Black Sheep
By Nicholas Jose
(about Roger Jose of Borroloola)

This hot, tropical bush settlement, a hundred years ago, was as close to the Wild West as Australia ever had. Stock drovers – men on horseback who led cattle overland for thousands of kilometres, through jungle and near-desert plain – sometimes stopped over at Borroloola with their herds. No doubt the men were tough, and Saturday nights must have got pretty wild in this one-horse, one-pub outpost.

One thing though, that visitors to Borroloola found over the decades last century, was that the few people who lived there seemed darn well educated, for a mob of bushies.

Sometimes a man could be seen sitting under a tree by the crocodilian river, reading a copy of Virgil, or Plutarch, or Henry James. A visit to the aboriginal encampments of the region might reveal an illustrated leather-bound Shakespeare whose pictures would be appreciated, and a drovers’ camp might turn up a fine Bible, the pages of which made useful fire starters or toilet paper.

There was a man lived around there, name of Roger Jose (1896 - October 7, 1963). This old eccentric and his aboriginal wife lived outside the ‘town’, like Diogenes and his barrel, in a building fashioned from water tanks, sweltering in the nearly equatorial sun. When a rare visitor arrived, Roger would treat them to some of his favourite fare, which included a glass or two of metho (methylated spirits), a shot or two of sal vital, and a nip of strychnine as a bolting heart starter.

Roger Jose was known for reciting many poets – Virgil, and Omar Khayyam included – as well as his own rather excellent (though politically incorrect) verse, such as,

Here doddering in senile decay,
My memory harks blithely away
To pink dawns, when I’d creep
On blacks fast asleep
And knock ‘em hell west and all of a heap.
A bravo, just hired to slay.

That their weapons could scarcely compare
Didn’t cause me much care,
Nor the fact that they slept
While sheer murder crept,
My red embers guided and no sentinel kept
Them apprised of the sinister shapes lurking there.

The famed erudition of Jose and the many hermits and other men of Borroloola was a happy consequence of the “Carnegie Library”, a remarkable collection of books that comprised much of the wide canon of Western literature. How those 2,900 books got to Borroloola, and into their own room in the town's little pub, is a disputed subject and there are several widely disparate theories, but (you know me) I’ll mention the most romantic of them.

One widely quoted aetiological story has it that towards the end of the 19^th century, the town’s solitary policeman, remembered as Corporal Power, saw the need for the wild bushmen of the region to get a little learning. Power, it’s said, wrote to as many dignitaries as he could think of to get support for his crackpot idea, and the Governor-General of the day took up the cause. Lord Hopetoun contacted the Carnegie Institute*, the famous American philanthropic body, and a generous grant was awarded.

According to this story, the books (after having been imported from England and the USA, no doubt) would have been freighted from Melbourne, Victoria (way down south) up to Thursday Island, many thousands of kilometres, by steam freighter, and then on a smaller steamer across the Gulf of Carpentaria and up-river to Borroloola, where Corporal Power enlisted local men to file them. And there, surprisingly, the books were read, and the rough local men became better educated in the classics than most genteel men anywhere.

Over that century between then and now, the Carnegie Library, as famed in the tropical North as were the educated hermits of Borroloola and the erudite bushmen of the whole big North, slowly went the way of most things in the Gulf country. Termites and mould inexorably ate the Carnegie Library to dust.

* "Over the course of his life, Andrew Carnegie endowed 2,811 libraries and many charitable foundations as well as the internationally famous Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He also bought 7,689 organs for churches. The purpose of the latter gift? 'To lessen the pain of the sermons.'

[Trivia: Fatal accidents in Carnegie's steel mills accounted for 20% of all male deaths in Pittsburgh in the 1880s. Newspaper lists of men killed and wounded each year were as long as a casualty list for a small battle in the American civil war.]"   Source

Gungulinya-Bunagina Diamond

At time of writing (August 16, 2003), the largest diamond ever found in Australia is the Gungulinya-Bunagina (or Jungiila Bunajina) Diamond, found south of the town at the Merlin Mine and first publicly displayed on August 15, 2003. At 104.73 carats and valued at over $1 million, the uncut diamond is larger than the Hope and Dresden diamonds combined. The mine, which is now destined for closure, was the first to begin with the agreement of traditional owners under the Native Title Act.  Source

Index of articles on folklore and other topics

Virgil: the poet as magician

Some Aussie stories at the Scriptorium I hope you'll enjoy

Australia Day

Mister Eternity

Australian nemeton

Bee Miles, one of Sydney's favourite individualists 

Lies, spies and the Sydney Hilton bombing

The yarn of Fisher's Ghost

Chicka Taylor's mystery flight

The Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson Chronology

External links

Nicholas Jose, author of 'Black Sheep', on the search for Roger Jose

Sing ho, for we know you, Carnegie;
God help us and save us, we know you too well;
You’re crushing our wives and you’re starving our babies;
In our homes you have driven the shadow of hell.
Then bow, bow down to Carnegie,
Ye men who are slaves to his veriest whim;
If he lowers your wages cheer, vassals, then cheer. Ye
Are nothing but chattels and slaves under him.
‘A Man Named Carnegie’, second verse, anonymous, California, July 7, 1892   Source: The Daily Bleed