TRAVELLING SOUTH

2 October 2026

We’ve just been into the Mount Barker Co-op building, part of Museum of the Great South in Albany. That’s where Uncle Peter, whom I wrote about in the last post, worked packing apples for in the season for a few years after moving to the Porongorups to live. 

[Note: I should explain that in the 1960s, the place was spelt p-o-r-o-n-g-o-r-u-p-s although now it’s called Porongurup. My fingers automatically type the old spelling.]

It’s 20 years since I’ve spent a few hours in Albany and more than 50 years since I’ve spent a whole day. As kids, during each holiday in the Porongorups, we’d usually drive the 30 miles (50 kilometres) to Albany once. All I can remember is the handmade chocolate-covered ice-creams (at Woolworths?), Dog Rock (a large granite outcrop that looks like a dog’s head), Strawberry Hill Farm, a National Trust property opened in 1966, and having a cold dip sometimes at Middleton Beach. 

Susan and I have come to visit for a couple of days and are staying in a charming blue cottage built in 1915 with a beautiful aspect out over King George Sound. We had decided on an October holiday because it’s wildflower season but our dates also coincide with an Art Trail through the South West so we’re enjoying the landscape, the history and the local art. 

The “original” settlement i.e. when the sealers and the colonists arrived, is on the edge of a deep-water harbour with houses moving up the hills that surround the water. As Susan said, it’s more like a New Zealand town than an Australian country town although it does have elements of a small Hobart. We visited a number of historic sites and museums both in Albany and on the way down in Kojonup and what surprises me is how much of the indigenous story of these lands is now being told, more than we were ever taught when we were kids. For example, I had no idea that there were still Aboriginal reserves in places like Mt Barker and Kojonup when we were visitors to the area in the 1960s. I can’t work out when the Mt Barker one closed but the near-by Gnowangerup reserve was still operational in 1971.

The real “original” inhabitants of Albany are Menang/Minang Noongar people and they were dealing with Europeans from the first visits of French and British explorers in the 18^th century. An interesting example of a new respectful focus on indigenous history is at Strawberry Hill, a government farm established in 1827. It’s currently closed for renovation but on their website they acknowledge that the Menang people would have seen the house, the farm and the fences as “both an intangible and physical barrier to their way of life” and the team at the farm are working with local Aboriginal people to tell the shared story of white and indigenous history.

One snippet of history that we learnt in the Kodja Centre in Kojonup on our way to Albany was the challenge that Aboriginal people of mixed heritage had to get Australian citizenship prior to the 1967 referendum. In a series of documents from 1938 to 1958 we read the story of a “half caste” farmer who wanted to be a citizen. For the most part, local whites supported his citizenship application and one  for his children to go to the local school but police officers and native “welfare” officers kept saying no. Why? Although he was viewed as a hardworking, responsible, teetotal person, he (surprise, surprise) had family and friends who were indigenous. In order to get citizenship you had to give up all such connections. It was these type of abhorrent rules that drove the amazing painter Albert Namatjira to drink after he was given honorary Australian citizenship in the 1950s.