Above: Watami has held an important place in Menang mythology for thousands of years. Bringing with it the long distant memory of overwhelming floods, giant personalities and monstrous creatures whose fights and dances carved shape into the landscape, it forms yet another strand in the boundless web of songlines tracing ancient Australia’s history of human occupation. An untouchable wonder for the Albany Aborigines of the late 18th century when foreign visitors began to arrive in large sailing ships, it bit back at the Menang who dared travel there with members of a sealing gang late in 1826, reasserting itself culturally as a place to be viewed and spoken of, not visited. Named Green Island by George Vancouver while on his Voyage of Discovery in 1791, Watami presented as an exposed but fertile isle free from Aboriginal contact which could serve as a handy fruit woodlet or wild vineyard. Potentially a herb and vegetable garden too, any source of Vitamin C serving to balance the diet of long voyaging sailors prone to scurvy by subsisting on biscuits and heavily salted meats. When Major Lockyer and Captain Wakefield were challenged with establishing a convict settlement in the area, they were met with a mainland landscape largely incapable of supporting either livestock or plant life of European cultivation, thus presenting them with their own scurvy dilemma. Increasingly desperate to exploit what land looked to be best suited, they had first to contend with the Aboriginal response to what had happened at Watami and what prevented them from clearing and planting the location later to become known as Barmup. What happened at Watami and Barmup is symbolic of Mokare’s inurement by earliest West Australian colonisers, constituting a profound tale in the wider story of European appropriation at King George’s Sound. Image: View of Watami, better known as Green Island to today’s population, from Bayonet Head. The islet sits less than a kilometer off the southern shore of Oyster Harbour and is now a protected pelican reserve. Image: Doctored image drawn from the internet public domain.
As we once again delve into the early period of permanent cross-cultural relations at Albany, searching for the story of Wannua, Yaramal and Barmup, we are drawn to Watami, Navy Captain George Vancouver’s ‘verdant little island’ in Oyster Harbour.
During September and October 1791, Vancouver first issued English language names to the topography around Albany. The very first being Mount Gardner at the north-eastern head of the Sound, then the Eclipse Islands, Bald Head, Breaksea and Michaelmas Islands, Point Possession, King George the Third’s Sound, Princess Royal and then Oyster Harbour and its single tiny islet. It was Vancouver’s published records which influenced every subsequent visitor of note to the area, if not in the way they acted when they got here, then in the style they set those experiences to writing. Those influenced include Flinders, Baudin, Parker-King, Dumont D’Urville, and even down into the settlement era itself with Scott Nind, Major Lockyer and Captain Joseph Wakefield of the original garrison contingent. It was Wakefield, after everyone else remarked on Vancouver’s gesture of planting vine-cuttings and watercress, who first managed to get Green Island to yield some consumable growth.
The question being, why?
When they first viewed it, Vancouver and his assistants described Green Island as being ‘covered with luxuriant grass and other vegetables’, something which, in their explorations of King George Sound, no other place offered. The rock encrusted or otherwise sandy or peaty nature of our coast was evidently, through the nature of the flora it generated, not conducive to European agricultural practices, and every voyaging ship’s commander worth his salt knew fresh produce was an essential item in warding off scurvy.
Thus, Vancouver wrote,
For the benefit of those who may visit the country hereafter, some vine- cuttings and water cresses were planted; . . . and an assortment of garden seeds, with some almonds, orange, lemon and pumpkin. . . (Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, Vol 1, Ch 3, pg 52.)
Vancouver’s gesture was not honored by the island itself however, as none of those future visitors found anything to even suggest an attempt at cultivation had been made. Indeed, Vancouver wasn’t sure his little experiment would work anyway, fearing his garden would be ‘overrun by the natural productions of the island’, and he was right. Two subsequent attempts to leave a garden behind at Oyster Harbour were made by Captain Dixon of the Elligood and Philip Parker-King, both at the same place on the eastern side of the channel entrance, but inevitably neither of these took hold either.
Watami was first successfully planted 36 years after Vancouver by the garrison commander of 1827 and 1828, Army Captain Joseph Wakefield, who had been struggling for ten months to raise anything from his seed library into a what might constitute a bearing plant. Later a Lieutenant Colonel, Joseph Wakefield was a career Army Officer born near Birmingham, Warwickshire. Still unmarried, he turned 34 years old just before taking over the garrison command.
Wakefield had bought a second-Lieutenant’s commission when he turned 21 and within a year had taken part in the Waterloo victory, soon after being promoted to Lieutenant. At age 26 he bought promotion to Captain in another regiment. Three years later he was transferred to the 39th Regiment and retired on half-pay, which he quietly endured for another three years. Late in 1825, Wakefield was reactivated and joined one of four companies of the 39th ordered to serve as convict escorts aboard transport ships to Australia and to serve similarly while remaining in service to the NSW government for a term. Within a year of leaving England, he had spent five months in Sydney before being made second in command to Major Edmund Lockyer and sent out to King George’s Sound by the Amity. After three months under Lockyer, Wakefield spent a further sixteen as lead officer.
Lockyer, who left the Sound early in April 1827, had identified Barmup as a likely site within a day of landing but both he and Wakefield were afraid to commit to it, so tried as a unit to first raise a garden and then a corn field at the barracks, then commissioned individuals to cultivate their own private plots, as well as having a go across the water at Little Grove where they were discovering the impracticality of lugging timber across the harbour.
The reason for not tackling the most obvious place to cultivate within the surrounds of Mount Melville and Mount Clarence, was fear of Aboriginal attack. Nagging legacy of the Sealers kidnap and murder episode carried out on the Aborigines between the departure of d’Urville’s Astrolabe and arrival of Lockyer’s Amity. This unfortunate occurrence left one of the Albany Aborigine’s shot dead on Watami, four others marooned on Michaelmas Island, one woman held captive in a whaleboat which made eastwards toward the Esperance islands, and another on Eclipse Island in the clutches of the infamous Samuel Bailey. Lockyer, of course, rescued the stranded Aborigines and then met with their ire when they speared his convict iron monger Dennis Dineen, literally hours after being re-landed.
From that moment there was an eighteen-day stand-off between the garrison men and the Aborigines during which Lockyer was worried by surrounding fires and fear of further reprisal, something which occurred with an attack on his sawyers at Mount Melville just days after the full extent of the sealer’s crime was revealed and the woman held captive by Bailey had been rescued. Lockyer had reason to believe relations had been repaired by his restraint and willingness to help but nevertheless would not let his men work out of sight of the garrison. The pressing need for building materials and fresh food drove him to seek lime and timber at Little Grove rather than the future Barmup site on the far side of Munster Hill, but when the gardens he planted there and at the garrison continually failed, it was Wakefield who decided Green Island was his next best option.
Resistance to planting Watami was ultimately eased by the growing relationship between the garrison and its most frequent Aboriginal visitors, brothers Mokare & Nakina. Likely delayed by Wakefield’s sense of sacrilege attached to the resting place of the unnamed Aboriginal man, or corresponding disturbance of the scene causing anger among the shore-bound Aborigines, it was the combination of improved cross-cultural relations and the worrying, if not outright dangerous degree of scurvy symptoms evident among the personnel, which forced the move. In his August report for 1827, Wakefield, as nonchalantly as he could put it, declared Green Island as having been planted.
Eventually, recognition of the security inherent in an island garden, and because Vancouver had decades earlier set the precedent, Wakefield in near desperation had sent a second gardener furnished with seeds, tools and a regular water delivery service, sourced and barreled freshly at Princess Royal Harbour, to Watami by way of the garrison’s boat. The guano rich soil went on to produce the much-needed vegetables and the settlement had not only its measure against scurvy but at last fulfilled the order to do so issued upon them from the outset.
By October Mokare was beginning to realise the full benefit of a lasting alliance between his family and the newcomers, to such an extent, in fact, he had been issuing punishments to Aboriginal visitors who stole from the garrison and effectively taken up residence there. By way of Army justification, under the employ of Surgeon Nind. In the meantime, despite the presence of a dedicated gardener, nothing put in the ground at the garrison went beyond germination and four or five centimeters of sprout. Something Wakefield was loathe to report.
There was another problem too, the livestock were dying. After initially thinking the sheep, cattle and pigs were faring well they began showing signs of ill health. The sheep particularly, which were soon 60% down on numbers. The proven remedy was Indian Corn (maize), and the planting of it was another primary instruction set out in the expedition’s orders. Lockyer was only too aware and had identified ground ‘west of Lake Seppings, toward the settlement’ as ‘an excellent place to commence a farming establishment’ on the same day he first climbed Mount Clarence to take a look around. Such was the expectation of the NSW command, by September a circular had been sent by Secretary McLeay instructing Wakefield to turn over whatever fresh produce (grain and other articles) he had raised to his commissary assistant for management by that department. However, the location Lockyer had spied on Day One at the Sound was a mile and a half from the proposed garrison site, on low ground behind Munster Hill and Mount Clarence, and therefore out of both sight and earshot. Restraints too great for either Lockyer or Wakefield to contemplate overcoming so early in the peace.
Wakefield may have attempted to work the Barmup site sooner if not for what had happened between the Sealers and Aborigines but still will not have prevented the dire reputation King George’s Sound acquired for being hopelessly infertile. This is because it made sense to attempt planting at the garrison first anyway, and the newly on-the-scene Navy Captain James Stirling had arrived just three months into the garrison’s existence and taken that failure as ammunition to destroy the foothold King George’s Sound had gained in the settling of Western Australia. Something we will elaborate upon in a separate post.
Wakefield’s confidence to plant Watami ahead of the future Barmup/Strawberry Hill site, despite the evolving alliance with Mokare’s moort (family), came down to three things. The task of clearing the land and widening the Aboriginal bidi to it into something that might accommodate a cart, fear the land might prove equally as infertile as the garrison surrounds, and the distance between the site and the garrison to be overcome in the event of Aboriginal attack. Watami, being an island, was safe, and not having to be cleared or requiring the fashioning of some kind of road to it, meant work could start straight away even though, being so small, it would not solve the maize problem.
As it turns out, the fresh vegetable problem, in theory being overcome, then drove Wakefield to commence work at the future Barmup site. Having discovered some decent top-soil on Breaksea Island and deciding to float it back to the garrison, Wakefield also benefitted from the livestock bearing Amity making a return visit with a decent accumulation of manure in its hold. Applying both to the garrison garden and planting pumpkins to it, he expanded there by an acre and finally set the maize seed to ground. The pumpkins appear to have yielded but the maize not.
Growing confidence in Mokare (and the relationship evident between him and the resident surgeon, Scott Nind), but with continuing failure to disguise in his reports, Wakefield finally opted for Lockyer’s early identified site west of Lake Seppings and sent his men to work. By doing so, at least he could not be accused of failing to try. The sheep continued to perish and despite the hardy pigs breeding in healthy numbers, the young were appealing to the garrison’s appetite and not able to be supported by suckling. Adding to that problem were the wild dogs which had taken a fancy to them. Wakefield had not built secure enclosures for the animals and this, compounding the maize headache, was evident in what he put in his reports. Regardless of what was said or unsaid.
Even though the garrison buildings had been constructed under his watch, the difficulty fashioning building timbers, lime mortar and clay bricks meant they were rudimentary in the extreme and likely only to last a year or so. With Stirling’s Swan River rhetoric still ringing in his ears, there was little to indicate anything permanent about the settlement Wakefield found himself presiding over.
No commander relished the task of reporting back repeated failure. Wakefield, who, after meeting Stirling (who came in HMS Success to fetch Major Lockyer back to Sydney) perceived the King George Sound settlement as a purgatorial, water treading exercise. Stirling had big noted the Swan River as the future of Western Australia and left him, at the point of assuming control, deflated. Wakefield only wanted to show he could maintain a decent command, but his motivation withered as readily as his seedlings, and he lost appetite for the tenure. The fact that nothing at all grew where he planted it made him look second rate and with a penchant for putting his foot in it with every report he wrote, his confidence dwindled. To such an extent, actually, his word-count per communique reduced to something like a quarter of what Major Lockyer had averaged.
In his report of 15th January 1828, more than a full calendar year after Lockyer’s identification of it, Wakefield announced work at the farm had begun. Mokare’s influence had cleared the way and now, with Green Island ‘commencing to be of great service’ and potatoes and pumpkins finally beginning to take hold at the garrison plot, not only was the fresh food problem sorted, but fear of Aboriginal attack had also become a thing of the past. Wakefield, despite his inclinations toward failure, had put into place the primary building blocks of a surviving European community. Something his successor, Lieutenant George Sleeman, grasped almost as lightly when he assumed control at the end of that year. Himself attune to the faltering certainty displayed by the NSW Command and only too aware of the circulating Sydney and Hobart newspaper reports that the King George’s Sound settlement was soon to be abandoned.
This clever work by James Stirling was a trick he would employ again back in England when forcing his Swan River hand upon Lord Bathurst over there.
In June 1828, Wakefield was advised by Sydney he was being replaced by Sleeman (at the time commanding at Fort Wellington, Raffles Bay) and was to make his way back aboard the Governor Phillip when it arrived. But it was the Governor Phillip (returned Sydney 4th July) which brought the letter and not Sleeman, so Wakefield had to wait until December before the same ship arrived again, and he could hand over. Sleeman arrived at King George’s Sound early in December aboard the same Governor Phillip sailing as Wakefield finally departed on, the ship having left Sydney on August 14th. Wakefield officially handed over to Sleeman on Dec 6th (HRA) and landed back in NSW on December 31st.
During all this time nothing of note can be added to the story of Watami, Barmup, Mokare and Wakefield, other than cross-cultural relations continued smoothly under Mokare’s diplomacy. Something Mokare readily capitalised upon as the military command became increasingly ambivalent. Future Albany was at a critical juncture and the uncertainty surrounding it drove Surgeon Nind to lose patience, and Sleeman, moving from the horror of the Northern Australian settlements, to struggle with his mental health. Prior to the arrival of the wide eyed and energetic Captain Barker, the Fredericks Town barracks was very close to becoming subsumed by the Aborigines. Mokare’s moort effectively had the run of the place and it was this confidence which led Mokare into the relationship he developed with Barker, and for which we cannot ever be thankful enough.
Wakefield was soon posted to the Norfolk Island convict settlement for a period before serving first within Sydney, then at Parramatta until his Regiment began making for India in July 1832. In 1836 Wakefield returned to England for a stint where he married Anne Wakefield, presumably a relative. The couple returned to India in service and had two daughters before, at the end of May 1840, both Wakefield and his wife contracted some form of infection and died within days of each other. Both were buried at Kamptee, Nagpur, Central India. Wakefield was 47 years old at the time of his passing. His wife was still in her twenties.