David Unaipon

On October 4, 1995, the Reserve Bank of Australia put a new fifty-dollar note into circulation. It was made of polymer, a kind of plastic. On one side was a woman, Edith Cowan, the first woman elected to a parliament in Australia. On the other side was an Aboriginal man, and beside him a drawing of a handpiece for shearing sheep.

It was the first time that an Aboriginal Australian who could be identified by name appeared on an Australian banknote. The bank had chosen him from suggestions put forward by what was then the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

The man was David Unaipon. He was an inventor and a writer. He was also a preacher, and that came across less clearly on the banknote. For almost fifty years he traveled through southeastern Australia and spoke in churches and cathedrals of every denomination. In old age he still walked from town to town to tell people about Christ, while hotels turned him away because he was black.

He was born beside a lake, in a village that was a mission station.

First something about his name. In many Aboriginal communities it is customary not to use the name, the image or the voice of someone who has died for a period of time. The museum of the Reserve Bank therefore warns on its website that it contains names, images and voices of people who have died. In this chapter I do name David Unaipon. He died in 1967, his name is on a banknote that circulates throughout Australia, and the design of the new note from 2018 was made together with his people. Anyone reading this chapter aloud to Aboriginal readers would do well to know this custom.

A BOAT PAST THE CAMPS

The land of the Ngarrindjeri lies in the south of Australia, where the Murray River flows into Lake Alexandrina and the long lagoon of the Coorong. It is about eighty kilometers (fifty miles) southeast of Adelaide. In the nineteenth century this area became part of the British colony of South Australia. The Ngarrindjeri, a confederation of clans and language groups, lost much of their land, as other Aboriginal peoples did.

In 1859 the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association, a society of Christians in Adelaide, founded a mission station on the shore of Lake Alexandrina. It was given the name Point McLeay. Since 1982 the place has been called Raukkan. The first leader was George Taplin, a Congregationalist minister. Congregationalists are Protestants among whom each local congregation governs itself. The mission station itself was formally attached to no church. A school, a church and houses were built. The Raukkan church was built in 1869.

David’s father was the man who had taken the first step. James Ngunaitponi was born around 1835 near Piwingang, a lagoon on the Murray, west of present-day Tailem Bend. At first he was called James McPherson, probably after an innkeeper he worked for. In 1861 the Scottish missionary James Reid of the Free Church baptized him. He was Reid’s first convert and took the surname Reid at his baptism. Later he became known by his own name, Ngunaitponi, which the colonists anglicized to Unaipon. Reid drowned in Lake Albert in July 1863.

James went to Point McLeay. Taplin saw in him someone who could bring the gospel to his own people. He later described him as “a steady Christian.” From 1869 James sailed a mission boat past the camps around the lake to read from the Bible. Where the boat could not go, he walked. In 1871 he became the first deacon from among the Ngarrindjeri. Taplin leaned heavily on him in translating portions of the Gospels into the local language.

On July 27, 1866, James married Nymbulda, a daughter of the Yaraldi leader Pullum. It was the first Christian marriage on the mission station. They had nine children.

AFRAID OF THE BLOOD

The fourth child was born on September 28, 1872. His name was David. The Australian Dictionary of Biography, the State Library of South Australia and the State Records of South Australia all give that date. The national institute AIATSIS puts it in the late 1870s, but that divergence stands alone.

From the age of seven David went to the mission school. The Christian teaching frightened him as a child, he later wrote. Above all the hymns about the blood of Jesus filled him with fear. Yet as an adult he said that he owed a great deal to his Bible study and to the example of his father. We know this from his own look back on his life, as AIATSIS summarizes it.

Do you recognize that? A child hears words bigger than it can carry. It is frightened. And years later those very words turn out to be the foundation under its life. I find it honest that David did not polish that fear away.

HANDEL ON THE MISSION ORGAN

As a teenager David became a servant to Charles Burney Young at Kanmantoo, in the hills near Adelaide. According to the State Records he left on September 1, 1887. The Australian Dictionary of Biography gives 1885. Young encouraged his interest in philosophy, science and music.

In 1890 David returned to Point McLeay. There he learned bootmaking and later became bookkeeper of the mission store. At the end of the 1890s he worked for a time as a storeman for a bootmaker in Adelaide. At the mission he played the church organ for many years. According to AIATSIS he played Handel’s Messiah among other complex pieces. From the mission library he read scientific books. He became fascinated by the idea of a machine that keeps itself running, a perpetual motion machine. That thought never let go of him for the rest of his life.

On January 4, 1902, at Point McLeay, he married Katherine Carter, née Sumner, a Tangani woman from the Coorong. The Australian Dictionary of Biography notes briefly that the marriage was not happy. Nothing more is said, and I know nothing more about it either. Katherine died in 1928. They had a son.

SHEARS FOR SHEEP

David devised an improved handpiece for mechanical shears. In 1909 he registered it with the patent office.

Here the sources diverge. The Australian Dictionary of Biography and the State Library speak of a patent. AIATSIS writes that he received only a provisional patent and had no money to protect the invention fully. The design was later used anyway, and he received nothing in return. They also differ on the number of inventions: ten applications between 1909 and 1944 according to one source, nineteen according to the other. What is certain is that he never grew rich from them and that his patents lapsed.

The handpiece is now on the fifty-dollar note. There is something bitter in that. The tool that earned him nothing now passes from hand to hand across Australia.

“AUSTRALIA'S LEONARDO”

In 1914 David made the newspapers with ideas about flight. He had watched the boomerang, which spins and stays aloft. In his view that motion could be used to build a machine able to rise straight up. The Reserve Bank writes that in this he foresaw the helicopter. The Australian Dictionary of Biography is more cautious and says he was repeating other people’s predictions, about flight and about polarized light. Either way, the publicity made him famous. Newspapers called him a black genius. The Reserve Bank writes that he gained a reputation as “Australia’s Leonardo.”

The compliment cut both ways. An Aboriginal man who spoke about physics did not fit the picture many white Australians had of his people. The Australian Dictionary of Biography writes that his fame, his cultivated manner and his careful English confused the prejudices of his time. He was admired as an exception. Whether his people were better off for it was another question.

He himself did not smoke or drink alcohol. It frustrated him that there was so little work on the mission stations for educated Aboriginal people.

LOOK AT ME

In 1913 David went to work for the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association, the same society that had founded the mission. He collected subscriptions and sold their booklets. It gave him something few Aboriginal men had in those days: he could travel.

He did so for about fifty years. He spoke in churches and cathedrals of various denominations in southeastern Australia, including South Australia and Victoria. According to John Harris, who wrote about the first Aboriginal evangelists, he preached in Ngarrindjeri when his audience was Aboriginal and in English when it was white. He knew large parts of the King James Bible by heart. His sermons were full of biblical references.

He had a set phrase. He pointed to himself and said: “Look at me and you will see what the Bible can do.” That is how the Australian Dictionary of Biography records it. According to the historian Billy Griffiths, he used the phrase mainly in lectures for the Anglican Church.

I have to admit that the phrase gives me mixed feelings. It sounds like a testimony, and it was one. But it also fits a message of assimilation: look how far an Aboriginal man can go if he lives the way the white church taught him. The Australian Dictionary of Biography writes that David shared the mission society’s view that Aboriginal people should find their way into European society through education. In a pamphlet from 1954 he called himself a “product of missionary work,” according to Griffiths.

Was that submission or conviction? Historians do not agree. I think it can be both, in one person. He believed in Christ. He lived in a country that kept his people small. And within that reality he looked for a place to stand and to speak.

A MANUSCRIPT THAT CHANGED NAMES

In 1924 his first article appeared in a Sydney newspaper. In 1924 and 1925 he traveled through southern and central Australia and collected stories and legends from various Aboriginal peoples. Most came from the Ngarrindjeri. He wrote them down in the ornate English of his day, with references to the Bible and to classical authors. Griffiths describes how in these stories he presented a Great Spirit as a figure resembling God, and had a crow play the part of the serpent in paradise. David saw similarities between the stories of his people and the Bible, and he wanted white readers to see them too.

In the preface he wrote that, as a member of his people, he could claim to be “the first” to produce an enduring record of their traditions. He added: “but I hope, not the last.”

The manuscript was titled Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. He sold it to the publisher Angus & Robertson. When contact between him and the publisher lapsed, William Ramsay Smith, a doctor from Adelaide, bought the manuscript. In 1930 it appeared in London as Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals, under Ramsay Smith’s name. David was not mentioned. According to Griffiths, Ramsay Smith also removed David’s own commentary and voice from the text.

It was not until 2001 that the book appeared under David’s name and with his own title, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. About seventy-five years lay between the writing and that edition.

During his lifetime, though, smaller booklets did appear under his own name, paid for by the mission society: Hungarrda in 1927, Kinie Ger, the Native Cat in 1928 and Native Legends in 1929. He sold these on his travels. He is regarded as the first Aboriginal writer published in English.

A BOARD INSTEAD OF A PROTECTOR

To understand what David argued for, you need to know how the law in South Australia treated his people. Since the Aborigines Act of 1911 the Chief Protector of Aboriginals had been the legal guardian of every Aboriginal child up to the age of twenty-one. That applied even if the parents were still alive. He could compel people to stay on a reserve or in an institution and could move them. Anyone who refused was breaking the law. From 1916 the government also took over the running of Point McLeay.

David spoke out about this. In 1912 he led a deputation asking for government control of the mission. In 1913 and in 1926 he gave evidence to a royal commission into the treatment of Aboriginal Australians. In 1928 and 1929 he assisted J.W. Bleakley in an inquiry into their conditions. In 1934 he asked the federal government to take over responsibility for Aboriginal affairs. He proposed replacing the Chief Protector in South Australia with an independent board. According to the State Library, his views on land rights did not endear him to the governments of the day.

In 1939 the Chief Protector was indeed replaced by a board, the Aborigines Protection Board. Whether David had any influence on that, I do not know. That law also brought a scheme under which an Aboriginal person could cease to be Aboriginal in the eyes of the law, if the board considered him fit for it. It shows how narrow the path was that he walked.

In 1925 the minister John H. Sexton tried to arrange a job for him at the museum in Adelaide. It came to nothing.

ON FOOT TO ADELAIDE

David grew old. His wife had died in 1928. He kept preaching. In old age he walked to Adelaide and to the country towns of South Australia to speak. The Australian Dictionary of Biography writes that he was often refused accommodation because of his race. Harris adds that the police sometimes detained him.

In 1953 he received the Coronation Medal, an award marking the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He was eighty at the time. A man honored by the Crown was often denied a bed to sleep in in his own country.

He wrote two more short reflections on his life, My Life Story in 1951 and Leaves of Memory in 1953. At eighty-seven he was still preaching. In his last years he was convinced he was close to the secret of perpetual motion.

On February 7, 1967, David Unaipon died in the hospital at Tailem Bend, ninety-four years old. He was buried in the Point McLeay cemetery, in the village where his father had sailed a boat past the camps.

A BLACK SWAN ON THE BANKNOTE

After his death his name grew. In 1985 he received a posthumous award from the Fellowship of Australian Writers. In 1988 a literary prize was named after him, the David Unaipon Award, for unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers. So the wish from that preface came true after all: he was not the last.

In 1974 his people regained control of Point McLeay. In 1982 the village received its old name, Raukkan.

On October 18, 2018, a new fifty-dollar note was issued. His portrait remained, based on the same photographs as in 1995. This time the design was made together with the Ngarrindjeri. According to the Christian magazine Eternity, the Raukkan church is now on it as well. It shows shields of his people from the 1850s. It carries references to customs he wrote about. In very small letters there are fragments of text from his own Legendary Tales, the book that once appeared under someone else’s name. And there is a black swan on it, his ngaitji, the creature that belonged to him.

I have never held that banknote in my hand. But I can picture it: a plastic note passing from till to wallet across Australia. A face, a pair of sheep shears, a small church by a lake. And somewhere in the microprint, too small to read without a magnifying glass, the words of a man who once hoped he would not be the last.