Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy:
Watson believed in reincarnation and shared his fervent hope that the unborn generation to follow him would come to bow at the feet of a guiding intelligence.
In the early nineteenth century, when economic forces unleashed themselves in the United States, a number of experimental communities sprang up, created by men and women who hoped not just to create a better way of life but to recast American civilisation so that greater equality and harmony could prevail. So, not surprisingly, as the harsh economic climate of the time took a toll in the 1890’s in Queensland Australia, and people found themselves unemployed, similar experimental communities were seriously considered.
At the time I was a young, rising, investigative reporter working for a prominent Queensland newspaper. I was keeping abreast of the fallout from the downturn and read reports from a Royal Commission which examined the benefits of co-operative land settlements as a means of alleviating unemployment in the cities. This led to the passing of the Co-operative Communities Land Settlement Act of 1893, an act that was designed to promote collective settlements on Crown Land and foster co-operative, self sufficient communities.
The hope was that if thirty or more like minded males associated themselves together as a group on an area of land, and worked for the betterment of all, the collective would become self-sufficient. The government of the day was prepared to provide them with perpetual leases and threw in the offer of loans to help purchase food, tools, implements of agriculture and materials to build shelters.
Full of altruistic intentions, the groups that were established here, like American counterparts, were typically founded by disgruntled idealists, well-intentioned people unhappy about life as they observed it. They were invariably confident they could personally create a new and better society. Some were avowedly socialist or communist.
More than a dozen groups formed, most of whom failed quite quickly because of the poor soil of selections, the remoteness of their land from any markets and abuse of alcohol by group members. However, it was not the inevitable demise of these initiatives that interested me. What interested me was the driving forces, those leaders who were prepared to go beyond being a theorist and who tried to build, in reality, what they had dreamed of on paper. Despite my personal reservations, I did believe it was all too easy to dismiss them as hair-brained and preferred to give these individuals credit for putting their time and money where their mouths and ink-pots were, even if the results were generally depressingly dismal.
One such luminary was Mr George C. Watson. It came to my attention that he had penned a long letter ‘undeceiving’ the populous and powers that be of the nature of the land, that had become known as the Wooloongabba Examplar. What particularly struck me as I read about the Wooloongabba region was that the indigenous people, who had lived on this land for centuries before colonisation, knew the land to be a place of trials and negotiation (tournaments) and a sacred place (bora). It was known as the place of the whirling waters, the place of tall timbered open forest and the habitat of the whip tailed wallaby. While Watson had been a land surveyor of some note, was an integral member of the party who surveyed the border between Queensland and NSW, I doubted he was aware of just how great a place of trials this would prove to be for him and those who went along with the scheme.
Whatever! I decided to go undercover and offer my services as a labourer and a carpenter and learn more about the man and see for myself how his ‘utopian ideal’ was working out.
I arrived knowing a bit about the man. I knew that Watson was born into a prominent ship building and sailing family in Tasmania in 1833 and that he was educated at Launceston Grammar School. Like so many Tasmanians he was drawn to Victoria after gold was discovered. He drew upon his experience selling merchandise and briefly ran a store in Echuca supplying adventurers seeking to travel overland and follow the path of Burke and Wills. However, in 1862, drawn to live out his dream of being an explorer and utilise skills he had learned under the tutorage of the celebrated geographer, James Bonwick, he caught a ship sailing north and moved to Queensland. It was here that he eventually became a licensed surveyor and surveyed significant swathes of South Western Queensland.
In 1865, he married Sophie Scott, and they had nine children of whom seven survived into adulthood. He was an enthusiastic Congregationalist who, during free time, studied homoeopathy and became interested in theosophy and a range of radical ideas such as utopian socialism and communalism.
Shortly after my arrival I noted in my journal that Woolloongabba Exemplars had a well-built house with chimney and bark roof, and half a hectare had been fenced and potatoes were being grown. Five more hectares of scrub had been cleared for cultivation near Yandina Creek, while near Lake Weyba fifteen families, totalling 116 people, had substantial cottages, an 18 metre jetty, smoke house and drying shed for curing fish to sell. I observed that they held regular church services and Sunday School, had a small lending library, and were erecting a school.
However, while it seemed to be an interesting experiment I did pick up on an undercurrent among some of the families that was disconcerting. Perhaps unsurprisingly utopian ideals like this appeal to the eccentric, the misfits and the oddballs of society. It attracts the desperate unskilled unemployed, ex-missionaries, bankrupt merchants who have lost everything because of an economic downturn, flaky artsy-types who hope to paint or draw their way to a livelihood and many other malcontents who have smoked rather too much sage.
Watson had an eccentric lot to work with and welcomed me when I made it clear that I had a background working as a carpenter on ships. He took the time to apprise me of the seven utopian principals upon which the commune was based. He talked about the selfless “spirit of community” and a “brotherly cooperation instead of competition,” and claimed that there would be virtually no divisions of class or income. He implied that everyone would live happily ever after (which, as readers know, is a popular final line of many a fairy tale).
For my part I talked about the need to erase the class distinctions, individualism, the unquenchable appetite for private property and the rampant competition promoted by capitalism. In other words I deliberately sang from what I knew to be his ‘song-book’. Call me ingenuous if you like but I needed to establish a connection with this man if I was going to achieve my goal. What I didn’t anticipate was the degree to which my cynicism would be replaced by an unwavering respect for him and that, unlike his many critics, I would go on to tirelessly defend him and all that he represented.
I am not sure what Watson recognised in me! Perhaps it was time spent on ships in the company of captains and ship doctors that helped him recognise that there was more depth to me than he had initially perceived. At days end, although he was a strict teetotaller, he was receptive to having a non alcoholic drink with me and to spending time discussing all manner of things. It was this time together that really helped me come to understand the forces that had shaped him and to appreciate how anyone who criticised his style of leadership, who dismissed him as a ‘good old sort – one of the old school, a little behind the times for this kind of work and only fit for praying’ simply didn’t know him.
We were both captivated when a copy of an article by Annie Bessant, published in the Cosmos in 1894 came into our hands. Bessant wrote that “When the vast Continent that once spread where now the Indian Oceon rolls, the continent of which Australia was the southernmost point, and of which the mountain tops are still found in the Islands of Polynesia: when that continent was peopled with a vast population, and Lemurian cities flung back the rays of the sun from his mighty temples, golden roofed, in those far off days the Divine science was taught, and Lemurian races bowed at the feet of the Divine instructions”
As we meditated upon these words Watson waxed lyrical about a time when he passed through Longreach, a town in Central Australia and told me that he had felt the enchanted atmosphere of the place, remarked that the rarified air that he breathed was like bathing in an ocean of life. The poet in me was won over by his words and needed to hear more about his time sailing through the Polynesian Islands, Islands he now felt, having read Bessants words, were a remnant of the lost Lemuria.
It became very apparent that Watson’s time on the Petrel, taking Polynesian labourers, who had worked on Queensland sugar plantations, home had, for a number of reasons, contributed to his earnest, utopian idealism. In particular it was his visit to the ‘blood stained shores of Erromanga‘ that had made such a profound impression on him. He explained that his meditations, as the ship approached the shore, the very place where the missionary zealot, John Williams, had been murdered and then feasted upon by cannibals, resulted in him pondering on the meaning of life, in a world where an event like this does nothing to halt greed or mindless selfishness. It also caused him to develop a deeper understanding of the concepts of martyrdom and atonement and led to his study of theology.
Of an evening we talked as we walked along the what felt like the enchanted shores of the Yandina Creek wetlands, a space so full of life. We were in awe of the flocks of migratory shorebirds who flew over as us, watched as stately black-necked storks strutted their stuff and admired the scores of egrets, spoonbills, pelicans and other waterbirds who graced the horizon in every direction. We pondered on the perilous journey of the curlew sandpiper, a bird who annually migrated from Siberia and I listened, enthralled as Watson recalled details of that fateful voyage which had seen members of the crew lured, attacked and critically wounded with poisoned arrows. As I listened I gained an insight into just how numinous events like this, combined with other life threatening episodes that he experienced on that long voyage, infected the spirit and irrevocably changed his life path.
Eager to learn more I began to spend more time with him, insisting that, as he had a way with words, he really should write about his life experiences. Given that I genuinely loved doing carpentry on board a rig we were building I loved hearing about his boyhood years and time in family shipyards at Battery Point in Tasmania. He came from a long line of shipbuilders, shipwrights and seamen and told me that descendants built one of the Drakes ships. As he talked I shuddered, overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu, that I had heard this before and known this to be true.
While I was intrigued by the path that he followed from Tasmania to Queensland, and was keenly interested in his experiences surveying vast parts of Queensland, I was fascinated by his willingness to respond to ‘needs must’ by doing whatever was required. However, it was his spirituality that captured my imagination.
As a devout Congregationalist Watson believed that no earthly body could be a more authentic church than a particular place that possesses the Bible, the sacraments, and a properly called and appointed minister and deacons. I was grateful that he did not try to impose his distinct theological views about mankind on me and, perhaps more importantly, appreciated that he shared experiences that actually supported my personal connection to a divine energy. While I did not share his belief in one God I knew there to be a force, not only greater than myself, but that had a capacity to guide me. It became evident that, like me, Watson believed in life beyond death and gained strength from other divinities. I was moved when shared his fervent hope that the unborn generation to follow him would bow at the feet of a guiding intelligence.
Two incidents, in particular, that Watson recalled, intrigued me. Both occurred at times when the ship and crew were seriously endangered. The first was at Erromanga when, to quote him, “the Petrel and the cruise were threatened with termination”.
The Captain believed Dillon’s Bay to be a safe place to anchor but light winds prevented them from putting down the usual anchorage in shallow water close to the coastline. No sooner did they let the anchor down in forty fathoms of water than the cable parted and a wind sprang up from the N.N.W. So close to rocks and drifting fast, they were only saved by the quick thinking of an intelligent seaman who thought to run up the jib for during the night the wind increased to gale force. The sea was so rough that had they relied on the anchor they would have been hurled into the rocks.
It was during the night, while the gale was at its fiercest that Watson managed to get some sleep and recalled having a moving dream where Captain Goodman, a sea captain and valued old family friend, who before being lost in a typhoon, had been at sea for upwards of twenty years, came and communicated with him. He believed that knowing that this resourceful captain, a man whose passing he had deeply mourned, was on board with them during the tempest, combined with the fact that the Petrel had been built in his family’s shipyards, provided the protection that was needed.
Wild Mother Calling 