The next day before I get in the car, there's a text. Today won't work. We reschedule to the following weekend, what'll be my second last day in the south west.
In the meantime, I keep thinking about something Wayne said. He said a lot of the information I was searching for was freely available, in the records, but not many people care to look.
I return to the small desk in my parent's guest room, and my laptop, and prepare to dive deeper into the archives. But there's mountains of material, so I contact someone who can help.
JESSICA WHITE: I'll just do a test right now. Testing, one, two, three, one two three.
SAM CARMODY: Jessica White tells me she is happiest when she's sitting deep in an archive.
She's deaf, though she can still hear some sound in her right ear if she strains.. and that can be tiring.
JESSICA WHITE: I expend a lot of energy trying to pick up sounds just automatically, but there's no sound in an archive because people are concentrating really hard. Um...so there's no distractions.
SAM CARMODY: So Jessica has spent a lot of time in the archives. Turns out she's spent a lot of time reading about the Bussells' neighbours, the Molloys and she started coming across these mentions of that incident in 1841.
JESSICA WHITE: It kept appearing and disappearing in history like right up until the 60s and then I was looking at it again in the 2000s.
SAM CARMODY: It was like whatever happened was refusing to be hidden, despite what seemed like initial attempts to conceal it.
Jessica walks me through what she's found out about 1841.It starts with that argument at the house of George Layman, the Bussells' neighbour.
JESSICA WHITE: He had put his farm on country belonging to a Wardandi Noongar man called Gayware.
SAM CARMODY: The elder Gayware was an important Wardandi figure.
JESSICA WHITE: Layman had asked Gayware and some other Wardandi Noongar people to help, I think, with the harvest and there was an altercation at the end of the day because they hadn't been paid properly.
SAM CARMODY: Now I've come across a bunch of different explanations for why this argument broke out between Layman and Gayware- most settler versions emphasise a pretty petty dispute, like some disagreement over the payment of damper for example.
Others hint that Layman was maybe up to no good but what is agreed upon by everyone is what happens next.
JESSICA WHITE: And so George Laman pulled Gayware's beard and that was thought to be terribly insulting and so he speared Layman and Layman went into his house and died. And they told ... someone then told the Molloys and the Bussell's and they were like, okay, we've had enough, we're going to go and kill Gayware in a reprisal.
SAM CARMODY: So, it seems like this is where my family, the Bussells get involved. They're in this posse of local settlers and soldiers riding north in search of Gayware.
JESSICA WHITE: And they used Noongar trackers. They wouldn't have been able to find Gayware without the trackers. They were native police and they hunted Gaywhere over three days and at one point they thought that Gaywhere was in a party of Noongars and according to John Molloy's account, they thought they were going to be killed and so they shot those people.
SAM CARMODY: Still no Gaywhere, but the settlers are just shooting other local people now, supposedly because they're scared.
JESSICA WHITE: They were told a few days later where Gayware was and they went and hunted him down and killed him.
SAM CARMODY: The local resident magistrate, Captain John Molloy, he's actually leading this group that carries out the reprisal.
Later, he'll write the official account about what happened for his superiors.
JESSICA WHITE: something like this could not have been covered up. So he had to write a report.
SAM CARMODY: Jessica found that report in the state records office of WA. In it Molloy describes what sounds like a clash or a skirmish.
He says against all efforts of the settlers, four Wardandi men, and one woman, were killed.
Jessica tells me one more important thing. That report is signed by a justice of the peace. A witness. My great great great grandfather... John Garret Bussell.
JESSICA WHITE: Led to several shots being fired... that's the passive voice is not showing or declaring who fired the shots. There was no sense of culpability around any of these descriptions
SAM CARMODY: There's another source of information that could have been really useful.
John Bussell's sister Frances was keeping a diary at the time but the days covering this incident in 1841, they're missing.
JESSICA WHITE: The pages from the second to the 25th of February were torn out and those days cover the account of when the massacre happened.
SAM CARMODY: After the reprisal attack. there was a kind of eerie silence that settled on the south west. A later newspaper article described it this way.
[NEWSPAPER ARTICLE- READ] "No further trouble took place for the remainder of the year of 1841 and during the following year the natives displayed a cowed and cringing disposition, as if a terrible lesson had been indelibly printed in their minds"
SAM CARMODY: Up to this point the records describe the 1841 incident as a kind mission to capture Gayware during which settlers were forced to fire their weapons in self defence, despite every effort to the contrary.
But Jessica tells me that around sixty years later, a controversial stranger to the area, would blow apart this account by compiling a very different story about what happened.
JESSICA WHITE: Certainly the account he wrote was very graphic.
[HISTORICAL ACCOUNT- READ]: "In 1841, one of the most bloodthirsty deeds ever committed by Englishman is reported to have taken place, no records exist of this affair, and the narrative depends on the evanescent memory of pioneers and the statements of several surviving natives of that period"
SAM CARMODY: Warren Bert Kimberley was an American. What little I can find out about him suggests that he came to Australia from the US in the 1880s, around 40 years after all this happened. He compiled an early history book on the local area.
What the book describes is no clash...it's a massacre.
[HISTORICAL ACCOUNT- READ]: "Into the remote places this party went, bent on killing without mercy. Through the woods, among rocky hills and shaded valleys they searched for the black men. When they saw them they shouldered their muskets and shot them down."
JESSICA WHITE: It's surprising that an outsider came in and was as far as we can find in history...the first person to note that this massacre had happened.
[HISTORICAL ACCOUNT- READ]: "They rode from district to district, from hill to hill, and searched the bush and thickets. At last they traced the terrified fugitives to Lake Minninup. The soldiers pushed on, and surrounded the black men on the sand patch. There was now no escape for the fugitives, and their vacuous cries of terror mingled with the reports of the white men's guns. The white men had no mercy. The black men were killed by dozens, and their corpses lined the route of march of the avengers. Then the latter went back satisfied."
SAM CARMODY: The massacre it seems my family took part in, it has a name. It's been referred to by some researchers as the Wonnerup 'Minninup' Massacre.
But even today the story remains largely unknown. Except, it seems, to one group of people. The people who were always here.
It's a weird thing I've been thinking about. My ancestor, John Garrett, he was my age when all this violence happened and I'm going to go to the house of a traditional owner to kind of help me fill in a gap, you know, it's anyway, um. Yeah, I don't know how it'll go but I guess we'll see.
(Door knock) TONI WEBB: Come in.
(Door opening) SAM: Morning, How are you?
TONI WEBB: Good good. Sorry we're just having a late brekky.
SAM CARMODY: It's Saturday morning at the home of Wardandi Elder Wayne Webb and his wife Toni. Outside it's cold and overcast but inside a fire is going and it's warm. Wayne's son Zac is there, over the stove, cooking breakfast.
TONI WEBB: It's all really quiet and then Zach turns up and everything happens. It's like, what? (laughs)
SAM CARMODY: On the table out back, Wayne has pulled out some books and photos.
WAYNE WEBB: These stories are not that old. It's not that long ago. They're my grandfathers that were there and my great grandmothers. They're telling these stories when we're young Fellas because they were still around and they're from the late 1800s and that, but they got told by their mums...
SAM CARMODY: After breakfast, Zac sits down too and they start to tell me their story of 1841. About the spearing of George Layman, and what followed.
The main version I'd always been told was that Layman had been speared over a fight over damper.
The story Zac tells me is different.
ZAC WEBB: Our grandfather, Gayware, they say that his wife was working at the homestead and that he wanted his wife back. He wanted to start walking on country. But at that time, she was considered a domestic, you know, a domestic or a servant of the family at the time. And our story orally is that, yeah, Gayware came up. He came with his two sons. He had a conversation with Mr. Layman and said that he would like his wife back. They say from there, Mr. Layman pulled Gayware's beard which culturally...it's not right to do that to an Aboriginal man. He'd been disrespected in front of his two sons and one of his sons passed his spear to the other brother and he put it into his...spear thrower, and as Layman turned to walk away, he was speared for the disrespect shown to First Nations countrymen.
SAM CARMODY: Parts of the story overlap with the colonial account. Gayware goes north through the forest, towards Minninup. A posse of settlers go in pursuit.
But there are other details I've never heard before, like what appears to be some dissent even among the settlers about what's unfolding.
WAYNE WEBB: Apparently when they chased them through there too, all the people, along with the farm ones there, were sympathetic towards the Aboriginal people... were hiding them in their barns and stuff.
SAM CARMODY: When the party of Settlers reach Minninup, they still haven't found Gayware.
ZAC WEBB: There was a whole bunch of old men and women and families camped around Minninup. And because they refused to tell the party where Gayware and his sons were that they were considered as retribution as well, and they said that ..um...they were actually murdered or were shot and killed at the time.
SAM CARMODY: That the violence occurred at a place called Minninup matches the account by the American, Warren Bert Kimberley.
After the settlers found Gayware they returned, back through the forest.
This next part of the story I've never heard.
ZAC WEBB: As they're heading back through the Tuart forest, they say that our grandfather was actually beheaded at the time in front of his two sons and his head was smoked in a hollow log and this is what we've been told, is that that's what happened inside the forest. His head was then smoked, put it in a barrel and put in Busselton as a deterrent for any other Aboriginal people wanting to create resistance or resilience against the colony.
SAM CARMODY: On the subject of the massacre, it's Wayne's son Zac that does most of the talking.
ZAC WEBB: That's where you find a lot of old people don't want to speak, don't want to speak about if they've been stolen through stolen generation. They don't want to speak about massacres. They don't want to speak about certain things.
WAYNE WEBB: Because they've been told all their livesand the people before them...don't practise your language, don't practise your customs.. it's dirty... You know, this is the devil and all these so-called great Christian people that were doing all this stuff. Yeah. They were just keeping them down.
SAM CARMODY: I wonder if there's something generational to all this. Like if there might be an increasing desire among younger generations to have the truth out in the open.
WAYNE WEBB: once the older people are gone. The younger people take it up with more of an interest and want other people to know and stuff like that. That's what's going on.
ZAC WEBB: And if they've heard something...
WAYNE WEBB (interrupts): Like even, Zack talked more than what I do about that sort of stuff and such. Yeah, it's the way it is. Yes, it's got to come out. The world would be a better place.
SAM CARMODY: The Webbs' story is even more harrowing than I had imagined it would be.
But through their generosity, in sitting down with me, I now have a more complete picture of my family history, one that feels more like the truth.
Though there is still one more question that I still need an answer to. The one my sister-in-law brought up at Christmas lunch, that none of us knew anything about.
Did my ancestor really shoot and kill a seven year old child? Turns out, it's basically true. It just wasn't John Bussell, it was his brother, Charles.
CHRIS OWEN: A seven year old girl had stolen some flour from the Bussells.
SAM CARMODY: Dr Chris Owen is a historian from the University of Western Australia.
CHRIS OWEN: So Charles was trying to interrogate her and tried to scare her by pointing a musket, which he thought was unloaded at her, and he kept pulling the trigger just to scare it into confessing. So she was seven years old.
CHRIS OWEN: Then the musket went off and the bullet or the lead went through her stomach and the girl died. Charles was arrested for murder as you would expect. So there was this early judicial system still was functioning and he went to court. And Charles said that he didn't know the musket was loaded and John Bussell had.. had loaded the musket with lead and he didn't know about it. So the charge was dismissed and he was fined one shilling, which is fairly extraordinary.
SAM CARMODY: Chris is currently working on a project to document Settler violence in Western Australia, part of the nationwide Colonial Frontiers Massacre Map. He tells me that in late 2021, the project will release an update to the map, including as many as three more massacre sites in WA's south west.
CHRIS OWEN: We're not talking about, you know, victimising settler families only just sort of recognising what happened. I think that's the key thing.
SAM CARMODY: After talking to so many people, I've got a rough idea about where some of the massacre took place. It's a stretch of coast about thirty kms north of Busselton. In the area where the Capel River meets the sea.
(Driving sounds): Interesting to be 36 years old, and this is the first time I'm doing this
The narrow road goes through forest and farming land, and then finally turns towards the coast.
And it looks like I've come to an end of the road...there's a path that keeps going... I might pull up here.
SAM CARMODY: I park at a small beach carpark, tucked behind some sand dunes. An old surfer sees the ABC logo on my microphone. He wants to know what I'm there for. I tell him I'm researching a massacre, and I ask him if he's heard of it. He shakes his head and walks to his car.
Then I follow a path to the river mouth.
I've come to where the river meets the ocean, uh, this big flat, open, sandy stretch. Um. I don't know, this could be the spot um...the way it's described is they were sort of trapped in a place where there's nowhere to hide, um, you know, there's just no cover. And I mean, a place like this could be the place It feels strange to come here, but it feels like the right thing to have done all this.
(ocean sounds)
Now that I've found out a whole side of the history of this place that I never knew growing up.. it's time to find out what the locals are doing about it.
I call the President of the Capel Shire and it turns out he's heard of the massacre.
MICHAEL SOUTHWELL: I actually think that, you know, if you if you went to school children these days and told them that they would be quite stunned that this sort of thing went on, you know, in our backyard, that things have successfully been sanitised over the years to the point where they don't really know the true history of the place.
It seems like maybe the council and it's President Michael Southwell have been starting to learn more of the stories about this area too.
MICHAEL SOUTHWELL: And we have got better, better ties now to some of the Elders. And so that's probably the next item that should be on the agenda is discussing what kind of memorial or remembrance would be appropriate so that the massacre isn't just left swept under the carpet.
I also spoke to Grant Henley, Mayor of the City of Busselton. He said the council would welcome a conversation about how to acknowledge what happened.
It feels like we're only at the very beginning, most people in this area haven't even heard the stories, let alone come to grips with them and those that have always known these stories... well they're patiently waiting for people like me to catch up.
SAM CARMODY: You're both doing me a favour by sitting down and being willing to kind of fill in voids in my own story, you know
ZAC WEBB: And that's what it's about, I guess, because for reconciliation, I mean, we... we didn't come up with that word. It's not it's not our word. I guess it's kind of like a buzz word at the time or whatever the flavour of the month, so....
WAYNE WEBB: ... like closing the gap.
ZAC WEBB: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You have all these things like reconciliation, closing the gap, all these sorts of things. And I guess that what it is is for Aboriginal people, that's what... it's what you're feeling right now is exactly. We feel as though we feel as though we don't have to reconcile anything. For us, it helps us heal in a way by having yourself come to us as a family. And we hope that that's exactly it, that it reconciles with yourself and it helps to heal yourself. It helps to fill in some of those knowledge gaps that may have been missed. And and that's how we walk together. And I really stress that...is walk together into the future by sitting down by talking about these things and even talking about the most uncomfortable things that can be uncomfortable a lot of the time but it's just about acknowledgement. And by doing that, I say I think it's a healing journey on both ends, then.