The Mystery of a Mallee-root Waddy found at 15 English Street, Hahndorf, South Australia.
Anni Luur Fox, Hahndorf, South Australia - 13 December 2013
What was that knobbly object with a 38 cm wooden ‘tail’ growing out of it by the back door? Brian and I had come to look at a sad old house at No.9 on the corner of English and Church Streets to examine its suitability for our design and printing business, Fox Publishing Pty Ltd. The street number changed to No 15 soon after Frank Schubert agreed we could rent and later, purchase this place his wife Lori (short for Delores) had inherited in 1971 from her aunt, Clara Hulda Webb.
I could understand why it had remained empty for three years gathering dust and rat droppings. My own heart sank at the thought of the work required to make it habitable but Brian remained determined as always in his role as the arch-organiser of the family. Knowledgeable and clever, he launched into the project with a small group of teenagers over the 1974 Christmas school holidays as well as friends and family, including me. My father, a refugee from Estonia, was appalled.
What past lives had been sheltered here I tried to imagine while searching for signs of a bathroom. The backyard dunny had been modernized at some stage with a flushing toilet but the torn calico ceiling in the parlor indicated an earlier era, before Hahndorf’s settlers had access to such conveniences. Situated on a floodplain flowing into the Onkaparinga River, the town had a high water-table not amenable to the ‘long-drop’ type of toilet prevalent in many country towns. Its stinking contents could have contaminated Hahndorf’s water supply based on wells until corrugated iron tanks became available to catch run-off from the metal that replaced thatch as roofing material. A nightcart man had been employed to empty each family’s outdoor toilet bucket and dispose of the town’s waste far away from human habitation. With the advent of the septic tank, inside toilets and bathrooms became the ultimate luxury, but not in this house.
Beside the house was a corbelled bakeoven with a chimney that looked as if it had once been attached to an earlier dwelling. Frank later told us that he had demolished the three-roomed cottage soon after his wife had inherited the site. A large green corrugated iron shed shared the backyard with a Friesian cow he milked daily, to the amazement of Lia and Jaan watching the procedure while waiting for me to finish work before taking them home after school. Unexpected, well-aimed squirts from the udders sent them shrieking with mock fright to the outdoor tap.
Another aspect of rural life presented itself soon after our business began operating from this house in 1975. Frank’s lovely cow gave birth to a calf which happened to jam itself behind the toilet bowl just before Bill Peach who was conducting research in my studio for filming a documentary about Hahndorf for the ABC-TV series, had a surprise encounter with the frantic animal with loose bowels in the outdoor dunny. Payment for our research services resulted in our brand new ‘Bill Peach Memorial Bathroom’ installed inside the house, next to the printing room.
The knobbly object found by the backdoor did hold my attention. It looked as if it might have belonged in a woodheap required to feed the iron stove in the lean-to kitchen area. What was it? The sawn mallee-root (I assumed) and its appendage had a purposeful air, as if someone had deliberately fashioned the knob for some use other than fuel for the stove. I kept it safe with other found treasures that might eventually reveal how past lives were conducted in this German village.
At last, a breakthrough in the mystery! Thirty-six years after my curiosity had been awakened but thwarted by my own pressing tasks of life and work, I had received an invitation to contribute a research paper for ‘Researching German Women Pioneers: Putting the Jigsaw Together.’ The workshop at Adelaide University’s Barr Smith Library on Saturday, 22 May 2010 had been convened by ‘Friends of the Lutheran Archives’. My chosen topic was ‘Early Hahndorf and the Pioneer Women’s Trail’, the title of a short book I published that year to mark the 30th anniversary of the National Trust of SA finding the route on a survey map of 1841and organizing the first public walk in 1980.
My talk was based on a growing appreciation of settler’s lives after walking the Trail and labouring on conservation works at what was once the Widow Schmidt’s wheatfield at 20 Main Street. After her husband died soon after the family’s arrival on Captain Hahn’s ‘Zebra’ in 28 December 1838, she became the ‘head of the household’. The homestead block allotted to her with several cultivation blocks after the village of Hahndorf was surveyed in 1839, had become the home of Fox Publishing Pty Ltd in 1974. It had been number 43 on an early plan of the village with fifty-four homestead blocks in a U-shape around the church.
I held up my prized mallee-root artefact found at 15 English Street and asked, ‘Does anyone know what this is and what it was used for?’ It drew a chorus of ‘It’s a waddy,’ from women in the audience. Their grandmothers had kept such an Aboriginal club by the back door as a deterrent for bad behaviour by grandchildren holidaying on the farm. ‘I’ll get the waddy to you!’ had been Grandmother’s way of demanding attention.
A quick flick at home through the ‘Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology’(1966) revealed ‘Wadi-y, a ravine or gully turned into a watercourse. Arab XIX’, clearly the wrong meaning and language I was seeking. ‘Macquarie Aboriginal Words’ (2005) listed ‘waddy’ in the English Index with three Aboriginal words. Was ‘waddy’ an English mispronunciation of an Aboriginal word? Page 41 introduced me to the Paakantyi, a name meaning ‘belonging to the river’, the Darling River flowing from Bourke to Wentworth where it joined the Murray. The language group extended from a wide area into the dry lands away from the river as far as Willandra to the east and a long way into South Australia to the west.
Was this group part of the Murray and South East Cultural complex described by R.W.Ellis (1978) as extending into more arid Mallee country north of the Murray River? He had written about the group sharing many cultural features. Resources traded between tribes included pigments, weapons, utensils and in some cases, species of plants throughout western Victoria. Perhaps the Paakantyi (2005) were the source of my waddy which may have found its way to Hahndorf via familial relationships with Lutheran settlers and settlements dotted around western Victoria?
3.5 kultyurru waddy (a long throwing stick with a knob on one end)
Pirri waddy
Perhaps the waddy originated from the Wembawemba (2005)? Their language had been one of the Kulin languages once spoken over the whole of western Victoria.
5.0 nyil-kalk womn’s waddy, covered with porcupine quills and poison
The sawn knob of my waddy was pockmarked with what I assumed to be holes made by borers prevalent at 15 English Street, not poisoned quills. Where did the people who lived here find this weapon, was it referred to as a ‘waddy’ and how did they use it? The Kaurna name for such a weapon was ‘katta’. Robin Coles (2010) referred to the photograph of an elegantly crafted hardwood Peramangk club as a ‘plonggi’, clearly unlike the mallee-root club in my possession. Was this the same thing Captain Hahn had described in his list of Aboriginal weapons in his diary, ‘ … in addition they carry along with them a short cudgel made from very hard wood. It is about two feet long and has a knob on one end. They call it wirra in their language. When the spear has been shot away in warfare, this serves as a weapon …’ (1964).
Another quick riffle through my historical resources found the word ‘waddy’ used by John Adams(1902) who described their use in games as well as killing people. Paul Hossfeld BSc (1926) interviewed residents of Eden Valley and Angaston including Mrs I Griggs who had grown up in Pewsey Vale. She described waddies as having handles about two feet in length with a knob at one end which sometimes was the size of a man’s fist. That feature was variable. They were used for throwing, fighting or killing.
So why was this weapon made of wood that seemed foreign to this region, in an old house at 15 English Street, Hahndorf and who had left it there? A search of Certificates of Title revealed its European owners but no real clues to origin of the waddy.
- 1839 - The Widow Schmidt
- 1853 - Ludwig Joachim Heinrich Starke, wheelwright
- ???? - Carl Friedrich Grund
- 1865 - Grund’s only surviving child, Mathilda Fredericke Louise Shove, married.
- 1879 - Carl August Heinrich Storch, tanner, Grunthal
- 1880 - Carl Samuel Hermann Storch and Wilhelm Albert Storch, tanners, Grunthal
- 1899 - Gottlieb August Boehm, carpenter, Hahndorf
- 1905 - Carl Ernest Ruge, labourer, Hahndorf.
- 1906 - Hulda Ernestine Amalia Webb, married woman.
- 1939 - Clara Hulda Webb, spinster, Hahndorf.
- 1971 - Delores Adela Brenda Schubert, married woman, Hahndorf.
Did Gottlieb August Boehm, younger brother of T.W. Boehm who started the Hahndorf Academy in 1857, bring the waddy back to Hahndorf when he returned in 1896 with his family after some troubled times near Natimuk and later, Roseberry in Victoria? It seems that they had lived in a region once inhabited by the Paakantyi and their kin. T.E.G. Boehm (1979) wrote of carpenter G.A. Boehm having built the house in English Street and later, the three-roomed cottage. There is an etching of ‘English Street, Hahndorf’ dated 1897 by George Reynolds in the Art Gallery of SA showing the corner house opposite St Paul’s Church of England. Boehm purchased the site in 1899.
The house as I knew it had two bedrooms, a passage and a parlor in the plaster and lathe section with a lean-to at the rear. Reg Butler remembered the adjacent three-roomed cottage attached to the corbelled bake-oven as being in poor condition with dirt floors and each room opening onto the verandah. He thought it to be a much earlier construction than the house. Perhaps the Widow Schmidt or her children had kept the waddy as indispensable for stunning the pig in autumn before its throat was cut and the blood caught and stirred by the younger children in readiness for making blutwurst? Perhaps it was used to cull possums running amok in the loft where the apples were stored and the boys of the household slept? Perhaps Clara Webb and her mother kept it by the backdoor to deter intruders. They, too, had returned from western Victoria and became residents of Hahndorf.
The mystery of the waddy in my possession remains unsolved but at least this story may provide clues to its provenance and evidence of European adoption of this Aboriginal weapon in Hahndorf. While mulling over possibilities one night I turned again to ‘Macquarie Aboriginal Words’ and found on page 61, ‘The Sydney Language’ which had no living speakers but many words had been borrowed from the language by early European settlers. Many of the words and place names are still in use today such as …. 4.5 wuda, wudi Club, shaped from a long piece of wood, thicker at one end.
Recently Lyndell Davidge, born and bred near Griffith at Yenda, sent me some references (1959) she found on the Net after she recognized my ‘waddy’ as similar to the ‘nulla nulla’ on her family farm. This indigenous hunting stick was usually made from a knotted tea tree root in Tasmania where the wood was hardened by fire. The Wadi Wadi people occupied the southern part of the Thurawal area. There is a place called Waddai, now Waddi on the intersection of the Hay/Coleambally and Griffith Road in NSW. Waddies were used in hand to hand combat. They were capable of splitting a shield and killing or stunning prey and could be employed as a projectile as well as to make fire and ochre. They found further use in punishing those who broke Aboriginal law.
I wonder if the use of the name ‘waddy’ in South Australia originated from the overlanders who brought their stock from NSW and fattened it in stockyards which had been built opposite the new village of Hahndorf settled in1839? Has anyone else ever found a waddy in a house in Hahndorf or did such artefacts remain unrecognized as evidence of cultural exchange with indigenous people and thus fell victim to a ‘clean-up’ bonfire of documents and other combustible fragments of a life that had ended? I certainly had no idea of the waddy’s significance until enlightenment came by pure chance in 2010 at a workshop organized by the ‘Friends of the Lutheran Archives’ to source information regarding German women which sent me on sporadic research with no real hope of finding an answer. I hope that someone will see it on exhibition at the Hahndorf Academy one day and solve the puzzle.
References
- Adams, J.W. 1902. My Early Days in the Colony. Balalklava, South Australia, published posthumously.
- Blaess, F.J.H, Dr. and Triebel, L.A., Dr. 1964, September. Extracts from the Reminiscences of Captain Dirk Meinertz Hahn, 1938-1839. South Australiana, September 1964, Vol. III, No 2. Libraries Board of SA.
- Boehm, T.E.G. 1979. Boehm: A historical and Genealogical Record of Johann Georg and Johanne Caroline Boehm and their Six Children who emigrated from Prussia to South Australia on the ship ‘Zebra’ in 1838. Their seventh and last, child was born at Hahndorf, South Australia in 1840. Printed by Lutheran Publishing House, Adelaide, SA.
- Coles, R.B. 2010. The Ochre Warriors: Peramangk Culture and rock art in the Mount Lofty Ranges. Axiom Publishing, Australia.
- Ellis, R.W. 1978. Aboriginal Culture of South Australia. Extract from SA Year Book.
- Hossfeld, P.S. 1926. The Aborigines of South Australia: Native Occupation in the Eden Valley and Angaston Districts. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia. 50: 287-297.
- McCarthy, F.D. Curator of Anthropology. 1959. New South Wales Aboriginal Place Names and Euphonimous Words, with their Meaning, 3rd Edition,The Australian Museum, Sydney, NSW.
- Onions, C.T (Ed). 1966. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, Great Britain.
- Thieberger, N. and McGregor, W. 2005. Macquarie Aboriginal Words, Macquarie Library Pty Ltd, NSW, Australia. First published in 1994. Reprinted 1995,1999, 2005.
Oral History
Reg Butle. 2005. Conversations over Thursday night dinners at The Old Mill, Hahndorf regarding Clara Webb and her house and three-roomed cottage at 9 English Street visited before Clara’s mother died. He first visited while still a young boy, with his mother Ruby nee Nitschke. I drew the plan of the cottage on a serviette.
Comment by Tony Finnis
Having spent my early years in Melbourne during WW2, the use of Waddies by aboriginal tribes was well known, particularly the type consisting of a mallee type knob on the end of a narrower handle. They were used to kill animals or during fights between individuals or tribes. If I remember correctly, a number of articles appeared in the Melbourne press concerning a few aboriginal battles where Waddies were the main weapon.
My belief is that the Waddy was different from the Nulla Nulla or Hunting Stick irrespective of what is stated in 'Wikipedia' on the subject. This is based on a very interesting lady school teacher (Miss Gibbs) I had early in Melbourne who had an excellent collection of aboriginal weapons and other items which she displayed to us stating the aboriginal names and the uses that were made of them. Waddies and Hunting sticks shown were different.
I also remember a woodworking teacher (Mr Jolly) I subsequently had at Rose Park Primary School who had an unusual mallet which he used for woodworking which appeared to be a modified aboriginal Waddy although this was never confirmed.
18 December 2013.
