The Literary history of traditional Australian Indigenous story for children reflects changing understanding and representation of traditional Aboriginal culture. This paper examines how cultural difference is portrayed in the first publication by Indigenous Australians in this genre. The path to publication of this pivotal book, The Legends of Moonie Jarl1, reveals the successful employment of publishing opportunities empowering Indigenous Australians to change reader perception of the traditional story genre.

During 2004, through a State Library of Victoria Fellowship, I examined over 300 books of traditional Indigenous Australian stories for children published between 1881 and 2004. I anticipated that the literary history of this genre would reveal a disproportionate number of publications under non-Indigenous authorship, with variable provision of provenance details depending on the collector's purpose and background. I was surprised to find, however, that even after the social, philosophical and political changes of the 1960s and 1970s, publications in this genre remained overwhelmingly non-Indigenous retellings of traditional story, acknowledging the original Indigenous tellers to varying degrees. Also, many nineteenth century recordings by anthropologists, ethnologists, missionaries and the wives of pastoralists on remote properties, continued to be sourced in later children's publications in this genre, even though the original publications often recorded privileged tellings of sacred stories. Despite awareness of the inappropriateness of this practice, it has continued to the present day.

The earliest publications of traditional story under Indigenous authorship are acknowledged as works by David Unaipon2 and were intended for an adult audience. For a child readership, the earliest publication in this genre was thought to be Oodgeroo Noonuccal's Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972)3, initially published under her non-Indigenous name, Kath Walker. My research establishes a date eight years earlier, marking the pivotal point between non-Indigenous representation and Indigenous publication of traditional stories for children. The Legends of Moonie Jarl (1964), a collection of stories told by Wilf Reeves and illustrated by Olga Miller, which was published by the small independent publishing house of Jacaranda Press, is the earliest children's book to be written and illustrated by the Indigenous people to whom those stories belong.

The Legends of Moonie Jarl is a collection of twelve traditional stories of the Badtjala people from Fraser Island and the adjacent mainland around Hervey Bay in Queensland. The Moonie Jarl of the title refers to the Badtjala elder responsible for passing traditional knowledge through generations of Badtjala people. The author and illustrator's father, Frederick of the Wondunna Clan, told these stories to Badtjala children, as lessons about specific places and protocols of behaviour. Each story in this collection is incorporated into one of nine story-maps, supported by explanatory keys opposite each full-page illustration.

The use of story-maps in this threefold presentation is in stark contrast to earlier imagery used in this genre. In the first edition of Kate Langloh Parker's Australian Legendary Tales: Folk-Lore of the Noongahburrahs as Told to the Piccininnies (1896) the notable British folklorist, Andrew Lang, juxtaposed Tommy McRae's drawings of traditional Aboriginal life around the upper Murray River, with Parker's collection from clans of Kamilaroi people in north-western New South Wales.4

Subsequently, the 1955 edition of Australian Legendary Tales was illustrated by Elizabeth Durack with imagery that often seems to be parodying Aboriginal people. In 1936, Robert Turner published the first of two collections of Aboriginal ‘legends’ for the instruction of Boy Scouts, illustrated with black and white images of Aboriginal implements and weapons.5 Texts published in the 1940s included visually romanticized and textually overwritten narrative, with imagery of ethereal spirit figures with wispy hair6 or the ‘noble savage’ Aboriginal storyteller surrounded by well-groomed white children eager to hear his stories.7

Olga Miller's story-maps chart the development of Badtjala story, linking content to the specific environment of Fraser Island. Arrangement of figurative and representational designs within bordered divisions in each story-map in The Legends of Moonie Jarl is not intuitive to a Western audience. The sequence of images does not necessarily proceed from left to right or top to bottom. The story, ‘In the Beginning and the Flying Fox,’ begins in the centre of the illustration where four triangles containing black and white angular symbols are arranged into a diamond shape. Successive layers truncate the diamond which signifies Beerall, the main god of the Badtjala people. Thin red and black parallel panels entwined by a serpent overlay the diamond and represent Yindingie, Beerall's son. Superimposed over these layers is a horizontal panel which relates not to the beginning of the story nor to its climax, but to behavioural protocols described in the middle of the story.

In contrast, ‘The Yindingie’ story-map begins in the top right hand corner, continues down the right hand panel, proceeds from top to bottom of the central panel and concludes at the bottom of the left-hand panel. Though each story-map contains symmetry around a vertical, horizontal or diagonal axis, the key is essential to understanding symbols and reading layout. In this way Miller's illustration bears similarities to Western mapping schemata. The reader gradually develops a visual vocabulary of figurative representations of Badtjala men and women (in silhouette), spirits, animals and actions.

The figure of Melong, the spirit of darkness, appears in five story-maps and is composed entirely of curved lines in association with specific magic symbols. Placed centrally in the ‘Mooging’ story-map, the Melong's function in this story is enlightenment while the backgrounded figure of Yindingie, the serpent, is instrumental to the outcome of the narrative. Unlike the other eight, the ‘Mooging’ story-map has no continuous outer border. The resultant ‘floating’ divisions are connected to the central diamond, which contains the Melong, by the apexes of the diamond. The text tells the reader that the story-map arrangement was designed to make a pleasing pattern that Aboriginal women would weave into their dilly bags with dried coloured rushes from Fraser Island. Glen Miller, Olga Miller's son,8 recalled his mother appearing on local Maryborough Television Station WBQ8 the year following publication. During her fortnightly appearances she would place the sections of each story on a large board, and following the key would narrate the story as she built the image of the story-map.

Jacaranda Press, a small independent publishing house specializing in poetry and books for the educational market, intended The Legends of Moonie Jarl for the middle Primary School reader.9 When Brian Clouston established Jacaranda Press in 1954 it was a one-man affair based in Brisbane. By the 1960s Jacaranda had offices around Australia and staffing had expanded accordingly. Australian school sales were the firm's primary market. In 1968, Sandra Hall published an overview of the emergence of small independent publishers onto the Australian book scene during the 1950s and 1960s.10 She noted Brian Clouston's publishing debut in 1954 with the secondary school poetry anthology, Living Verse by Andrew Kilpatrick Thomson.11 This anthology initially had a print run of 30,000 but by 1968 had been reprinted 17 times and had sold almost 500,000 copies. However, Jacaranda's most surprising sales success was Oodgeroo Noonuccal's first collection of verse, We Are Going (1964), which sold seven editions in ten weeks. Such publishing successes enabled Brian Clouston to channel funds into initiatives that gave new authors an opportunity to be published. For Clouston, small print runs represented recognition of writing quality yet limited marketing possibilities. Such was the case when he introduced Indigenous storytelling in published format into Australian schools with The Legends of Moonie Jarl in 1964, and subsequently Uncle Willie Mackenzie's Legends of the Goundirs (1967).12

It is interesting to assemble the social, political and personal influences that led Wilf Reeves and Olga Miller to the door of Jacaranda Press. Brian Clouston13 met Wilf Reeves and Olga Miller in Maryborough and accepted both the text and illustrations for their collection of traditional stories. Staff at the Maryborough Adult Education Centre had suggested Jacaranda as a potential publisher. Both Reeves and Miller were members of the Maryborough Writers Club and contributed to the Club's magazine, The Moonaboola Quill, published through the Maryborough Adult Education Centre. At the time Jacaranda had an open door policy towards authors, receiving manuscripts when offered rather than seeking contacts and referrals. Brian Clouston thought that The Legends of Moonie Jarl was well written, required very little editing, would be saleable and should be published. Jacaranda produced a print run of 5,000 through the printer Watson Ferguson, selling primarily to Australian bookshops and schools.

Jacaranda was interested in Aboriginal literature during the 1960s, appreciating the market potential of Dreaming or Dreamtime publications by high profile authors such as Alan Marshall14 and Roland Robinson.15 Clouston was also aware that Aboriginal authorship generated positive publicity; for instance, Oodgeroo Noonuccal was much feted after the immediate success of her first book of verse. Brian Clouston judged that The Legends of Moonie Jarl would appeal to schoolchildren around the ten year-old age group. He also felt that it was too early for a push into the international market and consequently concentrated on the Australian school market. Very few changes were made to the manuscript other than spelling and punctuation. Unfortunately, the original manuscript, illustrations, contracts and correspondence were lost when Jacaranda Press was completely inundated by floodwaters during the massive Brisbane flood in 1974. So devastating was this flood that everything kept at the Brisbane office was discarded due to water damage.

Wilf Reeves (1912–1968) and Olga Miller (1920–2003) were two of four children born to Ethel Reeves and Frederick, an elder of the Wondunna clan of the Badtjala people of Fraser Island. Their family home was full of books and both developed an interest in writing at an early age. Wilf enlisted in the Australian army on 10 March 1942 at Urangan in Queensland.16 Private Reeves was posted to the 39th Battalion at the time of his discharge on medical grounds on 20 March 1943, having served on the Kokoda Trail. He wrote a poem called ‘The Outpost’ during this time. Both ‘The Outpost’ and another of his poems, ‘Have you Heard?’, are reproduced in full on the State Library of Queensland website PoARTry in Motion17. The latter weaves the beauty of the island with elements of traditional story. Wilf met Patrick White in Maryborough during White's research trip to Fraser Island18 for his novel A Fringe of Leaves (1976). He gave White the Badtjala perspective on Eliza Fraser's survival of the shipwreck of the Stirling Castle in 1836. Wilf Reeves died in 1968, only four years after the publication of The Legends of Moonie Jarl.

Olga, eight years younger than Wilf, was born in Maryborough, returning as a child to Fraser Island where she developed a practical application of traditional culture from her Aboriginal father and grandfather. She later published a number of Badtjala traditional stories for children in print and electronic format. Her presentation to a symposium on the shipwreck of the Stirling Castle on Fraser Island in 1836 and the myth surrounding Eliza Fraser's survival, describes how lucky she felt having an Aboriginal grandfather and a non-Aboriginal one.19 Her Aboriginal grandfather, Willie of the Wondunna clan, was an elder of the Badtjala people who told her stories about their people. Olga Miller was given the Badtjala title ‘Caboonya’, Keeper of Records, by her grandfather20. The symposium offered the opportunity to explain how many reports misinterpreted the part played by the Badtjala people in Eliza Fraser's survival.

During her life Olga Miller achieved much for the Badtjala people of Fraser Island, in the fields of environmental conservation and Indigenous education. In 2002, the Queensland government recognized her contributions by conferring upon her the Queensland Great Award, recognizing her as a living legend. For her work in the field of Indigenous education, the University of Southern Queensland awarded her an Honorary Fellowship in April 2003, for her involvement in establishment of Buallum Jarl-Bah at the Wide Bay Campus. At the ceremony Olga Miller said:

Reeves and Miller's parents and grandparents expressed social convictions contrary to popular thought during their lifetimes. In Australia during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century political and social factors combined to silence Aboriginal people. The British invasion of Aboriginal lands brought Imperial systems of justice to Australia privileging the incoming pastoralists. Perceived as a threat, Aboriginal people were driven from their traditional lands and then exploited as cheap labour, often treated with a degree of inhumanity which shocked observers, such as the author and illustrator's non-Aboriginal grandfather, the Reverend J. B. Gribble. He took a prominent stance in support of Aboriginal people in Western Australia; a position which alienated him and his family from society and, ultimately, the Anglican Church. John Brown Gribble (1847–1893) was born in Cornwall, the son of a miner. His family migrated to Australia the following year and settled in Geelong, a rural township at the time. It was there that he was educated and at the age of 20 married Mary Ann Elizabeth Bulmer. The Gribbles had thirteen children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Gribble was 37 when he took up his first position of Anglican missionary in the remote north-west of Western Australia. There he publicly attacked the mistreatment and enslavement of Aboriginal people by pastoralists and pearling operators, thereby alienating himself and his family from that community.

In just under 20 years Gribble worked for three Protestant denominations at three Aboriginal missions, and lived at five localities as home missionary. Increasingly disillusioned with bureaucratic interference and opposition to his support of Aboriginal people, in 1892 he founded a mission on his own terms at Yarrabah, south of Cairns. Yarrabah was his last mission. He contracted malaria and was hospitalized initially in Cairns, subsequently dying in Sydney in 1893 at the age of 45. His dying wish was for his eldest son, Ernest, to carry on his campaign against the treatment of Aborigines by squatters and the police across Australia. Thus the author and illustrator's Uncle Ern, as Olga Miller called him, took over Yarrabah.

Ernest Gribble, aged 24, reluctantly following his father's wishes, arrived at Yarrabah. He had no formal missionary training and was totally ignorant of the local Kunggandji people's beliefs, totemic associations, kinship and marriage rules, having grown up with imperial ideology and evangelical zeal. Ernest Gribble's troubled life is examined by Christine Halse in A Terribly Wild Man (2002).22 She describes how Ernest descended into a deep depression after his father's death, emerging with a fervent commitment to missionary work. Halse's extensive research into Australian Board of Missions documents, newspapers and Ernest Gribble's diaries enabled her to analyse his life of emotional turmoil, the severe treatment he subjected Aboriginal people to at his missions, and how he developed policies of separating Aboriginal children from their parents as a means of building numbers at his missions.

Ernest Gribble came to Yarrabah at a time in Queensland marked by bloody violence towards Indigenous people as colonization progressed, diseases ravaged the Aboriginal population and damper laced with strychnine or arsenic poisoned them. Remnants of Indigenous communities clustered in poverty-stricken camps on the edge of towns where they relied on begging, prostitution and infrequent charity. Halse describes how this led to a relationship between Gribble's mission and the police:

However, like his father, Ernest also took a stand against the atrocities suffered by Aboriginal people at the hands of settlers and the police, making him powerful enemies. His campaign, while missionary at the Forrest River mission in Western Australia in the 1920s, for an investigation into the police massacre of Aborigines in the Kimberley region, put Australia in the international spotlight.

Ernest Gribble was a notoriously difficult man with exacting expectations of his staff and the Aboriginal inmates. The Anglican Board of Missions in 1894 sent two men, a carpenter and a stonemason, to assist Gribble at Yarrabah. The stonemason, William Reeves, was a reliable man and an accomplished, self-taught musician, with seven years experience as Superintendent of Wagga Wagga Sunday School. Though the carpenter, unable to endure Ernest Gribble's severe authoritarianism, resigned promptly from Yarrabah, Reeves remained and became a trusted employee. Ernest's mother, Mary Ann, moved to Yarrabah in 1893 with her three youngest children. Ernest's sister Ethel came later and taught in the school at Yarrabah.

In 1897 the Queensland parliament debated the new Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act which was the model for similar legislation in the other States. The Act established a hierarchy of Aboriginal Protectors and controls over virtually every aspect of the lives of the State's Aborigines: where they lived, how they worked, their money, family and movements. At the heart of this legislation was the provision for the forced removal and confinement of Indigenous Australians and ‘half-castes’ to missions and reserves. For Ernest Gribble the Act sanctioned his unofficial five-year alliance with the Cairns police. Archibald Meston, Protector of Aborigines, gathered up Aboriginal fringe-dwellers in southern Queensland and relocated them to a government settlement on Fraser Island, at first to a place called Beer-rill-bee and later further north to Bogimbah. There Aboriginal people from 26 different localities joined the Maryborough fringe-dwellers. Malnutrition, lack of sanitation, tension between Aboriginal people from differing cultures living in such close proximity and an abnormally high death rate, saw responsibility for the mission transferred to the Anglican Church in February 1900. Ernest Gribble, then Minister at Yarrabah, was given the additional responsibility for the Bogimbah mission. He sent his mother Mary Ann and his sister Ethel from Yarrabah south to Bogimbah. He appointed Mary Ann matron, Ethel schoolteacher, and put his loyal colleague, William Reeves, in charge for six months. Ernest returned to Yarrabah secure in the knowledge that Bogimbah was in the hands of family.

The Church of England Mission at Bogimbah lasted only until 1904. The soil could not grow fresh provisions to supplement minimal funding from the church. So a decision was taken to move the people back up to Yarrabah where there was more food and a better climate. In March 1904 Ernest's brother, Arthur, then a lay reader in the Anglican Church, arrived at Bogimbah from Gippsland to preside over the disbanding of the mission. One hundred and seventeen Aboriginal people were shipped to Yarrabah, 1500 km away. In his Indigenous history of the Badtjala people, Shawn Foley estimates twenty Badtjala people remained behind on Fraser Island, surviving by virtue of their traditional skills.24

Between 1900 and 1904, Mary Ann and Ethel identified the Badtjala people who had cunningly evaded Meston's roundup by staying on the back beach of Fraser Island. Ethel met and fell in love with the Badtjala man, Frederick of the Wondunna clan, while teaching at Bogimbah. Ernest's reaction to this news was to encourage Ethel, then in her mid twenties, to marry William Reeves. Succumbing to Ernest's insistence, Ethel married William Reeves in 1903 and 12 months later they had a child, called Faith. Two years later a devastating cyclone hit Yarrabah. William Reeves's weak constitution was known to immobilize him with even a slight change in weather. In January 1906, a team of Yarrabah workers braved the cyclone to tie ropes over his house to protect the bedridden Reeves, but he died three weeks later on 29 January 1906.

Some months after the closure of Bogimbah in 1904, Frederick and some other Badtjala men left Fraser Island and sailed into Trinity Bay aboard the Rio Logue. In Cairns, Ethel and Frederick kept their distance from each other; but after the death of her husband, Ethel sought support and solace with Frederick. Their relationship rekindled; and by August 1907 Ethel was pregnant. Ernest refused to marry them because of contemporary white attitudes:

Ethel was undoubtedly as headstrong and passionate about her convictions as was her father, the Reverend John Brown Gribble. Ernest suggested an alternative: for her own sake, Ethel should hide her pregnancy, have the child adopted and end her liaison. Fabricating a reason, he asked the Anglican Board of Missions to grant Ethel 12 months leave. Only three months were offered, which would not help Ernest's endeavours to contain the scandal of the imminent birth of his sister's Aboriginal child. It was clear to Ernest that Ethel could not stay at Yarrabah, so just before Christmas 1907, Ernest saw Ethel off from Cairns on a steamer bound for Sydney. Ethel's daughter Faith stayed at Yarrabah in the care of her grandmother, Mary Ann. As they had planned, Frederick then made his way overland through NSW and met Ethel in Sydney, and eventually found a Congregational minister in Sydney to marry them on 30 December 1907. When the Australian Board of Missions discovered Ethel's marriage to an Aboriginal man, they announced Ethel had retired from her teaching position with the Church of England due to poor health after the death of her first husband, William Reeves. Christine Halse26 notes that, even 22 years later, editors at the Australian Board of Missions censored all references to Ethel from Ernest Gribble's book A Despised Race (1933) after her relationship with Frederick became apparent.

Ethel and Frederick decided that Fraser Island was the best place to raise their family. They slowly made their way north from Sydney, reaching Brisbane in time for the birth of the first of their four children on 21 April 1908. Ethel and Frederick raised their children at their home on Fraser Island, combining a Western education with traditional Badtjala beliefs. Wilf Reeves and Olga Miller's book, The Legends of Moonie Jarl, is testimony to the priority placed on traditional beliefs within their family and especially the influence of their Indigenous grandfather. All of Olga Miller's publications and much of her community and educational work emphasizes that Badtjala land and culture were her priority. Ethel Reeves weathered church and society's disapproval, and pursued a life with clear-sighted acknowledgement of the rights of the individual, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Ethel's life with Frederick is remarkable for its time, a period of immense prejudice in Australia. Ethel lived to see two of her children publish a book about Badtjala traditions. Inherent in their publication is the continuing importance of those traditions and recognition that educating children is the way to change social perceptions.

The Legends of Moonie Jarl is important because it both revises existing perceptions of Australia's literary history for children, and its threefold format of text, story-map and key, transforms commonly held perceptions of Aboriginality. Viewed from the perspective of Queensland's history of sustained and violent conflict between European colonists and Australian Aboriginal people, this 1964 publication marks an enormous change in perception of the value of Aboriginal traditional story.

Acknowledgements: Pages from The Legends of Moonie Jarl are reproduced by permission of Glen Miller. Grateful thanks are also due to Glen Miller for generously taking time out from his work to discuss his mother's artwork, his recollection of his Uncle Wilfie and how The Legends of Moonie Jarl took form in the front room of Baddow House, Maryborough in 1964; and to Brian Clouston AM, and his daughter, Beth Clouston, for providing both their time and supportive material during interviews recorded in Brisbane.