Part Two: How Eliza Fraser Survived a Shipwreck and Sparked a Genocide

too often. When we discussed kind of the ethnographies of indigenous people being colonized, we sort of dropped like, here's what they believed about the world pre contact, and then we kind of leave it at that. But again, these are not static civilizations, right, no more than you know the Europeans themselves were, and they adapted their beliefs many times in light of new knowledge about how the world worked.

As I noted in the last episodes, the natives of what was at that point known to the Europeans as Indian Head Island and was called Gari by the people then and now, they interpreted their first sights of white people to be spirits returning from the dead. But whiteness symbolized death in every way, right, and so they didn't just respond to white people as if they were returning deceased relatives. Sometimes that would happen. You'd meet someone in like a member of the tribe, would get good vibes

from them. Basically it'd be like, oh, you know what, I think, that's like my dad or whatever, you know, my kid or something like that who died recently, But that is not the only way they reacted. Death was always involved in their reaction, but it wasn't always like, oh,

this must be a member of the tribe returned. As doctor Peter Lower wrote, their whiteness was symbolic of death, mourning, and apprehension, and so sometimes people were like, oh, no, it's a bad omen that there's white people here, right, because that means like the dead, or like it's this is this is a dark thing that's happened.

As was usually the case, Flinders was mixed up and believed he'd found Australia and the Highland was just a promontory. That's constantly they have no idea where they are. These people the maps are shit, they're bad at reading them. They're all drunk. Now they're not just drunk, they're heavily armed. And while it's a lot of fun to be heavily armed and drunk, it's also very dangerous for the people

around you. And Flinders and his crew were part of like the shoot first and never asked questions ever, like school of being a colonizer who's drunkenly landed on an island.

And so when like a group of Nogoulungbara tribes people who's like I think they with the people who live in the south of Ghari Island, they like come up to see these new people have landed, and they do what normally happens, like okay, well let's go look at this, and Flinders and his crew just start shooting, like they just they just start blasting immediately right, They like fire a cannon at the tribe for no apparent reason, and the tribe runs away, which is a reasonable thing to

do when someone shoots at you. Now, this we don't know if this was, you know, anyone on the island's first experience with gunfire, but it's the first recorded one we have, And we have a record of this from one of their songs, which roughly translated states that one of the white men quote two times, held up something and made loud noise and smoke Kong kong. I think that's how they onum on a pia the sound of gunfire,

which is you know, not bad perfectly. Yeah. So one thing that's so interesting to me about this story is that it's a really good example again of how much accurate historical information can be passed down through the centuries in an oral tradition like this. Because the captain's men also reported firing twice. So you have both this song and like documentation from the sailors that they shot twice.

their history. So people always have an agenda when recording their history. But it's also a lot of very very accurate grain gets through in the history as a result of this, these oral these songs, which I think is really interesting.

And the term for this mix of singing and dancing and storytelling to preserve history among the people of Ghari Island is called a corroboree. That's the term I found for it. So yeah, After one of Flinder's men fired upon the Nagoulungbara, Peter Lower writes, one of their number, women, Gala, who hid in the nearby bushes, watched the whites collecting water and killing some wild fowl with their terrible weapons

returning to the ship. Their heads are like Dingo's tails, the corroboree continued, impossible reference to the sailor's plaited hair or the kerchiefs they wore as head covering like the ceremonial Dingo tail headbands of the adult males of the tribe. The paddles are woods or like wood shaped by the fire. They're ongoing attempt by the Aboriginal people to relate the inexplicable to what could be culturally comprehended is thus most

apparent in these careful observations. And again like yeah, you get like these recordings of how they looked, and they're trying to kind of comparing their appearance to like their own appearance, right. Like, it's this really the amount of like fidelity you get in this attempt of one culture to comprehend another in some ways, in a lot of ways, much better than the European accounts of the same thing I find really interesting.

with them. So they take this indigenous person from like the mainland with them because he can probably talk to these guys, and they manage to make some sort of friendly contact with the Nagoulungbara, who are understandably nervous because the last time they saw this guy he shot at them and they could see guns like in the hands

of men on the island and know what they mean. Now, Flinders tried to bribe them with an offering of blubber from porpoises, and he's like, well, this is a valuable gift by my standards, because like animal fat is useful for cooking. But the islanders didn't hunter kill porpoise because they to them, the porpoise drive the mullet and whiting fish into their nets, so they see them as allies, like we work with the Porpoise's really fucked up for you to kill them. They're like our friends who help

us get food. Why did you murder one?

of our friends. So it's kind of amazing that they treat her and her fellow shipmates so well given that history.

but maybe not all of them suck. Well, we'll try to stop these people from dying, right, So again, we'll discuss further how Eliza described them as cruel and vicious, But it is also important to note that other survivors

of this shipwreck talk very differently about this people. Robert Darje is often considered the most dependable and reliable source of first hand accounts from the Sterling Castle survivors, and he described the locals as treating them very hard and stated, we had to work severely to get fish in kangaroos. But it's also clear he understood that this hardness was a product of the difficulty of survival on the island, and added, I cannot call them a cruel people. So like, yeah,

they we had to work. It's difficult, but like they weren't mean this is just the only way to live there.

History of the Island. It was later reported that Missus Fraser was compelled to dragon wood for the fires and fetch water with as much cruelty as the Gins themselves. This is from like a piece of reporting at the time that's obviously a on the like on the slur spectrum.

were ill. They're not good for a lot of work initially, which means they're being supported by the resources of people who are hungry themselves. When interviewed later, surviving Islanders described the shipwreck survivors as being incapable of foraging, quote at which even small children were expert. So like, even our little kids are better at living than you, guys, Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? And their incompetence was galling enough that it may have provoked VI.

had wounded them. I observed lost his leg had a desperate hatred of me, and he tried to kill me three or four times.

are not a monolith. You know, you've got Eliza who's gonna tell these fucked up stories, and you got Dars. She's like, yeah, this guy tried to kill me, but he had his leg blown off by a cannon, So like I get it, you know, like, yeah, I'd probably be pretty pissed for.

you know, there's some other things happening here. There's all this kind of lingering belief that these people have something to do with return to spirits, and like when someone dies, you burn their shelter because it's bad luck to have

the shelter around the spirit might get stuck there. And so there was this attitude that like, well, they don't need to sleep indoors, right, which is bad for them, you know, like it doesn't make this any more comfortable, sure, but they're not trying to be assholes by doing that. Probably the kind of darkest matter of conflict here is the matter of what happened to Captain Fraser. We don't know exactly, but Eliza's husband was killed or died soon

after they were taken in by the tribe. Eliza would later claim that about after about five weeks with the Bachola, she saw her husband trying and failing to drag a log for like the fire, and he was in bad health and not able to do this very well. And as she described it, a hunting party returned home empty handed. And for some reason one of the men stabbed Captain Fraser in the chest.

but others were taken to the mainland. There is no evidence of this but her account, and in fact, there is no evidence that any survivors of the shipwreck died on Fraser Island at all. The chief officer, Charles Brown, who Eliza claims was burnt at the stake, died on the Australian mainland. Her husband died at Lake Cutharaba, which is also on the mainland, and he was in fact stabbed with a spear at some point, although this did

not kill him immediately like she claimed. Instead, it seems like what happened is like someone slapped him in annoyance with a spear which caused like a superficial wound, but he was sick and it got infected, and so two weeks later he dies as a result of the injury, right, which is a very different story on the mainland. Yeah, on the mainland. Also because they take them to the mainland.

story that I want more about. Yeah, he had previously wound up on Fraser Island, so he was he was a convict who had like escaped to Fraser Island and he had been taken in by locals who adopted him as Moilo, the spirit of an elder who had died recently, And he basically been taken in by the old man's wife and sons and spent six years living as part of the family and then headed back to the mainland.

bread and and a potato. He was soon welcomed back among his people, observing customary ritual by sharing his carbohydrate rich food with them around the fire. That night, he learned of the presence of two young ghosts across Lake Kurobora.

have done much after this. He at least doesn't wind up in trouble again, So good for you, John Graham.

are things that may be down to interpretation. For example, perhaps she interpreted the behavior of the Bachila as cruel when it was not, and felt a need to punish them by lying and exaggerating what had occurred. The idea of an English lady living among Aboriginal people on an island for months tidillated white society, not just in Sydney but around the globe. And we kind of we have

global media by the mid eighteen thirties. Newspapers and stuff get around, so this story doesn't just stay in Sydney. For very long. In addition to that, like people are leaving constantly Sydney on boats and they're spreading the story around the whole British Empire. Eliza gives her first version of events when she's still in Moreton Bay in September of eighteen thirty six, and this was noted by Peter Lower, the historian, as being the least sensational version of the

story she would provide. He writes that this version of events was quote gradually embroidered with new horrors in Sydney and London for the titillation of eager audiences and anticipation of financial recompense.

another captain. She's got a type John Green, and at least one version of Evince is that Green helps her massage and maybe even written the second version of the story into something that was more fit to win sympathy and money from the English citizen rate, because he takes her from Sydney to London, right, and they get a bunch of donations in Sydney with the first version of the story enough that she's doing well. She's got like enough money to start a new life, and she's also

now married to a captain. But he takes her to London, where they publish another version of events and they start raising money again to compensate for Miss Fraser now missus Green's trauma. Eliza again she's like has done pretty well previously, which may have had something to do with why Green married her in February of the next year. But we don't really know that he wrote her version of events.

The best evidence for this is that when they land in London, they published a more embellished version of the story, and the signature on this was different from how Eliza had signed her first account and how she'd signed documents in the past, and people wonder, oh, was Green just kind of forging her signature? Did like he do this?

also can't go too far because it's bad for your reputation. Right, there's like a lot of patriarchal norms in the society that also play into how she's received and what she says.

worse than death. She described them as cannibals, and she of course raised money from the people of London offer suffering. Now again, global media does exist by this point, and so as soon as she starts telling this story in London, there are people who had been in Sydney and traveled on different boats, maybe even on the same one, and we're like, well, she teared it. First off, she's raising money here. She just raised money in Sydney and she

got a lot. And second it's a different story. Now is she telling you guys she doesn't have any money

like this? This kind of seems fucked up, And so some people go to the London press, to journalists and are like, this lady might be a grifter, right, which actually causes a scandal, Like there's articles about this because she comes and she's initially everyone's really sympathetic and giving her money, and then there's stories that like she's she's raising money a second time off this story and it's different now, right.

is questioned as to what happened. And this is the first version of the story where she claims she was forced to nurse a child by the island and that

she had given birth to a baby who died. And maybe so part of why people say she may have lied about these things or even likely did is that like, well, she's in trouble when she first starts telling people about this, and maybe like that's why she brings this up, is she's like she doesn't want this inquiry to be meet like to judge her too harshly, so like, well, if they feel like my baby died and I had to like nurse this baby, who I am going to She

describes the infant as subhuman. She calls it quote one of the most deformed and ugly looking brats my eyes ever beheld. She is very racist.

well enough for Eliza. She made a sizable amount of money off of her story and retires, probably with her second husband, to New Zealand, where she lives out the remainder of her days. So unfortunately she's one of yours.

The story first enters North America in eighteen thirty seven as a pamphlet titled Narrative of the Capture, Sufferings and Miraculous Escape of Missus Eliza Fraser. Scholar Olaine Brown writes that quote for American consumption, the illustrator dressed the Aboriginal people in loincloths, tunics, hose, and feather headdresses and gave

them tomahawks, daggers and bows and arrows. So we just they just like are depicted as like a racist drawing of like indigenous American people because like otherwise American audiences won't get what the fuck they're looking at. Yeah, and also i have no idea what these people look at. I'm not doing any research before I draw this cover. Yeah.

The first attempt at a serious historic account of the whole deal was John Curtis's The Shipwreck of the Sterling Castle, which gets published in London in eighteen thirty eight, so like a year after Eliza comes to London. Now Curtis is the closest thing to a journalist that existed in that era. And he had attended the inquiry in person and taken notes using the system of shorthand he'd invented himself. So he is. He's there for like her court appearance,

and he takes notes on the story she tells. He reports on the case for the London Times, and he doesn't just listen to Eliza.

heroic runaway convict. A story with unlimited possibilities for conflict, tragedy, and pathos.

but also too sympathetic to our grant Brown. The fact that, as we kind of discussed, a lot of misogyny is rooted in stories by other survivors that like called Eliza a liar and a she captain, but also the evidence strongly suggests that she did lie a lot, or at least let herself enter story be used by someone else

who lied. Now, there is still a potentially sympathetic version of Eliza in this, a physically and mentally traumatized woman who, by several accounts, was not quite sane after her rescue and was easily manipulated both by this new husband and by a public hungry for stories of savage natives and a man who promised her some kind of security in future. Right, that is maybe what's going on here. We'll never really know.

Accounts of the shipwreck were synthesized for a chapter in Australia's first children's book, A Mother's Offering to Her Children, written by a lady Long resident in New South Wales, imprinted by the Sydney Gazette in eighteen forty one. The text is in the form of a rather mannered conversation between missus S and her children, Julius, Emma, Clara and Lucy.

The dates and events mentioned are tediously detailed, but some idea of the tone of the work can be gained from Claria's exclamation on hearing of the death of the mate mister Brown. Such wanton barbarities fill one with horror and indignation and a wish to exterminate the perpetrators of

such dreadful cruelties. So this is from a part of the book where they talk about one of the shipwreck survivors being murdered by the people of Gary Island and the response of one of her children to this is kill, we should exterminate the people who did this, right, Oh, we should exterminate the brutes.

Sterling Castle survivors. The mutually hostile attitudes subsequently assumed by both the White Bay Aboriginal people and the Europeans who learned of their supposed wanton barbarities through the worldwide publicity given to Eliza Fraser's story. An undercurrent of what poet Judith Wright calls the fear as Old as Kane runs through most European accounts. So you know it's bad. This

is all going to be bad. Now, before we move on, I should note a coda to the Fraser story, which is that well, the early stories that went viral were very much focused on her as a heroic victim. The most popular early American account was an article for Knickerbocker magazine by Henry Yolden, who is the crewman who survived and hated Eliza and maybe stole everybody's water. He is the guy who goes viral in the US for a version of this story, and he describes her as a vixen.

So again, maybe not himself the best source God.

he's sexually assaulted Eliza. That's also not based on anything, and it's mainly just I only bring this up to note that, like fucking forty years later, people are coming with new versions of this story based on very evidence because it still sells. There's a book written about Bracewall's claims right by a guy named Russell in eighteen eighty eight, because there's still money in this shit, right.

a large fire. It was amusing enough to stop me in my walk, horrible enough to impress the writing beneath this picture on my mind. Sterling Castle wrecked on the coast of New Holland Botany Bay, all killed and eaten by savages. Only a survivor, a woman to be seen.

Sixpence admission and there's a lot there, right, Both that at this point the story has turned into all of these people were eaten by these savages, right, which like just is not a part it is not even like a part of the original versions of this story, right, it's just something people have admitted to make it more racist. And also you can see the old lady if you're just pay she'll talk to you about what happened, which

is definitely not Eliza. We know that she is in So it's got to be assuming he didn't just make this up. I don't think he would. This has to be like a show where someone's like, we'll just get some old late to pretend to be Eliza make some fucking money.

a play. There's like versions of this play up into the mid twentieth century, and of a licensed castivity with savages right, And the verbiage that Russell uses here is in keeping with like Leaflet's advertizing popular republications of the story from around the same time, like this Eliza Fraser who existed seven days without food or water, the dreadful sufferings of miss Fraser, who with her husband and the survivors of the ill fated crew are captured by the

savages of New Holland and by them stripped entirely naked and driven into the bush. They're dreadful slavery, cruel, toiled and excruciating tortures inflicted on them. A horrid death of mister Brown it was roasted alive over a slow fire kindled beneath his feet. Meeting of mister and Missus Fraser, and the inhuman murder of Captain Fraser in the presence of his wife.

This would contribute to some pretty disastrous things in the coming decades. There's no one massacre or atrocity you can point to and say, well, they did this because of what Eliza said. But I think I've established how popular

this account was and thus influential. A supplement put out by the Fraser Island Defenders Association notes that Fraser Island Aboriginal people gained international notoriety through the stories of Eliza Fraser, and one of Eliza Fraser's legacies was that there would be many men massacres of the very people who had helped her. In eighteen forty two, white Australians established a head station called Tiaro near Moreton Bay, which is in

the bay that's very close to the island. This was attacked so vigorously by local tribes that the forces manning it were withdrawn and the station abandoned mere months later. The Commissioner of Crown Lands from Moreton Bay noted in eighteen forty three that twelve white people had fallen as sacrifice to the Aboriginal peoples of the area. And he's not saying they were sacrificed by those people, saying that those people were a sacrifice for the cause of colonialism right.

It's also he notes twelve white people died. He did not bother to recount how many indigenous inhabitants were killed by white settlers in the same time period.

at Richard Jones's Bowie Station on the Merry River. In late November eighteen forty eight. Jones experienced two successive raids upon his flocks, and a large number were carried off, not for many reasons of hunger, but as a guerrilla resistance technique, or as the Moreton Bay Courier saw fit

determin it in the mere wantonness of patriotism. Hollanders. A reprisal party of ten whites led by station manager mister Clements and assisted by a collaborative black guide, then attacked the Aboriginal camp, firing a volley into it and dispersing them. And again there's no mention made of how many people were killed in this barrage of gunfire. Right, but this is kind of the nature of the conflict for a while.

There's both like murders when you've got these these white folks at stations, but also, oh, they've got like a couple thousand sheep here and there's not enough of them to guard them. Will either kill or capture take the sheep for ourselves, and that will render this unprofitable for them, because we've started to gain an understanding of how they're xiety works and that if we can make this costly enough, they won't be able to afford to keep taking our shit, right.

writing paints a very ugly picture. The Courier, which was a local paper, wrote published an editorial during this period arguing, we hold this country by the right of conquest, and if that right gives us a just claim to its continued possession, we must be empowered to enforce our claim by the strong arm when necessary. The Blacks have just the same claim to the restoration of their decayed nationality as would the principality of Whales have if it rose

in open rebellion against the crown. One law must apply to all conquered nations so far as the rights of the conqueror, order and rule must be maintained, And if this cannot be done by kindness and indulgence, it must then be affected by the iron rod.

number of settlers. And the effect of all this is to stretch the already insufficient local white labor supply and renders settling in the area financially unviable. Just describes this incredibly successful, vigorous defense as partly a response to the absolute shattering of the worldview many of these peoples had held for since time immemorial.

as a dreadful, almost inexpressible revelation. The traditional verities of a complex, orderly pattern of existence were rudely shaken, spiritual values were partially falsified, and the formerly authoritative explanations of tribal elders were increasingly undermined a people who had totally believed in a certain right mode of behavior for every person.

The sacrisanct nature of individual family and tribal totems, and all the rules of residency, hospitality, and reciprocity were rapidly confronted by incomers with new unstated rules and behavioral modes, who were no respectors of totems or territorial boundaries, and who were ready to impose an exclusive hegemony by force of arms. Tribal society here faced the most critical impasse conceivable, for to lose land was not simply to lose livelihood,

but to abandon the meaning of life itself. The sudden onset of an unprecedented invasion situation demanded from the indigenous. Therefore new patterns of adaptation and resistance and encourage the emergence of new leaders capable of meeting the onslaught and again. So this is like a culture that is changing and adapting, And one of the things they're doing is like, Okay, the people who told us these white folks were one thing were wrong. We probably shouldn't listen to them about

how to handle this situation. We need like a new plan because what we were doing doesn't work now. Ultimately, after several years of this, Australian authorities call the Native Police into the situation, which are like Aboriginal people who are taken in and trained and armed as police and led by white officers. Through the early eighteen fifties, there were a number of bloody clashes between tribesmen and these colonial forces that killed enough warriors to force their retreat

to Fraser Island. Right. They basically use it as a natural fortress, that's how Lwer describes this, so that they can avoid like European reprisal raids. And you know, this seems to be something that goes on for several years from the end of the eighteen forties up to the beginning of the eighteen fifties, and there's a lot of talk with like officers of the Native Force and local authorities that like, we have to actually land people on the island to quote finally put a stop to collisions

between blacks and whites. And there's an interesting line here in Lawer's writing. Although the Native Police acted as a paramilitary body engaged in border warfare while in the field, no legal recognition of this role could be given for officially the territory of others was not being conquered. It was merely seen as Crown land being settled. Resisting natives were therefore held to be British subjects behaving criminally, rather than being accorded status as the legitimate force of a

warring people opposing the invasion of their lands. Thus, in order to invade Fraser Island, the required legal procedure was that the execution of warrants. Basically, well, we can't like this island even though none of us, no white people live, there is crown land.

Native police, it's with all of these warrants. So they commence an assault on August fourth, eighteen fifty one. Police engage and slaughter locals and withdraw several times, but raids on mainland sediments continue. So in Christmas Eve of eighteen fifty one, the Native police engaged in a final clearing

of the island. A mix of two dozen Native police under several white officers and an undisclosed number of random armed white volunteers quote, all armed and sworn in as special constables, run rampant across the island, killing whoever they can. So like these police get together with a bunch of just like local militia, basically like angry white farmers, and they do an ethnic cleansing on Fraser Island, right on

Angari Island, right they're calling it Fraser Island. And that's how like a lot of these people get like forced off. That's kind of it's not entirely the end of habitation of the island in this period of time, but it is sort of the beginning of the end. In official reports,

this is always described as a police action. And again you can still find conservatives saying like, well, they were just trying to arrest people who had committed crimes, and there were several men taken into custody and apparently tried, although there's no evidence that any sort of judicial procedure was followed. They were just like, yeah, we tried and convicted them, you know, yeah, maybe they just shot them

where they stood and lied about that. Later. One local reporter at the time wrote, rumors are afloat that the natives were driven into the sea and kept there as long as daylight or life lasted. So basically, we drove these people into some say the sea, some say it's the Susan River, and waited until they drowned. Like that's how this massacre finishes, and somewhere between fifty and one hundred. But Schalla people are killed that way right.

the world. Fiona Foley, who I quoted earlier and Isobachila woman artist and writer, heard stories of the massacre from her relatives growing up as a child, and she created a sculpture based on these stories titled Annihilation of the Blacks, which became one of the National Museum of Australia's first major acquisitions by an urban Aboriginal artist, Aboriginal person artist. And this is Soviey's going to show you this work, Annihilation of the Blacks by Fiona Foley, who we quoted

from earlier. It's a pretty striking.

So ultimately, the Aboriginal peoples of Fraser Island were forced out of their homes for generations. The displacement was justified by the whites, not only by the violence of the years of raids, but by the legacy of Eliza Fraser's account.

In your twenty sixteen book Finding Eliza, Larissa Barren writes that stories like Eliza's provided fuel for British fear of cohabitation with Native peoples and quote once these anxieties found expression and form and narratives such as Eliza's, they justified the mechanisms for surveillance of Aboriginal people through policing practices,

legal control, and government policy. And in her own article, Folly adds the unspoken fear in Eliza's case was that this white woman could be sexually violated by Aboriginal men if not rescued. Racialized anxieties have formulated many patterns of structured behaviors used to subjugate Aboriginal men, women, and children

in Australia. And you know, yeah, it's fucked up, and it's made all the more frustrating by the fact that while this deplaced, displacement and slaughter was at its height near the end of the eighteen hundreds, clear evidence arose. And this is while we're still in the eighteen hundreds that the whole phrase your story had been a lie.

In eighteen seventy four, a colonial official named Archibald Meston spoke to several elderly men at Noosa and Fraser Island who had been alive when Eliza and other members of her crew were sheltered. These are members of the Bachola who had known her then, right, And so this colonial officer official like, who's you know, probably may himself have kind of grown up or as a young person at least new young people who were raised on these stories, as like, I'm gonna see if I can talk to

anyone else who was there, right. And here's how lower summarizes that. Concerning Eliza Fraser, Meston wrote, she must have either had a serious quarrel with truth or else her head was badly affected by her experiences. Certainly, she gave a wildly improbable tale in Brisbane, accusing the Blacks of deeds quite foreign to their known character and quite unknown before since an Aboriginal annals Bracewell and Durham Boy both declared that miss Fraser's tales in Brisbane, Sydney and London

were evolved from her own imagination. The old men in the seventies told Meston a story very different from that of the Lady, the effect that the Europeans were received in a friendly manner and passed on in canoes to the mainland. It didn't skip point to be forwarded to the white people at the Brisbane convict settlement, and we

know they were sent to the mainland. That version of the story that like, yeah, we sent them there because we were trying to get them back home, is totally consistent with the objective evidence that we have, and this also comports orally with the story of the Batchula themselves.

I found an article in the Courier Mail which interviewed Auntie Francis Gala, who's an elder of the tribe, who says, of Fraser's story, it isn't true for two very sound reasons, and never came down our oral storyline, whereas everything else of significance that happened in the past few hundred years

did come down, and there's no dance about it. If James Fraser had been murdered, we would still know that dance today, Like we gotta fucking made a dance about killing that guy if we'd done it right, Like we have that for other people, you know, And it's a good point, Like there's all you know.

It was Meston who carried out an experimental attempt to stamp out opium use among the population of Aboriginal people, which is generally described by their descendants today as an excuse to govern and control the lives of their ancestors.

Per Foley quote, the Opium Act contained thirty three clauses governing Aboriginal lives, with its tentacles reaching into my traditional country and the lives of fifty one Bachalla people living in Maryborough who are forcibly removed to the mission on Ghari under Archibald Meston's direction, and ultimately the peoples who had inhabited Ghari for many thousands of years were dispossessed

of their home right. They eventually get kicked entirely off of the island, and this is kind of part of that process, and the whole situation was not remedied for them. This happens at the end of the eighteen hundreds and there don't start to be remedies to this until nineteen ninety three when the Native Title Act is passed in

Australia and actually final. Fole's great aunt is the first Bachola person to lodge a title claim on Gari Island, which itself is officially renamed in twenty twenty three, so it is known legally as Fraser Island until twenty twenty three when it is renamed Ghuri, which is what it was originally called. So that just happened, that's crazy. Twenty twenty three, they finally get their name back.