Page 64 - Tropic Magazine Issue 28

TROPIC • REGIONAL HISTORY
Songlines of
sorrow
ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Following a multi-million
dollar renovation, the iconic
original Cairns Court House
building has reopened its
doors. It’s now an art gallery
and among the works gracing
its walls and floors, Indigenous
pieces are front and centre.
In a special Tropic column,
Associate Professor Henrietta
Marrie AM explains how
it’s quite a turnaround for a
property which symbolises a
painful past for Aboriginal mobs. people as the “killing times”. Cairns, often in chains. They were
64 • Tropic • Issue 28
The early years of Cairns’ settlement, As a consequence, many Aboriginal
people across north Queensland were
as well as its alternative, Smithfield,
are often referred to by local Aboriginal taken “off country” and brought to
Native Police – initially stationed held at the police reserve, conveniently
at the police reserve, adjacent to located near the wharves in Trinity
the Court House – participated Inlet, before being taken to Yarrabah
in a number of well-documented and to Palm Island.
massacres of local Yidinji people and
other tribal groups in the region.
In the 1890s, such open and
murderous hostilities began to wane,
and aided by the interventions of It was the administrative
missionaries like JR Gribble, the mood centre from which the
changed to creating safe havens for
local Aboriginal people. strict conditions of
The Bellenden-Ker Mission, colonial law and order
later known as the Yarrabah Mission,
was established at Mission Bay in 1892. were enforced.
The Aborigines Protection and Restriction
of the Sale of Opium Act came into force
five years later, establishing the Office
of the Chief Protector. Both my grandmothers and their
This ushered in an era of protective siblings were removed – one from
segregation for Aboriginal people, Jeannie River in Gugu Yimidhirr
enforced by strict limitations on country and the other from China
their freedom of movement and Camp on Kuku Yalanji land.
other freedoms taken for granted by They never saw their parents and
mainstream society. siblings again.