Abstract:This essay reconstructs defensive/offensive mechanisms of Aboriginal communication networks and presents historical examples of their application as a means of resistance during Australia’s frontier wars. The principal focus is on smoke-signalling systems, especially in Queensland.
“…More recently, historian Ray Kerkhove (2021:3) has cited Duncan‐Kemp as a valid source, with no reference to Wilson:Large alliances against European settlers appeared in many parts of Queensland. Alice Duncan‐Kemp described the Kooroongoora ‘rebellion’ (1912–1918) as a vast entity, involving groups from South Australia, Central Australia and Western Queensland.Duncan‐Kemp (1968:18–21, 51–53, 75, 81, 83, 109) on Kooroongoora and totemic ‘warrior squads’, cited by Kerkhove & White (2021:17–18)This is not to say that all aspects of Duncan‐Kemp's Kooroongoora must be invalid.…”
Section: Secondary Use Of Duncan‐kemp's Accountmentioning
A particular historical travelling religious complex in northern Western Australia, usually known as Kurangara, has been the subject of anthropological attention since the late 1930s. Overlooked in all the literature is a similar account assigned to 1912–1918, in the distant Channel Country of southwest Queensland. This is in Alice Duncan‐Kemp's last book, published in 1968. My examination shows that a good deal of Duncan‐Kemp's account repeated parts of a 1954 popular magazine about Kurangara in the Pilbara. In other respects Duncan‐Kemp may have drawn on her own childhood experiences, but in the absence of corroboration her account has to be considered unreliable.
“…More recently, historian Ray Kerkhove (2021:3) has cited Duncan‐Kemp as a valid source, with no reference to Wilson:Large alliances against European settlers appeared in many parts of Queensland. Alice Duncan‐Kemp described the Kooroongoora ‘rebellion’ (1912–1918) as a vast entity, involving groups from South Australia, Central Australia and Western Queensland.Duncan‐Kemp (1968:18–21, 51–53, 75, 81, 83, 109) on Kooroongoora and totemic ‘warrior squads’, cited by Kerkhove & White (2021:17–18)This is not to say that all aspects of Duncan‐Kemp's Kooroongoora must be invalid.…”
Section: Secondary Use Of Duncan‐kemp's Accountmentioning
A particular historical travelling religious complex in northern Western Australia, usually known as Kurangara, has been the subject of anthropological attention since the late 1930s. Overlooked in all the literature is a similar account assigned to 1912–1918, in the distant Channel Country of southwest Queensland. This is in Alice Duncan‐Kemp's last book, published in 1968. My examination shows that a good deal of Duncan‐Kemp's account repeated parts of a 1954 popular magazine about Kurangara in the Pilbara. In other respects Duncan‐Kemp may have drawn on her own childhood experiences, but in the absence of corroboration her account has to be considered unreliable.
“…For as Stephen Gapps (2018) argues, the raids conducted by Sydney's First Nations people "had all the hallmarks of guerrilla warfare: raiding and retreating and engaging the enemy when in a superior situation" (p. 5). Too often, however, research into the Frontier Wars has focused on the actions of the settlers and groups such as the Native Mounted Police (Kerkhove, 2021). Indigenous tactics such as communication networks, the co-ordination of allied groups, and the use of what in a European context would be described as military intelligence, have not received commensurate interest (Kerkhove, 2023;Kerkhove, 2020; see also article by Samuel White in this issue).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Too often, however, research into the Frontier Wars has focused on the actions of the settlers and groups such as the Native Mounted Police (Kerkhove, 2021). Indigenous tactics such as communication networks, the co-ordination of allied groups, and the use of what in a European context would be described as military intelligence, have not received commensurate interest (Kerkhove, 2023;Kerkhove, 2020; see also article by Samuel White in this issue). As a result, "the vigour of Aboriginal resistance [is] forgotten… Tribesmen and women [are] pitied rather than respected" (Reynolds, 2013, p. 14).…”
Frank Uhr and Debra O’Halloran’s Multuggerah and the Sacred Mountain (2019) is one of the few children’s picture books that explore the Australian Frontier Wars. In terms of message, the author and illustrator subsume First Nations’ resistance into the nation’s broader celebration of its participation in foreign wars. In terms of medium, they use the overwhelmingly conservative genre of picture books to deradicalise a potentially controversial topic, one that they frame using Joseph Campbell’s conception of the monomyth. Campbell’s development of the monomyth, widely referred to by his major work The hero with a thousand faces (1949/2008) was drawn from his sustained academic study of comparative mythology. He found a similar pattern emerging in a multitude of story forms, fairy tales, songs, and sonnets, and within sacred writings, dreamings, and monologue accounts. The canonical narrative arc of the hero’s journey has three core elements. It begins as the hero receives a ‘call to adventure’ and leaves the ordinary world (Separation or Departure). He or she enters an extraordinary world that requires engagement in a range of trials and challenges (Initiation), before returning home to the ordinary world, irreversibly transfigured (Return). Multuggerah and the Sacred Mountain is framed by this trajectory, thereby ensuring a familiarity that belies the reader’s lack of knowledge as to its origin. The author and illustrator thereby avoid too overt a challenge to the ideological and genre-based expectations of their readers.
Where rapid and violent colonization disrupted ancient lifeways, ethnographic sources can be used to reconstruct aspects of traditional life including ethnobotany. Such reconstructions can help connect people with their ancestral homelands and cultures and inform emerging native food and medicine ventures. Alice Duncan-Kemp sits within a small canon of white women writers who lived among Aboriginal people on the Australian pastoral frontier. Young Alice was cared for and taught by Mithaka and Karuwali people and recorded detailed ethnographic information. Her record is singular and intriguing but unscientific, difficult to verify and in some parts plagued by unacknowledged borrowing from other sources. Here I collate Alice Duncan-Kemp’s ethnobotanical writings from published and unpublished sources and attempt to identify taxa referenced through comparison with ethnobotanical sources from neighbouring areas and extensive field work. Alice Duncan-Kemp’s 885 ethnobotanical observations can be matched to 218 taxa or groups of taxa. They contain novel ethnobotanical information for over half of these plants and previously unrecorded names for around 150. Plants used for food and materials are broadly similar to other areas of the Australian arid zone; however, Alice Duncan-Kemp’s writings contain extensive novel and place-specific information on medicinal, indicator and ceremonial or mythological aspects of ethnobotany. A small portion of her writings, particularly in her later books, appears to have been borrowed from other sources and a couple of plants described do not occur in south-west Queensland. However, most of her ethnobotanical record appears to be a unique, detailed, and accurate account of human-plant relations in the Channel Country and contributes greatly to Mithaka ethnobotanical reconstructions and Australian ethnobotany more broadly.
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