‘The White-man calls me Jack’: The many names and claims for Jackey Jackey of the lower Logan River, south-east Queensland, Australia

Michael Aird, Joanna Sassoon and David Trigger

Abstract: Genealogies that demonstrate a continuous historical lineage play a critical role for native title evidence as well as contemporary negotiations concerning Indigenous identity. The complexities of this genealogical research are compounded in regions with lengthy histories of disruption from traditional lands and contestation concerning the forebears of Indigenous individuals, families and wider groups. This article presents a case study that introduces a forensic methodology to demonstrate challenges facing researchers and family members investigating Indigenous histories. It explores a history of the renaming of an Aboriginal man photographed wearing a breastplate inscribed with a name, Jackey Jackey. In this review of the extant historical data, we outline our genealogy of names that have been attached to Jackey Jackey. We suggest that two men named Jackey from different parts of the Logan Valley region, south-east Queensland, have been conflated into a single person’s identity and then renamed firstly as Bilinba and then as Bilin Bilin. We explore what these symbolic acts of renaming mean for the first wave of Indigenous descendants researching their family history, pose questions about the significance of this renaming, and identify the consequential issues for those now seeking legal recognition of traditional rights in land.

I’m tall dark and lean, everyplace I’ve been, the White-man calls me Jack

It’s no crime, I’m not ashamed I was born with my skin so black

When it comes to riding rough horses or working cattle, I mix it with the best

In the land where the crow flies backwards and the pelican builds his nest

Dougie Young, ‘The Land Where the Crow Flies Backwards’, 1964¹

Introduction

Cultural connections over time are the foundation of native title and Indigenous connections to country more generally. For a native title claim to be successful, claimants must demonstrate an unbroken, albeit adapted, traditional connection with land in question since the assumption of Crown sovereignty. Genealogies that demonstrate a continuous historical lineage play a critical role for native title evidence as well as contemporary negotiations concerning Indigenous identity. When investigating claims of traditional connection through documenting customary laws, mapping cultural landscapes and recording genealogies, Aboriginal people and anthropologists, linguists and historians preparing reports present information drawn from a range of sources including documentary, visual and oral records.

Genealogical research is complex and presents many challenges, including achieving cross-cultural competence in understanding Indigenous patterns of kin connections, addressing multiple links to different forebears, and forming opinions about the reliability of available archival and oral records. The pitfalls of this work are compounded in regions with lengthy histories of disruption from traditional lands and contestation concerning the forebears of Indigenous individuals, families and wider groups.

In this article, we present a case study to demonstrate challenges facing researchers and family members investigating Indigenous histories. We particularly address the types and characteristics of evidence that can be used when reconstructing family biographies including links to those who are asserted in native title claims to be what have become known as ‘apical ancestors’. In doing so, we introduce a forensic methodology that includes profiling, connecting and cross-referencing available data concerning a significant Indigenous man’s life, the name(s) by which he has become known, and his relationships to country.

Background

Several late nineteenth-century photographs depict an elderly Queensland Aboriginal man wearing a breastplate around his neck inscribed ‘Jackey Jackey – King of the Logan and Pimpama’, referring to two rivers in south-east Queensland (see Figures 1 and 2).² While some breastplates given to Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century in Australia survive, for many their existence is only recorded visually or in written reports.³ Breastplates are colonial objects with complex meanings. In fixing a person’s name and status, the objects also erase previous names for a person for everyone other than Aboriginal people who may have historical knowledge of the individual. At the same time, breastplates are mnemonics that potentially act as referents for people believing they are descendants of the named ancestor. In the absence of locating Jackey Jackey’s breastplate, the photographs reveal how he is literally chained to a metal plate that fixes a European name to his face, a settler-endowed status as ‘King’ and a connection to his traditional lands.⁴

Figure 1: ‘Jackey Jackey. King of Logan & Pimpama’, Albert River, 1893. Photograph by Will Stark.

Source: Courtesy State Library of Queensland (negative 63306).

Figure 2: ‘Jackey Jackey (on plate)’, Jackey Jackey, Beenleigh, 1896. Photograph by Ada Driver.

Source: Courtesy State Library of Queensland (negative 21309).

The engraving on the now lost breastplate, and its clarity in these well-copied photographic images, is a reminder of the power structures underpinning colonial relations that resulted in rewriting landscapes and peoples with English names. However, in contrast to the material permanence of the breastplate and its photographic representation, personal names can be more fluid. A more recent history of Jackey Jackey shows he was twice renamed: first he was referred to as Bilinba and second the name by which he is now more commonly known – Bilin Bilin.

Bilin Bilin is now a permanent street name in the suburb of Bonner in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).⁵ The greenfields suburb, previously part of a sheep property established in 1853, was named to honour Neville Bonner, a Queenslander, who was well known as the first Aboriginal person to be elected to the Parliament of Australia.⁶ While the provenance of the name of the suburb Bonner is clearly documented, there remain questions as to the origin of the name selected for Bilin Bilin Street. The 2011 gazettal notice includes the following statement:

Bilin Bilin was leader of the Yugambeh people and witnessed his country being occupied by white settlers. He was taught to read and write by Pastor Haussmann. In 1875 he was given a ‘king plate’ which stated that he was ‘King of the Logan and Pimpama’ …⁷

In 2009, before the gazettal of the street name, a photograph of Jackey Jackey wearing his breastplate featured in an exhibition about four Aboriginal Australian resistance fighters at the National Museum of Australia, in which he was identified under the name Bilin Bilin.⁸ The information to support Jackey Jackey being renamed Bilin Bilin in the street name gazettal and in the museum exhibition draws on a combination of sources. The ACT gazettal sources are not cited, but the information is based on a partial transcription of the second line of Jackey Jackey’s breastplate as depicted in exhibition text at the National Museum of Australia. The museum exhibition relied on information provided by descendants who assumed that Bilin Bilin was the name of the man wearing a breastplate that identifies him as Jackey Jackey.⁹ In both of these cases, there is no evidence provided to confirm that the man identified by his breastplate as Jackey Jackey is the same man as Bilin Bilin, nor is there any explanation as to the history of this conflation. This raises questions as to how institutions ‘authenticate’ knowledge and view their responsibility to undertake their own research on subject matters being interpreted or provided to their audiences.

In this review of the extant historical data,¹⁰ we outline our genealogy of names that have been attached to Jackey Jackey. We suggest that two men named Jackey from different parts of the Logan valley region, south-east Queensland, have been conflated into a single person’s identity and then renamed firstly as Bilinba and then as Bilin Bilin. We explore what these symbolic acts of renaming mean for the first wave of Indigenous descendants researching their family history, pose questions about the significance of this renaming, and identify the consequential issues for those now seeking legal recognition of traditional rights in land.

Jackey Jackey

The name Jackey Jackey has entered the Australian vernacular with a number of connotations. For colonists, the name was a generic dismissive, ignoring the individuality of Aboriginal people and denying their dignity.¹¹ In the context of colonial disinterest in Indigenous languages there were likely cases where it suited Aboriginal people to insulate personal names from settler knowledge of their families. However, those individuals who assisted explorers and early colonists and who were often among the first to receive English names, like Jackey Jackey, now arguably occupy something of an ambiguous position in the discourses focused on Aboriginal rights.¹²

Figure 3: Logan River area, south-eastern Queensland, showing place names, 1987. Produced by Linda Thomson.

Source: Courtesy Michael Aird.

There has been some confusion as to the identities of several men who are named Jackey without reference to traditional names in the Logan valley region of south-east Queensland (see Figure 3). In 1931 Frederick Hinchcliffe, an early settler in the region, was careful to distinguish that the Jackey that lived in the Degilbo region on the Burnett River some 250 kilometres north of Brisbane should not be confused with the Jackey Jackey whose breastplate identified him as ‘King of the Logan and Pimpama’ and which confined his domain.¹³ He stated that ‘Brisbane was the nearest point that this son of the soil [Jackey Jackey of the Logan and Pimpama rivers] was ever to Degilbo. And I have never heard, even from himself, that he was ever further up the Upper Logan than Beaudesert’.¹⁴ Hinchcliffe further identifies Jackey Jackey as ‘the lower Logan Jackey’ and that he should not be confused with another man named Jackey who lived in the vicinity of properties named Buddai and Telemon on the upper Logan River.¹⁵ In 1962 Michael Sullivan, whose non-Aboriginal forebears owned Buddai, wrote about Jackey who lived in the vicinity of the upper Logan River and stated that he was also known as Bilinba. A consequent confusion has been that this name for Jackey of the upper Logan was in the 1980s used to rename Jackey Jackey, King of the Logan and Pimpama, as Bilinba.¹⁶ This misinterpretation of historical documents has had implications for understanding the identity of the man presented with a breastplate so long ago.

Who was Jackey Jackey?

The man that is well documented in several photographs wearing the breastplate inscribed ‘Jackey Jackey – King of the Logan and Pimpama’ lived in the region of south-east Queensland near where the town of Beenleigh now stands on the lower Logan River. While a record identifying his birth has yet to be found, we estimate from his appearance in photographs in the years just prior to his death, as well as when his daughter Emily was born around 1853,¹⁷ that he was born around 1820. He lived in the region from before the first European settlers arrived in the Beenleigh district in the 1860s until his death in around 1900.¹⁸

With no known official records to show the names of Jackey Jackey’s parents, Dr Joseph Lauterer, a German-born medical doctor with interests in ethnobotany and languages, provides the only known information. Lauterer identified Jackey Jackey’s father as being the ‘Meyerbeer’ or composer of a traditional song.

There are many songs and corroborries [sic] of our aborigines which are seemingly without any sense. They have been brought to one tribe by another one which spoke a different language and was only understood by those blacks who had originally invented them … Of the following I can only understand the word mirrigan, which means star. It is a short One:-

Mirrigan, merrigan marn,

Mirrigan merrigan mam, barru, barru, barru.

Jackey-Jackey, or ‘Kaway-Kaway,’ king of the Logan, is very fond of this song. He says his father, another Meyerbeer, had invented it or composed it out of another one sixty years ago.¹⁹

Figure 4: ‘On the Albert – 1893 – A day out with tribe and King – with Hon. C. Lambert’. Group, including Cyril Lambert (standing at rear), Polly Boyd nursing her daughter Milly, Jimmy Boyd, Sarah Clarke, Jackey Jackey, Billy Galleen and Kipper Tommy Andrews. Albert River, 1893. Photograph by Will Stark.

Source: Courtesy Queensland Museum (EH781).

While the Europeans gave Jackey Jackey a breastplate bearing ‘his name’, the photographs then fixed this as his identity, and publicly ‘effaced and defaced’ previous names by which he was known.²⁰ However, in private, he may have continued to be known among peers by many names over his life, depending on their age, relationships, cultural status and circumstances.²¹ Lauterer refers to the people that lived between the Brisbane and Logan rivers as the ‘Yerongpan’, and explained one of several names that Jackey Jackey may have been known by to his community:

Some of the proper names of the Yerongpan people are senseless, like these songs. Tziarlumbankan is the proper name of a black woman, as Kalankaba that of a man. They have no meaning. The old ‘King of the Logan and Pimpama,’ Jackey Jackey, who is often to be seen in Stanley Street [South Brisbane] (suffering from cataract in both eyes, poor fellow!) is called by his tribe Kawae-Kawae (Sweet-Sweet) because, more than forty years ago, he uttered this word when he tasted the first glass of sweetened rum.²²

Another German settler, Pastor Johann Gottfried Hausmann (later spelt Haussmann), documented other names that may refer to Jackey Jackey, but his writings also show some of the challenges with early written sources and their translations and how information about names changes over time. Hausmann founded the Bethesda Lutheran mission in 1866 on the Albert River, not far from its junction with the Logan River, in the area now known as Eagleby.²³ He wrote of his invitation in 1867 to an Aboriginal camp near the mission to discuss a small booklet he had given the Aboriginal people. ‘Suddenly King Rehma (apparently the chief of the tribe) took this booklet and showed the picture of Jesus Christ crucified.’²⁴ In a 1971 interpretation of this story John Stevens used a different name, but writes that ‘it is almost certain that the Rama of the Logan River Tribe, was known to the whites as King Jacky’.²⁵ In August 1868 Hausmann wrote of a man that came from Brisbane with his wife: ‘Kingkema was about 21 years old when Hausmann landed in the colony, 31 years ago, and Hausmann describes how this young man had great affection for Hausmann and his whole family.’²⁶ Inconsistent translations of the spellings from German to English mean it is unclear if the names ‘King Rama’, ‘King Rehma’ and ‘Kingkema’ refer to the same person. However, if Hausmann estimated that this man is around 52 years old in 1868, this fits within the scope of our broad estimate as to Jackey Jackey’s approximate birth date in around 1820.

In addition to overwriting any previous names by which Jackey Jackey may have been known, the breastplate gives him the title ‘King of the Logan and Pimpama’. This locates his primary place of residence and association with country as being in the area to the south of the lower Logan River. Although he is recorded spending time to the north of the lower Logan River at places in Brisbane such as Norman Creek at Coorparoo,²⁷ Hemmant,²⁸ Holland Park,²⁹ Eight Mile Plains,³⁰ and South Brisbane,³¹ we have not found records confirming he spent time south of the Pimpama River.

In 1930 Jessie Berry wrote of her time living with her family at Hemmant, near the mouth of the Brisbane River, in the late 1860s. She described her interactions with a man she called ‘old Jackie’, and that: ‘He always wore a large piece of tin hanging round his neck, halfmoon shaped with some markings on it, showing he was king of his tribe.’³² We have found no other reports of a person known as ‘Jackey’ with a metal breastplate living in the region on the southern side of the Brisbane River at that time,³³ and this is most likely Jackey Jackey of the lower Logan. Reports of Jackey living in the vicinity of Hemmant fits in with references to him being friends with Tommy Rawlins who is documented as living at Tingalpa, a neighbouring suburb to Hemmant. Hinchcliffe noted the friendship between Jackey Jackey and Tommy and reported that they were together at the time of Tommy’s death at Waterford on the Logan River.³⁴

Jackey Jackey’s presence and movements in the lower Logan region have been well documented. He was well known to the Hinchcliffe family who in 1863 settled on a property known as ‘Broomhill’ on the southern side of the Logan River, and a nearby settler, Mr A. Rick of Waterford, remembered Jackey Jackey and his family camp.³⁵ Members of a farming family at Mt Stapylton on the Albert River remembered Jackey Jackey as being part of a local macadamia nut trade, ‘collecting them from the hills to the south. Together with honey and passionfruit, he traded these, probably for tobacco and rum’.³⁶ The Harrison family who lived in the region of what is now known as Cedar Grove near Jimboomba have specific memories of Jackey Jackey and others visiting their home in the early 1880s and camping nearby:

Ninety years ago, natives on the Logan were very numerous. They seemed to wander around the countryside in groups of from five to twenty or so. The ‘Kingpin’ of them all was ‘King Jacky’ who wore a brass plate across his chest suspended from a strong brass chain around his neck. The inscription read:- ‘King Jackey, King of the Logan and Albert and Pimpama’.³⁷

In 1879 Jackey Jackey attended a large ceremony on the Albert River in the vicinity of what is now known as Tamborine Village, which people across the region of the Richmond and Tweed rivers, Ipswich and Brisbane also attended.³⁸ Hinchcliffe remembered that Jackey Jackey was visited by local Aborigines from nearby locations and that a corroboree was held in ‘the Broomhill paddock – this was always their camping location – at which aborigines from the now Pimpama, Coomera and Tamborine districts took part to the number of about 300’.³⁹

Several German settlers arrived in the Waterford region in February 1864, with Pastor Johann Gottfried Hausmann settling in the region soon after.⁴⁰ In 1867 he wrote:

In the month of November, that is 1866, we had a visit from the tribe of natives along the Albert and Logan Rivers. The chief of this tribe stayed with me until Christmas. I wrote out an agreement with him that I would give him a weekly five shillings and rations. For this money I was able to keep his whole family, with children and quite a number of relatives and friends.⁴¹

A few years before his death, Jackey Jackey was moved to Deebing Creek Mission near Ipswich, around 50 kilometres to the west of where he normally resided, where he appears in a photographic postcard produced by Benjamin Taylor⁴² and a group portrait of the mission’s residents in about 1898 (Figures 5 and 6).⁴³ There are no official records confirming how long he spent at the Aboriginal mission and no reports confirming where Jackey Jackey died or is buried.

Figure 5: ‘Tarampa Johnny – Taylor. Ipswich Series II’. Jackey Jackey at Deebing Creek Mission, c. 1898. Photograph by Benjamin Taylor.

Source: Courtesy State Library of Queensland (negative 73911).

Figure 6: Jackey Jackey and others at Deebing Creek Mission, c. 1898. Photograph by Benjamin Taylor.

Source: Courtesy State Library of Queensland (negative 18939).

Jackey Jackey’s wives and children

Jackey Jackey is thought to have had three wives – Nellie, Mary-Ann and Sarah – however, it is his wife Nellie that is best documented. He had a daughter Emily with Nellie and a son known as Johnny Logan with Mary-Ann.⁴⁴ It is thought that his third wife, Sarah, may have been a sister of Jackey Jackey’s friend Tommy Rawlins.⁴⁵ Sarah had previously been the partner of a man from the Coomera region, and they had one child named Lizzie. Hinchcliffe wrote of Sarah that ‘Her Lord and master had been dead about eight years when she became Jackey’s last Queen’.⁴⁶

As with ‘Jackey’ being a common English name given for Aboriginal men, Aboriginal women were commonly named ‘Nellie’. Therefore it is important to note that there were several women referred to as ‘Nellie’ or ‘Nelly’ in the colonial records as living in the south-east Queensland region in the late 1800s. For example, one woman named Nelly died on Stradbroke Island in 1873,⁴⁷ another Nelly was murdered at Sandy Creek, Yatala, in May 1879,⁴⁸ and another Nellie was included in a list of Aborigines who were issued blankets at Cleveland in 1882.⁴⁹ Another Nellie appears in a series of photographs taken by Ipswich-based photographer Enoch Bostock around 1890.⁵⁰ With no reliable evidence that any of these references relate to Jackey Jackey’s wife, we focus on historical accounts that directly connect these two people.

However, even where an account connects Jackey Jackey and Nellie, this information has become confused over time. As a young boy in the 1870s, Alex Harrison recalled Jackey Jackey and his wife ‘Queen Nelly’ visiting their family property at Cedar Grove near Jimboomba.

His Queen (Queen Nelly) was always of the little groups travelling round with him, and ‘once seen, never forgotten’ because she had a decidedly crooked shin bone, evidently the result of some accident that went without medical treatment.⁵¹

This quote is included in Stevens and Harrison’s 1962 manuscript history of Tamborine and Jimboomba. Stevens reproduces the same story in his 1971 manuscript with the details of the woman with a leg injury and of her death and funeral ceremony. However, in the 1971 writing he gives Jackey Jackey’s wife’s name as ‘Queen Annie’,⁵² which may refer to Jackey Jackey’s second wife Mary-Ann rather than his first wife Nellie. This slippage in the granular detail of naming underscores the importance of researching each piece of information and contextualising the history of its translation in manuscripts and publications.

Harrison’s account dates Nellie’s death at Cedar Grove, near Jimboomba, at around 1882 and this confirms that she was neither the Nelly that died on Stradbroke Island in 1873, nor the Nelly killed at Yatala in 1879. This also confirms that it was a different Nellie whom Enoch Bostock photographed in Ipswich around 1890. However, one of Bostock’s photographs of ‘Nellie’ has been erroneously attributed as being of Jackey Jackey’s wife.⁵³ It is more likely that a carte-de-visite photograph of a woman with the inscription that reads ‘Queen of the Queensland Natives. Logan River’ (Figure 7) is of one of Jackey Jackey’s wives, although it remains uncertain whether she is Nellie, Mary-Ann or Sarah.⁵⁴

Figure 7: ‘Queen of the Queensland Natives – Logan River’, Logan River region, 1870s. Photographer unknown.

Source: Courtesy Michael Graham-Stewart.

Emily Jackey

Jackey Jackey and Nellie’s daughter Emily was born around 1853 at Waterford on the lower Logan River to the west of what is now known as Beenleigh.⁵⁵ On her marriage to William Williams, Emily moved to the Tabooba and Tamrookum district around 1878 and spent the rest of her life in her husband’s traditional country in the region on the upper Logan River. Emily and William lived and worked for the Collins family on their properties and had a family of 12 children who were among the first attendees at the Hillview school as the district came under closer settlement. The family was well respected in the district and William and Emily’s daughter Katie was presented with an official gift of a watch when the 1927 Royal tour spent a private weekend at Tamrookum Station to recognise her work as maid in charge.⁵⁶ A location nearby to Tamrookum Station is known locally as Emily’s Hill in memory of Emily Jackey. While William and Emily are buried in the cemetery at the Tamrookum Anglican Church with a headstone noting their surname as Williams, among their descendants they are remembered in a memorial stone outside the nearby Tamrookum Memorial Hall.⁵⁷

How Emily is remembered over time provides an example of changing traditions of naming Aboriginal people. She lived during a time of considerable social change as Aboriginal people became more settled and assimilated yet were using traditional names as well as adopting European surnames. The various names by which Emily and her parents are known demonstrates problems that arise when placing too much emphasis on a single official document, when a broader research methodology holds the promise of greater clarity and accuracy. Names of Aboriginal people can differ on documents because they were based on information given by people in different relationships and quite often with limited education and literacy skills. Women could be known by many different surnames over their lifetime in addition to their use of the surnames of their male partners. More specifically, the spelling of names on early official documents such as birth, death and marriage certificates can vary depending on who was giving the information, who was writing the information down, and how neatly or accurately the names were recorded. We address some of these challenges by bringing clusters of documents together to look at the origins of more general patterns of naming of Emily.

Emily is among the first generation of Aboriginal people in the local region to be recorded with a surname. Her descendants now best remember her as Emily Jackey, using her father’s European name as her surname, despite her long marriage to William Williams.⁵⁸ However, when her children, who followed the European norms of the era and took their father’s surname Williams, provided information about Emily and her father for official documents, they revealed a changing tradition of naming within their generation.

There are no birth or marriage certificates for William and Emily, and we are not aware of birth certificates for her children’s generation who were born in the 1870s through to the 1890s. Certificates for her children’s marriages and deaths and her husband’s death list her name variously as Emily Logan or Emily Jackie.⁵⁹ However, when Emily’s eldest son Edward⁶⁰ provided the information for his mother’s 1929 death certificate under the name Emily Williams, he identified her mother as ‘Nellie’ without a surname and her father not as Jackey, but by the name ‘John Logan’.⁶¹ In this, Edward, who went by his father’s surname, overlaid his choice to use a European surname on his mother’s record even if she was not generally known by this name in other records. In addition, in transforming his grandfather’s name to John from the diminutive form Jackey, it may be he reflected a growing community discomfort that the name Jackey for Aboriginal people was being increasingly seen as disrespectful. It is also possible that Ted knew his mother as Emily Logan, and his mother’s brother’s name as Johnny Logan, and transposed the surname to his mother’s father, rather than use the perceived disrespectful name of Jackey Jackey.

Johnny Logan

The three names by which Jackey Jackey’s daughter Emily was known anchored her in relationships with her father and his country, and to her husband. Two names by which Emily’s brother was known –Johnny Logan and ‘Johnny from the Logan’⁶² – anchor him to place. Johnny spent several years incarcerated by the government at the Lytton Boys Reformatory, in 1893 he was at Deebing Creek Mission and in the same year he was incarcerated at Woogaroo, also known as the Goodna Asylum for the Insane. In 1894, at the request of Jackey Jackey, John Hinchcliffe wrote to the Colonial Secretary’s Office to request his son Johnny Logan’s release from Woogaroo.⁶³ The response from the Colonial Secretary’s Office, which called Johnny by the diminutive ‘Jackey’, was that ‘Jackey Logan now very well and may leave asylum at any time’. A request for a pass to Beaudesert for Johnny was ordered,⁶⁴ which suggests he may possibly have intended to visit his sister Emily. An entry in a Queensland Police Gazette dating to January 1897 indicates Johnny Logan, aged 25 years, was tried at Beenleigh for vagrancy, and this is around the time his father was last recorded living in the Beenleigh region.⁶⁵ Johnny Logan was admitted, discharged and re-admitted to the Goodna Asylum several times between 1893 and 1908. Then his final admission was on 16 December 1908 and he remained incarcerated until his death on 12 June 1934.⁶⁶

Genealogy research

In the 1970s, Aboriginal people were becoming increasingly interested in tracing their families and genealogies. As one of this first generation of Aboriginal researchers, Ysola Best, Jackey Jackey’s great-great-granddaughter, began collecting written and photographic evidence of her family history.⁶⁷ In the 1980s Best spoke to her father’s two surviving brothers, Les and Sonny Yuke, and worked closely with her father’s cousin Cyril Williams, who, a generation above her, had provided important family history. In 1987 she helped organise a large reunion in Beaudesert of the descendants of her great-grandparents William Williams and Emily Jackey that brought together over 300 family members.⁶⁸ The invitation to this event is significant for it shows where she was in her search for genealogical information at that particular moment in time, and an expression of her desire to continue to reconnect with her broader family.⁶⁹

The reunion invitation featured a photo of the 1936 Beaudesert All-Black football team that pictures several of Emily and William’s grandsons (Figure 8). What is of particular note is that the text on the invitation acknowledges the name ‘Emily Jackey’, the name she was most commonly referred to by her grandchildren,⁷⁰ and spelled the same way as on Jackey Jackey’s breastplate. Of equal interest is that the 1987 invitation also states that while the family knows a bit about William Williams, ‘not much is known about Emily’. In showing the extent of family knowledge of their ancestors in 1987, the Williams family tree distributed at the time of the reunion listed William Williams and Emily Jackey at the top of a family tree with no mention of their parents.⁷¹

A tenacious researcher, Best was determined to understand the place of her Aboriginal ancestry in south-east Queensland. She had graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Aboriginal Studies from the University of Adelaide in 1990 and later obtained a Graduate Diploma in Community Museum Management from James Cook University.⁷² In the early 1990s she was employed by the State Library of Queensland to index the Queensland sections of the genealogies recorded by the anthropologist Norman Tindale. A strong believer in oral history, which meant she could ‘hear and understand what historical experience has meant to the people who lived it’, her work at the State Library of Queensland gave her the opportunity to assist and encourage family history research for her own family and others.⁷³ She also worked to develop what is now the Yugambeh Museum Language and Heritage Research Centre in Beenleigh.

Figure 8: Invitation to Williams Family Reunion, Beaudesert, 1987. Produced by Ysola Best.

Source: Courtesy Michael Aird.

Best’s growing knowledge of her family genealogy had been assisted by her employment at the State Library of Queensland, which gave her improved capacity to access government information including personal files and registration certificates and greater access to other information resources such as photographs, newspapers and manuscripts. She had confirmed Emily’s parents as ‘John Logan’ and ‘Nellie’ from Emily’s and William’s death certificates,⁷⁴ and that Emily was also known as Emily Jackey on some official documents. However, it was only in the late 1980s when Best gained access to Hinchcliffe’s press articles⁷⁵ that she made the connection that Emily Jackey⁷⁶ was the daughter of a man named Jackey Jackey. Around this time, Best identified photographs of Jackey Jackey that were held in the State Library of Queensland as her ancestor, which enabled many of his descendants to connect and identify with these images.⁷⁷ By 1993 Best had sufficient genealogical data to prepare academic articles about her family history for publication that reconnected her family to the man wearing the breastplate naming him Jackey Jackey.

Renaming

In the context of Indigenous Australia, claiming the names of forebears is an act that can also re-establish connections with particular family groups and inscribe those families into landscapes understood to constitute Aboriginal people’s ‘country’. As with the case we have presented, this can involve attempts to find personal names that have been previously overwritten if not deliberately ignored in the social processes of settler colonialism. Linguist Michael Walsh provides several examples of a noted trend from the 1970s for those seeking their Aboriginal family history to discard names introduced by European settlers and to take on new names that identify their forebears as distinctively Aboriginal.⁷⁸ However, he also notes that this trend to re-inscribe Aboriginal names may not replicate traditional naming practices, given only partial knowledge among descendants.

Jackey Jackey, also known as Jackey or King Jackey, were names by which Europeans knew the man who wore a breastplate linking him to a particular area of country. As problematic as the name is, ‘Jackey Jackey’ were the words inscribed on the metal plate that he chose to wear, and it was the name by which he was known to colonists for much of his life, a fact that is well documented in the historical record. It is likely his kin and wider community knew him privately by other names, though as we have shown, only one or possibly two of these are documented in extant sources.⁷⁹ Since his death, Jackey Jackey has had other names attached to him by descendants that come not from the colonial record, but from an understandable misinterpretation of at times complex historical documents.

Bilinba

Ethnographic and linguistic field notebooks and diaries can be a challenging source material, particularly for non-specialist researchers. This is due in part to the technical nature of renditions of words, phrases and names and in some cases to the personal style of the documentation. However, these unpublished manuscripts often contain significant information that has not been documented elsewhere, or reproduced alongside interpretations. Information on one page of the linguist Brian Geytenbeek’s 1962 field notebook has taken on considerable significance in tracing the genealogy of the conflation of Jackey Jackey with a man named Bilinba.

In June 1962 Geytenbeek was working with Joe Culham to document traditional language knowledge at Woodenbong in northern New South Wales⁸⁰ and he helped Culham respond to a letter from Michael Sullivan who at the time was researching the history of the Hillview region of the upper Logan River and compiling a book about the region to commemorate the establishment of the local schools.⁸¹ The notes that Geytenbeek recorded in his field diary clearly align with the details reproduced in the Hillview history book. Sullivan acknowledges Culham as a key source of information for his early history of the Hillview and Christmas Creek region. He wrote, ‘Living on the “Creek” in those particular eras were a number of full-blooded aboriginals, both wild and semi-civilised’. He goes on to name a few men including ‘Bilinba (Jacky)’.⁸²

Almost 30 years later in the late 1980s, when Ysola Best was undertaking extensive family history research, she discovered Sullivan’s 1962 publication and incorrectly connected Joe Culham’s mention of Bilinba (Jacky) to her ancestor Jackey Jackey.⁸³ Soon after, the first documented account of this incorrect naming was published as part of Jakelin Troy’s 1989–92 survey and national list of breastplates. The entry for Jackey Jackey was listed as ‘Jackey Jackey King of Logan and Pimpama – also John Logan and Aboriginal name Bilinba (King Parrot)’. The information on which this entry is based is credited as being supplied by Best.⁸⁴ Since the first publication of a statement that Jackey Jackey was known as Bilinba, this information has spread into a wide range of public contexts including scholarly literature⁸⁵ and Wikipedia.⁸⁶ This connection has also been reproduced in Public Notices and Federal Court judgements referencing apical ancestors in native title claims.⁸⁷

We have outlined a process of historical and genealogical interpretation whereby the connection between the name ‘Bilinba’ and the man named Jackey Jackey from the lower Logan River has become entrenched in the public domain. However, in order to understand further how this connection has been made, it is important to return to primary source material. In 2011, a member of the second generation of Aboriginal genealogical researchers and nephew of Ysola Best, Michael Aird, began to research the origins of the confusion between the two men named Jackey/Jackey Jackey. He also noted the contemporary renaming of Jackey Jackey of the lower Logan as ‘Bilinba’⁸⁸ and that it was Sullivan who first published this connection in his history of the Hillview region. Michael Aird first knew of this book through his Aunt Ysola Best and that this book was seen as an authoritative source and has since been circulated widely within the Aboriginal community, including to descendants of the Williams family, who were among the first attendees at the Hillview school.

In order to understand the history of this connection, Aird searched for the correspondence between Sullivan and his original source, Joe Culham. Failing to find these letters, Aird instead discovered Geytenbeek’s field notebook that contains notes from his conversation with Joe Culham. On one page, Geytenbeek wrote a comment ‘Known to you when a boy – Jacky – bilinba’ and refers to two other men named ‘William Naigir’ and ‘Joe Culham (Senior) bunberi’ also known as ‘King Joey (eiga) oldest man’.⁸⁹

To contextualise Joe Culham’s information and the connection documented as ‘Jacky – bilinba’, it is important to understand the geography of the region and the cultural boundary and distance that exists between the upper and lower reaches of the Logan River, a watercourse that stretches over 180 kilometres draining the southern reaches of the mountainous ‘Scenic Rim’ and eventually emptying into Moreton Bay. Joe Culham lived on the upper reaches of the Logan River region, and it is therefore unlikely that he ever met the man ‘Jackey Jackey – King of the Logan and Pimpama’ who spent his life in the lower reaches of the Logan River. It is more likely that the Jackey also known as Bilinba that Joe Culham knew as a boy was the aforementioned Jackey who lived in the vicinity of the properties known as Buddai and Telemon in the upper reaches of the Logan River, and, according to a 1931 press article, may have also had traditional connections to the Clarence River region in northern New South Wales (see footnote 15).

In 2011, Aird sought further information from Geytenbeek about the notes he made in 1962. He asked Geytenbeek to clarify whom Culham may have been referring to and sought his opinion as to whether these few words have been taken out of context and become one source of confusion between the identities of the two Jackeys.⁹⁰ Geytenbeek’s response is significant. On viewing his 1962 notes for the first time in several decades he wrote: ‘Seeing the actual page really does make it easier for me to work out what was going on. And it sure brings back a lot of memories. It sounds as if Joe Culham, when he was a boy, had known Jacky (alias Bilinba).’ Of particular note is Geytenbeek’s assessment of the identity of Jackey: ‘Those attempting to use this line to link this Jacky with “Jackey Jackey – King of the Logan and Pimpama” are being far more hopeful than evidence entitles them to be.’⁹¹

Bilin Bilin

Our research understanding the origins and sequence of the renaming of Jackey Jackey as Bilinba takes another turn when Jackey Jackey is renamed a second time – as Bilin Bilin. In 1993, Aird published a photograph of Emily and two photos of Jackey Jackey in his touring exhibition and catalogue, Portraits of Our Elders. He chose to use well-documented names to caption the two photographs of Jackey Jackey as ‘Jackey’ and ‘Jackey Jackey – King of the Logan and Pimpama’⁹² rather than be influenced by assumptions as to what Jackey Jackey’s traditional name may have been. In the same year as Aird’s publication, Best became the first person to publish a second new name for Jackey Jackey – Bilin Bilin. Previously, Best used Sullivan’s publication to support her renaming of Jackey Jackey as Bilinba, yet she was now confident in her published assertion that ‘Bilin Bilin is the name of the man who bears the brassplate which is inscribed “Jackey Jackey-King of the Logan and Pimpama”’.⁹³ Best also held onto this belief in future publications.⁹⁴ In 1997, when Best’s nephew Rory O’Connor published his assumption connecting Jackey Jackey to the name Bilin Bilin,⁹⁵ he continued a chain of events that has resulted in the perpetuation of the conflation of two separate men named Jackey into one person.

The speculation and assumptions about Jackey Jackey

Jackey Jackey has attracted considerable scholarly and community attention as a significant figure in south-east Queensland history. On close scrutiny of recent published statements about Jackey Jackey, including the explanation of his name used for a suburban street and in a museum exhibition, we believe that some of these constructed stories have resulted, not from sound historical research, but from a belief in a series of conceived assumptions about his life.

When the National Museum of Australia’s exhibition described Bilin Bilin as a resistance leader and freedom fighter, this description arguably distorts the complexities of a rich life lived by a person whom writers such as Best, O’Connor and Lucashenko have variously explained as a strategic man successfully protecting his family, negotiating means of survival, and standing for his principled connection to country.⁹⁶ Venerating such a historical figure can understandably appeal to those who trace key aspects of personal and family identity to him. However, if such strategies of cultural recuperation are to be persuasive, the historical facts must be addressed alongside strategic assertions about a deceased forebear’s life.⁹⁷

Furthermore, connections to forebears known from the historical record to have been customary owners of traditional lands are central to many negotiations seeking legal recognition of Indigenous rights. Jackey Jackey, in native title proceedings, is thus potentially an ‘apical ancestor’ for a range of individuals and families. We note that historical research by the relevant native title representative body for an area including the Logan and Pimpama rivers continues the interpretation conflating the name Bilin Bilin with Jackey Jackey who received the breastplate.⁹⁸ We also find that public advertisements relating to the relevant native title claim present the name Bilin Bilin as an alternate name of an apical ancestor.⁹⁹ Given the result in an adjacent native title claim in 2015, where a Federal Court judge found claimants’ asserted genealogical connections to certain named forebears were not supported in the evidence,¹⁰⁰ the importance of rigorous archival research in land claims is clear.

Connection to country is at the heart of native title, and as part of the process, communities need to provide proof of their apical ancestors. However, there are also significant Aboriginal politics swirling around such desires for history and identity, and considerable resistance against correcting errors of people claiming descent once such assertions are situated in the public domain. At times, these two forces constrain the conduct of rigorous archival research and the importance of correcting the historical record. In the context of native title claims it is obvious that such accuracy is of critical importance. Our interrogation of a wide range of sources has reached a different conclusion from historical researcher Fiona Skyring who appears to follow other writing in conflating the significant Aboriginal forebear named Jackey Jackey with the name Bilin Bilin.¹⁰¹ In our view, this reinforces the chain of cementing and de-contextualising the renaming of Jackey Jackey in the native title context, risking confusion as to correctly named apical ancestors appearing in public notices and expert reports in the resolution of native title claims over a large area of south-east Queensland.

Conclusion

Over his lifetime and posthumously, the names attached to Jackey Jackey have entered the domain of published writings. One recent source lists five names for this man.¹⁰² Yet this conflation of labels for a person does not reflect details of the cultural and historical origins of the different names, who ascribed them, what the patterns of naming may reveal about broader historical themes or whether the names refer to the same person.

Those seeking clarity about their family connections are faced with a complex set of data that can be difficult to navigate. Jackey Jackey’s daughter Emily is known by three surnames: Jackey, Logan and Williams. The researcher and family member Ysola Best twice renamed her great-great-grandfather as her confidence with genealogy and historical data increased. However, in Michael Aird’s experience, the embracing of the names Bilinba and Bilin Bilin has come to vary across the wide group of descendants, with ‘Jackey Jackey of the lower Logan’ preferred by some so as to avoid confusion and ambiguity.

This case study has sought to engage with the way the colonial imposition of a generic label for a person initially disregarded any attempt at understanding Jackey Jackey’s name in the language he would have regarded as his own. Our research demonstrates the need to forensically interrogate historical sources in thorough and granular ways so as to understand the origins of historical and subsequently contemporary renaming. We have proposed the likelihood of several mistakes in identifying two individuals with similar generic names. Based on clusters of sources, we have drawn out patterns of naming that reveal detail of the origins of the names by which Jackey Jackey was known, and explain some of the meanings and historical patterns in naming and renaming down the generations of his family.

We recognise that renaming of ancestors is embedded in a range of practical contexts and desires. These include native title cases in which there are considerable symbolic and material resources at stake. We understand that the way that descendants have renamed Jackey Jackey may not be ‘accurate’ in a historical sense. Seeking family history can be an important source of surety about one’s place in the world and this clearly applies to the descendants of colonised peoples more than most. However, there is a risk of errors and misinterpretations remaining as confounding realities for subsequent generations unless thorough research is carried out.

The claiming and renaming of Jackey Jackey has been part of a broader desire for cultural recuperation of family history by the first wave of Aboriginal researchers who were his descendants. Subsequently, the negotiations with government and the private sector over cultural heritage and native title have provided a politicised context for the interpretation of historical connections to forebears and their country. The stakes in such negotiations go beyond desires for clarity about family identity to encompass potential financial and material opportunities. Hence the mix of rights in land, money and symbolic capital can produce vigorous politicking over the identity of a forebear like Jackey Jackey and the possible benefits attaching to his cultural legacy.

To return to the street name Bilin Bilin in Canberra, it might be seen as a harmless attempt at celebrating what some propose is the name of an Aboriginal cultural hero. However, in a setting that is more than 1,000 kilometres south of Jackey Jackey’s traditional country, the public embrace of an incorrect name for such a significant figure in the Aboriginal history of south-east Queensland masks contemporary complexities and dynamics of intercultural relations. Those complexities encompass both the invisibility of detail in attempts to recognise Aboriginal history and the significance of genealogical rediscovery that naming and renaming is bringing to Indigenous Australia.

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