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Rasharasha: To Africa for a Rose blends family biography with history. In any such work, a complex balancing act is required to include background information for context without miring the main story in detail. Inevitably, it is necessary to shortchange interesting secondary characters.

Among the most striking of the secondary characters is Ethel Hassell - mother, grandmother and greatgrandmother to the book’s three central women characters. As the detail included about her is necessarily concise, this article amplifies the remarkable story that lies within and beyond her publication, My Dusky Friends.

“My Dusky Friends”

Ethel Hassell, wife of a pioneering sheep station owner and prominent in Western Australian society from 1861-1933, wrote My Dusky Friends, later described by anthropologist Sara Meagher as, ‘a book which will not only delight those who enjoy the myths and legends of the Aborigines but it will also be of great value to those interested in the traditional life of the Aborigines of Western Australia’.

Ethel Hassell, née Clifton, author of My Dusky Friends, was the wife of pioneering sheep station owner Albert Young Hassell. Living in the southern town of Albany, the Cliftons and the Hassells were among Western Australia’s most distinguished families of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Ethel was mother to Honor, grandmother to Patricia and great grandmother to Jeannine, the three women central to the story told in Rasharasha: To Africa for a Rose.

As author of Rasharasha: To Africa for a Rose, I first ‘met’ Ethel in her intriguing obituary of 1933, printed in a local paper, the Albany Advertiser: ‘[She] invoked the reaction of removing one’s hat and offering a deep bow, while causing small boys to become quickly seen but not heard’. The writer added, ‘[but] one always received a gracious smile beneath the massive zower or bird-be-decked toque [hat], and playful prod with the flowery parasol.’

Then I came to know Ethel through family letters. Insisting on being called ‘Mater’ in a formal manner by her ten children, she appears to have deprived the youngest, Honor, of parental attention through an overfull life combined with the era’s Victorian/Edwardian cultural mores. Her subsequent disapproval of Honor’s marriage to Frank Anderson in 1917 proved key to piecing together the family story.

I learnt more while reading through corresondendence relating to Honor’s return to live with her mother in 1923 (by which time Albert, her father, was dead). In that year, the Great Kanto earthquake destroyed the home in which Honor, Frank and their daughter Patricia had been living in Yokohama, Japan. While Frank remained in Japan to continue working and to look for a new home, Honor and five-year-old Patricia returned to Honor’s childhood Albany home, where they stayed for almost two years.

Patricia’s recollections of her experience as a small child and earthquake refugee living with Ethel were coloured by finding her grandmother daunting, apparently unsympathetic to trauma and disapproving of the absent Frank.

But Ethel also clearly impressed Patricia with her intellect, powers of observation and passion for Western Australia’s incredible wildflowers and cultivated flowers of all kinds. The child observed her grandmother’s aptitude for growing vegetables and flowers, as well her efforts to stimulate interest and pride in Albany’s history, flora and fauna. Ethel’s skilled embroidery became gifts that were perhaps an expression of love at a time when it was unfashionable to discuss feelings openly. During my own visit to Western Australia in 2018, I met one of her very elderly grandsons, who recalled her as an extremely kind woman who could not do enough for her grandchildren.

Eventually I realized that this lady provided fascinating insights into the ambivalent ethos of that era. She was the model of propriety and yet had shocked the community with some initial defiant decisions. She was stoic with no time for self-pity and yet was generous and thoughtful. She demonstrated the class consciousness of her time and yet was unusually interested in and concerned for the welfare of non-white races.

Studying photographs of Ethel’s stout figure in later life, her elaborate clothes and grand home, I was intrigued to learn that as a young woman, she had headed into Western Australia’s outback to live as a sheep station pioneer in a humble stone cottage where she was the first white woman seen by indigenous people of that region. Quite a contrast in lifestyles!

*

Born in England in 1857 of English and French descent, Ethel was taken as a two-year-old by her parents to Mauritius. Aged four in 1861, her family relocated to Albany, Western Australia. Still a fledgling community, Albany had been founded in 1826 as a small penal colony but soon attracted free settlers. Western Australia was then one of six separate British colonies on the Australian continent.

Ethel’s father, William Carmalt Clifton, established himself in the tiny town as a powerful P&O Shipping Company agent at a time when Albany was the principal mail station for Western Australia and coaling station for ships en route from Europe and South Africa to Sydney. He built an impressive mansion, painted landscapes as a hobby and kept a yacht in the harbour. He considered himself among the elite, since he was ‘old money’. The Cliftons could trace their titled ancestry back to the Norman Conquest. William Carmalt himself was descended from the owners of Clifton Hall, a Palladian manor house and estate in Nottinghamshire, England.

Ethel was a striking-looking girl, but not especially beautiful, judging by contemporary photographs. Her father encouraged her to enjoy pursuits such as gardening, embroidery, literature and intellectual studies; fashionable among women not otherwise hard-pressed over household chores.

Clifton looked askance at those ‘in trade’ like his neighbour, Captain John Hassell.

Captain John, as he was known, was a seafarer and son of a shipping agent. Arriving in Albany in 1839, he became one of the most successful of its free settlers. Tenacious and determined to overcome obstacles, he eventually established the well-known sheep stations of Jarramongup, Warriup, Quaalup and Kendenup, pioneered the region’s wool trade, boosted Albany’s economy and stimulated British markets and investments in Western Australia’s wool industry.

Despite Captain John’s huge land holdings, Clifton refused to speak to him for many years, although their sons worked together on the sheep stations.

Ethel Clifton thus caused a stir within the fractious Albany community when she married Captain John’s second son, Albert Young Hassell. She was twenty-one, Albert was sixteen years older.   

The somewhat unexpected union and age difference caused much gossip, even though it was a pragmatic necessity in a small community. Albert, by the age of thirty-seven, had failed to find a suitably interesting wife among the sparse population, especially given that he spent much of his life in isolation on sheep stations. However, Ethel and Albert had known each other for many years and shared a passion for the region’s legendary wildflower diversity – about which Albert was then more knowledgeable than Ethel – and for cultivated flowers such as roses.

Ethel further shocked the community by announcing her decision to spend her early married life on a remote sheep station. She recalled; ‘My parents did not like the idea of my going so far away from civilization.’

Ethel trusted Albert’s judgement that she would be safe. The Hassell family had refrained from indulging in the violence that many other settlers meted out to Aboriginal people, then considered a primitive race. Captain John Hassell and his sons, pragmatic in the face of labour shortages, were firm but fair with all sheep station employees, treating them as individuals, whether white, Aboriginal or Chinese indentured labour, at a time of widespread discrimination against non-whites. Ethel’s new husband, Albert, had learnt the local Aboriginals’ dialect and developed a respect for their culture.

Fortunately, it was easier in the colony’s south to mantain good relations with indigenous people where fewer were employed on stations. By contrast, the northern people fought hard for their rights to food, water and shelter from the earliest days of settlement.

Ethel had decided to live at Jarramongup (Jerramungup today) station, where one of her brothers was working. In addition to not wanting to endure long periods of separation from her husband, she was intrigued by the thought of experiencing sheep station life. She was also eager to see the spectacularly diverse inland flowers Albert had described.

She could, of course, return to Albany’s safety, although it was four days’ travel away, but hers was still a brave decision, not least by defying convention for women of her background to eschew comfort and live ‘rough’.

On their wedding day in early spring 1878, Albert and Ethel set off on the 150-mile journey into the hinterland in a horse-drawn trap loaded with fine linen and china. They also took a beautiful mahogany travel case containing silver-backed hairbrushes and beauty items - Ethel’s wedding gift from her parents, a reminder of ‘civilization’.

The first night was spent at an inn and the second night at a remote cottage by which time Ethel was exhausted, admitting, ‘I had never spent the whole day in the open air like this, my head and back ached, and I was glad to go [to bed], and though my surroundings were so strange, I was very soon asleep.’ With the countryside ever more remote, the third night was Ethel’s first experience of sleeping under the stars, lying semi-clothed rolled up in blankets on a bed of eucalyptus twigs.

Seeing the incredible beauty of terrain barely touched by settlement, Ethel wrote:

the road the whole way was covered with wonderful wildflowers in masses of pink, yellow, white and blue. The wild bush was flinging out her welcome to me bedecked with her floral wreaths, and rapidly weaving her spells which have never really been broken.

After four days’ travel, Ethel and Albert reached the sheep station. Ethel called its 1862 granite homestead her ‘little grey home’. She described it as:

A quaint old stone house with a high-peaked thatched roof with large round rafters and no ceiling inside, deep verandah in front, and a sloping sort of lean-to at the back. Deep windows with strong jarrah shutters fastened on the inside, also two strong jarrah doors which were securely bolted at night… There was a small room where the guns and powder and stores were kept. Two bedrooms, the living room and kitchen, a comfortable large room with a Colonial oven, delightful in winter but very hot to cook with in the summer.

Ethel was met with an ‘ardent hug’ from her brother and was soon introduced to the local people. She wrote: ‘I was the first white woman to visit that part of the country and I think they gazed on me with as much curiosity as I did on them.’

She understood them to be Wiilman people, (meaning curlew) which she spelled as Wheelman. One of fourteen Noongar language groups in the Bibbulman (South West) region, they would later be identified as probably Koreng people.* Semi-nomadic, they camped near the station and were employed by the Hassell family for haymaking or as stockmen, as they were good riders with keener eyesight than whites.

Albert looked annoyed as they remarked on his new wife’s fashionably tight-waisted outfit, but her brother laughed uproariously, interpreting for her:

“Your dress is not respectable or modest, and your waist-line is absolutely indecent”, and went into fresh fits of laughter at my look of indignation.

At last he recovered himself a little and called out – “Yilgar”, and motioned for a particularly dreadful looking old woman who had been very free in her remarks, to come up to me. She rose from where she had been squatting by the fire, looking like a bundle of dried skins, with the flesh side out, and a bag of what looked like furry skins on her back. The skins dangled all around her knees, and she had the thinnest legs and ankles I had ever seen.

“Behold!” cried my brother, pointing at her, “The proper dress for a respectable married woman – no figure at all, but a good deal of leg”.

“Well”, I retorted, “I would rather be a little indecent than look like that”.

“Each to their taste, my dear, only you will have to be extra careful in your behaviour, so as not to quite outrage your new friends’ feelings, for I fear now that you are at the other end of nowhere, you will have to fall back on them for most of your amusement”.

‘My brother spoke truly,’ recounted Ethel. For the next nine months, she saw no whites other than Albert, her brother and a handful of jackaroos employed to manage some 20,000 sheep. Ahead of her was no genteel life of sewing, card games, art, flower-arranging and music that she might have enjoyed in Albany. Twenty-one-year-old Ethel was now a pioneer who worked hard at everyday chores, although she did admit that; ‘Baking and washing on the same day are almost too much of a good thing.’ If she could, she went back to bed for ‘another hour’s snooze’ once the men had gone out after breakfast.

However, she did also have time to spare. ‘I found plenty to keep me busy and interested,’ she noted. She began studying history and botany, aided by an irregular post collected from 60 miles away. She also kept a pet kangaroo for years. It sometimes went off for a month but always came back.

Being innately curious, Ethel made a great effort to make friends with the indigenous women, among whom she mixed fearlessly: ‘Our tribe was a fine looking race. They had beautifully shaped small feet and hands [with] exquisite filbert-shaped nails.’ She accompanied them for miles on foot on animal tracking expeditions. She wrote: ‘The customs and strange ways of the natives were an unfailing source of interest to me… I learnt bush craft and found it more interesting than books’:

I often look back on the really interesting walks and talks I had during the early years of my married life, for a native is observant – it is part of their life to watch and notice. I soon learned to track, and the women used to derive great amusement at my blindness in not taking notice of small things which is really the true art of tracking.

Although she spent a great deal of time in the company of these women, there were limits to her interactions.

My husband went on the principle “never trust a native”, and though they were friendly, they were never allowed to camp close to the station or to be near the premises after dark. The homestead buildings… were all of stone, and each quite capable of resisting a siege if needed.

Ethel was responsible for feeding her menfolk and clearly was aware of the need for a balanced diet with greens:

Vegetables during the summer were impossible to get, and we had to eat a good deal of pickles to keep us in health. I got very tired of bread and meat for breakfast, meat and bread for dinner, bread and meat for supper.

She took time to investigate indigenous fare and described medicinal and edible plants, making her husband and brother eat some of the latter: ‘I argued what was good for the natives was good for us.’

Although Ethel learned to make toffee and found it a useful and popular way of sealing friendships with local women, she became aware they became sick when eating European food.  She also realised that clothes and blankets handed out by well-meaning Europeans did not provide appropriate protection from the wet and cold, unlike traditional clothing made from animal skins.

Ethel recorded as many of the local customs and legends as she could persuade her friends to divulge. She came to appreciate more than most how early settlers had arrived with no understanding of the intricate spiritual relationship indigenous people had with the land over which they travelled. Her reverence contrasted with others’ perceptions that Aboriginal culture was virtually sub-human. However, she noticed that;

The influence of the whites was beginning to make itself felt in the younger generation, and they were inclined to argue and point out that the whites went to places supposed to be haunted, and came to no harm.

Neither Albert nor Ethel challenged the concept of Terra nullius – that land without settled inhabitants belonged to no-one. It could be claimed by the occupying state and thus gave settlers the right under British law to claim unsettled land. To the Hassells, this represented inevitable progress. They also both enjoyed the respect of the local people as the ‘master and his wife’. Ethel did not become fluent in the local dialect but her Aboriginal friends seemed to pick up English quickly. Most of her conversations with them were in basic English. Albert was more knowledgeable and could explain to her the meaning of dances and songs that she could not understand.

On the other hand, Ethel was remarkably non-judgemental (for the time) when describing various customs, such as the killing of a healthy person to accompany a recently-dead person on the ‘unknown journey’. This practice often started a war if the healthy person was taken from another language-group. Likewise, she described uncritically their punishment for marrying incorrectly: expulsion or death. Albert had longer experience of their customs and said they were ‘blackguards’ but told Ethel she was too young to be told the extent of what this meant. He wisely did not get involved in their quarrels, but his new young wife saw the wounds they inflicted on each other in battles. Ethel said she did not try to Christianize them, observing that:

Their morality is not ours, their laws are not ours, but they are admirably adapted for the life they lead and their punishment for any infringement of the laws is far greater than ours.

Ethel remarked that, ‘A native’s confidence is very hard to gain, I doubt if one ever really gets it, but very easy to lose and once lost is never regained.’ She observed their ‘keen sense of justice’:

If they think they are not justly treated they will quietly early one morning walk off. Agreements are of no value in their eyes, if they feel they are kindly and firmly treated they will stay for years, leaving at intervals for trip into the bush.

The fact that many remained loyal employees on Hassell sheep stations, always returning to work after their customary periods of wandering, was testament to fair treatment.

*

After Ethel’s first nine-month stretch at Jarramongup, she returned to Albany to give birth to her first child, Jock, in 1879. She brought the infant straight back to the station, where with great excitement, the local people assembled for a corroboree (festive celebration): ‘A son had arrived who would grow up to be a big master like his father.’

Another two sons were born, but Ethel remained undaunted:

There were two ways of reaching the station. One by sea and then driving about sixty miles inland, the other the route I took when first married, but I was a good sailor, and decided to try the sea trip, while my husband met me at Bremer Bay where there was a repeating station for the overland telegraph line which connected Western Australia with Eastern Australia, and one might say with the world, as Eastern Australia is connected by cable with Europe. So I arranged to get a passage for myself and three children in a sailing boat of eighty two tons as far as Bremer Bay, and then to drive to my home sixty miles inland, camping out one night instead of three. We left at daylight and after a run of fifteen hours with a fair wind we arrived at Bremer. The scenery on the coast is most magnificent in its wild grandeur. Huge rocks resembling prehistoric animals crawl up from the shore far inland. Great crevices where the sea has eaten into the earth leaving nothing but bare rocky cliffs against which it unceasingly dashes, and every now and then we passed great bare boulders of rock seemingly dropped at random in the sea a few miles out from the coast. I have heard this scenery likened to the fjords of Norway and the Kyles of Bute. I was glad I had taken this trip though the children were a little sick but not bad enough to distract my attention from the beautiful and savage grandeur of the coast as we sailed along, so close to the shore that I could note all the curious rocks and strange shapes they took.

Ethel brought up three sons and a daughter, Kathleen, on the sheep stations, encouraging them to learn the local dialect and respect their customs.

She admitted that childcare increased her sense of isolation; her inquisitive nature craved stimulating company. When the menfolk were out all day she recalled, ‘Life seemed very flat after they had left, for everyone counts in the outback… My dusky friends were a great resource. Indeed, I often wonder how I would have got on without them [and] their unfailing humour.’

As time went on my trips from the station were less frequent, my family was increasing and I could not leave the children behind, therefore my husband used to go alone. But every now and then we used to take a trip to town, the children all thoroughly enjoyed it. They used to call it a picnic without going home. A cover was put over one of the waggons and plenty of bedding in the way of rugs and pillows. The boxes and chaff were packed in the back of the waggon, the children were put in with their pet cat and dog and the maid in charge, while the eldest boy, mounted on his pony used to follow driving the cow. Having started the waggon driven by a careful old blackman, who had a wonderful fund of stories with which he used to keep all the children amused, my husband and I would tidy and lock up the house, then drive in the trap to where we were to dine and have everything ready for the waggon by the time it arrived. We generally rested for a couple of hours, the waggon would be started again and we would follow and pass it. On arriving at the evening camping place we would put the tents up and have supper and beds ready for the family by the time they arrived. Some would sleep in the waggon, some in the tents. The children were always in uproarious spirits and have many wonderful stories to tell me before they settled down to rest. We always made an early start and would travel for four days and nights like this.

Ethel described how, once the children were asleep:

Many an evening when all was quiet I have gone for short walk and having sat down on a fallen log, watched the wild animals of the night come out, and listened to their various cries. When one has lived long in the quiet bush one learns to be very silent and to sit very still, thus many wild creatures show themselves in their natural state. I have often heard an opossum cough and on looking up seen it peering down on me, its bright beady eyes looking straight into mine. Then the mate has appeared and I have watched their pretty gambols amongst the slender boughs.

Eventually, however, Ethel moved back to Albany in 1886. She and Albert built a grand home, named Hillside, on Albany’s heights and established themselves as leading local figures, regularly entertaining notable regional and overseas visitors.

Hillside was an impressive example of pastoralist success. It was huge, with a superb view over Princess Royal Harbour and King George Sound. Second only in size to the Town Hall (built at the same time), it was probably one of the first houses in the town to have electricity and running water, a stark contrast to Ethel’s early married life.

The family increased in number: Ethel gave birth to seven boys and three girls in fourteen years. Unsurprisingly, she admitted to being rather fed up with having children by the time her tenth and youngest child, Honor, was born on 5 February, 1893.  

Meanwhile, the Western Australian government was in the process of formalizing ‘protection policies’ aimed at isolating and segregating Aborigines on reserves and restricting their contact with outsiders. In those reserves, numbers shrank rapidly through disease, alcoholism and untold misery.

In the early 1900s, Ethel produced a 100,000 word manuscript entitled ‘My dusky friends; sketches of station life and south eastern natives of Western Australia; some of their legends and customs’. A copy was lodged in the Sydney library by 1910.  She described her work as, ‘a record of, ‘the manners, legends and customs of a fast disappearing race’, and wrote compellingly about the engaging personalities of the women and some men she had known over so many years. She added the following introduction:

And now, times have changed – nearly all my dusky friends are dead. I go by motor in one day to the station, when it used to take nearly four days to drive [by horse and trap]. A railway runs to within thirty minutes, and a thriving village within fifty… More land is cleared and many old landmarks have gone… Everything is different – improved I suppose – the reaper and binder rattles over the fields where the men used to go with the scythe and the native women followed gleaning the sheaves… The several-furrowed plough tears up the surface of the ground and the headlands are left. Neat work is not bothered about now. Machines take the place of hand-shears, and there is not the friendly rivalry as to the highest score, and cleanest, evenest sheep shorn; and saddest of all, the old cordial feeling between master and man seems to have gone… Will the old times ever come back I wonder, or have they gone with the natives and soon be legends like theirs.

It seems the manuscript was largely forgotten until 1930, when American anthropologist Daniel Sutherland Davidson, while in Australia as a Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, came across a copy and corresponded with Ethel.

Ethel died in 1933, but the following year Davidson arranged for her work to be published in installments in Folklore magazine during 1934-1935. The magazine had been founded in London in 1878 for the study of traditional vernacular culture. Installments also appeared in 1936 in Anthropos, the international journal of anthropology and linguistics founded in 1906 by Wilhelm Schmidt.

Davidson considered that much of the material important to those interested in pioneer days was beyond the interest of the anthropologist. He therefore edited it and published it in a series which contained only myths, legends and ethnological data. Anthropology had developed further as a science since Ethel’s day, but the parts published by Davidson were valued for their exceptional thoroughness and care to include interviews with women of all ages.**Ethel was not a trained observer and so there were gaps in her work, but without it details of Aboriginal life would have been entirely lost.

However, Davidson’s editing removed some of Ethel’s spirit. In the early 1970s, anthropologist Sara Meagher wrote:

While these papers are of interest and value to the anthropologist, the editing of the manuscript in this manner has deleted the relationship between Ethel Hassell and the people of whom she wrote. From her writing it is obvious that she had an unusual appreciation of the Aborigines and a real concern for their welfare.

Meagher had discovered a copy of Ethel’s manuscript at the Western Australian Museum while working on a thesis concerning Aboriginals of South West Australia. It proved a remarkable resource, especially since other documentation was limited.  

This thesis stimulated a descendant, Cleve Hassell, to publish Ethel’s manuscript as a hard-back book under the title, My Dusky Friends. Sarah Meagher wrote in her introduction:

In preparing the manuscript for publication Cleve Hassell has confined his editing to a minimum and it is virtually all as it was originally written. It is a book which will not only delight those who enjoy the myths and legends of the Aborigines but it will also be of great value to those interested in the traditional way of life of the Aborigines of Western Australia.

By publishing this book, Cleve made its contents available to the descendants of the region’s people themselves to consult as the only written source of their own history. It was printed with the subheading, ‘Aboriginal life, customs and legends and glimpses of station life at Jarramungup in the 1880s’.

Cleve also organized the restoration of Ethel’s ‘little grey home’ at Jarramongup. It still stands today as a fascinating insight into a vanished era.

**

A brief return to the story in Rasharasha: To Africa for a Rose: in 1925, while Honor and Patricia took refuge at Hillside after the Great Kanto earthquake, Ethel warned Honor against joining Frank. He had written to say he had left Japan and bought a farm in Tanganyika Territory, East Africa. Honor confided in her diary: ‘The poor old soul can’t understand me,’

But Ethel was neither a fool nor unfeeling under her seemingly unsympathetic exterior. She knew not only the nature of comfort but also what hardship was like. She had seen many people fail in Western Australia. The Hassells’ own incomes and landholdings were diminishing. She knew the physical effort and risk involved in working the land and what a strain poverty can put on a marriage. She had lost four sons to accidents and the Great War of 1914-18. She had a brother and a sister living in South Africa in Pietermaritzburg – a frontier town of the nineteenth century Zulu wars. She feared for the life and health, both mental and physical, of her youngest daughter.

But Honor went to Africa. She never saw her mother again, nor Australian shores. But despite the thousands of miles separating them, Ethel Hassell continued to play a pivotal role in Honor’s life.

*

As I continued my research, I was especially intrigued when I looked at the list of items Honor inherited from her mother – special books, jewellery and the last piece of embroidery Ethel ever did, all packed up and shipped off to Africa after her death in 1933. To me, they spoke volumes about how much Ethel loved her youngest daughter, even though she supposedly neglected her as a child. Among the bequests was the beautiful travel case she had taken on her pioneering adventures in the Australian outback.

Although Ethel is largely peripheral to the main story in Rasharasha: To Africa for a Rose, she was a key figure in the family’s life in so many ways. I found her ever-present influence lingering in the other characters within the book.

The possessions Honor inherited reflect Ethel’s remarkable personality. They are now part of a collection formed to honour Honor and Patricia in the Western Australia Museum, where in due course, some may be included in online and physical exhibitions.

Ethel’s observations of socio-cultural interactions that she herself experienced while living in the tough environs of a sheep station in close contact with Aboriginal communities provide thought-provoking nuance and parallels to the life that her daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter endured on their East African farm, Rasharasha, over the following decades in the twentieth century. Ethel did not want them to go to Africa, but it was she who, ironically, enabled them to survive there.

*According to Norman Tindale, much of the material ascribed by Ethel Hassell to the Wiilman was gathered from their southern neighbours, the Koreng and actually reflects Koreng culture. The Hassell stations were situated on Wudjari and Koreng land.

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Hassell

References and sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiilman

https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/guide/wa/WE00788 

https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia

https://www.harveyhistoryonline.com/?p=3661

Garden, Donald, Albany, Thomas Nelson (Australia) Limited, 1977

The Hassells in Western Australia, Cleve W Hassell, privately printed, 2015

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