2011 - Theses - Flinders University

White Lives in a Black Community: The lives of Jim Page and Rebecca Forbes in the Adnyamathanha communityTracy SpencerVolume One Creative Writing Component: Excerpted Chapters from Volume Three Appendix OneJim, Will, and Iris are hidden from the world for the next four months. 95 The roar of rifle fireechoes through Australian history: to the north of them, Mounted Constable William GeorgeMurray and his party massacre at least thirty-one, maybe fifty-two, seventy or two hundredIndigenous people, including women and children, up and down the Lander River in thevicinity of Coniston Station, in a battle that shocks the nation. The Federal Enquiry hearsjustifications, hears of natives so hungry they murdered Fred Brooks for his stores, hears thatFred had more than flour under his lock and key. 96 Another UAM missionary, Annie Lock,stationed further north at Barrow Creek, is called as a witness in the investigation and saysthat white men had ‘stolen native girls and hunted natives away from waterholes’, althoughshe would not name names.The massacre provokes a flurry of concern regarding white men and aboriginal women. 97Bro. Reg Williams, another of the missionary colleagues, has his permit to enter the CentralReserves cancelled by the South Australian Advisory Council of Aborigines, who minute: ‘inview of the temptations presented by native women in the reserves that Mr R Williams as ayoung single man be not permitted to enter them …’ 98 Annie Lock, not surprisingly, comesin for more overt criticism. The Board vilifies her as an ‘unattached Missionar[y] wanderingfrom place to place, having no previous knowledge of the blacks and their customs andpreaching the doctrine of the equality of man’, 99 and the Lutheran missionary fromHermansberg tells the Enquiry ‘Miss Lock had told him she would be happy to marry ablack'. 100Newspapers across the country take up the sensation: photographed beside anAboriginal man, the headlines next to Annie read ‘Happy to Marry a Black’, and so ensues anational debate about the rights and wrongs of ‘women living alone among the natives’.62