An Alternate View of the Mokare Era
A chronology of events at earliest Albany: 1827-1843
(Long piece in progress – Expected time of completion March 2027)
Almost all studies of NSW era Albany focus on the relationships Mokare conducted with the sequence of senior officials at the garrison and during the period of Alexander Collie’s tenure as original Swan River Colony Resident Magistrate. Mokare’s influence was overwhelmingly benign and he is rightly regarded as an agent of acceptance with regard to the arrival of the Europeans. There is a parallel narrative, however. One which focusses on the behaviour of Wannua, one of the most active others described across the literature. The story of Wannua is the very first of dispossession in Western Australia and through it we witness the turmoil and resistance demonstrated by Mokare’s contemporaries as his acquiescence permitted appropriation of the most desirable natural living place in the surrounds of Mount Clarence. A place called Yaramal, part of which the military came to call The Farm, and after all that happened there as a result, what the King George’s Sound Aborigines then came to call Barmup – Place of Farm.
As settlement at Albany nears its 200th anniversary, the Old Farm at Strawberry Hill is being renovated and refurbished. Closed for the remainder of 2025 there is significant anticipation between Indigenous and government interests as to what the upgrade will reveal. This is because the twin names of Strawberry Hill and Barmup represent two entirely different stories. Strawberry Hill represents the optimism and desire brought by the Swan River Colony’s earliest settlers as they sought to bring the new townsite of Albany into the fullness of British-bred being, albeit struggling dreadfully as they went, while Barmup is a literal translation of The Farm, a place upon which the tragedy of the original Albany Menang played out. The Old Farm at Strawberry Hill may look a quaint transplant of English countrified living with its own tale of colonial hardship to prop it up, but as Barmup it holds a story of deceit, exclusion and loss for an entire clan, among which one man played a singular role of defiance and against-the-odds survival.
This previously untold version of the Barmup story acknowledges all King George Sound Aborigines who lived through the devastation of that time.
Above: There came to be two points of focus for the military during the garrison period, these were the site of the garrison itself, very close to Point Frederick on the waterfront, and The Farm, on the northside of Mount Clarence. During his term, Captain Collet Barker identified multiple localities important to the Aborigines, including Yakama and Yaramal, which comprised the marshy low land on the north side of Mount Melville and Mount Clarence. Yakama was called the Albany Plains on early maps while Yaramal was the valley between Mount Clarence and Strawberry Hill, fronted to the west by Craggy Bluff (Kangas Rock) and to the east by Lake Seppings and Middleton Beach. The Aboriginal name Yakama survives today as Yakamia while Yaramal was forgotten in favour of various English monickers including Strawberry Hill, Middleton Road and Mira Mar. Image: This map is from Alfred Hillman’s 1835 town drawings, by when The Farm had been bought by Sir Richard Spencer, Resident Magistrate from November 1833. Under Spencer family ownership The Farm moved from source of produce to genteel countrified home, preferred image for most town residents today.