contacting him. No Internet in those days. He had no chance to say good-bye to either of them. His faith was tested yet he was grateful to God however for sparing his son Robert and his youngest daughter Maria. He had to move on.
Your Uncle, who is a Psychiatrist, says that Barclay probably suffered from clinical depression. It wouldn’t have been known in those days. After some years it appears Barclay passed through this black period and began rebuilding his life. Now a much older man, he married Harriet, a young girl of 15. He brought Harriet and their baby son Henry back to Australia together with Robert and Maria. Apparently this marriage was not a happy one, according to Maria and they parted ways. It’s not known if Barclay ever received news of the death of his 2nd son, Henry. He apparently did not have contact with either of them – such must have been the bitterness. I unearthed some years ago, a death certificate for Henry Barclay. He was 18 years of age. The cause of death was accidental drowning. Barclay was probably better off not knowing. Curiously, Henry’s death certificate stated he was an American, which he was not. The detective in me suggests it may have had something to do with Barclay’s 1st son, Robert, who went to the Californian Goldfields. I must look into that. Might be a good story for another scrapbook. I’ve got 3 already! But I digress.
Where was I? Barclay, yes. Barrington Barclay was an unusual man for his day. When he was with the SPA Company, the committee and others remarked upon his enlightened attitude towards the Aboriginals, whether as praise or criticism it was never clear. You can work that one out. It’s a tragic fact that during the 1820s, the most common form of interaction with the Aboriginals was a white man’s eye peering down the barrel of a gun. Barclay was not that sort of man. Barclay wrote ‘Blacks never hurt a white man if treated with humility and kindness – I would trust myself anywhere with them’. He was eventually vilified for his friendship with the Aboriginals. This unjust vilification, together with other tragedies, nearly destroyed him. He wrote also that the Aboriginals would ‘soon be de-based and ultimately destroyed’. He was convinced that’ increasing contact with white men would retrograde their characters’. His prediction was a bitter paradox.
2 particular events marked his downfall with the company. The first was his act of ‘whistle blowing’ on the powerful McKenzie clan, who made up the committee of the company. John McKenzie himself, as head of the committee, fobbed off his old and diseased sheep to the company at a high price, from his own flocks! The history books say Barclay initially accepted these diseased sheep foolishly. Yet it was probably out of respect for McKenzie’s’ social standing, and his perceived‘integrity’ that he did so. When Barclay realised that McKenzie intended to continue this blatant fraud, Barclay pulled the pin. It was the pivotal event in his life that caused his bitterness. Yet it is the events that came after that reveals the key to his humanity and legacy to his descendents.
According to Barclay’s memoirs in June 1827, he wrote to John McKenzie:’ I am no longer disposed to the company grant, a burial ground for all the old sheep in the colony’. From that day forward his days were numbered. Previous to this letter, he had been always been praised in the highest of terms. The next visit by McKenzie in December of that year was not so convivial. He was accused of mismanagement, insubordination and in particular… for his ‘disgusting familiarity with the natives’. By April the following year he was suspended. In January 1829 he was formally dismissed. The cruel irony for Barclay was that he was also accused, though interestingly not charged with, running his own flocks on the grant at the company’s expense! John McKenzie stated:’ the concern cannot prosper because the company’s servants are only solicitous for their own interests’. This galling absurdity would not have been lost on Barclay. I am reminded of a quote, by an Australian historian. He said of McKenzie, ‘He never failed to destroy a man who stood in his way’.
The second cause of his ‘magnificent failure’ lies with his respectful relationship with the Aboriginal people. The Gringai tribe. In particular, a young Aboriginal girl named, Woomaree. According to Barclay, Woomaree was about 15 years of age, quite petite and fine-boned. She wore her hair in a cone shape secured with tufts of grass and was quite shy. Her only remaining relative was her sick brother. White men had murdered their parents in a massacre north of the company grant. One day on her way to collect ‘Bungwahl', a type of fern used as medicine, she was attacked by 3 timber cutters. Woomaree was viciously raped, bashed and set alight with rum. She was left for dead. Her injuries were shocking in the extreme. Such was the viciousness of the attack that Woomaree sustained a fractured hip, broken fingers, severe bleeding and burns. That she even survived was a miracle. Through an interpreter the only recollection she had of her attackers, was that 1 man had red hair. Learning of this atrocity, Barclay was incandescent with rage. He was still raw from the news of his own daughter’s death of the same age. With the permission of her sick brother, Barclay, together with a Gringai woman elder, nursed her in the comfort of his own hut. He wanted to make up for the gross deficiency of his race. His interest in the company grant declined. He wasn’t to know at the time, that his decision to nurse Woomaree would lead him on a journey of self-discovery. Barclay would never forget the smell of rum and burning flesh. He never drank rum again and if he could smell it, would fly into a fit of fury.. He writes of this rage as being debilitating and uncontrollable. He was to struggle with it for the rest of his life. Until he saw the falling leaves.
According to Barclay, Woomaree’s injuries healed slowly. He poignantly writes of stroking her cheeks one morning, his hands so large next to her little elfin face. He kept saying sorry over and over again. With tears streaming down his face he asked her if she could find it in her heart to forgive his countrymen. As he did, he took off a pendant from around his neck. It had been a courtship gift from his wife Anne, before they were married. At the end of the pendant hung a sterling silver matchstick box with one remaining wax matchstick inside. He knew that Anne would agree to what he was doing. He said to Woomaree,’ in memory of my daughter Grace, would you accept this gift to wear for all time as an affirmation of life and as a remembrance of apology for my race’. I don’t think Woomaree would have understood his words, but she would have understood his intent. Over the time of her recovery in his hut, Barclay and Woomaree forged a strong, silent bond. They communicated not by words, but by their hands and eyes. And by her drawings. It never failed to astonish him that she allowed herself to trust him, after what she went through. When she was well enough, he taught her how to hold and draw, with a pencil. Some months later it was discovered that Woomaree was pregnant. Barclay fervently hoped that it was not a child conceived from the seed of white man’s hatred. But then again, he thought, ‘a life is a life’, and it would be Woomaree’s child. Not a white man’s. He never found out. Barclay had to leave before the child was born to return to his own family in England, after he’d been dismissed from the company.
One more thing Barclay gave to Woomaree. Before he left to sail home he gave her his horse pistol. He wanted her to know that she and her child whatever its colour, would never have to be afraid of white men again. Barclay learnt many years later, a few years before his death that she had been hung for shooting and killing a white man with red hair. Barclay imagined that Woomaree might have wanted to make sure that her child had no father.
Following the breakdown of Barclay’s 2nd marriage to Harriet, he returned to England for the last time. After parting with Harriet and Henry, Barclay, together with son Robert and daughter Maria suffered the worst drought for a century in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. He writes of the anguish of looking up to the sky each day. When storm clouds did appear, they taunted and teased for days, and then the clouds simply moved on. He went bankrupt. Barclay was by all accounts a broken man. He returned home to die, leaving his grown up children, now both happily married, in Australia. The 2nd picture I have of him depicts such a dejected soul if I ever saw
one. His eyes are hooded and look down sadly at his large hands, now gnarled and knobbly, resting on his thighs. His mouth is curled downwards in abject misery and bitterness. It was a few years before he died. He did not die a broken man however.
Nightly in his dreams he was visited by Woomaree. Her soul had passed over a few years before Barclay. He revealed in his journal, her messages to him in obscure, abstract form. Yet he writes that the dream had a sense of order. Late in life, Barclay’s interest was drawn to comparative religions. From what he witnessed in his life, he started to question his own God. He studied Chinese religion, Judaism, Islam, among others. He was trying to find some order that meant something to him. In particular he was drawn to Eastern religion and of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. From the texts he recognised the dream as a mandala, vivid in colour, richly symbolic. He knew it was Woomaree as the voice for her tribe, because of the familiar icons he had seen her draw on trees, rocks and paper. This same dream haunted and teased him night after