WARNING: This story contains names and images of Indigenous people who have died, and describes settler violence in a way that could be upsetting for some people.
For most of his childhood, Fred Leone knew very little about his mother's family lineage.
The hip hop artist from Brisbane grew up listening to his mum and aunties sitting in the kitchen, sharing stories about their family over cups of tea. He heard a lot about his grandfather, Papa Nimrod, but there were gaps in the story.
Fred was told that Papa Nimrod had been taken from his parents and siblings when he was a teenager and put to work as a stockman. After trying to escape the station, Papa Nimrod was punished by being sent to the Cherbourg Mission, in south-east Queensland.
There, he met his wife — Fred's grandmother — and started a family. But that original separation from his mother, father and siblings meant that information about the rest of Papa Nimrod's family was missing.
In 1989, when Fred was 12, his mother decided to fill those gaps and took the kids to look for some of her father's family in Mount Isa, where she heard they had relatives.
Fred says they had only just arrived in town when their family connections started to appear.
"This old lady rocked up to the hostel and said [to me], 'Hey, boy, where are you from?'" Fred says.
Fred told her he was from Brisbane, but that his mum's side of the family had grown up in Cherbourg. Her eyes widened when she heard his name – the old lady was named Jessie, and she was Papa Nimrod's last living sibling.
"What was really nice about it for me and probably for my siblings is we'd never met any of our grandparents [on] either side of our family because they had all passed away," Fred says.
"You know, to me, it was like, 'Oh, I have a nan now. Like, I actually have a nana. Here she is, Nana Jessie.'"
Fred's "cuddly, old, grey-haired" Nana Jessie held crucial knowledge about his family lineage, stories that had been lost to his mother until this point.
And for Fred, they were a revelation.
Finding the King of Westmoreland
Nana Jessie told Fred and his siblings that her father – Fred's great grandfather – was a great Garrwa warrior known all throughout the Gulf Country in north-west Queensland. He was respected by blackfellas and feared by white people.
His name was Garrinjamaji, and he was also known as King Peter.
"Nana Jessie told me … 'He was a king. King of the Garrwa mob,' she'd always say.
"I just assumed, being a little kid, that we have kings in our culture. And he must have been one of those kings.
"Hearing that stuff as a kid … it made you dream … this person was like Superman, like, he's just an amazing warrior. Couldn't be stopped."
Fred later learned that King Peter had been given a king plate by colonial authorities, because they recognised him as a leader of his people.
This practice, common before Federation, was meant to undermine the importance of collective leadership among First Nations people.
Nana Jessie told Fred that Garrinjamaji had seven wives and fathered 52 children.
"Nana Jessie always said because of his stature … this is why he had so many wives, because of the fights that he fought and the battles that he'd had over time," Fred says.
In pre-colonial times, marriage was a way to build relationships between neighbouring nations. It created alliances across huge expanses of country, which became useful in the fight against encroaching colonists.
"It was almost like a political play because … the women that he married were all the daughters of head lawmen across the whole Gulf of Carpentaria.
"And so there was this thing that bound all these tribes and clans together."
Garrinjamaji's resistance
Through Nana Jessie, Fred learned that Garrinjamaji had been one of many warriors who engaged in a 30-year battle against colonists at Hell's Gate, close to what is now the border between the Northern Territory and north-west Queensland.
She said all the lawmen from across the Gulf teamed up to hold the line against colonisation.
As the settlers approached what's now the Queensland side of Garrwa country, they faced a fierce line of warriors.
"She said any time they wanted to move up into the territory and go and bring their cattle or whatever, the military would only bring them there," Fred says.
"And then they'd say, 'Anyone who wants to go past Hell's Gate, you're on your own because the blacks are too wild.'
"Over that time they said, 'No, we don't escort anybody past this point.' And so we held off Western civilisation for 30 years at Hell's Gate, simply through guerilla warfare."
This period was known as "the Wild Times". It was marked by constant fighting, as well as brutal massacres, three of which Garrinjamaji managed to survive.
A pastoral boom took over the top half of the Northern Territory beginning in 1881. Within a year, the entire Gulf district – an area the size of Victoria – had been leased to just 14 landholders, nearly all of them wealthy businessmen and investors from the eastern colonies.
They were granted stations with an average size of almost 16,000 square kilometres. The colonial government in Adelaide, which administered the land grab, knew from recent experience that pastoral settlement would mean starvation, sickness and massacre of the inhabitants.
Tony Roberts, in his book Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900, estimates at least 600 men, women, children and babies – about one-sixth of the region's Aboriginal population of 4,000 – were killed in the Gulf Country to 1910.
The survivors were dispossessed of every inch of land.
Survival at Wollogorang
Nana Jessie told Fred that Garrinjamaji survived one such massacre in 1886 at Wollogorang, near a place called the Pocket, on Branch Creek.
In his book Whitefella Comin', anthropologist David S Trigger details how one of Garrinjamaji's wives was abducted by colonists during the violence, and how the warrior set her free.
"In a well-known event at Wollogorang, a party of Whites (and at least one man of mixed descent) from the station attacked a large group of people holding a major cult ceremony at a site on Settlement Creek some 19km from the station house," Trigger writes.
"They shot many and abducted a woman, taking her back to the house. Her husband (Garrinjamaji) escaped and came to the house that night.
"There are different accounts of precisely what happened, but the result was that he speared the White abductor in the thigh and was himself shot by the latter with a shotgun. Both men survived."
Nana Jessie told Fred that while Garrinjamaji was facing off against the station owner, his wife was able to escape.
The couple met up afterwards and returned to the site of the ceremony for sorry business. Nana Jessie described her father and the other survivors burying the men, women, children and babies that were killed.
The survivors mourned by hitting their heads with their boomerangs until they bled. The scarring from these wounds served as a reminder of the people they lost.
Garrinjamaji's resistance ended while he was on the run from police. He had discovered that a cook at Westmoreland Station had raped one of his wives. Tribal punishment called for the offender to stand in a circle and face a spearing. Garrinjamaji speared the cook through the heart, killing him instantly.
He fled, and when police finally caught up to him, they shot him in the head.
"They buried him upside down to show disrespect and they took his king plate," says Fred.
"Nana Jessie would get upset telling the story and even now when my cousins or family members talk about that old fulla, my grandfather … people feel a sense of sadness around his ultimate demise and why it happened. But also, always a sense of pride that he fought for 30 years."
Stories to hold close to the heart
Despite feeling great sadness about the way Garrinjamaji died, Fred says that knowing he is the descendent of a warrior who fought colonisation connects him with his community.
"This isn't even just a story of my one family," says Fred.
"This is the story of every Aboriginal person that's alive today … there's a warrior in every one of our families that either survived all the wild times that were happening or died in that process."
In everything Fred does, he carries the stories that he learned from his old people.
A few years ago, Fred took a trip to his country in the Gulf to go through ceremony.
He is also learning his language and songline, a song that stretches across hundreds of kilometres of Gulf country.
And now he is a custodian of traditional songs and one of a handful of keepers of the Butchulla language.
"[I do this] because I knew the foundation of going through initiation and ceremony and law, what it did and how it fortified my great-grandfather and my grandfather and every other generation back in time," he says.
"To have that connection to them through that ceremony was something that I'll always hold close to my heart, because it connects me to not only those stories, but that law and that ceremony that they've seen and that's always been there, part of the land."
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