Australians by adopting the tactics, and operating under the norms, of Aboriginal warfare - payback and revenge killings for perceived transgressions?

The theft and killing of stock and unprovoked killings of settlers and aborigines and subsequent reprisal killings were illegal under the white man’s law, but not necessarily forbidden under aboriginal law. Was there an increase in violence on the frontier because the white’s were actually respecting the legal norms of the blacks and thus adopting the fighting and killing codes of the aborigines?

Not sure, but we shall see.