Bringing WA's past to colourful life
Interest in The West Australian's recent historical chronology of WA emphasises how little is widely known about the past 200 years of our State's European settlement.
Perhaps it is the discomfort many feel with histories written in the past which airbrush out the mistreatment of Aboriginal people in the early days after Captain Stirling established the Swan River Colony.
Three books written by WA author and historian Penelope Hetherington describe different aspects of our history in a detailed yet very readable way. The latest in the trilogy, Marriage and Divorce in Colonial Western Australia 1829-1900, has been published this year and is part of a wonderful set of WA social and political histories.
The first book, Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in the Nineteenth-century Western Australia, published in 2002, documents a shameful period in the State's history. The new colony, desperate for workers and expanding in search of wealth, swept children from Aboriginal and poor European families into indentured work positions with no State controls over how they were treated.
Some Aboriginal children in the North West were stolen by blackbirders and forced to work in the pearling industry or on pastoral stations. Many were appalled at the slavery imposed on children, to which the authorities turned a blind eye despite slavery having been abolished in England in the 1830s.
Hetherington lays out this complex history in a logical and somewhat dispassionate voice, allowing readers to see for themselves the way our fledgling society abandoned the needy and allowed the wealthy to exploit them.
It also enables us to understand more clearly what led to the setting up of reserves for Aboriginal people and to the infamous removal of some children from their families and their placement in homes as part of the process we now describe as the Stolen Generation.
In her second book, Paupers and Poor Relief and Poor Houses in Western Australia 1829-1910, published in 2009, Hetherington meticulously unpicks the history and experiences of the poor, the convicts and the indentured labourers who landed in the colony where there were no charitable institutions and no safety net of social security.
This was a harsh period for many people, during which huge wealth was developed for few families but the poor were basically on their own. The gold rushes brought thousands to the colony but few made their fortune and the plight of the underclass swamped the State's limited resources.
Published this year, Hetherington's third and most recent book, The Marriage Knot, details the challenges experienced by the settlers who landed in the Swan Colony with no established law for marriage and certainly none for divorce.
Hetherington charts the early efforts to mirror the laws of England in which the established Anglican church demanded that banns be read in one's local parish church for three Sundays before a wedding, thus giving anyone with evidence as to why the happy couple should not be united in matrimony the chance to say so. But there were problems: across much of the State there were no churches in which to read the banns, no priests to read them and no sacrosanct edifice in which to celebrate the event.
Hetherington's history tracks the changes in the laws, including the provision for registration of marriages, and the demands of the Catholics and the non-Anglican Protestant churches for a say in the process. She gives us glimpses of a colourful canvas of the challenges, such as those that led to the Fremantle Harbourmaster marrying couples in his office - which was on a stranded, partly sunken ship at the Swan River's mouth - and the search for a church which led to one being built using the reeds growing along the Perth waterfront.
These are three very important and readable social histories, to be commended to anyone wishing to understand from whence we come and, most importantly, to be read by those who might determine where we go.
Settlers, Servants and Slaves ($34.95), Paupers and Poor Relief and Poor Houses ($24.95) and The Marriage Knot ($25) are published by UWA Publishing.
