WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

Historic shipwrecks
A total of 237 shipwrecks are known in the north-west of Western Australia. Of these,
the locations of only fifteen have been recorded. Of the fifteen identified, only six
shipwrecks occur in the west Kimberley assessment area. These six shipwrecks are
the: Manfred, SS Karrakatta, SS Colac, Calliance, Sunbeam and Henry. All these
sites have local, regional and state heritage significance, however following
assessment by a Western Australian State Historic Shipwrecks Practitioner and a
DEWHA officer; none of these sites has outstanding heritage significance to the
nation.
Bunuba resistance to the rolling frontier of European settlement
The rolling frontier of European settlement finally reached the northwest of Western
Australia with Alexander Forrest's expedition of 1879. The Kimberley presented a
very different set of circumstances to that which had occurred in the east and the
south over the preceding 100 years. Authorities and settlers alike had learned from the
experiences of their forebears the most effective methods to remove Aboriginal
people from the land and by the late 1800s the colonial administrators were taking a
much more hardline approach to relations with Aboriginal people (Broome 2010).
This approach was no doubt also influenced by the change in western views about
Indigenous people; Indigenous people were considered 'primitive', and not having the
right to stop settlement by more 'progressive' races. Colonisation was seen as an
inevitable process in which peoples deemed to be 'inferior' were doomed to die out
(Kinnane 2008). Developments in technology and science during this late period of
settlement also created a vastly different set of circumstances for European settlers
and for Kimberley Aboriginal people. The availability of new gun technologies meant
that settlers and police had accurate, multi-shot, rapid-fire weapons at their disposal at
a time when police and settlers were not held to account for their responses to
Aboriginal resistance.
Despite this harsher set of circumstances, the Bunuba people resisted the onslaught of
colonisation for some 13 years using their intimate knowledge of the fortress-like
refuge of the Napier and Oscar Ranges, and ironically, by using the better weapon
technology of the day. The success of the Bunuba resistance brought a severe
response from authorities who threw enormous resources into efforts to capture the
perpetrators, sending a quarter of the state's police force to the Kimberley to put down
the Bunuba resistance, where only one percent of the European population lived
(Pedersen 2007).
The rolling frontier reaches the northwest
By 1882, only three years after Forrest's expedition to look for land and gold, most of
the lowland area of the west Kimberley had been taken up by sheep graziers. Seventy
seven people held leases to 18 million hectares of land across the region (Broome
2010). Aboriginal people living in the more accessible areas were unable to stop the
rolling frontier and soon became part of the growing 'station mobs' located along the
Fitzroy River corridor. By 1889, over 100,000 sheep were grazing in the south-west
Kimberley, almost five times as many as there had been six years earlier (Pearson and
Lennon in press).
As sheep and cattle enterprises continued to spread across the Kimberley so did
attacks on livestock as life became increasingly difficult for Aboriginal people living
117