An unusual (historic) view of Rottnest

The Battye Library archives hold a memoir, as fascinating as it is short, by L.C. Timperley, who lived on Rottnest Island (Wadjemup) from 1883-1890.

For today’s visitors to the island, it forms a kind of “shadow map” to a colonial past which, far from diminishing our appreciation of its pristine beaches, flora and fauna, only enhances it.

As a four-year-old, Lewis Clayton Timperley sailed with his family from Geraldton to Fremantle on the SS Ferret after his father William Henry Timperley’s promotion from inspector of police to superintendent of Rottnest Island. The family and their belongings were transferred to the island on the Wilwatch.

Growing up in his father’s house adjoining the island’s government stores and stockyards gave young Lewis a front-row seat from which to observe the colony’s administrative machinery and the differences between the prisoners’ lives and those of the elite — especially since his father was in charge not just of the “native prison” but the European Boys’ Reformatory (for young European offenders) and Rottnest’s salt and farming industries.

The best example of Rottnest’s history from that time until now is that of the Quod, built in the 1860s and originally the Aboriginal prison complex (the Rottnest Island Aboriginal Establishment came into being in 1838).

“The prison was an octagonal building strongly built of stone, capable of accommodating in its cells up to 200 natives as occasion demanded,” Timperley wrote.

“The Superintendent’s offices were in front of the gaol and on the right side of the main gate. Further along were the quarters occupied by Warder Mark Forkin. On the left side of the main gates were the quarters occupied by the Chief Warder, and still further to the left were Warder Flannigan’s quarters.”

The Quod was repurposed for tourist accommodation, before closing in 2018.

Today, it is undergoing important conservation work as part of the Wadjemup Project, whose aim is, according to the Rottnest Island Authority, “to formally acknowledge and reconcile the island’s Aboriginal prison history through truth-telling, ceremonies to facilitate healing, and memorialisation of the Quod and the Wadjemup Aboriginal Burial Ground.”

In his memoir, Timperley starkly recounts how the Aboriginal prisoners were identified by numbered discs tied about their necks, and their lives regimented by a bell sounding atop Heliograph Hill.

Knowledge of such history can add important layers to your Rottnest experience. Standing on the jetty at Thomson Bay, you might know you’re standing on the spot where Timperley saw prisoners arriving “chained together” so they weren’t tempted to escape overboard.

“The natives who were usually thoroughly uncivilised and clad in the scantiest of filthy rags – highly nervous and apprehensive as to what would happen next – and with long hair and beards matted together with lime, charcoal and grease, presented an awesome sight on landing at the small jetty in front of the pilot boat shed in Thomson Bay,” he wrote.

Walking along Garden Lake, you might also know of the former nearby gardens.

“The vegetable supply for the inmates of the prison and the Superintendent’s house was grown in the ‘Government Gardens’ situated on the east side of the settlement lake,” Timperley wrote.

“A good supply of figs, yellow peaches (and grapes) were also produced there… Each warder was given a garden allotment on which to grow the vegetable supply for his own household. Gardens were also maintained by the Pilot and his crew.”

In this way, Timperley’s memoir is more than a “shadow map”. The man himself becomes a ghostly guide to a past world survived by natural beauty and a complex legacy.

This holds true for Timperley’s observations of the prisoners’ corroborees, which were “usually held during week-end evenings, but every evening members of one or more tribes would have a singsong until they were counted into their cells for the night”.

Apparently, whenever a large corroboree was to be staged, “it was possible to see as many different varieties of corroborees as there were tribes in the prison”.

“Those taking part painted various designs on their bodies with lime, manufactured spider web head dresses from rushes, sticks and the woollen bindings from their blankets and carried sticks which had been scraped into balls of shavings,” Timperley wrote.

On such occasions, men danced around small fires to the music of a “vocal orchestra”. Their stamping feet “could be heard all over the settlement”.

If these special occasions warrant such mention, so too do the details of the “gaol routine” which on weekdays comprised a 7am-5pm workday fuelled by bread, tea, vegetable soup and stew, on which diet, according to Timperley, prisoners “grew sleek and contented”.

On Saturday afternoons, which were taken as half-holidays, some prisoners were allowed to play cricket with warders and other inhabitants of the island. On Sundays after breakfast, all “were given un-cooked meat and their ration of bread, and allowed to roam about the Island away from the settlement until 4pm, when every man had to be in the gaol”.

Fishing and the smoking of clay pipes were also indulged in, while during summer “natives brought in snakes they had killed and received their reward of half a stick of tobacco for each snake produced”.

By the time Timperley was writing his memoir in 1934, many changes had already taken place. He finds Phillip Rock, formerly a solid stone mass with hardy shrubs, now a crumbling, eroded remnant. The wattle-lined Lovers Walk disappeared. A pine plantation was laid to waste during World War I to make way for a prisoners of war compound. Government House was now subdivided into flats.

Rottnest’s history is far wider and deeper, rising sea levels separating it from the mainland around 6500-7000 years ago.

Timperley’s memoir offers a rare first-hand account of what it was like to live through only an infinitesimally small slice of that history. It is the matter-of-fact telling of the details that makes it disproportionately significant to us all.