A Terribly Wild Man by Christine Halse

Author:Christine Halse
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: HIS004000
ISBN: 9781741766592
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2002-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Word that Gribble was making trouble began filtering south and the Perth Board of Missions started to get anxious. It handled the daily administration of Forrest River for the ABM in Sydney and Gribble’s crusade against the police revived its collective memory of JB’s clash with the establishment and the upheaval that resulted. Just as troubling for the Secretary of the Perth Board of Missions, Archdeacon Hudleston, was the high turnover in staff and the mission’s mounting debts to shopkeepers in Wyndham. Hudleston decided to make the long trip north to personally inspect the mission. On his return to Perth he floated the idea of replacing Gribble but Bishop Trower rejected the idea outright. This path blocked, Hudleston urged Gribble to take an early furlough rather than wait the usual five years. Gribble’s past flashed before him. His confidence was rattled. He insisted that he was indispensable and doing the work of three men: ‘to force matters as regards my furlough will not do’.13

Gribble exhausted his anxiety by forging a tidy village between Dadaway lagoon and the stony hills that edged Oombulgurri Plain. Streets were laid out in grid formation and named after Anglican missions. A hospital, dormitories and married people’s home appeared. The Church of St Michael and All Angels—a thatched pavilion partially open on all four sides—was the only church in the East Kimberley when it was completed in 1921. The thatch buildings were picturesque, but alive with nesting insects and fires were frequent. To keep the dust at bay, the dirt floors were soaked with bullock blood and polished to a shine when dry. The furniture was ‘Kimberley Chippendale’—rough constructions made from onion and oil boxes. Later the place was rebuilt in sun-dried bricks. Michael Durack, patriarch of the Durack cattle dynasty and Member of the Legislative Assembly for the Kimberley from 1917 to 1924, visited the mission and declared it a collection of ‘tumbledown sorts of thatched houses’.14

Gribble put his hopes for a Christian community in the young married couples in the mission compound. Women were persuaded to abandon their tribal husbands and married on the mission in defiance of betrothal commitments, kinship laws and tribal obligations. The brengen and narlies retaliated by showering the compound with spears when Gribble refused to hand over married women or girls promised as brides. The women at the mission had to be guarded in case they were abducted or absconded, and the men were attacked for ‘marrying wrong’. Gribble threatened the attackers with twenty strokes of his strap and promised to ‘drive back with a stockwhip any mission man who went outside the compound to the old men’s camps’.15

Outside the mission compound, the birth rate fell. Gribble declared this a victory for God and proof that the mission was saving the local people from extinction, but the women told anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry that they aborted pregnancies because they did not want to bear children to be taken by the mission. Others avoided the place. Inside the compound, Gribble worked to impose order.

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