Above: Barmup features on Robert Dale’s 1831/32 Panorama of King George Sound despite not being visible from the summit of Mount Clarence. Clearly an important aspect of early Albany’s drive to evolve in a replica style to rural England, The Farm at Strawberry Hill appropriated the title of most desirable residence from Albany’s Aborigines and granted it to the new colonial Governor. In the face of dispossession, it was held on to by Wannua and his family for as long as they were able. By the time this drawing was made Barmup was at least four years in the making and about to transition into the Vice Regal Estate of James Stirling who sold it two years later to Sir Richard Spencer. Wannua and his family remained closely attached to Barmup right up until 1842 when Wannua was eventually killed by means of tribal spearing at Nornalup, some sixty-five miles to the west. Source: This image is a personal photograph taken of a section of the large-format backlit display of Dale’s Panorama positioned at Albany Library.
Come, sit. Let me yarn.
Barmup was the name they gave to the place the soldiers called The Farm.
The old Aborigines did not have a sound for the English letter F. There was no F (eff) sound in Noongar language.
When they said Farm, it came as Barm.
Barmup is a literal translation. It means, Place of Farm. The Farm.
Above: Barmup was always important Menang ground, always home to the fires of Mokare’s moort. A fertile, marshy land lit by the first beams of the day and looked over by them for the rest of it. While it was a place of tall trees it wasn’t called Barmup until after the soldiers came, and then the Spencer family. Mokare’s moort came to call it Barmup because of what happened there. Because it was a place of such massive change it could only bear the title the new White presence gave it. This exaggerated, romanticised watercolour found in a scrapbook belonging to Laura Trimmer, sister of one-time Assistant Protector of Aborigines at Albany, Arthur Trimmer, probably made in the early to mid-1840s, reflects an essential Aboriginal presence despite utter transformation of the landscape.
Consider the following
When you heard stories of precocious strangers, or you met them once, a long time ago when you were too small to remember properly.
When you lived at the place those pale strangers came back to, still clothed in colour and pattern, and they were saying “King, King, King”.
When they went away and returned once more, saying “King”.
When you thought you had made friends with them, and that their arrival made you stronger, only their boats the next time they came were small and they spoke different, acted different, and there was no talk of King.
When those strange strangers tricked you, crossed you, stole your women and left you to die on a waterless island.
When those decorated strangers came one more time, took you back from the island, presented as protective, as interested and instructional, and this time did not leave.
When you gave up your ways and practices and your ground as well because the precocious strangers were full of gifts and promises you believed.
When events of profound relevance occurred and reoccurred at a particular place but there was no name yet to identify that particular place.
When your own language had only ever been spoken and therefore was fluid and current, so you sought new sounds to describe the change, to identify what was becoming familiar.
When the strangers gave their own name to that place but you could not easily make the sound of it, but the name was real and important, so you shaped it to your own tongue.
When after years of the strangers altering your place, confusing your beliefs, holding you to their own wicked power while your families crumbled and disintegrated under wave upon wave of sickness and death, you understood things could never be the same again.
Yet you remained.
Barmup.
Above: From Captain Collet Barker’s descriptions of the ground behind the two hills at Albany, the ‘plain behind the high hill’ was called Yaramal. This was where Wannua and Mullet kept their fires. The flat marshy land to the west was Yakama while the land ‘downstream from Lake Seppings’, was called Pyrrlyup. On 26th December, 1826, after walking to Oyster Harbour, Major Edmund Lockyer noted the land which eight months later was cleared by Captain Wakefield. The land was between the lake and the plains which Lockyer described as ‘most suitable for a farm’. Years later, as the farm took shape and events involving Wannua’s defiance toward the change and of his exclusion from it, resulted in the Albany Aborigines taking the name Farm and shaping it to their own language. Thus, The Farm became known as Barmup.