Pulling the past together: Dr Ray Kerkhove traces the major Aboriginal camps around Brisbane. Credit:Tony Moore At the time he worked as a junior historian for FAIRA, the Foundation of Aboriginal and Island Research Association at Spring Hill. He had to pretend he was not researching the history of Musgrave Park. ‘‘They were bugging us, they were tapping our phones,’’ Dr Kerkhove said. ‘‘The police would ring me up and say ‘Why are you doing this, why are you working with them'?

‘‘Joh’s special branch used to tap the office and interrogate me, and say ‘You shouldn’t be involved,’’ he said. In those days, Ray Kerkhove was a recent history graduate. ‘‘I just wanted to help and they didn’t have any money - I mean this was back in the dark old Joh days,’’ he said with a smile. ‘‘Everywhere they tried to rent office space people would say ‘Oh, you’re black, we don’t want you,’’ he said. ‘‘They said, ‘All we can offer you is $700 to help us with our research on Musgrave Park for six months',’’ he says.

‘‘And I said ‘I’ll do it, I’ll do it'.’’ At the time he was so poor, he would walk to work (at Spring Hill) from his home at Greenslopes because he needed the job. ‘‘I was unemployed and they couldn’t pay me (a wage), and I used to just used to hang out at the office answering phones doing all sorts of things.’’ Complexities prevented a full version of his research ever coming out. It is a long story. However 2012 is a different time, he says.

Thirty years on, Ray Kerkhove’s Aboriginal research for FAIRA is still relied upon, particularly some of the original oral histories he recorded. Historians Ros Kidd and Carroll Go-Sam whom brisbanetimes.com.au reported this week, refer to his research. Now he wants to publish a book finally putting together a history of the larger Aboriginal camps in Brisbane. In Enoggera, he straddles a large paper map on his lounge room floor, pointing out large Aboriginal camping grounds we now know as Enoggera, Breakfast Creek, Spring Hill or ‘‘Baramban’’, South Brisbane and Woolloongabba, or ‘‘Woollen-carpen’’. Pre-white settlement, Brisbane had ‘‘canoe reaches’’ - basically ‘bridges’ at the narrow river crossings from Kangaroo Point to Howard Smith Wharves; between Chelmer and St Lucia; between South Brisbane and North Quay and between West End and Toowong.

‘‘They were like our buses, you always had a canoe parked there so you could cross over,’’ he said. Each of the camps would be home - temporarily, but repeatedly - for 500 to 600 people. They were close to hunting grounds; the West End/Hill End peninsula for the South Brisbane campground; the Kangaroo Point peninsula for the Woolloongabba camping grounds and the ‘‘George Street’’ peninsula on the northern side of the river for the York Gully or Spring Hill camping ground. Between James Cook’s visit in 1770 and 1825c when white settlement shifted from ‘‘Humpy Bong’’ or Redcliffe to ‘‘Brisbane’’, Southeast Queensland’s Aboriginal population dropped from 20,000 to around 10,000. In 1842 three white townships were started; North Brisbane, Kangaroo Point and South Brisbane. In 1846, there were less than a thousand people living in these three areas.

Ray Kerkhove says that by the 1860s there were around 6000 white people living in Brisbane, but about 5000 Aboriginals. ‘‘Everyone talks about them being fringe camps, but as far as I can work out, they were where their settlements started - they were their first camps,’’ he says. ‘‘They were here before settlement. They only became ‘fringe camps’ because we surrounded them. They didn’t start out as fringes at all.’’ He said ‘‘York’s Hollow’’ or ‘‘Barambin’’ at Spring Hill and the Woolloongabba camp grounds were the prime spots, while South Brisbane had a string of waterholes along a creek. ‘‘You've got to remember that the population ratio was different,’’ he said.

‘‘In the 1860s you are talking about Brisbane having 6000 people, but the Aboriginal population in the Brisbane area and up in Moreton was about 5000. ‘‘So it was almost equal. They were a bit afraid, and going back a couple more decades they were even more afraid.’’ Ray Kerkhove has no doubt that ‘‘Musgrave Park’’ is what remains of a larger permanent meeting place for Aborigines, known as the South Brisbane Recreation Reserve. ‘‘Musgrave is the last little piece of it, if you like,’’ he said. He spent time at Musgrave Park with an older anthropologist named Bill Love, who died in the 1990s, who had found stone axeheads near Musgrave Park and later found scrapers made from tiles.

‘‘He found little roof tiles from the 1880s which had been turned into tools, and that was at Musgrave,’’ he said. Ray Kerkhove has no doubts that what remains of Musgrave Park was a permanent Aboriginal camp and remains an important place for Aboriginal culture in Brisbane. One South Brisbane resident, Chas Melton, described the camp in detail, he said. ‘‘Melton described it as being at the base of Highgate Hill,’’ he said. ‘‘He talks about the water holes and it being very streteched out, of them camping all the way from (what is now) Somerville House along this whole South Brisbane area. Near the dry docks where the Maritime Museum is.’’

Ray Kerkhove says it is no surprise that Aboriginal people coming to Brisbane find their way to Musgrave Park. ‘‘This is the like the last stand if you like, at Musgrave Park,’’ Ray Kerkhove says. ‘‘This is why they get so upset. It’s like the last little pitched battle over the remnant of what was,’’ he says. ‘‘It is the liitle teeny piece that was left to them. They are now public parks and it gets me so angry. ‘‘They (critics) say, ’Well I can’t pitch a tent in a public park, but it’s a bit of a different history'.’’

‘‘I mean this is all we left to them. ‘‘They were just going to where they have always gone, if you like.’’ Some members of the Aboriginal community who have been members of the Brisbane Sovereign Tent Embassy – the centre of media attention this week - have been sleeping on Ray Kerkhove’s couch. They chose to replicate the Canberra Aboriginal Tent Embassy at Musgrave Park for obvious reasons, he says. ‘‘Because it is the one place for Aboriginal people in Brisbane that is left,’’ he says, laughing.

‘‘I mean, they don’t want to go and sit in a house. They can go and sit in plenty of houses.’’ Simply put, Musgrave Park - the remnant of what historians refer to as the South Brisbane campsite, or the South Brisbane Recreation Reserve - is a tiny remnant of what aboriginal life was before Cook, Flinders and John Oxley. ‘‘A lot of the places they were chased out of. Musgrave did keep that tradition going, but even then, it has only since being rediscovered in 1960s, that they were allowed to come back into the park.’’ At a meeting of indigenous elders and Lord Mayor Graham Quirk on Tuesday, the next tentative steps towards a new age of reconciliation may well be started.



