A legacy of frontier disruption

Kabi Kabi songman Fred Embrey was born into an era of frontier settlement and disruption. The discovery of gold in his Country, in the late 1860s, brought thousands of men to seek their fortunes on the diggings at places like Yabba, Jimna and elsewhere. 

When Embrey was first living at Cherbourg in the early 1900s, Aboriginal people of the Mary River and South Burnett region had already experienced several decades of turmoil and upheaval to their way of life after Moreton Bay and the broader region was opened to free settlers from 1842. It was an era marked by violence, with the massacre of untold numbers of Aboriginal people at the hands of settlers and Native Police, led by the infamous Lieutenant Wheeler.¹

A major catastrophic event for Kabi Kabi people was the Kilcoy Massacre: the poisoning of some 60 or so of their countrymen who ate damper made with flour laced with arsenic or strychnine, deliberately left in a shepherd’s hut on Kilcoy Station in early 1842. In response, the remaining Kabi Kabi men formed an alliance with their Wakka Wakka and Butchulla relatives, mounting a campaign of resistance against the settlers that lasted for more than a decade.² Alex Bond, great-grandson of Fred Embrey, recalls his mother Penny Bond talking about a base camp of these resistance fighters on Bribie Island.³
 

Despite these disruptions, key cultural practices appear to have continued — even if only intermittently — including the ‘kippa-making’ or initiation ceremonies (also known as the ‘bora’ ceremony) where youths were made men. In Two Representative Tribes (1910), anthropologist John Mathew (1849–1929) recalled witnessing this ceremony at Manumbar Station during this time (1865–72), observing that what had been a major ceremonial occasion was by that time ‘much curtailed’.⁴

According to anthropologist Norman Tindale (1900–93), Tin Can Bay was the ‘place where [Kabi Kabi] had last bora’ and these ceremonies are thought to have continued to at least the early 1880s.⁵ As an initiated man, Fred Embrey most likely went through these rites around this time.
 

Fred Embrey’s family at Cherbourg

Embrey married Sylvia Cobbo, a Wakka Wakka woman and daughter of leader Boobijan Cobbo who, like Fred, was a Miva (man of knowledge) at Cherbourg. Their son, Dennis ‘Dinny’ Embrey, died in 1934.

Anthropologist Caronline Tennant Kelly’s photographs of Dinny’s funeral at Cherbourg clearly show Fred Embrey, in traditional ceremonial dress, overseeing the proceedings. Given this major event was conducted on the lands of the mission, it is a tribute to Embrey’s status as a senior custodian that the funeral of his son was carried out with obvious cultural protocols; these images capture a remarkable cultural event in the history of Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement.

Fred Embrey discussed protocols observed for his son’s funeral with Tennant Kelly:

I am Carpet Snake and my wife Grass Tree. My son was Grass Tree. The reason we danced the Eaglehawk at the funeral is that my father was an Eaglehawk and that’s how we bring my father into it. He is dead and my son will be meeting him so we dance his dream so he will know.⁶

Fred and Sylvia raised Dinny’s daughter Penny (later Penny Bond), who was born on 21 December 1932.⁷ They are said to have raised the children of other close relatives, like June Bond (nee Hutton), whose parents were away as part of the labour force provided to pastoral properties from Cherbourg, facilitated under The Act 1897.