Part Two: How Eliza Fraser Survived a Shipwreck and Sparked a Genocide

Robert tells Jack about the 'rescue' of Eliza Fraser and how her lies about what happened on K'gari Island helped to fuel decades of colonial war and genocide. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, hootley do. It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I finally learned how to open my podcast. I think we figured it out. I think we got it locked down. Oh, hootley do is a keeper. Oh, hootley do. That's, that's a keeper. That's a keeper. I think yesterday's was hub doober, dumber. Yeah. That, that, that one was, that one was a fuck up. It was a disaster. Not calamity. I, I just think it would be hard to remember to how to do it again.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  You're doing, you're doing great.

• 0:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, cuz I have to get every syllable right, obviously. Oh, hootley do. Yeah, yeah. Hootley do. Much easier, easy to remember. I can see it on T-shirts. People are gonna be getting tattoos of this in like a month. Sounds like something you would say if like a fancy person corrects you. Oh, hootley do. Yeah. Yeah.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 1:00Robert Evans?

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• 1:41Robert Evans?

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• 2:07Robert Evans?

  Now, speaking of things that are gonna be on t-shirts in a month,

• 2:12Robert Evans?

  I don't know how that actually leads us into part two. When we ended part one, Eliza Fraser and her husband-

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Where were you going there?

• 2:20Robert Evans?

  I have no, I don't know, Sophie. I just, I just transition sometimes when I'm speaking and it just usually doesn't work very well. We mostly edit in the ones where it did, but that one was a failure, you know, I can admit that.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Jamie did send me that, send me that picture of the two of us when we did that one live show when we wore each other's shirts with each other's faces on it and didn't acknowledge it.

• 2:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that was good. That was a good move. But it, you know, it's a visual joke. I try not to do too many of those because most people listen to the podcast.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:50Robert Evans?

  Well, hootley do, look who's a professional podcaster all of a sudden. Says the guy who hired me to do podcasts.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Sorry, pal. All right.

• 3:02Robert Evans?

  Now, speaking of getting hired, Eliza Fraser has kind of gotten a job, which is trying not to die while living as part of a civilization that survives off the land, a thing that she doesn't know how to do. And it's not going well. She doesn't understand and they don't understand her. Right, that no one speaks each other's language. Kribendorf's tribe. Right, right. It's not going great. So we should probably peel back a bit more to talk about the Pachilla's contacts with European civilization outside of Captain Cook and the odd Aussie prison escapee, right? We talked about that last time, their first contact, the fact that these prisoners have been like coming in like individually for a while and getting adopted.

• 3:45Robert Evans?

  Too often, when we discuss kind of the ethnographies of indigenous people being colonized, we sort of drop like, here's what they believed about the world pre-contact and then we kind of leave it at that. But again, these are not static civilizations, right? No more than, you know, the Europeans themselves were. And they adapted their beliefs many times in light of new knowledge about how the world worked. As I noted in the last episodes, the natives of what was at that point known to the Europeans as Indian Head Island and was called Gari by the people then and now. They interpreted their first sights of white people to be spirits returning from the dead. But whiteness symbolized death in every way, right? And so they didn't just respond to white people as if they were returning deceased relatives. Sometimes that would happen.

• 4:29Robert Evans?

  You'd meet someone and like a member of the tribe would get good vibes from them. Basically it would be like, oh, you know what? I think that's like my, my dad or whatever, you know, my kid or something like that who died recently. But that is not the only way they reacted. Death was always involved in their reaction, but it wasn't always like, oh, this must be a member of the tribe returned. As Dr. Peter Lauer wrote, their whiteness was symbolic of death, mourning and apprehension. And so sometimes people were like, oh no, it's a bad omen that there's white people here, right? Because that means like the dead or like it's bad. This is, this is a dark thing that's happened.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  That is always my interpretation and it's why I'm always so nervous.

• 5:05Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  In America.

• 5:06Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really terrible place for you to live.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Like, ooh, I feel like the vibes are off everywhere.

• 5:12Robert Evans?

  Looking in the mirror, oh no, the ghost.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Dear God.

• 5:16Robert Evans?

  It's me. In August of 17, I mean, looking in the mirror does make you think of your own mortality sometimes, but

• 5:22Speaker 03

  I don't like it.

• 5:23Robert Evans?

  In August of 1799, which is about 30 years after Captain Cook's voyage, an English boat called the Norfolk put ashore on the great sandy island. Captain Matthew Flinders went ashore with a party of men to find water and food near a place called Watumba Creek. As was usually the case, Flinders was mixed up and believed he'd found Australia and the, but it was just a promontory. That's constantly, they have no idea where they are. These people, the maps are shit. They're bad at reading them. They're all drunk. Now they're not just drunk, they're heavily armed. And while it's a lot of fun to be heavily armed and drunk, it's also very dangerous for the people around you. And Flinders and his crew were part of like the shoot first and never ask questions ever.

• 6:05Robert Evans?

  Like school of being a colonizer who's drunkenly landed on an island. And so when like a group of Ngulungbara tribespeople, who's like, I think they, the people who live in the south of Gari Island, they like come up to see these new people have landed and they do what normally happens like, okay, well, let's go look at this. And Flinders. And his crew just start shooting like they just they just start blasting immediately. Right. Um, they like fire a cannon at the tribe for no apparent reason. And the tribe runs away, which is a reasonable thing to do when someone shoots at you. Now, this, we don't know if this was, you know, anyone on the island's first experience with gunfire, but it's the first recorded one we have.

• 6:46Robert Evans?

  And we have a record of this from one of their songs, which roughly translated states that one of the white men, quote, "two times held up something and made loud noise and smoke. Kong, kong." I think that's how they onomatopoeia, the sound of gunfire, which is, you know, not bad. Perfectly. Yeah. So one thing that's so interesting to me about this story is that it's a really good example, again, of how much accurate historical information can be passed down through the centuries in an oral tradition like this, because the captainsmen also reported firing twice. So you have both this song and like documentation from the sailors that they shot twice.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Coming down across history, totally unrelated from one another. That's wild.

• 7:29Robert Evans?

  It's so interesting. Yeah, because usually when you're like, well, these people have an oral tradition of storytelling. It's discussed as like storytelling, as like myth. But like, no, this is no, this is not really necessarily less accurate than like a fucking newspaper in London at the time, right? Which is also a lot of times wrong or filled with lies, right? Like, and I'm not saying the songs are all like the songs, clearly, this is people recording their history. So people always have an agenda when recording their history. But it's also a lot of very, very accurate grain gets through in the history as a result of this, these oral, these songs, which I think is really interesting.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  I mean, we made up Paul Revere just because his name rhymed.

• 8:07Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  Song is not always the, our best way of recording things. So it's kind of impressive that they're getting the right number of shots down through time.

• 8:17Robert Evans?

  It's often very good. And that's all I'm saying is not that like you shouldn't view, you know, these oral like stories that the people on Gari are, it's like 100% you know, accurate history all the time, but you shouldn't view it as just like mythology. Right? Right? This is an attempt at. At recording history and like all the like Herodotus, it's not perfect, but you shouldn't see it as like less accurate than Herodotus, right?

• 8:44Robert Evans?

  And the term for this mix of singing and dancing and storytelling to preserve history among the people of Gari Island is called a corroboree. That's the term I found for it. So yeah. After one of Flinders men fired upon the Nagulungbara, Peter Lauer writes, "One of their number, Wumingela, who hid in the nearby bushes, watched the whites collecting water and killing some wild fowl with their terrible weapons before returning to the ship. Their heads are like dingo's tails," the corroboree continued, "in possible reference to the sailor's plaited hair or the kerchiefs they wore as head covering, like the ceremonial dingo tail headbands of the adult males of the tribe. The paddles are wood, are like wood shaped by the fire. Their ongoing attempt by the Aboriginal people to relate the inexplicable to what could be culturally comprehended

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  is thus most apparent in these careful observations." And again, like, yeah, you get like these recordings of how they looked and they're trying to kind of comparing their their appearance to like their own appearance, right? Like, is this this really, the amount of like fidelity you get in this attempt of one culture to comprehend another, in some ways, in a lot of ways, much better than the European accounts of the same thing, I find really interesting.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, the European account being like, they're basically animals and we tried to like shoot at them. They ran away like animals.

• 10:00Robert Evans?

  The Nagulungbara are trying to kind of do their own anthropology. They're trying to get in these people's heads to understand like, why are you doing what you're doing? What are you? Right? Which, yeah, it's just really interesting to me.

• 10:13Robert Evans?

  So Flinders returned to the island in 1802, which is three years later, with a party of scientists to collect plants and an Aboriginal person from the mainland named Bongari, like, was brought with them. So they take this this indigenous person from like the mainland with them because he can probably talk to these guys. And they they managed to make some sort of friendly contact with the Nagulungbara, who are understandably nervous because the last time they saw this guy, he shot at them and they could see guns like in the hands of men on the island and know what they mean now. Flinders tried to bribe them with an offering of blubber from porpoises. And he's like, well, this is a valuable gift by my standards. Cause like animal fat is useful for cooking.

• 10:57Robert Evans?

  But the islanders didn't hunt or kill porpoise. Because they, to them, the porpoise drive the mullet and whiting fish into their nets. So they see them as allies, like we work with the porpoise. It's really fucked up for you to kill them. They're like our friends who help us get food. Why did you murder one?

• 11:13Speaker 03

  They're like the fish shepherd.

• 11:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You just killed him?

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:17Robert Evans?

  But he's useful.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Hey, we killed your friend. Do you want some of this? You want some of the stuff in their body?

• 11:23Robert Evans?

  Man, why do these people like this stuff? Yeah, it's, it's, it's, yeah. Anyway, so for the next about, that's like kind of the last well documented contact between the Europeans and people on the island for like 30 years or so. Right? Even though there's some ships that semi regularly stop and obviously some convicts who find their way. This is like, when Eliza Fraser lands, they're like last contacts, detailed contacts with Europeans that they had stories of. Were like, yeah, they tried to kill us and then they killed one of our friends. So it's kind of amazing that they treat her and her fellow shipmates so well. Like given that history.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  And it's kind of a less a, the white gods descended from the sea and more of a these assholes again.

• 12:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Type situation.

• 12:06Robert Evans?

  And it, it, you know, this is something I don't think we have perfect texture on, but it does kind of seem like by the time they take her in, they have moved on to like, yeah, these probably aren't the dead return. These are like some kind of assholes, some species of asshole.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Very specific species of asshole.

• 12:20Robert Evans?

  They're, they're clearly willing to be like, but maybe not all of them suck. Well, we'll try to stop these people from dying. Right? Um, so again, we'll discuss further how Eliza described them as cruel and vicious. But it is also important to note that other survivors of this shipwreck talk very differently about this people. Robert Darje is often considered the most dependable and reliable source of firsthand accounts from the Sterling Castle survivors. And he described the locals as treating them very hard and stated, we had to work severely to get fish and kangaroos. But it's also clear he understood that this hardness was A product of the difficulty of survival on the island and added, I cannot call them a cruel people. So like, yeah, they, we had to work. It's difficult, but like, they weren't mean.

• 13:06Robert Evans?

  This is just the only way to live there.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Fucking Darje.

• 13:10Robert Evans?

  Darje.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Great last name. Darje. It does sound like somebody. I used to get shitfaced with Darje.

• 13:15Robert Evans?

  Oh, Darje. Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Darje, Darje.

• 13:19Robert Evans?

  You might compare Eliza's situation in this to like a post-apocalyptic story where some Instagram influencer flees the city and finds refuge in an off-grid farm. And they're like, taken care of, but like, they have to learn how to work, right? It is kind of like this, that sort of situation, right? This is like a middle-class person who's now having to learn how to live off the land. And she seems to have taken grave offense to this. Peter Lauer notes in his excellent history of the island, "It was later reported that Mrs. Fraser was compelled to drag in wood for the fires and fetch water with as much cruelty as the gins themselves." This is from like, a piece of reporting at the time. That's obviously, uh, uh, on the, like, on the slur spectrum, right?

• 14:02Speaker 03

  The gins themselves. Okay. Yeah. That seems bad.

• 14:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And as she herself claimed, "She was constantly beaten when incapable of carrying the heavy loads they put upon me." Now, Lauer does go into some detail about how hideously traumatic the crew's experiences before this had been. And when they came upon the Bachelot, it was late winter, the most meager season of the year, which means that not only were Eliza and her fellows starving, but everyone kind of was. The shipwreck survivors had gone through a shipwreck, so they were ill. They're not good for a lot of work initially, which means they're being supported by the resources of people who are hungry themselves. When interviewed later, surviving islanders described the shipwreck survivors as being incapable of foraging, quote, "at which even small children were expert." So like, even our little kids are

• 14:47Robert Evans?

  better at living than you guys. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? And their incompetence was galling enough that it may have provoked violence.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  It would have been so easy for them to, if they were as...

• 14:57Robert Evans?

  Beat them to die, right?

• 14:58Speaker 03

  If they were as cruel as like, any aspect of this like, universe asks us to believe, it would have been so easy for them to just kill them. Like, they are not useful to them

• 15:09Robert Evans?

  No, they are not helping. They are not making anyone's life better.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:15Robert Evans?

  Now, Robert Darje also came to expect.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Darje.

• 15:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and this is why I find Darje interesting because like, he's not like sugarcoating the situation. He's like, you know, I did face hostility from some of them. Some of them even like tried to do violence to me. And I think it was because the last time they'd met Europeans, they'd been shot. Quote, "I believe that the reason some had such a hatred of me was that soldiers had wounded them. I observed that a man who lost his leg had a desperate hatred of me and he tried to kill me three or four times." Yeah, man.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  The guy who had his leg blown off by the guy, yeah. Um, did they, were they armed at this point?

• 15:54Robert Evans?

  Yes, they still, they have some sort of arms. It's unclear to me how well they're able to use them. There are reports that they had guns, but obviously, I don't know how much powder they got away with. I don't know how damaged the weapons were by the water and the shipwreck, so they may not have been super usable, right?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Got it. Yeah, yeah.

• 16:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's interesting to me that like, again, like, these shipwrecks also are not a monolith. You know, you've got Eliza who's gonna tell these fucked up stories and you got Darje who's like, "Yeah, this guy tried to kill me, but he'd had his leg blown off by a cannon, so like, I get it." You know, like, yeah, I'd probably be pretty pissed.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  For literally no rea- like, they were doing our favorite pastime at that time, which was watching a ship come in and like wave.

• 16:36Robert Evans?

  What's happening?

• 16:36Speaker 03

  That was, that was basically the movies back then.

• 16:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  You wanna go down to the dock and wave at a ship that's coming in?

• 16:42Robert Evans?

  And people shot them.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, they got shot with a fucking cannon, Jesus.

• 16:46Robert Evans?

  And so that's probably when we talk about like, some people were like, would have been violent when these folks like failed to do their chores. Well, maybe some of the reason why they were forceful is that they'd had friends and family killed or been injured themselves by European guns. You know, not the craziest scenario.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Wild take.

• 17:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so, uh, you know, there's some other things happening here. There's still this kind of lingering belief that these people have something to do with returned spirits. And like, when someone dies, you burn their shelter? Because it's bad luck to have the shelter around. The spirit might get stuck there. And so there was this attitude that like, well, they, they don't need to sleep indoors, right? Which is bad for them. You know, like it doesn't make this any more comfortable. Sure. But they're not trying to be assholes by doing that. Probably the kind of darkest matter of conflict here is the matter of what happened to Captain Frazier. We don't know exactly, but Eliza's husband was killed or died soon after they were taken in by the tribe.

• 17:45Robert Evans?

  Eliza would later claim that about, after about five weeks with the bachola, she saw her husband trying and failing to drag a log for like the fire. And he was in bad health and not able to do this very well. And as she described it, a hunting party returned home empty handed and for some reason, one of the men stabbed Captain Frazier in the chest. Quote, "I was horrified to see it emerge several inches through his chest. I pulled the spear from his body and from his mouth, an immense quantity of blood spouted and he died." She furthermore claimed that after this, two other survivors were tied to stakes and executed by sun exposure. Confusingly, she also claims that several crewmen who escaped were burnt, but others were taken to the mainland. There is no evidence of this but her account.

• 18:28Robert Evans?

  And in fact, there is no evidence that any survivors of the shipwreck died on Frazier Island at all. The chief officer, Charles Brown, who Eliza claims was burnt at the stake, died on the Australian mainland. Her husband died at Lake Kutharaba, uh, which is also on the mainland. And he was in fact stabbed with a spear at some point, although this did not kill him immediately like she claimed. Instead, it seems like what happened is like someone slapped him in annoyance with a spear, which caused like a superficial wound. But he was sick and it got infected. And so two weeks later, he dies as a result of the injury, right? Which is a very different story. On the mainland. Yeah, on the mainland also, because they take them to the mainland.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  He was so annoying that somebody spear slapped him.

• 19:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. To death. That's kind of what it sounds like. We don't know, because again, she lies about all this, like she says it happens on the island. They are taken off the island, uh, like by the bachola. It doesn't happen there. The guy she claims is burnt to death definitely isn't burnt to death. And her husband isn't just like impaled and bleeds to death immediately. Like he suffers a light wound that gets infected and he dies two weeks later.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  This is a, this is a big episode for the women lie guys.

• 19:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, baby.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  I mean, I didn't trust her from the beginning. Okay.

• 19:50Robert Evans?

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• 19:55Speaker 03

  Beautiful lies.

• 19:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, beautiful lies. Believe them, just like Australian people believed Eliza.

• 20:05Robert Evans?

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• 21:04Robert Evans?

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• 21:49Robert Evans?

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• 22:15Robert Evans?

  Ah, and we're back. So in all, Eliza spent about three months with the Pachola. And by the time she was rescued by her fellow Europeans, she'd been moved to the mainland. Her rescue was affected largely thanks to an Irish convict named John Graham, who's another one of these really cool guys you hear about in this story that I want more about. Yeah. He had previously wound up on Fraser Island. So he was another, he was a convict who had like escaped to Fraser Island and he had been taken in by locals who adopted him as Moilo, the spirit of an elder who had died recently. And he'd basically been taken in by the old man's wife and son and spent six years living as part of the family and then headed back to the mainland.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  What is happening?

• 22:57Robert Evans?

  What a run.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  What is happening in this, in the script?

• 22:59Robert Evans?

  I mean, people could just do stuff back then. Like there was, it was really easy to die doing stuff, but you had a lot of options for, you know what? I'm going to live a completely different kind of life now for like six years. Bye.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  I'm still stuck on, you're annoying. I'm going to spear you in the chest.

• 23:16Robert Evans?

  I have definitely met some people that had I had a spear in hand, I would have slapped them with it. Now thankfully, we have modern methods of cleaning spear wounds here. So every time I've done that, I've been able to stop them from, you know, dying of an infection. It would have been a friendly spear slap to the chest. Oh, it wouldn't have been friendly, but um, so anyway, this guy, John Graham, right? He'd spent six years or so living with the Pachola and then he had returned to European civilization and he had gotten imprisoned again, right? So he's, he's in custody, but when members like folks from the Pinnace who had like left get back and are like, yeah, How are we spelling that, by the way? I just have to ask, the Pinnace? P-I-N-N-A-C-E. Okay, got it.

• 24:00Robert Evans?

  So when they get back, people are like, hey, there's more shipwreck victims that are out somewhere near this island, you know, off the coast. We should go get them. They try, they start to like local authorities start to put together a rescue party and someone's like, well, there's this dude in prison, John Graham, who like lived on that island for a while. He probably knows how to talk to people and can probably find. Them, right?

• 24:25Speaker 03

  So it's like the plot from The Rock, basically.

• 24:27Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, this is a, this is, this is The Rock.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  He's Sean Connery in The Rock.

• 24:31Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  They're like, well, there's only one man who knows how to get in there.

• 24:35Robert Evans?

  He's in, the island is where he went to escape from prison, as opposed to the prison he was in.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  It's complicated, but yeah, basically.

• 24:42Robert Evans?

  In his book, Irish Convict Lives, author D.J. Mulvaney describes Graham stripping himself, as soon as he's like, yeah, I'll go, I'll go rescue these people. He strips naked, greases himself up and then leaves with bread and a potato. And

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Which is what you did immediately after accepting my offer to work at a Cool Zone or at iHeart.

• 25:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I stripped naked, greased myself up, grabbed bread and a potato.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  And we're out the door.

• 25:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, look, I know it sounds like I'm being like racist to Irish people, but that is what the history says. He just marches off with bread and a potato.

• 25:20Robert Evans?

  According to Fianz, who's like one of the authorities at the time, Graham stripped off his clothes, greased himself up with charcoal and grease and set off to seek information armed only with some bread and some potato. He was soon welcomed back among his people, observing customary ritual by sharing his carbohydrate rich food with them. Around the fire that night, he learned of the presence of two young ghosts across Lake Curaburra. He offered tomahawks to those who brought them to him, for he stressed they were my sons. So maybe he's not working, like he's looking for like two men who were among the shipwrecked people. He's not really thinking about Eliza for whatever reason.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Oh, those are, the ghosts are the white shipwreck victims.

• 25:58Robert Evans?

  Right, that's how he's talking about it to these people on Fraser Island. And they're like, well, we already actually took them across like the, the strait to the mainland. They're over, you know, by this lake now.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, just a world-class bullshitter who's like, yeah, and then I told them that they were ghosts over there.

• 26:14Robert Evans?

  And they're my sons, my other kids.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Right, the only way they could possibly understand.

• 26:18Robert Evans?

  He's got the, he's Irish, he's got the gift of gab. And he, and he brought a potato. So, you know, they're endeared to him. You bring me a potato and some axes, I'm, I'm gonna be your friend.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Based on his behavior and having nothing to do with his Irish heritage, I'm going to be forced to assume that he was shitfaced this whole time.

• 26:34Robert Evans?

  One has to guess, right? I'm not, I'm not going off on this mission sober.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Was the taking all of his clothes off and greasing up and grabbing.

• 26:44Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Maybe he does this like on the boat when they get him near the island. But the way the story is, it sounds like he's like in Sydney and just stripped naked. They're like halfway through giving him the assignment and he's already taking his clothes off. Oh, this guy got his dick out immediately. He was down. Anyway, to make a long story short, Graham saves the day. He rescues a couple of the remaining crew members and Eliza Fraser, for which he was rewarded with his freedom. And he went on to live an apparently law abiding life. There's a book about him called John Graham Convict 1824 that was published by Robert Gibbings in 1937. Grambo. But he doesn't really seem to have done much after this. He at least doesn't wind up in trouble again. So good for you, John Graham. Fucking Grambo, guy's a legend. Grambo, yeah, yeah.

• 27:29Robert Evans?

  Loves, loves being naked and covered in grease. Yeah. Fucking animal, dude. Thanks to Grambo, Eliza wound up back in Sydney, where she spent several months recovering physically from the trauma of the journey and crafting the first versions of what will soon be her famous story. Her exact motivations after this point will forever be unclear. There are many things we know that she lied about, such as the nature of several of the deaths of her crewmen. But then there are things that may be down to interpretation. For example, perhaps she interpreted the behavior of the bachola as cruel when it was not, and felt a need to punish them by lying and exaggerating what had occurred.

• 28:09Robert Evans?

  The idea of an English lady living among Aboriginal people on an island for months titillated white society, not just in Sydney, but around the globe. And we kind of, we have global media by the mid 1830s. Newspapers and stuff get around, so this story doesn't just stay in Sydney for very long. In addition to that, like people are leaving constantly Sydney on boats and they're spreading the story around the whole British Empire. Eliza gives her first version of events when she's still in Moreton Bay in September of 1836. And this was noted by Peter Lauer, the historian, as being the least sensational version of the story she would provide. He writes that this version of events was, quote, "gradually embroidered with new horrors in Sydney and London for the titillation of eager audiences and in anticipation of financial recompense."

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Right. Like basically a stand up routine that like they're just like working on their material. They're seeing what gets a reaction. They're steering it in that direction. And yeah.

• 29:06Robert Evans?

  It's also, and there's a little bit of like a GoFundMe situation here where she's like, because she is raising like donations to help her for this. And she's kind of like, ah, the original story, I gotta, if I'm gonna really get donations, I gotta make people feel sorry for me. If they're gonna open their pocketbooks here, you know?

• 29:23Speaker 03

  It's a good system capitalism.

• 29:24Robert Evans?

  It's great. I love, I love the way it works.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Oh, my husband is dead. I'm going to have to tell enormous harmful lies in order to get people to give me their money, because otherwise I'll starve to death.

• 29:37Robert Evans?

  It's simply the only way to succeed. There is some debate that she may have been coaxed along in juicing up the story by her second husband, the man she married not long after, like within weeks of being rescued, another captain, she's got a type, John Green.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Hell, yeah.

• 29:55Robert Evans?

  And at least one version of events is that Green helps her massage and maybe even written the second version of the story into something that was more fit to win sympathy and money from the English citizenry, because he takes her from Sydney to London, right? And they get a bunch of donations in Sydney with the first version of the story, enough that she's doing well. She's got like enough money to start a new life. And she's also now married to a captain. But he takes her to London where they publish another version of events and they start raising money again to compensate for Ms. Fraser, now Mrs. Green's trauma. Eliza, again, she's like, has done pretty well previously, which may have had

• 30:36Robert Evans?

  something to do with why Green married her in February of the next year. But we don't really know that he wrote her version of events. The best evidence for this is that when they land in London, they published a more embellished version of the story. And the signature on this was different from how Eliza had signed her first account and how she'd signed documents in the past. And people wonder, oh, was Green just kind of forging her signature? Did like he do this?

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:02Robert Evans?

  We'll never know.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Because I mean, it's being written, so it must be. The man, right?

• 31:07Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. And that's also it. A woman could never lie about things that happened to her for money.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  That's too ingenious. I also wonder, like, was there some element of like, when people find out that she lived out there with this tribe for so long, like, is there some, like, looking askance and being like, ah, she went savage? Or, you know, that was like a big term at the time, like,

• 31:32Robert Evans?

  Yes, a wild European, I think, was another way they put it. A wild white person, yeah, wild white man. That's what they call these convicts. Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  She's having to, like, do some reputation, like, by acting like she was, that they were mean to her and not that she was, like, accepted into the tribe. Is it like helping her kind of save face a little bit?

• 31:54Robert Evans?

  Yes, I think that's part of it, too, because there's also all these myths or these rumors about, like, well, did she sleep with any of them? Or did any of them, like, rape her, right? Like, that's a, that's a thing that people talk about. And she kind of plays into, to an extent, because, again, it, it increases the sympathy of the story a little bit. But you also can't go too far because it's bad for your reputation, right? There's like a lot of patriarchal norms in the society that also play into how she's received and what she says.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, that makes sense. Like, that feels like that's something that's gotta be playing in there. That's gotta be, like, at least a consideration for her and her new captain husband as they're, like, deciding. Yeah.

• 32:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And the version of the story that she disseminates in London, the natives of Fraser Island, which had been named Fraser Island at that point, again, it's always called Gari, but people now call it Fraser Island because her husband had died there. Even though he didn't die there, he died on the mainland. The people there are depicted as nightmarish savages. She called her time with them a fate worse than death. She described them as cannibals. And she, of course, raised money from the people of London off her suffering. Now, again, global media does exist by this point. And so as soon as she starts telling this story in London, there are people who had been in Sydney and traveled on different boats, maybe even on the same one.

• 33:13Robert Evans?

  And we're like, well, she turned it, first off, she's raising money here. She just raised money in Sydney and she got a lot. And second, it's a different story now. Is she, is she telling you guys she doesn't have any money? Like, this, this kinda seems fucked up. And so some people go to the London press to journalists and are like, this lady might be a grifter, right? Which actually causes a scandal, like, there's articles about this, cuz she comes and she's, initially, everyone's really sympathetic and giving her money. And then there's stories that, like, she's, she's raising money a second time off this story, and it's different now, right?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Which probably also doesn't really hurt the virality, the old timey virality of the story is-

• 33:57Robert Evans?

  Controversy sells, baby. No bad PR.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, controversy, so now, yeah, the story isn't, doesn't have, like, more legs if it's just like, and, that's messed up. Well, there goes that story. Now, it's like, wait, that, she might be the villain of the story, actually. And then, yeah.

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  This is why periodically I'll just make up a bastard to do episodes on. For example, Hitler, not a real guy. I just, I just came up with him, you know? Joseph Stalin, not a real, okay, you're probably right.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe not, maybe not that one. There's a lot of people who want to believe that you did make that one up.

• 34:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, you're right.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  He's actually a normal guy who gets, gets a bad rap in a lot of places.

• 34:42Robert Evans?

  Just a painter, right?

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's just a painter that everybody decided-

• 34:46Speaker 01

  I hate this bit.

• 34:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, look, Sophie, they can't all be, all the bits are terrible, actually. I don't know. They have to be bits. So, this causes a scandal, and there is a formal inquiry in London, which is where she gives her third and final version of her story, right? So, the third version of this story is like, she hands, gives out in court when she is questioned as to what happened. And this is the first version of the story, where she claims she was forced to nurse a child by the islanders, and that she had given birth to a baby who died. And maybe, so part of why people say she may have lied about these things, or even likely did, is that, like, well, she's in trouble when she first starts telling people about this. And maybe, like, that's why she brings this up. She's like, she doesn't want this

• 35:33Robert Evans?

  inquiry to be me, like, to judge her too harshly. So, like, well, if they feel like my baby died, and I had to, like, nurse this baby who I am going to, she describes the infant as subhuman. She calls it, quote, "one of the most deformed and ugly-looking brats my eyes ever beheld." She is very racist.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  It's also just like, you made the point earlier that this, it becomes like a Marvel cinematic universe of like multiple story. Like it is the writing process of a film where they're like, I, I just feel like the protagonist is not.

• 36:04Robert Evans?

  Baby in there.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. She's not like sympathetic enough and like they're not scary enough. So.

• 36:09Robert Evans?

  We gotta make the she captain more likeable.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  The she captain lost a baby and then she has to nurse basically like the alien from the alien movies, you know, like that would really make things scary.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Why didn't you try just stripping down and pouring grease all over herself and grabbing a potato? People seemed to really like that.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  That's the move.

• 36:29Robert Evans?

  I, I mean, first off, Sophie, who wouldn't like that? Uh, that's awesome.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  That only works for men. Women who do that, uh, go to jail.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Sorry, she captain.

• 36:40Robert Evans?

  A she captain who does that would go right to jail. Um, so disgust is also a major part of her narrative and that is like, you know, a major motivating factor for conservatives, like the kind of people who are going to be running a board of inquiry for the British Empire. Like you get a reaction out of people by making them disgusted. So I don't think it's coincidental that she dials that up to 10 for the version she gives when she's in trouble. Ultimately, the whole situation seems to have ended well enough for Eliza. She made a sizable amount of money off of her story and retires probably with her second husband to New Zealand, where she lives out the remainder of her days. So unfortunately, Kiwis, she's one of yours now.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Okay. So we're good here? We're good here?

• 37:22Robert Evans?

  No, there's a, there's a genocide we gotta talk about next. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:29Robert Evans?

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• 38:28Robert Evans?

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• 39:11Robert Evans?

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• 39:39Robert Evans?

  So, uh, she disappears, Ol' Eliza, as a public figure not long after this point, but her story continues to spread about as fast as a story could spread in that period of time. In fact, variants of the Eliza Fraser story become a cottage industry in their own right for like a century or so. And I guess in a way, I'm continuing that tradition. The story first enters North America in 1837 as a pamphlet titled Narrative of the Capture: Sufferings and Miraculous Escape of Mrs. Eliza Fraser. Scholar Elaine Brown writes that, quote, "For American consumption, the illustrator dressed the Aboriginal people in loin cloths, tunics, hose, and feather headdresses, and gave them tomahawks, daggers,

• 40:21Robert Evans?

  and bows and arrows." So we just, they just like are depicted as like a racist drawing of like indigenous American people? Cause like, ah, they, otherwise, American audiences won't get what the fuck they're looking at. Yeah. And also, I have no idea what these people look at. I'm not doing any research before I draw this cover. Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:38Robert Evans?

  Um, the first attempt at a serious historic account of the whole deal was John Curtis' The Shipwreck of the Sterling Castle, which gets published in London in 1838. So like a year after Eliza comes to London. Now Curtis is the closest thing to a journalist that existed in that era, and he had attended the inquiry in person and taken notes using a system of shorthand he'd invented himself. So he is, he's there for like her court appearance, and he takes notes on the story she tells. He reports on the case for the London Times, and he doesn't just listen to Eliza. He does, scholar Elaine Brown describes what he does as, quote, "A little research of his own." So, not a lot.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Good for him.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Do your own research, bro.

• 41:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The equivalent of like, he glances at Wikipedia for like fucking Fraser Island is what it's called now. Um, she describes his book as sympathetic to the survivors. Quote, "Curtis made the most of his opportunity to produce a new Robinson Crusoe. He was dealing with a true story of shipwreck in an exotic setting on an unexplored Pacific shore, a cast of exceptional characters, the crew of a merchant ship, the captain's lady, cruel savages, red-coated soldiers, and a heroic runaway convict. A story with unlimited possibilities for conflict, tragedy, and pathos."

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Sounds like he's thinking like a real journalist, guys.

• 41:54Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, isn't that, you know, journalists at this point are basically fiction writers?

• 41:59Speaker 03

  A perfect three act structure.

• 42:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we talk about again, this method of oral storytelling that, you know, is common on the people of Gari in a lot of ways, better than journalism at the time. So that quote comes from a paper that Elaine Brown wrote in 1993 titled "The Legend of Eliza Fraser: A Survey of the Sources," which I would describe as useful, but also too sympathetic to Fraser. I'll grant Brown the fact that, as we kind of discussed, a lot of misogyny is rooted in stories by other survivors that like called Eliza a liar and a she-captain, but also the evidence strongly suggests that she did lie a lot, or at least let herself and her story be used by someone else who lied. Now, there is still a potentially

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  sympathetic version of Eliza in this, a physically and mentally traumatized woman who by several accounts was not quite sane after her rescue and was easily manipulated both by this new husband and by a public hungry for stories of savage natives and a man who promised her some kind of security and future, right? That is maybe what's going on here. We'll never really know.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  And at a time when, yeah, like, women are just like-

• 43:06Robert Evans?

  There's not a lot of options.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Treated like shit, not a lot of options, immediately like viewed, you know-

• 43:11Speaker 01

  She-captain.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, she-captain.

• 43:15Robert Evans?

  And again, she's just got a barrel of PTSD from this whole situation.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  And there's gotta be so many, like, sexist insinuations happening, the fact that she survived living with an indigenous tribe for that long.

• 43:30Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  She-captain.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Sure, sure, sure. Sophie is really luxuriating in this, and I feel like it's like going to become a new sound drop and then a t-shirt and, yeah, whole brand of merchandising.

• 43:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're really gonna squeeze more water from the rock that is the Eliza Fraser story. Um, so her lies were just what got the ball rolling, right? Whether or not you want to see her as like sympathetic and in some way a victim herself or is fundamentally malevolent, what happens next is entirely out of her hand and is a malevolent process. Elaine Brown writes, "Back in Sydney, press accounts of the shipwreck were synthesized for a chapter in Australia's first children's book, A Mother's Offering to Her Children, written by a Lady Long resident in New South Wales and printed by the Sydney Gazette in 1841. The text is in the form of a rather mannered conversation between Mrs. S. and her children, Julius, Emma, Clara, and Lucy. The dates and events mentioned are tediously detailed, but some idea of the tone of the

• 44:33Robert Evans?

  work can be gained from Clara's exclamation on hearing of the death of the mate, Mr. Brown. Such wanton barbarities fill one with horror and indignation and a wish to exterminate the perpetrators of such dreadful cruelties." So this is from a part of the book where they talk about one of the shipwreck survivors being murdered by the, the people of Garry Island and the response of one of her children to this is, "God, I want to kill them so fucking bad." We should exterminate the people who did this, right? All of them. We should exterminate the brutes, right? Yeah. Like that's, that's literally a line in a children's book. You know, kid's stuff. So when we're talking about the way in which this story influences the genocide that's happening in this period, literally like the first major publication in Australia to use this story is like, yeah, we should murder the people who did this, all of them,

• 45:18Robert Evans?

  right? Um, so, uh, to continue with Brown's writing, "Thus emerged the third problem historians have faced in dealing with the fates of the Stirling Castle survivors. The mutually hostile attitudes subsequently assumed by both the wide bay Aboriginal people and the Europeans who learned of their supposed wanton barbarities through the worldwide publicity given to Eliza Fraser's story. An undercurrent of what poet Judith Wright calls 'the fear as old as Cain' runs through most European accounts." So, you know, it's, it's bad. This is all going to be bad. Now, before we move on, I should note a coda to the Fraser story, which is that while the early stories that went viral were very much focused on her as a heroic victim, the most popular early American account was an article for Knickerbocker Magazine by Henry

• 46:02Robert Evans?

  Yolden, who is the crewman who survived and hated Eliza and maybe stole everybody's water. Yolden's back. So he's the guy who goes viral in the US for a version of this story. Uh, and he describes her as a vixen. So again, maybe not himself the best source.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Also, everybody's just so horny back then.

• 46:20Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  He's just like, oh, yeah, she's a bitch.

• 46:22Robert Evans?

  You gotta really cloak it. Yeah. The OnlyFans is very primitive at that point.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  On the kid book front, I would just on Daily Zeitgeist, we were just talking about this book written by Mike Huckabee called Kid's Guide to President Trump.

• 46:38Robert Evans?

  That, yeah, I don't think kids need that. Okay.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. And one of the thing, one of the quotes was when people come to take, uh, this is him describing illegal immigration is when people come to take money and jobs without paying taxes, sneak in to sell drugs, commit other crimes, and in worst case, commit acts of terrorism. So, um, you know, as wild as it might seem.

• 47:00Robert Evans?

  Tradition is continuing.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Isn't he the current ambassador, US ambassador to Israel?

• 47:06Speaker 03

  And this is how, one of the ways that he, it's actually like a weirdly popular way to kiss up to Trump is making a children's book about him.

• 47:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Because I also, I think it, he likes the idea of being indoctrinating children. And it's also at his reading level. So he's like, hell, yeah.

• 47:24Robert Evans?

  And again, this book, this is the first like children's book published in Australia. It comes out in 1841. A lot of the genocide we're talking about is like in the seventies and eighteen seventies, eighties, nineties. So it's going to be perpetrated and orchestrated by men who would have grown up as kids.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  The generation that was like, yeah, this was their green eggs and ham.

• 47:43Robert Evans?

  Obviously, that's not the only thing, right? It's not just this children's book makes them all do a genocide, but it's not like a non-factor.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's background noise for their growing up.

• 47:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So long after that account spreads in the US in the 1880s, another account is published claiming that an entirely different convict, a guy named Bracewell, had actually rescued Eliza. And Bracewell was the source of this. There's no evidence of this. There are some claims that maybe he sexually assaulted Eliza. That's also not based on anything. And it's mainly just, I only bring this up to note that like fucking 40 years later, people are coming with the new versions of this story based on very little evidence because it still sells. There's a book written about Bracewell's claims, right? By a guy named Russ. In 1888, because there's still money in this shit, right?

• 48:32Speaker 03

  It's like the JFK assassination. It's like, yes, people will keep telling and retelling the stories.

• 48:39Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  And also, everyone's so horny. They're like, oh, then there's this guy Bracewell who like comes in and he's like kinda handsome.

• 48:46Robert Evans?

  It's not really worth getting into this. He may have had some involvement, but like, it's not really worth talking about. What is worth noting is that Russell, the guy who writes this book about Bracewell's claims in 1888, describes how in the 1880s, decades after Eliza left for New Zealand, there are sideshows on the London streets featuring an Eliza impersonator recounting her story, right? So like someone pretending to be her telling her story.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  A fake she-captain? What's happening here?

• 49:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's awesome. A quote from Russell's book, "Walking from Hyde Park down Oxford Street, I observed a man who was carrying over his shoulder one of those show advertisements, a large wooden square frame nailed to the end of a long pole. On the calico with which it was covered was a bright colored daub which represented savages with bows and arrows, some dead bodies of white men and women which other savages were cutting up on the ground, and another squad was holding on spits to a large fire. It was amusing enough to stop me in my walk, horrible enough to impress the writing beneath this picture on my mind. Sterling Castle, wrecked on the coast of New Holland, Botany Bay, all killed and eaten by savages. Only survivor, a woman, to be seen, sixpence admission." And wow, there's a lot there, right?

• 49:54Robert Evans?

  Both that, at this point, the story has turned into, all of these people were eaten by these savages, right? Which like, just is not a part, is not even like a part of the original versions of this story, right? It's just something people have admitted to make it more racist. And also, you can see the old lady. If you just pay, she'll talk to you about what happened, which is definitely not Eliza. We know that she is in, so it's gotta be, assuming he didn't just make this up, I don't think he would, this has to be like a show where someone's like, we'll just get some old lady to pretend to be Eliza, we'll make some fucking money.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Which was like a popular thing back in the day.

• 50:26Robert Evans?

  Shit like that happened all the time.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, touring people who were like, I was George Washington's like, wet nurse.

• 50:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, whatever.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Also, like this, the idea of like a- Uh, you know, white woman who is under attack from, you know,

• 50:43Robert Evans?

  Only a survivor of this cannibal Holocaust, right?

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's also like the birth of a nation and like that's a powerful like that. That will start wars across the history of, you know, white supremacy and racism in, uh, you know, his, the history of the world.

• 51:00Robert Evans?

  Your dash gum tootin'. Um, so we know that in the US and the UK, there were also staged productions of the story of the sterling, sterling shipwreck. It gets turned into a play. There's like versions of this play up into the mid 20th century, um, and of Eliza's captivity with savages. Right. And the verbiage that Russell uses here is in keeping with like leaflets advertising, popular republications of the story from around the same time, like this. Eliza Fraser, who existed seven days without food or water, the dreadful sufferings of Miss Frazier, who with her husband and the survivors of the ill-fated crew are captured by the savages of New Holland and by them stripped entirely naked and driven into the bush.

• 51:42Robert Evans?

  Their dreadful slavery, cruel toil and excruciating tortures inflicted on them. The horrid death of Mr. Brown, who was roasted alive over a slow fire kindled beneath his feet. Meeting of Mr. And Mrs. Frazier and the inhuman murder of Captain Frazier in the presence of his wife. It's like.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Meeting of Mr. And Mrs. So we get to see the meat cute and his murder?

• 52:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I think so. I guess there's, maybe they start with, I don't know. But this is how the story has been summarized now, right? And it's just completely separate from what we know of the reality.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  And they're bringing in like the iconography that we've all seen in like old like 50s and 60s, movies where somebody is captured by cannibals and like they're tied to a post and there's a fire around them. That, you know, like all of those images are like, oh yeah, that's the familiar cannibal imagery.

• 52:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And the reality is like, yeah, you've got somebody who's like starving and frustrated and maybe like hit someone who's not able to, who's like, just can't learn a simple task. Like, that's not ideal, but it's turned into like, they were tortured and cooked over fires.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Burnt alive. Yeah. Um, so what really matters here is that the story became a huge and prominent part of the white Australian and European conception of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. This would contribute to some pretty disastrous things in the coming decades. There's no one massacre or atrocity you can point to and say, well, they did this because of what Eliza said. But I think I've established how popular this account was and thus influential. A supplement put out by the Fraser Island Defenders Association notes that "Fraser Island Aboriginal people gained international notoriety through the stories of Eliza Fraser, and one of Eliza Fraser's legacies was that there would be many massacres of the very people who had helped her." In 1842, white Australians established a head station called Tiaro near Moreton Bay,

• 53:31Robert Evans?

  which is again the bay that's very close to, you know, the island. This was attacked so vigorously by local tribes that the forces manning it were withdrawn and the station abandoned mere months later. The Commissioner of Crowned Lands for Moreton Bay noted in 1843 that "12 white people had fallen as sacrifice to the Aboriginal peoples of the area." And he's not saying they were sacrificed by those people, he's saying that those people were a sacrifice for the cause of colonialism, right?

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 53:56Robert Evans?

  Um, it's also, he notes 12 white people died. He did not bother to recount how many indigenous inhabitants were killed by white settlers in the same time period.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Not important, Robert.

• 54:05Robert Evans?

  No. And Peter Lawre's History of Fraser Island says that this was the norm, right? They just didn't talk about that. Quote, "So successful were what was Aboriginal resistance activities against isolated white settlers in this period that those moving into the Mary River area by the late 1840s were taking up the country abandoned two, even three times before. The pattern of warfare escalating upon this pastoral frontier by the late 40s is well exemplified by developments at Richard Jones's Bowie Station on the Mary River. In late November 1848, Jones experienced two successive raids upon his flocks, and a large number were carried off, not for many reasons of hunger, but as a guerrilla resistance technique, or as the Moreton Bay courier saw fit to term it, in the mere wantonness of patriotism.

• 54:46Robert Evans?

  Hollanders, a reprisal party of ten whites led by station manager Mr. Clements and assisted by a collaborative black guide, then attacked the Aboriginal camp, firing a volley into it and dispersing them." And again, there's no, no mention made of how many people were killed in this barrage of gunfire, right? But this is kind of the nature of the conflict for a while. There's both like murders when you've got these, these white folks at stations, but also, oh, they've got like a couple thousand sheep here and there's not enough of them that guard them. We'll either kill or capture, take the sheep for ourselves and that will render this unprofitable for them. Because we've started to gain a, an understanding of how their society works. Sure. And that if we can make this costly enough, they won't be able to afford to keep taking our shit. Right?

• 55:29Robert Evans?

  And that's the one thing us whites cannot abide is taking our shit. Yeah. You know? It's taking our shit. That's our property. Yeah. And that's a... Well, and that is very much like however things get dressed up today and you can find some articles made by conservative white Australians today about like, oh, you know, there really was a lot of, you know, horrible violence done by these people to these settlers and, you know, the settlers were just trying to make a living. Evidence at the time from the way these settlers was writing paints a very ugly picture. The Courier, which was a local paper, wrote, published an editorial during this period arguing, "We hold this country by the right of conquest and if that right gives us a just claim to its continued possession, we must be empowered to enforce our claim by the strong

• 56:14Robert Evans?

  arm when necessary. The blacks have just the same claim to the restoration of their decayed nationality as would the principality of Wales have if it rose in open rebellion against the crown. One law must apply to all conquered nations so far as the rights of the conqueror. Order and rule must be maintained and if this cannot be done by kindness and indulgence, it must then be affected by the iron rod." Sound like cool people. Yeah, they sound nice. They sound like nice people who would be easy to get along with. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I don't see why anyone's fighting back against them. Right. Why are they being so mean to us? Yeah. Well, they don't want us to just take their stuff? Yeah. Over the next several years, until 1850, different groups of Aboriginal warriors continued

• 56:58Robert Evans?

  to... this is a... and this is another thing that's worth emphasizing. This is a very successful insurgent campaign. They are planning, they're like, they're thinking this through, and they're, they're winning for a while. They take thousands of sheep, they destroy a lot of infrastructure, and they kill a number of settlers. And the effect of all this is to stretch the already insufficient local white labor supply and renders settling in the area financially unviable. Lauer describes this incredibly successful, vigorous defense as partly a response to the absolute shattering of the worldview many of these peoples had held for, since time immemorial. Quote, "The dawning realization that whites were not explicable spirits but unknown usurpers whose guns and horses induced terror and whose imposed presence demanded utter forfeiture

• 57:42Robert Evans?

  of territory must have emerged as a dreadful, almost inexpressible revelation. The traditional verities of a complex orderly pattern of existence were rudely shaken, spiritual values were partially falsified, and the formerly authoritative explanations of tribal elders were increasingly undermined. A people who had totally believed in a certain right mode of behavior for every person, the sacrosanct nature of individual, family, and tribal totems, and all the rules of residency, hospitality, and reciprocity, were rapidly confronted by incomers with new unstated rules and behavioral modes who were no respecters of totems or territorial boundaries and who were ready to impose an exclusive hegemony by force of arms. Tribal society here faced the most critical impasse conceivable, for to lose land was

• 58:25Robert Evans?

  not simply to lose livelihood, but to abandon the meaning of life itself. The sudden onset of an unprecedented invasion situation demanded from the indigenies, therefore, new patterns of adaptation and resistance and encouraged the emergence of new leaders capable of meeting the onslaught." And again, so this is like a culture that is changing and adapting, and one of the things they're doing is like, okay, the people who told us these white folks were one thing were wrong, we probably shouldn't listen to them about how to handle this situation. We need like a new plan, because what we were doing doesn't work. Now ultimately, after several years of this, Australian authorities called the native police into the situation, which are like Aboriginal people who are taken in and trained

• 59:08Robert Evans?

  and armed as police and led by white officers. Through the early 1850s, there were a number of bloody clashes between tribesmen and these colonial forces that killed enough warriors to force their retreat to Fraser Island, right? They basically use it as a natural fortress, that's how Lauer describes this, so that they can avoid like European reprisal raids. And, you know, this seems to be something that goes on for several years, from the end of the 1840s up to the beginning of the 1850s. And there's a lot of talk with like officers of the native force and local authorities that like, "We have to actually land people on the island to quote, 'finally put a stop to collisions between blacks and whites.'"

• 59:50Robert Evans?

  And there's an interesting line here in Lauer's writing, "Although the native police acted as a paramilitary body engaged in border warfare while in the field, no legal recognition of this role could be given, for officially the territory of others was not being conquered. It was merely seen as crown land being settled. Resisting natives were therefore held to be British subjects, behaving criminally, rather than being accorded status as legitimate force of a warring people, opposing the invasion of their lands. Thus, in order to invade Fraser Island, the required legal procedure was that the execution of warrants." So basically, well, we can't, like, this island, even though none of us, no white people live there, is crown land, right?

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Just land on it and be like, "I hereby declare that this is, yeah, you're trespassing."

• 1:00:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you're trespassing and we have a warrant, right? We have to write out a warrant before, so they go around to locals to get like descriptions of some of the men who had been leading raids, and some of them are just known by like descriptive names that settlers give them, but they actually have a bunch of warrants in hand for 35 Aboriginal men for murder and felony of settlers, right? And that's when they invade Fraser Island, this force of native police, it's with all of these warrants. So they commence an assault on August 4th, 1851. Police engage and slaughter- Locals and withdraw several times, but raids on mainland settlements continue. So in Christmas Eve of 1851, the native police engaged in a final clearing of the island. A mix of two dozen native police under several white officers and an undisclosed

• 1:01:21Robert Evans?

  number of random armed white volunteers, quote, "all armed and sworn in as special constables, run rampant across the island, killing whoever they can." So like these police get together with a bunch of just like local militia, basically, like angry white farmers, and they do an ethnic cleansing on Fraser Island, right? On Angari Island, right? They're calling it Fraser Island. Right. And that's how like a lot of these people get like forced off. That's kind of, it's not entirely the end of habitation of the island in this period of time, but it like is sort of the beginning of the end. In official reports, this is always described as a police action. And again, you can still find conservatives saying like, well, they were just trying to arrest

• 1:02:05Robert Evans?

  people who'd committed crimes. And there were several men taken into custody and apparently tried, although there's no evidence that any sort of judicial procedure was followed. They were just like, yeah, we tried and convicted them, you know? Yeah. Maybe they just shot them where they stood and lied about that later. One local reporter at the time wrote, "Rumors are afloat that the natives were driven into the sea and kept there as long as daylight or life lasted." So basically, we drove these people into, some say the sea, some say it's the Susan River, and waited until they drowned. Like, that's how this massacre finishes. And somewhere between 50 and 100 B'Challa people are killed that way, right? Jesus. Now, again, you can find a lot of argument.

• 1:02:48Robert Evans?

  I found a whole book by this Australian conservative commentator arguing that this massacre never happened. I should note that the publisher of that book, Connor Court Publishing, also publishes works of climate change denial and books by famous right-wing shitheads like Cardinal George Pell, who has been accused of covering up and ignoring child sexual abuse in the 1970s. So maybe I don't consider that the best source in the world. Fiona Foley, who I quoted earlier, an Isobachola woman, artist and writer, heard stories of the massacre from her relatives growing up as a child. And she created a sculpture based on these stories titled Annihilation of the Blacks, which became one of the National Museum of Australia's first major acquisitions by

• 1:03:30Robert Evans?

  an urban Aboriginal artist, Aboriginal person artist. And this is, Sophie's going to show you this work, Annihilation of the Blacks by Fiona Foley, who we quoted from earlier. It's a pretty striking. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Do you want to describe it, Robert?

• 1:03:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, you've got two, like, would look like trees, basically. I mean, I think they're made from like branches, but they're supposed to be trees with like a branch lying in between them. They're sort of like Y shaped at the top and there's a branch in between them and strung up on the branch are, let me count here, nine, like, black human bodies, like, strung up and hung while a single white person stands below with a pretty deep shadow cast, like, looking over them. So ultimately, the Aboriginal peoples of Fraser Island were forced out of their homes for generations. The displacement was justified by the whites, not only by the violence of the years of raids, but by the legacy of Eliza Fraser's account.

• 1:04:28Robert Evans?

  In her 2016 book, Finding Eliza, Larissa Barrent writes that stories like Eliza's provided fuel for British fear of cohabitation with native peoples and quote, "Once these anxieties found expression and form in narratives such as Eliza's, they justified the mechanisms for surveillance of Aboriginal people through policing practices, legal control and government policy." And in her own article, Foley adds, "The unspoken fear in Eliza's case was that this white woman could be sexually violated by Aboriginal men if not rescued. Racialized anxieties have formulated many patterns of structured behaviors used to subjugate Aboriginal men, women and children in Australia." And, you know, yeah, it's fucked up and it's made all the more frustrating by the

• 1:05:12Robert Evans?

  fact that while this displacement and slaughter was at its height, near the end of the 1800s, clear evidence arose, and this is while we're still in the 1800s, that the whole Fraser story had been a lie. In 1874, a colonial official named Archibald Meston spoke to several elderly men at Nusa and Fraser Island, who had been alive when Eliza and other members of her crew were sheltered. These were members of the Pachola who had known her then, right? And so, this colonial officer, official, like, who's, you know, probably, may himself have kind of grown up, or is a young person, or at least knew young people who were raised on these stories, is like, "I'm gonna see if I can talk to anyone else who was there", right?

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Robert Evans?

  And here's how Lauer summarizes that. "Concerning Eliza Fraser, Meston wrote, 'She must have either had a serious quarrel with truth, or else her head was badly affected by her experiences. Certainly, she gave a wildly improbable tale in Brisbane, accusing the Blacks of deeds quite foreign to their known character, and quite unknown before since in Aboriginal annals.' Brayswell and Durhamboy both declared that Miss Fraser's tales in Brisbane, Sydney, and London were evolved from her own imagination. The old men in the 70s told Meston a story very different from that of the lady, to the effect that the Europeans were received in a friendly manner, and passed on in canoes to the mainland at Inskip Point to be forwarded to the white people at the Brisbane Convict Settlement." And we know they were sent to the mainland? That version of the story that like, "Yeah, we sent them there because we were trying to get them back home?"

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Robert Evans?

  Is totally consistent with the objective evidence that we have. And this also comports orally with the story of the Pachola themselves. I found an article in the Courier-Meal, which interviewed Auntie Frances Gala, who's an elder of the tribe, who says of Fraser's story, "It isn't true for two very sound reasons. It never came down our oral storyline, whereas everything else of significance that happened in the past few hundred years did come down, and there's no dance about it. If James Fraser had been murdered, we would still know that dance today." Like, we would have fucking made a dance about killing that guy if we'd done it, right? Like, we have that for other people, you know? Um, and it's a good point. Like, there's all, you know?

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, we don't skimp on, yeah, that's like an important thing.

• 1:07:19Robert Evans?

  We would dance about this, right?

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  We wanted to. It would have been fucking great, but we didn't.

• 1:07:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  And, yeah.

• 1:07:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I should also note here that although Meston is kind of a hero in this part of the story, where he's helping to break this myth, or at least attempting to, he's also not what you would call a kind man to the Aboriginal people of Queensland, even though his official title was Southern Protector of the Aboriginals. It was Meston who carried out an experimental attempt to stamp out opium use among the population of Aboriginal people, which is generally described by their descendants today as an excuse to govern and control the lives of their ancestors. Per Foley, quote, "The Opium Act contained 33 clauses governing Aboriginal lives with its tentacles reaching into my traditional country and the lives of 51 B'challa people living in Maryborough, who are forcibly removed to the mission on Gari under Archibald Meston's direction."

• 1:08:13Robert Evans?

  And ultimately, the peoples who had inhabited Gari for many thousands of years were dispossessed of their home, right? They eventually get kicked entirely off of the island, and this is kind of part of that process. And the whole situation was not remedied for them. This happens at the end of the 1800s, and there don't start to be remedies to this until 1993, when the Native Title Act is passed in Australia. And actually, Fiona Foley's great aunt is the first B'challa person to lodge a title claim on Gari Island, which itself is officially renamed in 2023. So it is known legally as Fraser Island until 2023, when it is renamed Gari, which is what it was originally called. So that just happened. That's crazy. Yeah.

• 1:08:58Robert Evans?

  It took a while. 2023, they finally get their name back.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  The wheels of history turn very slowly when it comes to naming things, but we go, we go pretty fast and check the, check things out later, fact check later when it comes to killing people. We're pretty quick on that front. Yeah.

• 1:09:16Robert Evans?

  Yep. Great. Well, that's the story. You got any pluggables to plug?

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't know. It, that... Does sound shockingly familiar with like people being driven off. Again, there's just like all sorts of these things from history where that seem somewhat familiar if you pay attention to the news, which is something that we cover over on the Daily Zeitgeist, me and my co-host, Miles Gray, which you can go check out anywhere. Fine podcasts are given away for free. You can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien and on Blue Sky at Jack OB and then the number one.

• 1:09:57Robert Evans?

  Jackie O, which is not what we call you.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  No, not at all. My cousin.

• 1:10:03Robert Evans?

  Which would be.

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, Jackie.

• 1:10:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Although like Jacqueline Onassis, you also were present when JFK was assassinated.

• 1:10:13Speaker 03

  And not a lot of people know that and that's because I don't want them to.

• 1:10:18Robert Evans?

  Because the statute of limitations is still not up. Oh, well, that too. Yes. The CIA vampire thing. Yes.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  That is the first thing you told me, you know?

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. It's a you'd think that a vampire works for the CIA would be. Oh, nice to meet you.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  You'd think I'd be more discreet and yet I just usually when I meet somebody, I brag about having seen the life drain from Kennedy's eyes, take off my clothes, cover myself in grease, grab a tater and some bread and run out the door.

• 1:10:51Robert Evans?

  And listen, folks, you listening at home, don't keep listening to the news. The podcast is over. Come back and listen next week, but take some time off the internet. Do a little digital detox, strip naked, cover yourself in grease, grab a potato and some bread and run off into the woods, you know, see what happens to you. It'll probably be fine.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  I feel like that is better than like most of the advice that you get.

• 1:11:17Robert Evans?

  It's also healthier than being on social media. Some time naked in the woods, covered in grease, good shit.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Or just pet a dog if they want you to.

• 1:11:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or pet a dog. I don't know. Naked grease, potato, pet a dog, both good things.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  If they want you to.

• 1:11:33Robert Evans?

  If they want you to. But but strip naked and cover yourself in grease, whether or not anyone wants you to. Yes, you do that no matter what. Do not listen to anyone who says, don't get naked and covered in grease. All right.

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  Great advice.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

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