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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 50| April 2001


Bringing Them Home Goes to Beagle Bay

Ernie Sarah

Mr Ernie Sarah

Beagle Bay Aboriginal community’s inclusion in the National Library of Australia’s Bringing Them Home Oral History Project would seem a natural one. The small community, on the west coast of the Dampier Peninsula 120 kilometres north of Broome in Western Australia’s remote north-west, is home to many Aboriginal people who, as children, were separated from their families as a result of past government policies. Most, if not all, of the children came from the east Kimberley region.

Bringing Them Home interviewer Colleen Hattersley’s trip to Beagle Bay in November 2000 revealed a vital resource of information for the project.

The community first started life as a Catholic mission that came under the control of Trappist Monks around 1890. Two priests and a police constable rode from Derby to ‘inspect the country and select a site suitable for a mission station’ in 1889. The new site’s name was derived from the boat the Beagle after it was moored at the bay during a brief stay. After ten years under the Trappists, in 1901 the mission was officially placed in the care of German Pallotine Monks.

These facts bear out that Beagle Bay has had Aboriginal occupation/residency in each of the past three centuries—from 1890 to the present. The area was, and to a certain degree, still is, traditionally home to the Nyul Nyul people. Beagle Bay has in the past few decades become well known for its church—more specifically its mother-of-pearl shell altar built entirely by hand by the monks and Aboriginal people. Work began on the Catholic church in 1914 and was completed four years later. However, the massive bell tower at the front of the church crumbled and caved in after the Big Wet of 2000.

Beagle Bay is one of only a handful of such communities in Western Australia previously used as a home for separated Indigenous children, and now currently administered by those same children. The machine shop and other equipment and maintenance were handed over by the monks, who now focus on running the church and school.

Ernie Sarah was 12 years old when taken from his family to live at Beagle Bay mission. He was born at Moola Bulla in 1932 in the east Kimberley. On arrival the young Ernie went straight into the mission’s school—he says there was no school at Moola Bulla. At Beagle Bay’s Sacred Heart School, Mr Sarah recalls two big classrooms of around 15 to 20 students in each. ‘It was more or less exciting,’ he said of school life. ‘You knew you had to go to school and keep to the rules. In our country [at Moola Bulla] we would just run off anywhere.’ Moola Bulla was a government station that took separated children and others from all over the Kimberley. The school at Moola Bulla was closed for a time—it seems that Ernie Sarah was sent to Beagle Bay for schooling when the Moola Bulla school closed.

‘I wasn’t too bad at sums,’ he said. ‘Reading was better than spelling. I’m still a bit hard at spelling but I can read better now. But I didn’t have much chance at school because I was 12 and a half when I first started and when you turn 14, that’s it, you have to leave school.’

Crucially, Mr Sarah said he was permitted to speak his first language—Kija—at the mission with a few other boys there. But he says he and his friends had to learn English straight away. ‘That’s why we forgot all our language. I can still understand it, but I can’t speak it.’

As soon as he turned 14, he said he was put to work. ‘I began at the blacksmith shop we had back then, [but] I used to do all sorts of work there. I used to do gardening, bricklaying, plastering, cementing, carpentry.’ He helped build some of the brick houses but these have since been demolished. He said he learnt all these crafts from the Brothers. Although he enjoyed work, and felt that learning trades helped him to learn useful skills, he told Bringing Them Home interviewer Colleen Hattersley that he didn’t like being removed from his mother.

‘Well, I reckon that was the worst thing, that they ever take us away from our mother. That is the worst thing I reckon. I’d say that’s the main thing I reckon, you know, from your mother especially. You go into a different world and you grow different altogether then, you know. Yeah, I think we’d be more better off staying with our mothers, I reckon.’

‘But you can just imagine what happened when they took us away. They hitting their heads and everything with stones and everything you know. Yeah, our mothers.’

Unlike many children who were removed however, those at Beagle Bay were treated well. During leisure time Ernie Sarah would join the other kids in fishing at the coast and bay area, some 15 kilometres away on foot. ‘When we caught the fish, we’d cook and eat them straight away. We had no freezers back then.’

Mr Sarah eventually left Beagle Bay two years later, at 16, with some other boys. ‘We had to go,’ he explains. ‘But we were more than happy to go because we were heading back towards our country, you see.’

He returned to Beagle Bay after nearly five years, around 1957–58, to be married to a girl he met at the mission earlier. Beagle Bay offered the young couple work, but only enough to get by. ‘There was work, but we didn’t get much wages at that time. More or less just rations—tea, sugar, everything [like that] free.’

Mr Sarah reflects on those times. ‘You know, they treated us all right,’ he said. ‘When you are married you are more or less independent. Not like when you are single. You just had to go by the rules then.’

‘Them days were different. When the Fathers were there, it was a lot different. A lot has changed here, it was a different system.’

Another long-term resident Phillip Cox is Beagle Bay-born and bred. Since his birth in February 1921, he has, more or less, been a part of the mission community throughout his life. He has been married for the past 51 years to Mary Cox.

‘Beagle Bay was a very happy place,’ Mr Cox said of the time he lived there as a youngster. ‘Even though the place was very poor—there was nothing much here—we were happy. It was just like one, big large family—everybody together. Caring and sharing.’

Fortunate to grow up with his parents all his young life, Mr Cox says he became aware of new children from other parts coming into the mission at a young age but says he was unaware of the reasons for them being there. ‘We heard that they were taken away but not taught in what manner,’ he said. These ones, Mr Cox said, soon became life-long friends.

The school at Beagle Bay had two large classrooms of around 15 to 20 students. Children were to attend daily classes up until they were 14 years old.

Apart from the education system, the German Pallotine Monks had various other work related activities for the children in place. The mission offered various trades—from stock work to carpentry and blacksmithing. Mr Cox said when children left school they all went to learn these trades. ‘I started off as a carpenter but I never saw it through,’ he says with a laugh. ‘They [the children] had good opportunities. The Brothers, they taught them how to work. But they wouldn’t just tell you what to do they’d work with you, too.’

He said he and the newcomers never felt the urge to run away to go and live in Broome, a place that offered more in terms of worldly distractions and the like. ‘No. We didn’t feel we were missing out anything. As young blokes, we all felt the same. We were quite happy—we had very little, but we were happy. And we stuck together.’

At about 14 years of age, Mr Cox for a time went to Halls Creek, around which a new Aboriginal reserve was to be built. Here, he vividly recalls a brief encounter with A.O. Neville. Mr Neville was the government’s Protector of Aborigines and was a prominent figure at the height of the government’s child removal policies of the 1920s–30s. ‘When he saw me,’ Mr Cox said, ‘he wanted to know what I was doing and that I shouldn’t be here [at Halls Creek]. He said I had no right to be there and he had me sent to Moola Bulla which was an [already existing] Aboriginal reserve. But then they—the authorities changed their minds and Mr Neville came and asked me if I was happy and I said I was, and then he asked me if I wanted to go somewhere else [to live] and I said “no, I got a good home, I’m happy and I came out here to help these people”.’ Mr Cox is referring here to a group from Beagle Bay who were involved in building another settlement project.

Mr Cox returned to Beagle Bay about a year later but in the late 1930s the mission had to close for a time—it is not clear why but lack of funds is thought to be the reason. He went back to the eastern region of the Kimberley, this time to Moola Bulla for a few years, but ended up settling in Broome for quite a few years.

In 1986 Mr Cox retired, and made the decision to return to Beagle Bay and take up permanent residency. He has been there ever since. He is acutely aware of the problems the community now faces. Alcohol, marijuana and suicide have taken a terrible toll on its inhabitants. ‘I’d say the last 10 years (these) troubles started,’ he said. This aspect of life at the community was featured in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners program.

‘You see in our time the Brothers were very good. They were strict, but they were kind, and they believed in discipline. Kids today—no discipline whatsoever.’

There is still plenty of community pride in Beagle Bay. A lot of the older ones are mighty proud of what they have achieved in transforming the once mission-run institution into a well-managed Aboriginal community. A few of the old ones have said they can see in the young people that ‘same old community spirit that the old people had’.
—Darren Moncrief

 

Darren Moncrieff is a descendant of the Tharrgari, Bayungu and Wajarri peoples of the central west and west coast of Western Australia. He is a freelance photojournalist. Originally from Carnarvon, Western Australia, Darren started writing for a living when he was 26. From early 1997 to late 1999 he helped re-establish the Yamaji News, a fortnightly Indigenous newspaper based in Geraldton, WA, and doubled as the paper’s sub and sports editor. Since early 2000, he has contributed to a number of publications, most notably the Koori Mail, Australia’s national Indigenous newspaper, and a number of other mainstream publications. His passion is Aboriginal sport and sportspeople, and he has reported widely on this subject.

Research assistance was provided by Colleen Hattersley, Bringing Them Home Oral History Project interviewer.

 
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