History

This is for the Wednesday Wall group of photographs, showing all that remains of the police/troop barracks in Mandurah. The building behind is the post office and the foreground is a car park. From here in October 1834, soldiers, police and settlers rode out to massacre men, women and children of the Bindjareb people of the Noongar nation in Pinjarra, some 25 km inland.

History is a slippery thing. We tend to think of it as being definitive and fixed, when of course it isn’t; winners write history, especially when the losers speak a different, less dominant language. In the case of the Noongar people there was no written language, history being passed on through story, song, dance, paintings, carvings and drawings. Needless to say, the history as shown here by Wikipedia (Pinjarra Massacre) is disputed by the descendants of the Bindjareb.

Despite this, I wish you all a happy and pleasant Wall Wednesday. I echo the hopes of Mother Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

(By the way, the beer bottle in the window is not an original part of the barracks.)