Annie Mullarvey

CONTENT WARNING: Please note that the following piece involves descriptions of the death of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and colonial violence.

             Like many others I have been trying to process the stark reality of Australia’s dark colonial history. How shameful that it’s taken so long to overturn the toxic myths about the First Nations people here! I learnt some decades ago that from early settlement the new colony harbored a great number of cruel and power-hungry tyrants; ruthless squatters for example who exploited convict labor, ‘displaced’ Indigenous people under the guise of terra nullius, and convinced us of the fallacy that Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’. The Mabo Ruling of 1992 was a groundbreaking turning point in so many ways.  I recently uncovered some powerful and violent rogues in my own family history. They originated in the Scottish Highlands.  I am hoping that by revealing my findings about them in as accurate a manner as I can, given historical cover-ups surrounding their hideous crimes, I can contribute to Truth Telling History, particularly in Queensland.

I am focusing mainly on two of my powerful ancestors, John Donald McLean (1820-1866) and John Donald McLean (around 1889-1977).   Same name? Yes indeed. How utterly confusing.  I’m pretty sure that the second man was made the namesake of the first, who was his great uncle, a ‘Pure Merino’ squatter on the Darling Downs and the fourth Colonial Treasurer of Queensland. The second John Donald McLean was my great uncle. I even met him a few times as a child.  In the 1930’s he was Protector of Aboriginals in the Torres Strait Islands.  Just for the sake of clarity, I’ll refer to the colonial squatter as Jock McLean and the 1930s protector as J.D. McLean.  

Before I launch into some information I discovered about both men, I will introduce the first of their family to arrive in Australia i.e. their so called ‘pioneer’.  Can you believe it?  He was another John McLean, but he has also been referred to as Jonathan McLean (1797-1840). Betty Coxon, a family historian, described how Jonathan who arrived here in his early twenties, quickly became known for his cruelty, particularly towards convicts.  In my mind he embodied the family springboard into state sanctioned violent, inhumane practices in the new colony, setting a precedent for the other two McLeans.  He was the much older brother of the squatter. I believe he was the first born in their family.  The squatter was the last born. Their mother, Flora, died in 1821, within a year after baby Jock came into the World.  1821 is also the year that oldest brother Jonathan emigrated from the Isle of Skye to NSW aboard the ship, Sirius, as a free immigrant and a gardener. 

Jonathan worked as a gardener for a few Scottish notables in the young colony, such as John Thomas Campbell, the Macarthur’s on Elizabeth Farm, and Captain John Piper.  He was made a convict overseer at some stage and gained a reputation as a cruel taskmaster.  By the 1830s he was the Deputy Superintendent of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney. After the Superintendent, Charles Frazier retired from illness, Jonathan applied for his position but was unsuccessful gaining the top job. He instead worked under Allan Cunningham, the famous explorer and botanist who had coincidentally ‘discovered’ and named The Darling Downs in 1827. Jonathan became dissatisfied with his well-known boss and was also disliked by the convicts under his authority.  In 1836 he took up the prominent and powerful role of Agricultural Superintendent at the Norfolk Island penal colony. 

 Coxon writes that Jonathan was ‘as much disliked on Norfolk Island as he had been in NSW.’

By all accounts remote Norfolk Island was a dehumanizing and terrifying experience for its unfortunate inmates.

 Governor Darling referred to it in 1825 as ‘a place of the extremist punishment, short of Death.’ 

Jonathan seems to have taken up his new position with enthusiasm and excessive brutality.  However, his own life was cut short by a drowning incident off the island in 1840.  He was returning from a fishing and hunting expedition with some friends, one of them being Captain Best.  Jonathan’s disaffected charges apparently made little attempt to save their agricultural superintendent.

The convict, J.F. Mortlock summarized the incident in his book, ‘Experience of a Convict’:

‘No prospect of indulgence could induce the prisoners to save McLean, justly detested for his unfeeling severity, whom they saw struggling in the boiling surf, but they gallantly rescued his companion, the Hon. Captain Best.’

Jonathan McLean had years earlier petitioned the Governor of NSW for a piece of land for farming in the Capertee area near the Blue Mountains.  He named the run Warrangee. In 1837, his sixteen-year-old brother, Jock arrived from the Isle of Skye with their sister Marion, her husband and their children aboard the immigrant ship Midlothian.  Warrangee was to become Marion’s first family home in NSW.  Later she and her land greedy husband (another John) expanded their holdings taking over neighboring farms such as Glen Alice. 

Young Jock, the squatter-to-be, instead travelled north along the Hunter Valley with other clan members.  He remained living near the Clarence River, learning among other things how to adapt Scottish farming techniques to Australian conditions, until about 1843.  Around that time, he began a foray northward with another Scot.  Eventually Jock amassed 32,000 acres of land for himself in Bundjalung Country, Northern NSW which he named Duck Creek run. According to some dated information I found on the internet, he is considered to have ‘discovered’ the nearby town of Bonalbo, which is now called Old Bonalbo.

The most direct evidence I have found of Jock McLean’s readiness to randomly shoot at Indigenous people with little or no regard for their status as fellow humans is from The Maitland Mercury of Wednesday 17^th May 1848.  It is under a heading entitled:

 ‘Aboriginal Depredations – The blacks.’

  It describes how ‘Mr. McLean of Bonalbo’ stated he had lost several cattle including calves and a number suffering from recent spear wounds, so he went to ‘an encampment of the blacks’ which he said was ‘a short distance from his home.’  The article continues saying that Jock was ‘accompanied by the chief constable and three other persons.’

According to Jock’s report ‘The blacks refused to allow them to approach’ and threw spears and hunting sticks at his party ‘who, in self-defense, fired on the blacks, but without doing them much bodily harm.  However, they succeeded in driving off the blacks, to the number of about 200…’

It is unclear as to whether the chief constable who Jock mentions is from the notoriously murderous and newly formed Native Police. Certainly, whoever the three unnamed men were, they are sure to have been armed with rifles or guns. That’s five armed men including my ancestor. A posse? I think it can be established that by the age of twenty-eight, Jock McLean was a squatter and an experienced gunman and willing participant in the Frontier Wars.

 My mother spoke of our early settler McLean Scottish Highland ancestors as farmers. She implied that they were small time selectors, just making a living growing food for their families.  Presumably that’s about the extent of what she’d been told.  Like so many of her generation she was duped when it came to the greedy, murderous unscrupulous reality of men like Jock. Another reason there was probably little information passed down about the squatter from previous generations is that at age forty-six in 1866 he was killed in a horse-riding accident at his Toowoomba estate entitled Westbrook. His wife, Mary, soon took most of his plundered fortune off to London so she and their seven children could live in splendor. The only other fact my mother told me about her great, great uncle Jock from the Darling Downs was that he had been the sole benefactor of my tragically orphaned grandfather. Jock had evidently chosen to finance the youngster as a long-term boarder at Kings College Paramatta, rather than raise him along with his own family.  

By the time thirty-four-year-old Jock McLean married sixteen-year-old Mary Strutt in Sydney in 1855, he had been a member of the Darling Downs ‘squattocracy’ for at least two years.  He was now the official owner, along with William Beit, of Westbrook, a 64,0000-acre estate on rich farming land near Toowoomba. He was and had been a partner in several runs in NSW and Queensland.  He was also involved in other commercial enterprises.  By 1860 he was the major shareholder in the lucrative Queensland Steam Navigation Company. As a pastoralist he already had a reputation for being mean-spirited towards his farm laborers. Shearers considered their working conditions and living quarters to be inhospitable and bare.  A story goes that a German couple who were employed as shepherds on the fringes of Westbrook starved to death because their rations didn’t arrive in time.  He and his partner William Beit were considered arrogant and shrewd in their dealings with locals and townspeople.  Westbrook had a reputation for capturing stray livestock roaming on adjoining crown land and branding them as belonging to Westbrook.

Jock McLean was a man who from all accounts possessed a remarkable business head right at the time when the British Empire was at its wealthiest peak, the 1860s.  After all he was made Treasurer of the Queensland Government during a financial crisis in 1866 and is reported to have made a success of his job. He and his squatter allies on the downs, such as Arthur Hodgson and John Watts were making a fortune from the wool clip when the British Empire’s demand for wool was insatiable. That they were occupying land, initially selected before Government survey, and which had displaced tens of thousands of Aboriginal people from their homes and traditional hunting grounds, was evidently okay.  Previous massacres on the Downs, such as the one near Helidon in the 1840s and the ongoing white reprisal fallout from Battle of One Tree Hill had significantly reduced the numbers of Aboriginal people. 

            In the 1850s, Thomas Davis (the father of Steele Rudd) wrote this heart wrenching and grisly account in his diary:

‘The blacks, even this far back, were quiet on the Darling Downs.  Hodgson, the Leslies and many others by many conflicts had taken the go out of them. To this day the bones of many an Aboriginal still lie bleaching on well-known parts of some Downs stations. (But) I can recall two occasions only when a white man was murdered by blacks on the Downs.’

It is evident that Jock McLean was also a master at playing the system, including the very Government of which he so loyally served in the Legislative Assembly from 1862 to 1866. I think it is more accurate to say that he and some of his powerful squatter pals on the Downs ran the fledgling Queensland Government for a major part of his political career. They ensured that they had the exclusive upper hand when it came to the sale of valuable crown land for farming, they campaigned for expensive railways and stations to be built conveniently close to their acreages, and they lorded themselves over ordinary city folk and small-time selectors with their wealthy advantage, bold arrogance, and underhanded political tactics. I have read one or two of Jock’s parliamentary speeches where he evidently enjoyed pointing out the superiority of squatters such as himself as a social class. He despised free selection which he said was ‘subversive of the true principles of civilization’. Jock is known to have disliked the notoriously scandalous and brutal Native Police but he along with his parliamentary peers were quite happy to approve funding for their continued existence. 

 It is no secret that men like Jock blackmailed and bribed their way into parliament by getting their laborers and other staff to vote for their ‘masters’ or there would be dire consequences. During Jock’s first and failed Parliamentary campaign in 1859, an article in the North Australian accused him of ‘buying Drayton Stockowners’ votes.  Apparently, he had sent a three-man team to all outlying stations to bribe pastoral workers to come to Drayton and vote for him. I suspect that the Northern Australian newspaper was no friend to Jock and his haughty peers.  On Tuesday 27^th December, after five-year pastoral leases had been granted to the squatters through parliamentary legislation, an article condemned the politician for outrageous tax evasion.  Westbrook Estate, which was estimated to carry 14,000 sheep and 1500 cattle had paid thirty-five pounds in tax in an assessment of only $105 pounds (profit?) for the year. The article continues in its condemnation:

‘The Darling Downs squatters are the backbone of the Government…henceforth they must get their runs at nothing a year…The assessment of Westbrook Station does not amount to a half-penny a sheep…’

In that same year, there was an item in the Toowoomba Chronicle (Thursday 22^nd September) which I must confess, raises a chuckle or two for me. The Reverend John Dunmore Lang, who had advocated for Jock, his family and many survivors of the violent Highland Clearances in Scotland to receive supported passages to Australia in the 1830’s was furious that wealthy Jock still hadn’t repaid the Reverend for his boat fare. The angry Dunmore Lang describes himself as ‘ungrateful’ Jock McLean’s benefactor.  He further states that if it hadn’t been for the humanitarian gesture of allowing Jock to escape to NSW, 

‘Mr J.D. McLean might have been a poor highland shepherd, talking Gaelic all his life, and wearing a kilt, a blue bonnet, and brogues at a salary of fifteen pounds a year and his brose.’ 

Brose is apparently a Scots word for an uncooked porridge.

J.D.McLean.

            As I previously mentioned, Jock McLean the squatter was the great uncle of J.D. McLean, the Protector. My Grandmother, Effie Flora McLean (1893-1987) was a younger sister of J.D. McLean, therefore Jock the squatter’s grandniece. This brother and sister were born in Toowoomba and were children around the time that a section of the old Westbrook Estate, which had at one time had been their squatter ancestor’s stately domain, became the site of the notorious Westbrook Reformatory for Boys (est. 1900).  That horrific Government institution’s role in contributing to the Stolen Generations is now widely known. It was highlighted in the 1998 Commission of Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions.  Although my ancestors cannot be deemed culpable for Westbrook’s changed role by their time, as an unjust and punitive detention center for ‘misfit’ boys, they would certainly have known of its existence.  

  The man our ‘Granny Effie’ married was William Ellis.  He was a station manager of cattle and sheep in Central Queensland during the 1920s and 1930s.  Effie fascinated us as children, with her tales of living remotely on these vast outback acreages where there were ‘blacks camps,’ Chinamen’ who tended the orchards and vegetable gardens, white rookie ‘jackeroos’ who stayed as houseguests, and ‘native’ servants. Effie was provided with an unmarried live-in ‘lady companion’, a Miss McMaster, so she could have another white woman to keep her company and help with her growing family.  Indigenous adult women were referred to as ‘gins’, and their children quickly made themselves scarce when Government representatives came to ‘round them up for school.

I will never forget Effie telling me one day that as a newly married woman of slight build, she often felt unsafe and vulnerable.  One day she walked into her kitchen and found a bearded, recently appointed cook ‘who looked just like Rasputin’, threatening her house servants, a young married Aboriginal couple, with a knife.  According to my grandmother she was able to disarm the offender single-handedly. Grandma Effie was unashamedly racist. It goes without saying. These descriptions of hers about ‘station life’ are reminiscent of the antebellum Deep American South.  She even gloated about how some of the ‘gins’ liked to address her as ‘Little Missy’.

  Her older brother was unquestionably tarnished with the same racist brush.  However, his determination to wield unprecedented Government authority over Torres Strait Islanders, which contributed to a prolonged maritime strike in 1936 involving 70 percent of the Islander workforce, surely places him in a similar category to his two nasty male predecessors. 

By then, J.D. McLean had worked his way up through the Public Service and become what was called a Police Magistrate.  This made him, among other things, a direct instrument of the Aboriginal ‘removal’ system. By the time he was appointed Protector in Torres Strait in the early 1930s, I am sure he would have already impressed the Queensland Government of the day with his employment history.  This included forcibly sending Indigenous people away from their families, clans, and ancestral lands on the mainland. I have certainly found later evidence of him ordering the relocation and dislocation of Torres Strait Islanders to far flung prison like missions. These included dreaded Palm Island as a destination for some which was over one thousand kilometers away.

It is now ninety years since this great uncle of mine wreaked havoc amongst the Melanesian population of the 200 or so Torres Strait Islands. There is even an ABC dramatized documentary called Blue Water Empire (2019) where Roy Billing is cast in the role of J.D. McLean, the despotic Protector.  I believe my great uncle’s appointment began sometime early in 1933 and was abruptly ended when the striking Islanders were satisfied that they were well rid of him by July 1936. It had taken them six months to convince the Queensland Government investigator, Cornelius O’Leary, that McLean had to go before the pearlers would return to work.

 Noni Sharp, an anthropologist from La Trobe University interviewed several Islander survivors of the McLean Administration. She was mindful that some interviewees were still experiencing the effects of trauma from those years, when she visited the islands to complete her thesis on the Strike in the early 1980s.  Here is what one participant in the Maritime Strike had to say:

‘…when Mr.O’Leary been get around people mention to him about Mr. McLean doing things only by himself.  When people go to him and say, ‘I’m in trouble’, he kicks them out of the DNA (Department of Native Affairs) office.  That’s why everybody make up their minds to chase him away from here.  All round the islands they mention to Mr. O’Leary, ‘we don’t want McLean to be in that seat. That one.  So, when the strike’s been finish Mr. McLean get out.’ 

So, what was it that precipitated this historic industrial strike which in many ways was brought on by the deeds and attitudes of the Queensland Government and their tough representative in the person of my ancestor?

The brand of racism J.D. McLean grew up with and staunchly adhered to in his work is undoubtedly a throwback to the Victorian Darwinism which I witnessed from his younger sister, my grandmother.  I recently read J.D. McLean’s section of the 1935 Protectors’ report to the Chief Protector of Queensland, J.W. Bleakey, where he proudly discussed ‘the native psychology’ in reference to a visit by Mr and Mrs Baden Powell to Thursday Island. McLean was haughtily describing the ceremonious and orderly greeting to the visitors put on by masses of Islander uniformed young scouts and guides. He described how he thought their submissive behavior was important for their later introduction into the workforce. I am convinced that he viewed the Melanesian inhabitants of Torres Strait as far less than human.  When I read that he introduced a nightly curfew for all ‘native’ residents where a ‘Bu’ whistle from a conch shell was sounded at 9pm I suspected he was imposing dog training rules on the residents.  I believe some Islanders have referred to the draconian legislation they were now living under as The Dog Act. 

In 1934 there had been a further tightening of the notoriously racist and punitive 1897 Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act.  Sharp explains that these amendments reclassified the definitions of non-Europeans in line with the Government’s White Australia policies. New rules were made for each ‘grade’ of non-Europeans and the protectors were given ‘vastly extended powers of control.’  J.D. McLean was now given authority to oversee and interfere in every aspect of an individual Islander’s personal, social, economic and political life, and this he evidently reveled in doing. No longer would the pearlers be paid in cash.  They and their families would be given food rations instead. The Government would ‘mind their wages’ and keep them in a trust fund. How patronizing was that?

Apparently at the time J.D. McLean was appointed to his post, The Queensland Government were concerned that the pearling industry was no longer turning the enormous profits of previous decades.  There was already talk of unrest among the Islanders due to the Government attempting to take over the control of their working boats, a proportion of which Islanders owned and operated independently. Their rationale was to create a larger fleet of Government ‘Company Boats.’ The new Protector reinforced this new direction, forcing more Islanders to work on these boats for lower wages, to make the industry tighter and more profitable. The autonomy workers had previously experienced, where they could also use their own boats for hunting, fishing, visiting relatives and other aspects of ‘personal use’ was deemed unprofitable and to be actively discouraged. In December1935, the Protector had even knocked one of the council chiefs to the ground on Murray Island (Mer). This was after the chief, Marou Mimi and other leaders backed by about 40 Island men, had refused to allow a visiting dentist to examine the children’s teeth. 

The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners Advocate reported on 20^th December under the heading:

‘ANGRY ABORIGINES Official Threatened. Trouble on Murray Island.’

‘A message from Thursday Island states that the courage and firmness of the local Protector of Aborigines (Mr J.D. McLean) averted a serious situation at Murray Island during the week…’ The article describes the incident in detail and there is no doubt that the Protector is seen as perfectly justified in assaulting the chief!

 ‘Mr. McLean Knocked down the ringleader Mauru, and ordered his arrest…’                    In conclusion the article says that another six Islanders were arrested during the fracas and after court the following day they were each sentenced to one month’s goal.

 The Islanders’ collective anger and justified fear of losing their centuries old culture, traditionally organized governance and ways of life boiled over by January 1936.

‘Take them,’ take the boats, said the strike leaders:

‘We lived here before the boats came here…’

 I could list more of the documented impossible rules that J.D. McLean either abided by in his role or which he introduced to make the lives of his charges more miserable.  The heroic ways that so many Islanders stood up to this brutal dictator, and at enormous risk, are legendary. On Badu Island at least 30 men were jailed by McLean after they began climbing out of windows of the meeting hall to escape whilst he was ordering them to return to work. The brilliant way news of the strike was spread from island to island, via the mouth of the skipper, Tanu Nona, of the very boat J.D. McLean was using, the lugger Wakaid.  How impressive is that? A bell was removed from outside a school because the locals decided there was no need for the children to attend. Work in the vegetable gardens was now a priority. The strike meant no money to buy from the shops. 

My great uncle was apparently ropable at arriving at one of the islands under his jurisdiction, with six police on hand, to discover that locals had removed the school bell.               As one witness recalled:

Mr. McLean called out a name: ‘Did you take out the bell?…Then he said, ‘Anybody stand up and come and join him?’ ‘Did you all make this arrangement to take out the bell?’ Yes, we all agree on that.  ‘Well everyone who been on that meeting that stop children from school, come up here.’ Everybody walk up, walk up…to go inside goal. ‘Yeah, come on, come on, come on…you fellers going to be inside goal for 24 hours.’  Others refuse to stand up, they’re frightened…(Noni Sharp interview)

I understand that the Maritime Strike of 1936 was successful in so far as most of the Islanders’ immediate demands were met.  J.D. McLean was replaced by a less harsh regime under Cornelius O’Leary, and the Queensland Government was compelled to return to separate rule of the Torres Strait from that of the mainland. Eddie Mabo of Native Title fame, who was from Murray Island (Mer), described the dreadful working conditions still twenty years after the Strike, which he experienced working on the pearling luggers often as a diver, during the 1950s.  He also discovered that the Queensland Government were taking 50% of the pearlers’ earnings for their own profit. 

‘I realized we were being exploited, so it was my intention not to see the full year (a season) through, but rather sort of get off the boat somewhere along the line and find something else.  I ended up jumping ship in Cairns.  Cane cutting was a way out to the big country down south.’ (from Mabo, The Native Title Revolution).

I hope I have now convincingly explained the reason I picked the two John Donald McLeans as the central characters in this essay. They were undoubtedly influential with regards to their negative impacts on the dark history of white settlement in this nation.  Some commentators I have read, when researching about J.D. McLean, are of the view that the extreme harshness of his behavior and attitudes towards Torres Strait Islanders, along with the heroic tactics of the Islanders in retaliation, has probably contributed significantly to the mobilization of Indigenous protest since the 1930s. For example, 1938 was the year of the first Aboriginal and Torres Strait day of mourning, which was organized by First Nations activists to grieve and protest the devastating impacts of colonization. 

Some References.

• Anon., 2018. “Day of Mourning – 26 January 1938.” Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
• Coxon, Betty. “Not Lost but Gone Before.” A Family History of the McLeans of Capertee, 1999.
• Mabo, Eddie. “The Native Title Revolution.  Living Under the Protector.”  Recorded interview with Flo Kennedy (by Trevor Graham) Digital.
• Marr, David “Killing for Country” 2023, Collingwood Melbourne, Schwartz Books.
• Sharp, Nonie. 1981. “Culture Clash in the Torres Strait Islands: The Maritime Strike of 1936.”  Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 11(3): 107-26.
• Waterson, D.B.  “Squatter, Selector, and Storekeeper – A History of the Darling Downs, 1859-93.” 1968, Sydney University Press.

About Annie Mullarvey

Annie is in her mid-60s and cannot imagine living anywhere other than the Municipality of Merri-bek.  She spent her childhood in Glenroy and now lives way up the other end in East Brunswick. 

Over the years, she has worked as an inner urban community worker, a mental health social worker for Merri Community Health, and later for another local organization as counsellor/advocate for refugees and asylum seekers.  She even married a teacher from Moreland High (now defunct), and they raised a family together in Brunswick.

She is passionate about social justice and human rights, and her short stories often reflect this. Annie has recently completed her first fiction novel, ‘No Fences for Joyce.’  The story follows Joyce O’Connor, a young woman rescuing her children and fleeing an abusive and alcoholic husband in Yarrawonga during the 1960s. They eventually settle in Broadmeadows where Joyce is hired by ‘Fenton’s Electronics’ (no relation to the Ericsson company), initially as a factory hand. There she meets her lifelong friends, Rosa from Italy and Maureen from Liverpool, England.  Joyce and her companions are horrified by the frequency at which their female co-workers are developing repetitive strain type injuries due to the unrealistic work practices set by management.  Joyce eventually becomes a shop steward with their union and helps to stage a successful lunchtime rally from the roof of the canteen. Later in the novel, Joyce reconnects with her old school friend, Suzi, and together they help to establish a women’s refuge in Yarrawonga. 

Annie’s dream is to somehow convert this novel into a community play.  To see it travel between Melbourne and Yarrawonga someday, helping to spread awareness about gender-fueled violence, is her idea of pretty darn special. 

Copyright Annie Mullarvey, October 2024. All rights reserved; this intellectual property belongs solely to Annie Mullarvey.