The stolen star – ABC 7.30 Report

 

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On a 500km journey, a son fulfils his late father’s wishes to return a stolen Aboriginal artefact — a 160kg rock carved with a star. His deed heals a First Nation traumatised by a blood-soaked colonial history.

7.30 Report by>          Jon Daly          David Iliffe     Alison Middleton

Topic: Reconciliation

First presented  Wed 18 Aug 2021

*Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this story contains images of people who have died.

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LIKE A KING in a carriage, a slab of sandstone is pulled along a bumpy outback trail in Queensland, followed by a procession of people.

Puzzled passers-by remark: “Is that a rock?”

It is no ordinary rock, but a stolen Aboriginal groove stone, and it is being taken on an epic journey home.

The Star of Taroom, as it is known, belongs to the Iman people, whose lands stretch across what is now cattle country in southern and central Queensland.

To the Iman’s ancestors, the rock was a tool sharpener, a waypoint directing people towards food sources, and a boundary marker of traditional country.

Its grooves once guided the Iman across the land, and now it is leading a new generation back to country.

Countless cultural items have been stolen from Australia’s landscape, but this one is being returned.

For the past 45 years, the rock has sat half-buried in the garden bed of John Danalis’s family home in Brisbane.

Its mysterious markings were fixed in his imagination as a child, as he ran his fingers and toy cars through the deep grooves.

“I guess I am the one who called it the Star of Taroom,” Mr Danalis says.

“I used to imagine it was a stone star that fell from the sky.

“It was a bit of a time machine because when you sat with it, with your hands on it, it took you back.

“You could imagine the people that sat around that stone centuries ago.”

Righting past wrongs

His father, Jim Danalis, collected countless curios and relics in his younger years as he travelled regional Queensland as a veterinarian.

In the 1970s, Jim Danalis often visited the town of Taroom, 500km north-west of Brisbane, and on a trip to check cattle, he came across the Star of Taroom.

“He convinced the farmer to wrap a chain around it, and they pulled it from the earth,” John Danalis says.

In a cloud of dust and diesel fumes, the rock was loaded into the tray of a dirty white Ford ute and brought back to Brisbane.

Black-and-white photos depict Jim Danalis as a typical bloke of the 1970s — “when the men were men and the shorts were short,” John Danalis quips.

“As far as his attitudes towards Indigenous people, they were … not very PC by today’s standards.”

That changed in 2010 when Mr Danalis convinced his father to repatriate the grimmest item in his collection: an Aboriginal person’s skull that had long sat on the mantelpiece.

“Dad was quite reticent to take that journey, but our family received so much gratitude and kindness; it was a real turnaround for Dad,” Mr Danalis says.

“It really broke Dad apart.”

John Danalis’s father died before he could return the Star of Taroom.

“Cancer moved faster than we could, and we didn’t make that last road trip together,” Mr Danalis says.

With the help of close friends, John Danalis hatches a plan to walk the Star of Taroom back to Iman country in a custom-made cart designed by a Brisbane bicycle builder.

“I just love my dad so much … he was a bit of a hero to me,” Mr Danalis says.

“He was larger than life, he wasn’t perfect, but I want this walk to celebrate the better aspects of him and his generation.

“What he did was wrong, but we can turn those [acts] around sometimes and maybe do something really good with it.”

With a band of a dozen volunteers, Mr Danalis sets out on the 500km trek.

Over 22 days, they pull the 160kg rock through the lonely bush tracks and bitumen backroads from Brisbane to Taroom and Iman country.

Mr Danalis is often asked, “Why not just load it in the back of the car?”

For him, the long walk highlights the importance of returning stolen cultural items.

“When you’ve looked into the eyes of someone who you’ve stolen these things from, you can’t put that into words, and there are stolen cultural heritage items all over Australia,” Mr Danalis says.

“There are treasures all over Australia that need to go back, they need to go home.”

The endeavour starts with a handful of people but soon takes the form of a pilgrimage, attracting all types, who have heard the story on ABC Radio.

Mr Danalis says the rock weighs a feather compared to the hefty responsibility of returning it to the Iman people.

“We thank the Iman people for that because of their generosity in allowing us to take this journey walking across country,” Mr Danalis says.

“By allowing us to take this journey, the Iman are allowing us to heal.”

The journey is marked by clashing personalities, blisters “visible from space” and freeze-dried dinners, but the walkers grow closer, sleeping each night under a chandelier of stars and waking to scrape ice off the tops of tents and swags.

“I felt really proud of our community, that we could do this as a bloody bunch of disparate individuals from all walks of life and walk together,” Mr Danalis says.

“It just gives me real hope for our country. We’re Aussies, and we can do anything.”

When Iman woman Tamie-Lee Lawson hears of the walk, she feels a “deep sense of responsibility” to travel from Melbourne to join.

Following the Star of Taroom also means reconnecting with the culture she has lost.

“You have that trauma from what’s happened to our people, and it’s something that’s always just under the surface,” she says.

“I can’t speak my language, and I don’t know all my ceremonies.

“Being able to connect to country and … walk where your ancestors have walked and feel their spirits is very healing.”

Ms Lawson hopes the journey will encourage others, who were perhaps too busy or too scared of reprisal, to return stolen cultural items.

“It would do this country wonders to have that healing for all mobs over Australia,” she says.

Taroom’s painful past

There are not many Iman people left in the town of Taroom.

The quaint cattle town, with a population under 900, is alive with dusty road trains and dustier station hands sporting ripped blue jeans and big hats.

A closer look reveals wounds from the town’s blood-soaked colonial past.

The darkest chapter of the town’s history centres on a Hornet Bank sheep station massacre in 1857.

Iman people were involved in the massacre of 11 white colonists at the station, some of whom were women and children from the Fraser family.

The words “murdered by Aborigines” are written in cursive in the old records at the local museum.

After the massacre was a bloody campaign of revenge by a surviving relative, William Fraser, serving in the Native Police of Queensland.

Taroom District Historical Society secretary Glenys Shearer says it is a story not many locals like to talk about.

“They [Iman people] were hunted down and slaughtered,” she says.

“For the next 10 years, there were mass killings of any Indigenous person they came across in that time.”

Hundreds were killed arbitrarily, but no-one recorded their names in cursive.

Many more were displaced as they fled the carnage, and previous historians considered the Iman people to be wiped out.

At the turn of the 20th century, many surviving Iman were forced onto the Aboriginal Reserve at Bundulla Station outside of Taroom under the Aboriginal Protection Act 1909.

White stones mark the gravesite for hundreds who died there.

Iman elder Stuart White’s mother was born on Bundulla Station near the banks of the Dawson River.

“There are over 200 people buried here,” says Mr White, standing in the long grass and beside scores of unmarked graves.

“When the Spanish flu came through, a lot of people got that, a lot died from that.”

In 1927, the mission at Bundulla was closed, and occupants were forced off-country to a new site at Woorabinda, 200km to the north.

“People were taken off the land, and it made it hard for them to keep their culture,” Mr White says.

Mr White says the stolen rock’s return is a chance for his people’s old wounds to heal.

“It gives the Iman people recognition of this land, and that’s what we want, we want to be recognised as traditional owners of this country and our connection to this part of the land,” he says.

“We’ve got a past, but we want to try to go forward too, and the only way to go forward is by healing.”

Healing community and country

Scores of people travel to Taroom to see the rock’s return — the repatriation sparks the Iman people’s largest return to country in decades.

Mr Danalis walks the last few kilometres with his closest friends by his side and a big crowd at his back.

An Iman man painted in tribal markings and wearing a feathery diadem leads the final procession.

Paperbark smoke lingers, and his ceremonial song cuts through the silence of the crowd.

The moment almost 50 years in the making arrives.

Elders, eyes shining with gratitude, embrace Mr Danalis.

“You’re Iman now, you’re one of us,” they tell him.

It is a moving moment for Iman elder Heather Tobane.

“It’s healing a lot of our people and a lot of the people who live around us, and that’s what it’s meant to be,” she says, fighting back tears.

“It’s the star on the day, and it’ll always be the star in our hearts.”

Ms Tobane says the returned stone is crucial for the younger generation.

“It’s rekindling that sense of place,” she says.

“Now the rock has come back, it has brought us back to where the roots are, and it means a lot.”

With his promise to his father and the Iman fulfilled, Mr Danalis is unburdened.

“For the first time in my life, I feel proud,” he says.

“It’s healing for everybody … it’s incredible. Who would have thought that a stone could carry so much love and hope and pride?

“This stone has got some magic about it, that’s for sure.”  

#ends

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Image links for this story:

The 160-kilogram rock is pulled in a custom-made cart. ABC Southern Qld: Jon Daly.

The returning artefact sparks one of the Iman people's biggest returns to country. ABC Southern Qld: Jon Daly.

Wattle flowers are placed on top of the groove stone in respect for Iman country. ABC Southern Qld: Jon Daly.

Many Iman people were forced to leave their country when the mission closed in 1927. ABC Southern Qld: Jon Daly.

Hundreds of people who lived at the mission died in the Spanish Flu pandemic. ABC Southern Qld: Jon Daly.

‘The star’ basks in morning light before another day of travel. ABC Southern Qld: Jon Daly.

The rock is secured in a custom-made cart. ABC Southern Qld: Jon Daly.

Along the way, John Danalis is touched by the generosity and emotions of everyday Australians. ABC Southern Qld: Jon Daly.

 

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Credits

Reporters: Jon Daly and David Iliffe

Video and photography: Jon Daly

Digital production: Alison Middleton, Adam Connors and Ruslan Kulski

Odyssey format by ABC News Story Lab

#ends

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