Back in 2013 I wanted to re-invent myself. I had been researching family history for a few years and I had collected so many interesting facts and stories that I felt I needed to expand my skills in actually presenting this information in a form that was interesting and engaging to some one who wasn’t only me. My first university experience had concluded with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Graphic Design with honours, somewhat over two decades ago. This time I wanted to study History.
But in early 2014 my plans were derailed when in late February I needed to go into hospital for some urgent but routine surgery. It all went wrong. Badly wrong. For all intents and purposes I died on the operating table— was unconscious for quite few days after that— then in hospital for over a month (including a second operation to fix the things they had botched the first time around). I was in constant discomfort and weak for the six months afterwards. I had wanted a fresh start, but this was not quite what I had in mind… I was probably was not yet fully recovered physically when I started a single Honours year in History at Murdoch University in the second half of 2014, as preparation for a full Master’s degree or even a PhD in Western Australian history.
Francis Fraser Armstrong.
I did successfully complete that Honours degree in 2015, but I have yet to follow up on any postgraduate study. The subject for my thesis was (and no surprise here) a distant ancestor called Francis Fraser Armstrong. Armstrong was one of the first British settlers in Western Australia. He was a teenager when he arrived in 1829 with his family, and was among the first Europeans to learn the language of the Aboriginal people of the region fluently. Thus at a critical juncture in the history of the Colony, he became the official interpreter between the two peoples. Whether he was a force for good or evil, you are going to have to read my thesis yourself to make that judgement.
A lot of good people assisted me in the writing of this work, so it should go without saying than any errors are mine and mine alone. I do stand by the facts as I present them here but I have to acknowledge that new knowledge will most certainly come to light. But these were my thoughts in 2015.
Digression time: This is an actual sandgroper. They are very rare, I doubt most “true blue” Westralians have actually seen one, much less know what they actually are… that’s another trope I detest: the name Westralia. It’s Western Australia, thank you! Fortunately this obnoxious moniker had mostly died out in the early 20th Century.
One of the more annoying legends I had to endure when I grew up was how integral Rottnest Island was to the hearts and minds of all true Western Australians. Located only a few kilometres off the coast from Fremantle and easily visible from the continental shore, it was the mythical holiday island of the state. Tradition was, as far as I could tell, you weren’t a true-blue sandgroper unless you’d been conceived there in a boozy, sandy orgy of debauchery, preferably during the school holidays.
Now, one of the only certainties, perhaps the only certainty I had about my own identity, was that I 100% belonged to Western Australia. I resented bitterly the implication that because I had never been to that place, I was somehow less of a citizen. As a result, even when I was old enough to have made the trip over there myself, I shunned the place. I had no desire to visit until comparatively recently when I finally began to learn more about the island and it’s history, and to my surprise and initial dismay— how it was intricately bound to my personal story — whether I wanted it to be or not.
The first thing you are going to see when you approach Perth and Fremantle from the seawards is Rottnest island. So before it was a holiday mecca, it was (proceeding backwards in time) a military base during WWII, concentration camp during WWI, then for most of the time of the British occupation of Western Australia in the 19th century, a prison of last resort for the colony’s aboriginal population. There were a number of phases to it’s use as a prison, some less horrible than others, but depending on your skin colour, Wajemup was an island of dread.
The entrance to the Quod: 2013. See that timber there?…
I first learned that my Armstrong ancestors had much to do with Rottnest during these early days as an aboriginal prison. Francis Fraser Armstrong has been depicted as the hero versus the villain that was gaoler Henry Vincent, but of course things were never that cut and dried. The Armstrongs left their mark on the island in many place names and a sandwich.
My family the BLT
One hundred years or so later, Rottnest then featured in the tale of my adoptive great-grandfather. He might well have owed his later success in business to his employers who narrowly avoided being interned on the island during the First World War for the crime of not being born British. They were forced to divest their Western Australian assets (some of which Arthur Turton acquired). But there was another story from the next decade that Turton never related to his grandchildren, and remained hidden until we uncovered it (finding it printed in just about every newspaper in the country at the time)… It was not a scandalous story, just an embarrassing one… for him. He was shipwrecked off the island and he couldn’t swim. Obviously he survived and went on to be Mayor of North Fremantle, but that is a story for another day.
Finally, there had to be a Dyson connection… so there was, and it is an important one for both James Dyson and the history of Rottnest island. Now we must back-track to the early days of Rottnest as an Aboriginal gaol, and the establishment’s second (and ostensibly more competent) superintendent Henry Vincent. Vincent had a reputation for sadism and brutality that no number of official investigations and formal inquiries could ever quite dispel. The whole island was a designated prison, but while the prisoners enjoyed (at this stage in history) the liberty of the island for much of the time, they were expected to return to the establishment barracks in the evening.
Plans for the Native Establishment dated 1842
Constructed in 1842 mostly from materials and timber on the island by the prisoners themselves under Vincent’s supervision, by 1845, when the whole island was gazetted as a prison, an extension must have been required. Local supplies were maybe no longer available so timber needed to be purchased from the mainland. The government put the matter out to tender:
The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833 – 1847) Saturday 22 March 1845 p2
And the successful tender was from…
The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833-1847) Saturday 29 March 1845 page 3
So James Dyson provided timber for an extension to the first Native Establishment building on Rottnest Island. It’s a not-very-interesting historical footnote in Western Australian terms, but a vital moment in the Dyson family’s history, for this is the first mention in public of James Dyson in Western Australia. Only a labourer in 1842, now he was a sawyer and a successful independent contractor after only four years in the colony.
If the plan of the prison from 1842 does not look much like the current structure on the island, now known as the “Quod,” there is a reason for that and it’s not due to the 1845 extensions. Henry Vincent once again would be supporting Dyson and his family in their livelihood, just as his legendary clashes with Francis Fraser Armstrong were about to reach their peak. For next year, he (or another warder) burnt most of the settlement down, including the establishment:
A fire took place at Rottnest a day or two since, when a stack of hay, containing about fifty tons, recently sold to the Commissariat at the rate of £4 per ton, was destroyed, together with the gaol and some other buildings. It appears that some native prisoners had escaped, and hid themselves in the bush. Mr Vincent, in order to dislodge them, set fire to the bush, the wind then blowing from the direction of the houses, but it eventually shifted, and carried the flames towards the buildings which caught fire, and were ultimately consumed. Mr Barlee and Mr Brown left Fremantle for Rottnest yesterday morning, to inquire into the matter, and, until the result is made known, we must only conjecture that there might possibly be some justification for the conduct of Mr Vincent, in resorting to so novel a method for securing escaped prisoners. The loss to the Colony is about £500.
The Inquirer & Commercial News (Perth, WA : 1855–1901) Wednesday 19 November 1862 page 2
In 1862 a new gaol building was finally commissioned. Lo and behold, Dyson once again successfully tendered to supply timber for the replacement. Vincent was gone, but if it was possible, the future regime was even crueller. The Quod was a prison, pure and brutal. Armstrong returned to the island once more, late in his life, to witness the execution of an uncomprehending aboriginal prisoner. If James Dyson ever visited Rottnest Island, even if just to deliver his timber, the records do not tell.
The Quod is a ten sided prison — like the Roundhouse on steroids : 2013.
…Ultimately, Yagan was shot by a young farmer named Feast on the Upper Swan, near Belvoir, now the property of Mr. W. T. Loton; Midgoroo being dispatched in a similar manner by a military guard in front of the Perth Gaol, now used as our Public Art Gallery. Yagan’s head is now on view in the British Museum, it having been preserved by Francis Fraser Armstrong, our first official interpreter of the native language, and our first embalmer of animals, birds and reptiles.”
If your stomach is strong enough, you can read the rest of this foul screed on the trove site by following the link. The article was triggered by the death of the widow of one of the first European botanists to study in Western Australia. His name was John Nicol Drummond, and you would do well to note that I refer to him as one of the first, and as a European botanist in Western Australia. I’m pretty sure Charles Frazer, the Colonial Botanist who accompanied future Governor Lt. James Stirling on the 1828 survey of the Swan River region prior to the foundation of the colony would pre-date him, even if he did completely misrepresent the fertility of the region to prospective settlers. Also the Aboriginal peoples of Western Australia around the South West region, known as the Noongyar, carried detailed botanical knowledge for generations prior to the arrival of the British. Some of their knowledge, particularly that relating to birds and animals, was eagerly sought by the young man Francis Fraser Armstrong, who, while he was the first to hold the formal title of interpreter as employed by the Colonial government, he was by no means the first European to attempt to communicate in the Noongyar language.
However this article is about taxidermy, which I choose to define as the preservation of birds, reptiles and mammals, often by the means of drying and stuffing, and it should come as no suprise to you by now that the claim to being the first embalmer in Western Australia made for Francis Armstrong in the above article can also be proved to be conclusively false. The motivation of the pseudonymous author of the above article is one of the subjects I explored in my thesis on Armstrong, available to read here, so I will not dwell on it further, other than to observe the author has deliberately conflated the story of Armstrong with one who has a far better claim to be the colony’s first carcase-preserver.
Inquirer (Perth, WA : 1840 – 1855) Wednesday 25 March 1846 p1 (Trove)
Armstrong was an amateur taxidermist, as were a number in the colony during its early days of existence. This newspaper advertisement placed by Armstrong himself was for the sale of taxidermy supplies. That there were other stuffers in the public at large must be self-evident as who else could he be selling glass eyes to?
Western Australian Almanack 1842 (SLWA)
That he was a skilled embalmer of dead things, particularly of birds, might be demonstrated by his business of selling sets of specimens of the colony’s fauna, advertised as early as 1842, and culminating in a noteworthy exhibition of his work in a colonial exhibition held in Melbourne, Victoria, during 1866.
Francis Armstrong’s contribution to the Melbourne Exhibition of 1862 The Inquirer and Commercial News, Wednesday 13 June 1866 p3
To be fair, Francis Armstrong never claimed any primacy for himself, unscrupulous others did that. Armstrong was only a teenager in when he arrived in Western Australia in 1829, and his first few years in in the colony are well documented as a time of struggle for survival for both he and his family. Among those who have a better claim to be the first documented taxidermist in Western Australia, George Fletcher Moore probably has the best case to make.
Oh what a jolly fellow is this George Fletcher Moore!
Moore (1798-1886) was a mediocre Irish lawyer who realised that immigrating in the first wave of settlers to the Swan River Colony opened up the chance of becoming a very big fish in a very small and shallow pool. He arrived in late 1830. So it was that he swiftly acquired some prime real estate in the Swan Valley and a highly lucrative position as one of the Colony’s top law officers. His inflated reputation as a historical figure today rests on the survival of his extensive and candid diaries of the first decade or so of the Swan River Colony’s existence. These were published in edited form both in the contemporary newspapers and as a book Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia (London 1884). However, I would recommend the reconstructed and unexpurgated version of his writings: The Millendon Memoirs: George Fletcher Moore’s Western Australian Diaries and Letters, 1830-1841 edited by J. M. R. Cameron (Hesperian Press, 2006). It is this version I quote from here:
…There are many of the same sorts of birds here as at home but differing either in colour or voice – crows rooks magpies cuckoos redbreasts wrens of a beautiful blue, and many others. I thought of making a case of curios, tho but as yet I assure you the necessity of attending to more important concerns supersedes that feeling. I killed a snake and stuffed it – a nameless sort of grey large headed bird, and a beautiful copper coloured heron but for want of time, I see the ants are destroying the skins.”
Tuesday 28 December 1830. (The Millendon Memoirs, p9)
So while it is perfectly feasible for another settler or possibly a scientifically minded naval officer to have stuffed something before this, Moore’s diary is the earliest documented example I know of. Moore was not particularly fortunate in his hobby. Many of the specimens he sent back home to Ireland never arrived, and he found himself in close proximity to one particular “specimen” he was unable to add to his collection. Moore’s property was adjacent to that where the Aboriginal warrior Yagan was murdered on 11 July 1833, and Moore made haste to observe the body and admire the handiwork of the embalmer.
I forgot to mention on Sunday I saw at Mr Bull’s the head of Yagan, which one of the men had cut off for the purpose of preserving. Possibly it may yet figure in some museum at home. I should have been been glad to get it myself.
Monday 15 July 1833 (The Millendon Memoirs, p258)
Moore later offered the man who preserved the head and the skin flayed from Yagan’s back (because it had an interesting tattoo on it) a job on his own property as a shepherd. William “Doctor” Dodd must also be another candidate to be Western Australia’s earliest taxidermist.
I was inspired to write this article after a visit to the State Library of Western Australia where I had the opportunity to have an interesting conversation with a staff member from the Western Australian Museum about what might be the earliest taxidermy specimen in the Museum’s collection and whether any of those specimens were the handiwork of Francis Armstrong. At the same time, I looked at two specimens on display there: A mountain devil (Moloch horridus, the same sort as mentioned above) and a Tawny Frogmouth (Podargus strigoides). Both were beautifully preserved and displayed. Time was taken to explain that both specimens came from creatures that died of natural causes and that no foul play was involved in their procurement.
A very much alive Moloch horridus as photographed by the author in 2016. The Tawny Frogmouth in the header is one of mine as well.
Which lead me to think again about the earliest history of taxidermy in Western Australia. George Fletcher Moore regarded the carcase of a man he had enjoyed a conversation with some weeks before (admittedly Yagan had thrown a spear at him) as merely an interesting subject for his collection, no different to a bird or reptile. I find his callousness and racism abhorrent. While we are in truth all animals, I doubt Moore categorised himself as fauna. Then there was Armstrong. He and his friends in the Noongyar community killed beautiful and rare animals in large numbers so he could stuff them and sell them to collectors. I find this disturbing for among other reasons: the disconnect between his admiring and supposedly respecting nature, then slaughtering it to fill a display case.
Yet these preserved animals dispersed to collectors and the occasional reputable naturalist and museum all over the world has spread the knowledge of the beauty and diversity of the natural world, all over the world. I myself was inspired by visits to the museum as a child, with their display cases and tableaux of animals in the wild. One avid collector and preserver of dead animals was a young natural historian called Charles Darwin. The skins of birds he collected from the Galapagos were many years after the fact an inspiration to him in his attempts to prove his theory of natural selection. (An irrelevant but interesting fact: Many years after Darwin’s sojourn, the ship he sailed on, the HMS Beagle, was employed to survey the north west coast of Western Australia)
Finches collected by Charles Darwin from the Galapagos Islands in 1835 are still available to researchers today.
So when I see a stuffed animal, I may admire the workmanship, I may admire the beauty of the animal itself, I must acknowledge its value as an artefact, but I must also feel disquiet, some discomfort. I think a measure of discomfort is not a bad thing to possess, sometimes.
Download pdf of “The Interpreter: The Legacy of Francis Fraser Armstrong”
