11 - “Happiness and fun”

Summary

Yarrabah has a superb physical location, right on the coast with a view over Trinity Bay and Green Island in the distance. It has soft, silver sands, and shady trees, with jungle-covered hills as a backdrop. But I have never been anywhere that was more socially depressed and depressing. At Palm Island, there had been an autocratic administration and covert ripples of defiance among the wards of the State; at Yarrabah in 1971 there was almost nothing, on either side, save sheer, dull apathy.

In the early days of the mission, a dozen little villages were spread over the considerable area of the Yarrabah reserve. The people had grown paspalum grass, cotton, peanuts, bananas, potatoes and turnips, and there had been some dairying and poultry farming. They must also have resorted to their traditional vegetables and fruits from time to time, despite the missionaries' negative attitude towards these.

In 1971, almost every one of the thousand inmates lived in the central settlement, as they were required to do by the Queensland government. Recent attempts to establish “outstations” – both here and at other settlements in the State – had met first with equivocation and finally with blank refusal. There was nothing for most of the people to do at the settlement. A few worked in the sawmill or looked after the steadily dwindling dairy herd.