Important part of our story
IF YOU were living in these parts during the 1840s, there is no doubt you would have known the name Multuggerah.
He was not some obscure fringe dwelling part of our history but one of the main actors in our shared past.
William Wilkes, the editor of the Moreton Bay Courier, (the ancestor of today’s Courier Mail) penned the poem, The Raid of the Aborigines in his honour.
Wilkes was one of the key people who pushed for Queensland to become a separate colony. The neighbouring newspaper, the Queensland Times agreed when it came to Multuggerah’s prominence stating he, “exercised great sway in East and West Moreton, and as far as the western slopes of the Main Range.” (QT, June 28, 1884)
For more than a century Queensland historians have written about the warrior Multuggerah and his exploits. He even found his way into Australian fiction featuring as the character “King Multuggerah” in one of the major novels of Rosa Campbell-Praed.
Yet for some time Multuggerah’s name was lost due to what the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner labelled the Great Australian Silence.
It was hard enough to entertain the thought that life didn’t start on the Downs with the coming of Cunningham or Leichhardt or Mitchell let alone the fact that there was a genuine struggle to capture and maintain the pastoral districts to the West of the Dividing Range.
Stanner described the way we dealt with this past as a “cult of forgetfulness” which emerged at the end of the 19th century.
Until a group of Year 4 students from Middle Ridge Primary School in 2004 pushed the Toowoomba City Council to recognise Multuggerah and the Battle of One Tree Hill there was little to remind us of our shared history.
Local historians such as Bob Dansie and Professor Maurice French worked hard to break the local silence – but it was a battle to get it past the library, university or classroom walls.
Building on the work of previous historians our knowledge about Multuggerah is starting to expand.
Research by Dr Ray Kerkhove reveals that Multuggerah was a diplomat negotiating with local white settlers and in a number of cases avoiding bloodshed.
Multuggerah was also a unifier of people bringing tribes from the Lockyer Valley, the Brisbane Valley and the Darling Downs together.
He built cross cultural relationships forging a deep bond with John “Tinker” Campbell, the then owner of Westbrook Station.
Prominent local historian Libby Connors records that at the time of his death in September of 1846 Multuggerah was known as “Jemmy Campbell” having taken on “Tinker” Campbell’s surname.
The naming of the Second Range Crossing is a great opportunity for our community to collectively break the Great Australian Silence.
This is not about a separate Aboriginal history or a separate European history, this is part of everybody’s story.
This is not about guilt or promoting a black or white armband version of history. It is about revisiting our past with honesty and compassion. If you live here this is part of your story.
There will be an open event commemorating the Battle of One Tree Hill next Wednesday, September 12 at noon at Bill Goulds Lookout, Tobruk Drive, Picnic Point. Submissions to name the Second Range Crossing close on September 21.