BROCKMAN OF MINILYA
“ … an area infamous for wild Aboriginal tribes who were rumoured to be fierce cannibals … “
In an era rich with adventurers in West Australia’s early history possibly the most colourful of all was the Gascoyne pioneer, George Julius Brockman (1850-1912) – “Minilya Julius”, as he was affectionately known.
As a raw boy of 16, in 1866, Julius Brockman left his family home at Greenough to ride his pony 400 miles down to Busselton to seek work on farms, quickly learning about cows, pigs, wheat, crops and cattle for “thirty shillings ($3) per month” and toiling 76 hours per week.
“By late 1869,” he wrote in the diary he maintained for all of his life, “I was a man able to do any work …”
Feeling the lure of the North West, Brockman sailed his boat, “White Witch,” from Cape Leeuwin to Shark Bay in 1874 to sample pearling, then on to Cossack and into the sheep station country which was to hold him for 26 years of his adult life.
Arriving in Carnarvon in 1885 to visit his brother, Charles, who had “taken up a million acres” and was “pasturing 12,000 sheep on the Minilya country”, Julius found his brother to be ill and anxious to sell “800,000 acres of the driest country in West Australia” for fifteen thousand pounds ($30,000).
Arranging a loan in Perth, the 27-year-old pastoralist acquired Minilya Station.
Times were tough. The sheep were scabby. There was a drought. Money was scarce.
Using tobacco in place of sheep dip, Brockman treated 24,000 sheep for infection. He could not sell his meat. Wool was at famine prices. There had been little rain for the past five years, he learnt.
“Such were the difficulties (we) had to contend with in (the) early days,” he wrote in his diary.
A type of feudal village evolved around the Minilya homestead, with a population of Europeans, Malays, Chinese and Afghans, as well as 60 Aboriginal workers. The owner administered his own justice by installing old English-style stocks, rather than risking his wrongdoers to the alcoholism and venereal disease of the Carnarvon gaol house, 136 kms away to the south.
After three years of battling, Julius Brockman acquired country to the North West of Point Cloates, an area infamous for wild Aboriginal tribes who were rumoured to be fierce cannibals and who were known to dress up in “naval clothes and women’s dresses,” and to throw around “gold doubloons and boots and shoes” as they re-enacted in their corroborees the “grisly details of … those ship-wrecked alien people years before.”
Life in the region at that time was picturesque, Brockman observed.
“Men, women and children,” he wrote, “ … and dogs of all shapes and sizes, had miniature Waterloos. Spears flew, clubs whacked … women became unfaithful to their lawful husbands, and little … children crawled, trembling, into the nearest bush for cover.”
Purchasing a boat, the “Ada May,” from a bankrupt pearler at Shark Bay, the pastoralist intended to solve ever-present water problems by sinking fresh water wells along the rugged coastline.
Sailing for Maud’s Landing, the iron-bound vessel nosed into Tuckey’s Passage heading for Yalobia. A great wave struck the boat broadside and washed everyone overboard into a boiling ocean.
Another mountainous wave crashed down on the struggling vessel, driving it deeply into the water to sink in the wild sea. In an ocean normally swarming with sharks, Julius and a Filipino employee, Peter, grabbed tight to the bowsprit and wriggled out of their clothing. In the confusion the ship-wrecked men were separated and Julius found himself, cut and bleeding, clutching at two floating boards. Fearful of shark attack, he wrapped seaweed tightly around himself, hoping to stem the blood flow.
Soon he reached a beach and collapsed, completely exhausted.
Naked, the young pastoralist set out to walk overland to the Yalobia Well. During his painful journey he met two Filipinos who had also survived.
“I was burnt and stripped of all the skin on my body,” he later noted.
With two toes almost severed, his “physical suffering was … indescribable.”
Sending on his employees to obtain help, Brockman continued his agonised journey over the barren, waterless country towards Minilya. Covering 12 miles in nine hours, the hot wind and sun parched his body and swarms of flies assaulted his raw flesh.
Eventually rescued and returned to Minilya Station, his injuries were such that he could not lie on a bed and “every breath seemed like boiling fat” and his “skin peeled off everywhere.”
He had to sleep by leaning across a stick tied between two verandah posts, half standing. Every day an Aboriginal employee treated his injured body with emu oil.
He wrote: “For months I used to feel a horrid thrill moving all through – from neck to feet – like a million needles. But at last it worked itself out of the big toe on my left foot and the forefinger on my left hand, and I was cured!”
Possibly due to his affected health and continuing medical treatment, Brockman decided to sell his Koolkilya property (inland from Minilya) to his neighbour, George Gooch (1858-1923), and the Point Cloates (now Cardabia) holding to the English ornothologist-cum-squatter, Tom Carter.
At this period, he notes, mail was delivered by Aboriginal runners between Minilya, Point Cloates, Wandagee, Williambury, Yanyeaready, and other inland properties, keeping lines of communication open, as well as bringing “news of rain, drought or corroborees, spearings, clubbings and woundings …”
Always he was reminded of the harshness of the North West tribal existence. For example, while walking along a bush track, he discovered the corpse of an old black woman.
“She was lying huddled up, partly covered by an old bit of blanket. The poor old creature had evidently been blind, and the natives had simply left her to her fate. It was apparent she had made an effort to follow them but, losing her way, died from thirst and hunger.”
In 1889, now aged 39, Brockman’s terse entries in his faithfully maintained diary, make interesting reading:
“(Mervyn) Bunbury, a station neighbour, sent natives for meat today, but I refused to supply any more … went to Bunbury at Mooricoora (Williambury Station) and interviewed him about kidnapping my native boys. After … straight talk … and home truths … he offered to give them up …
“Hopwood (a European employee) stole wine and I found him drunk in the office, so promptly turned him out of the house … ‘Monday’ half killed a woman, so locked him up for the night … Natives had a fight last night and one man got his eye cut clean out with a kylie (boomerang) … I started out six miles and put a well down … I got salt water in one … and stone in the other …
“Malays kidnapped a little native girl and took her into their camp last night … I should have them arrested for criminal assault … Tomorrow I shall discharge them … Let the two old native women go today whom I had chained up for murdering a child … Johnnie’s woman killed her infant child and gave it to the pigs, the inhuman brute … She got her desserts for it – the stocks!”
For the next two years Julius Brockman’s spirit seemed to decline in the face of the terrors constantly before his eyes.
He wrote: “Am tired to death and broken hearted, for the outlook is dismal beyond all description. My heart is like lead … No sign of rain …
“I reported native ‘Monday’ for a vile, foul, infamous criminal assault upon a girl of six years, of such an outrageous nature as to cause her death. I hope the case will be thoroughly investigated and that he will be hanged …
“Caught a (bush) turkey too poor to fly … They are dying from starvation. The monotony of life is terrible. A sort of long, drawn out, gradual starvation in a continuous, blinding, whirlwind of dust, aggravated by every sort of irritation and worry and trouble … After this horrible experience, I do not believe in either God or the Devil, for what power could stand calmly by and indifferently regard the sufferings and tortures of these poor dumb beasts … having the power to avert all this misery without the exercise of it?”
On Christmas Day, 1891, still depressed with his lot, Brockman complained: “What is there to rejoice at with the prospect of ruination staring one in the face and the daily sight of of the dreadful struggle and famine? … It seems as if Providence has determined upon the destruction of all animal and vegetable life …”
In January, 1893, his diary states: “Carnarvon is full of loafers and surveyors. There is more drinking going on than I ever saw before. It would disgust the Devil himself. Wherever one turns, one meets a drunken man; the whole place is reeking with drink.”
Brockman’s home in Carnarvon was “Leura Farm” (now along Robinson Street), consisting of 60 acres on the southern bank of the Gascoyne River, where he established an experimental garden and orchard.
Early in 1895, Brockman, then aged 45, was informed of the death of his “dearest friend,” 26-year-old nurse, Emily Taylor – the young woman he had hoped to marry who died at Roebourne of typhoid fever.
Again his heart fell to grieving as he wrote: “All my hopes are gone. There is nothing that is worth worrying about now. If it were possible, I would leave here for ever. It is very lonely. I have never felt so before. I see no reason why a man should live if he has no desire to do so … Never more …”
Julius Brockman completed his last Minilya shearing in September, 1900, sending 337 bales of wool to Carnarvon for shipment south.
He offered for sale his property to D. McLeod for $34,000 with 20,000 sheep. Later he purchased a property on the Chapman River, near Geraldton, “Eurilla.”
Tired by the torturous bush life, Brockman farmed for a time in the milder southern climate embarking on a leisurely world tour, visiting Singapore, the East Indies, Hong Kong, China, Japan, New Zealand and the U.S.A.
After travelling extensively in America, the bushman complained in 1905: “I am now full of the USA and its discomforts. Baths are a luxury and towels unknown … From what I can learn from certain odours, peculiar to the great unwashed, people do not bathe from September to February …”
Then, ironically, Brockman adds: “May Australia never be cursed by American’s laws, manners and customs.”
Visiting England, Ireland, Egypt, Holland and Germany, the traveller returned to Australia to serve out his declining years as a rather crusty, out-spoken bachelor, critical of the rising generations of Australians who “drank and danced too much and could not make a bed.”
“What sort of creatures will they be in fifty years?” he wondered in his diary.
Brockman never returned to his beloved North West, a place he came to call “The Land of God.”
Admitted to the Geraldton Hospital, George Julius Brockman died on August 29, 1912, aged 62 years, and was buried at Geraldton Park.
Described as a “generous, genial, high-souled man,” Julius Brockman was a great pioneer of the North West of West Australia who, in his will, bequeathed $100 for the benefit of “any old native servants” who toiled by his side during the heart-breaking seasons at Minilya Station in the first years of settlement.
THE LIFE OF A MAN WHO ONE DAY A FILM SHOULD BE MADE OF . THE BOOK “HE RODE ALONE” WRITTEN FROM HIS DIARYS IS A FASCINATING STORY OF THE HARSH LIFE IN THE 1800 s IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA.
— WILL SLATER · 25 April 2008 · #
I,am a friend of Jamie Julius Brockman.Vernon Brockman told me of a book that was writen from the diary from a saddle bag and i was wondering if this is the book,and where can i get a copy.
— Paul Whincup · 2 June 2011 · #