Freo squared – reconciliation or cheap politics?

COMMENT: Beaconsfield Ward Cr Hannah Fitzhardinge last year told council there had been plenty of community consultation on renaming Kings Square as part of its Walyalup reconciliation action plan. After having spoken to local Indigenous people the day before elected members met on February 26, 2020, the Labor mayoral hopeful said she decided to move an alternative idea where the City’s ‘stakeholder’ group (of which she is now chair) would present a shortlist of names after consulting the wider community (www.streetwisemedia.com.au/kings-square).
Having voted to name the City’s new civic building Walyalup Civic Centre, council deferred its decision to retitle the historic square after Noongar leaders including Yagan’s father Midgegooroo, pronounced ‘midj-ee-gor-oo’.
Last week, more than a year since Cr Fitzhardine’s change of mind, the City released a shortlist of five options including Midgegooroo: “The process attracted 194 submissions which included 128 suggestions for a new name, five suggestions for a dual name and 108 general comments about renaming the square or keeping the current name”. This is hardly a whopping result given the City states it reached out to residents and community groups online, via mailouts and direct contact with local schools, youth and leisure centres and businesses fronting the new space. The number of responses show most people do not care, raising questions over whether the City’s My Say survey is rigorous enough or just a tick-the-box exercise to ensure it followed due process.
Cr Fitzhardinge said suggestions were assessed against three criteria – civic pride, be relevant to Fremantle and stand the test of time, ‘enduring’. She said the names were provided to Landgate for preliminary comments before ‘stakeholders’ considered it: “The issue of acknowledging Fremantle’s Italian heritage also came up through the process, so we’ve included an option to use Piazza rather than Square to refer to the space.”
Naming options will be open for discussion before council considers a final title later this year including, “the current name Kings Square, Whadjuk Noongar names already put forward (Midgegooroo, Whadjuk, Walyalup and Manjaree), and other suitable suggestions received through the stage one process”. The public has until April 18 to respond.

Alleged?

IN its April 2020 edition, Freo StreetWise published a 10-page feature that drew on archival records of and academic research into early WA colonial history to build a better picture of Noongar elder Midgegooroo and other Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal figures against the City’s three criteria of pride, timelessness and local relevance (https://streetwisemedia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Freo-Streetwise-Easter-Edition-2020.pdf).
Historical figures profiled by StreetWise include tracker Tommy Windich or Windiitj, who helped recapture bushranger Moondyne Joe; boxing legend Black Paddy; Mary Sargeant; who fought for the right of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to live together; former PM John Curtin; Captain Charles Fremantle; and Italian sculptor Pietro Porcelli, who designed the Monument Hill war memorial.
According to the City, Midgegooroo was the leader of the Whadjuk clan that occupied and “owned” the area called Beeliar, which included Fremantle (A national park and street in Cockburn Central are already named after Midgegooroo).
Importantly, the City states Midgegooroo was executed by firing squad on May 22, 1833, for what it claims was, “the alleged killing of colonial settlers”.
Alleged? Midgegooroo actually killed settlers. There is nothing alleged about the Noongar elder or his son Yagan’s part in some of the most brutal and well-documented confrontations with colonists and soldiers in the Swan River Colony after 1829.
This sugar-coated history promoted on the City’s webpage shows up the City and most of its elected members for its ideologically-driven and arrogant dismissal of official and eyewitness accounts of Midgegooroo while unable to provide any evidence Midgegooroo or Yagan did not commit the crimes they were accused of.
But the real crime is the attempted rewrite of local history in a process designed to support the same ideological agenda that saw Fremantle council walk away from Australia Day.
How can council conduct an ‘independent’ rename of Kings Square when most of its elected members are politically motivated, Cr Fitzhardinge stating a final decision will be made later this year (presumably before the chair of the stakeholder group runs in the local government elections in October).
Using the ‘Indigenous card’ to promote personal political agendas is disrespectful. East Ward Cr Su Groome and Hilton Cr Sam Wainwright clearly don’t like statues and monuments honouring ‘white’ colonial figures such as Captain James Cook. City Ward Cr Rachel Pemberton even describes the city’s founding father Charles Fremantle as a paedophile and rapist though she provides no evidence he was convicted of any such crime, her unsubstantiated commentary having offended the Fremantle family in the UK.
There is no dispute settlers and soldiers killed Aboriginal people, Midgegooroo’s people and members of his family including two sons, Domjum and Yagan, the latter, with his father, declared an outlaw by colonial administrator Lt-Governor Frederick Irwin. The Brits were brutal, with ‘punishment’ raids waged against Aboriginal people in WA since 1829. Hundreds of Indigenous people and settlers were killed; in Perth (1830); Pinjarra (1834), La Grange (1865), Flying Foam (1868), Kariyarri (1890-99), Ravensthorpe (1880), Worla, Kitja (1900), Sturt Creek (1922), Bedford Downs (1924), Forrest River (1926) and many more.
* In May 1830, just three years before he was executed, Midgegooroo was found and beaten by a military detachment while plucking two turkeys stolen from a farm on the Canning River. The same month, Midgegooroo’s son Domjum was shot breaking into a shop in Fremantle.
* In February 1831, Midgegooroo visited Lionel Samson’s store in Fremantle where he was given biscuits by servant James Lacey who stated: “Midgegooroo was not satisfied, I was obliged to put him out of the store by force. As I was in the act of shutting the door he threw a spear at me through the open space of the door-way; it lodged in the opposite side”.

Blood on both hands

THE episode that stands out for its ferocity and fear it generated among colonists, as well as Aboriginal people, unfolded on August 3, 1831, when a man named Thomas Smedley, servant to farmer Archibald Butler, reported having discovered, “a native (a relative of Midgegooroo) stealing potatoes from Mr. A. Butler’s garden on the banks of Melville Water … He fired at and killed him. Shortly afterwards a party of natives surrounded the house of Mr. Butler, and brutally murdered his servant Entwistle”.
Inside, Erin Entwhistle hid his two sons under the bed as Midgegooroo approached the farmhouse. Entwhistle’s son, aged about 10, survived the attack and later gave a statement identifying Midgegooroo as the principal offender in the killing: “They thrust spears through the wattle wall of the house – my father was ill at the time – he went out and was instantly speared. I saw the tall native called Yagan throw the first spear – which entered my father’s breast, and another native Midgegooroo threw the second spear, which brought my father to the ground. I saw an old woman rather tall and wanting her front teeth and who I have since been told by Midgegooroo himself is his wife, break my father’s legs, and cut his head to pieces with an axe. My father had always been kind to Midgegooroo’s tribe, and on good terms with them.”
The Noongar elder with a ‘remarkable bump’ on his forehead was about 50 years old when he was executed at Perth Gaol on May 22, 1833. He had two wives, the younger Ganiup, and four sons including ‘Billy’, believed to be five years of age, also referred to as ‘young Midgegooroo’. He was sent to the Government schooner Ellen off Garden Island, “out of sound and hearing of what was to happen to his father”. Midgegooroo, the most significant Indigenous man in the Fremantle area at the time, “yelled and struggled fiercely to escape. He was pinioned and blindfolded, and bound to the outer door of the gaol”. The Noongar elder was shot dead in the only firing squad execution in the history of Australian colonisation.
News of Midgegooroo’s death was kept from Yagan, who vowed to kill three white people if anyone harmed his father. Yagan was killed a few months after Midgegooroo’s death, his head sent to England as an, ‘anthropological curiosity” later returned to WA.
Newspapers in 1833 were filled with reports of theft and violence in the colony of just over 1500 settlers and military personnel, the powder keg lit in the previous year when, “the usual allowances of flour, etc. were denied the natives, and hence the increased number of instances of thieving. The original fear of white weapons, too, had worn off, and having successfully murdered some men, they more readily murdered others. It was murder on both sides”.
Civic pride? Enduring?
Why drag out this ‘process’ when Fremantle council could have simply chosen or applied for a dual name as it has done for many other place names in the city? Over to Hannah & Co.
More stories at www.streetwisemedia.com.au.