The Ark

On 21 February 1891 in Central Australia the murder of two Aboriginal men prompted an enquiry and a murder trial of Mounted Constable William Willshire. They were just two deaths in a litany of killings, but this time it was more a crime of passion than punishment for cattle rustling. Peter Vallee has thoroughly researched this complex tale about the Central Australian Frontier.

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: He liked posing for portraits with elaborate backdrops, firearms, and scarcely-clad Aborigines. Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn, and on The Ark this week, a police constable in Central Australia at the centre of a story of murder, love, and rough justice.

You're tuned to ABC Radio National, Radio Australia and online.

Constable William Willshire was a law until himself, but in uniform, he had the consent of pastoralists, the government and his Aboriginal troopers. The missionaries and the Western Aranda people, were not so sanguine. On February 21st, 1891 there was yet another killing, and it opens Peter Vallee's book, God, Guns and Government on the Central Australian Frontier.

Peter Vallee: A mounted policeman called William Willshire, walked up with his four Aboriginal constables, and shot two Aboriginal men dead, in cold blood, in the creek just beside the Tempe Downs cattle station.

Rachael Kohn: They were just lying there.

Peter Vallee: They were just sleeping there, that's how they caught them. This was fairly standard practice in the Centre if you were staging a raid. When I first heard this story about 40 years ago in a creek bed in the Flinders Ranges, rather like Tempe Downs actually, it just struck me as something so far beyond anything I'd expected to hear about South Australian history, that I was intrigued and offended and indignant, and all of those youthful feelings one has, and so I determined to try and find out the background to it. After some distractions through the usual job and marriage and mortgage and so on, I came back to it five or six years ago and pursued it through the archival resources.

Rachael Kohn: And how were the archives on this?

Peter Vallee: Well there's never enough. I had to work them rather hard to get the story up, but it is surprising what you can discover about not just what happened, but what people's circumstances were, what their motives were, what their police's were, from the written record. The story is, I think, pretty well established now.

Rachael Kohn: Who were the two men who were shot in cold blood? I think their names were Ereminta and Donkey.

Peter Vallee: That's right. Well Ereminta was a man from the Territory of Hunt's cattle station which is about 150 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs. It's very beautiful, hilly country. He was a senior man amongst his people and also had been a very much-valued employee of the cattle station, which adds some interest to the fact that here was a policeman coming to murder him right beside the cattle station. And behind that act is a whole story of the relations between pastoralists and Aborigines, between the police and the pastoralists and the Aborigines, between the missionaries at Hermannsburg, and the Aborigines, and it all comes together in this one incident, a fact that of course I didn't know when I started researching it.

Rachael Kohn: Now Ereminta was part of the Western Aranda people, was he not? By that time they would have been already approached by the missionaries.

Peter Vallee: Indeed. He was Matuntera, not Western Aranda, but they're neighbours, in fact often fighting each other and killing each other at the time. But certainly he had had a decade's worth of experience with the pastoralists and the missionary. He'd spent some time on the mission. He was married to a baptised Lutheran. And so he was one of those men who operated between the two cultures, if you like, without having become himself a Christian.

Rachael Kohn: He wasn't himself a Christian?

Peter Vallee: No, certainly not. Most people at that time weren't Christians in the area of the Finke River, Hermannsburg, Tempe Downs, there were a core of Christians at the Mission, most of them young people, and very few senior people. So that Ereminta if you like was more typical of the men of the area than the Christians.

Rachael Kohn: The missionaries who were there at the time, I think Kempe and Schwarz were the main ones in this story, they would have had difficulty kind of wrestling with Aboriginal beliefs. How conscious were they of the beliefs that they were replacing?

Peter Vallee: Well it took them a long while to learn, simply because the senior men would not tell them. The senior men tolerated the mission, many of them tolerated their young people being taught at the mission school, but they basically had nothing but contempt for these strange people and their weird ideas, and they would not tell the missionaries until there was some baptised, some initiated Western Aranda young men were baptised, and they told the missionaries about the world view and the faith, if you like, of the Western Aranda.

Rachael Kohn: Now who was Donkey?

Peter Vallee: I know next to nothing about Donkey. He was an associate of Ereminta's, a Matuntera man, and therefore one in the thick of the cycle of revenge killings between the Western Aranda and the Matuntera. So he would have been a significant man in his group, but we just know nothing about him.

Rachael Kohn: He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Peter Vallee: He had the wrong friends.

Rachael Kohn: Well this ambush of Erementa and Donkey was orchestrated by Constable William Willshire, who you mentioned earlier. How would he come to the area?

Peter Vallee: He was posted up there as policemen were in those days, from the settled south of South Australia. He obviously loved it up there, he loved being a big man, having native constables that he had the power of life and death over. We know that he was a killer, but I don't think killing was his thing. His big thing was really exercising power. And so he was given a posting to the Finke River, it's an isolated spot, about a day's horse ride from Hermannsburg and Tempe Downs stations, and set up there a very strange domain, where he lived with his native constables, his Aboriginal wives, and anyone else who cared to stay there among the Aborigines, he encouraged them to stay. He obviously wanted to see himself as Lord of the Domain.

Rachael Kohn: A kind of secular mission?

Peter Vallee: Indeed, he had that that ambition and I believe he thought himself a lot more of a natural leader than the missionaries, partly because they were trying to impose on their West Aranda people a form of life which was very unnatural to them, whereas Willshire could see that they'd be much happier living with him.

Rachael Kohn: Now he was brought into the area in order to protect the pastoralists, to some extent, because their cattle was often picked off by Aboriginal people in the area.

Peter Vallee: Indeed, yes, entirely. The politics of it was that pastoralists had lobbied the government long and hard to get extra policing up there, and the result was William Willshire. But in fact cattle killing was not a major problem. It was irritating and the station managers clearly wanted to stop it if they could, or reduce it, but they in fact employed people who were known to be cattle killers, and one of them was Eriminta who when he wasn't working for the station, was known to kill cattle.

Rachael Kohn: Goodness. Do you know the numbers, approximately, annually how many cattle would be picked off.

Peter Vallee: Well from some figures that were presented to an inquiry in 1890, I worked out that over the period of the station's existence, the numbers couldn't have been greater than about 5% of the total cattle population.

Rachael Kohn: Well one of the interesting things that comes out in your book, God, Guns and Government on the Central Australian Frontier, is that William Willshire was something of a vain man, and there's a lot of evidence about that.

Peter Vallee: Yes, he was extraordinarily vain, and really pathologically vain, in that his vanity blinded him to the things you need to do to be accepted by people. So he was always a misfit in white society. And it's having the power over the Aboriginal people, especially his constables and his wives, that I really think gave him a buzz. It kept him up there, and that's why when Ereminta killed his youngest wife, the one I think he took to Adelaide in 1889, that Willshire became so enraged by this that he pursued Ereminta and killed him in this blatant way.

Rachael Kohn: So it was in fact over a woman. I was going to leave that to the last, but you let the cat out of the bag; yes, it was over a woman.

Peter Vallee: Indeed it was. And of course relations between black women and white men in the Centre were a key to a lot of what happened up there. And it was also a key to the mission, of course, because the missionaries went up there to teach the local people about sin, so that they could seek redemption through God's grace. But their notions of sin were very different to those of the Western owner. Sex was one of the key items on the list, and so the missionaries were struggling to keep their baptised women, and the men too, to some extent, on the straight and narrow. And this created a power polarity, if you like, between the mission and the stations and William Willshire's station.

Rachael Kohn: Well I certainly got the impression that they were the meat in the sandwich, as it were. I mean there were the Aboriginal men and their women; there were the missions and how they viewed the women and what they wanted to make of them; and there was Willshire. But the women themselves - oh yes and there were the Afghan cameleers, they were interested in the women. But the women themselves were so vulnerable.

Peter Vallee: In a sense they were, but in another sense they were very powerful, because they had something that was extremely highly valued by the white men, and they had obviously sex, they had also domestic labour to offer, they worked the cattle, and so any white station worker up there might have a black common-law wife if you like, who not only did his daily work for him, but helped him with the cattle and provided him with the sort of life which he might not have been able to achieve down south.

Rachael Kohn: Well Willshire didn't get away with this particular act of murder, did he? Although he didn't pull the trigger himself.

Peter Vallee: No, he didn't, but he had Ereminta shot by one of his troopers so that he could in fact finish him off himself. He gave Eriminta the coup de grace by cutting his throat. One of the most interesting things about this whole story, and one that I think we've pinned down, is that the reason Wilshire didn't get away with it was because one of his troopers refused to corroborate the story he concocted to explain the killings. And that trooper was Thomas, one of the first converts to Lutherism.

Now of course we don't have any direct evidence from Thomas on this point, but the most probable explanation is that the missionaries had inculcated him, young Thomas, one of the personal characteristics which was lacking in Western Aranda traditional culture, which was a strong, you could call it conscience or moral character. One has to explain this by reference to the way Western Aranda culture worked, which is very different to European ways. But I think it's fair to say that while of course an Aboriginal person in that place and time had a very strong sense of conscience about certain rules, in fact you could die of shame for breaking the rules. One of them did, as I've recorded.

But beyond those basic rules, which were rules of sacrilege more than law, they weren't expected as children to develop that sense of regulation, of desire and impulse that's very much part of everyday training of our children from the time they can - even before they can walk. And I think that some of this got through them, we can see in the story of the mission that I've recorded the great struggle the first converts had, with the pressures being put on them by the missionaries to live in a sense like a white man, or like a Lutheran.

Rachael Kohn: Yes. Well what happened to William Willshire? How did he live out his days?

Peter Vallee: Well he was taken south to Port Augusta for trial, and the trial failed to convict him. There's no doubt that the evidence was in a sense tainted by standards of normal British justice, but I'm also satisfied from the evidence that the judge didn't run it straight, it wasn't a good trial. The judge was determined, I think, to see that he got off because everyone knew he was guilty, and it affected the way policing was run in the Centre thereafter. They were much more careful about how the police behaved, and in a way, even responsible for turning the tide from the bad old days of high violence to the more modern ways, if you like, and if you became a policeman in various country centres around South Australia after one short stint in the Northern Territory, he was always a misfit, and eventually had to resign from the police force to get back to Adelaide.

Rachael Kohn: And I think his last uniform was that of a security guard?

Peter Vallee: Yes, his last job he took when he left the police force was a night watchman at the Adelaide Abattoir, which of course some people regard as highly appropriate. So he never again achieved the respect and the sense of power that he had achieved in Central Australia, including I might say, several children. The records I have from Central Australia say that there were two daughters he's thought to have had and they are said to have died childless. And that was very common at the time because of the prevalence particularly of gonorrhoea, but this evidence was collected by Ted Strehlow in the '30s, and they may not have known, they may simply have said 'No known children'. So it's conceivable that there are descendants of William Willshire's in Central Australia, as there are descendants of others involved in this story.

Rachael Kohn: To find out who they are, you'll have to read God, Guns and Government on the Central Australian Frontier by Peter Vallee. Details will be on our website.

Next week, the man who wrote a hymn about his conversion and kicked off an amazing career as the maestro of hymns, Charles Wesley, on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

Peter Vallee
is a former South Australian who returned to the study of the State's history after working as a lecturer and science administrator.

Publications

Title: God, guns and government on the Central Australian frontier
Author: Peter Vallee
Publisher: Restoration, 2007

Presenter

Rachael Kohn

Producer

Geoff Wood and Rachael Kohn