Design and Art Australia Online

Crayon drawings by William Monop (Manop or Monap) are preserved in a sketchbook in the papers of Daisy Bates at the National Library of Australia. His other visual art, the painting of bodies and manufacture of decorations for ceremonies, is recorded in Bates’s writings and some photographs by Perth photographer E.G. Rome. Details of his life are to be found in the archives of New Norcia Mission, and in Bates’s papers. The record is of a man who was expert at managing the various worlds through which he moved.
From a young age Monop lived among peoples of disparate cultures. On 5 May 1864 he 'came in from the bush’ to the New Norcia Mission and asked to stay. The monks registered him as of around 21 years of age, born at Gnirgo / Nergo spring, (twenty kilometres east of New Norcia and two days on horseback from Perth), of Giragiok 'family’, and Ballarruk section. The name of his father was written into the record as Wi-ingut (wi-in meaning death, spooky, bad luck; cut/gut meaning heart) and the name of his mother as Nucatgin.
The small Nergo spring near Yerecoin on the east of the Victoria Plains, Western Australia, was an unknown place from the point of view of the mission but Monop’s people were aware of the mission. Monop and his two male companions, young men all of them, evidently came to New Norcia to find a wife because if they remained in the bush they had little chance of marrying before they reached thirty.
New Norcia was a Spanish mission run by monks of a Benedictine order. Monop’s first ten years at the mission coincided with Abbot Rosendo Salvado’s experimental policy whereby the Australians were allowed a degree of self-determination. In the heyday of the Abbot’s sympathetic research into Aboriginal ways of life he recommended to Governor Weld that native courts should judge Aboriginal affairs, and in the early 1860s he confided to Florence Nightingale that the success of his mission would depend on yielding to the indigenes’ need to maintain a bush way of life. They were dying – of homesickness, he maintained – and so he had instructed the monks to observe their flock closely and to send home to the bush those Aborigines who appeared to be unhappy or listless, and a monk was to accompany them on these visits and bring them back when they were well enough to return. The diaries of the monks through the 1860s and early 1870s reveal how often and how assiduously they obeyed the instruction to stay with their charges.
Monop was one of those who became ill. On 31 March 1866 he was baptised (a ceremony that was more often than not followed soon after by death), on 16 April he went bush for three days and again on 12 July for a week, and on 15 August he made his first communion. On 28 October the banns of his marriage with Scholastica Nangulan were read. On 8 November he was taken to Perth to consult Dr Fargason who diagnosed that he would soon die. A fortnight later he was married at the mission in a ceremony 'of uncommon splendour’. Monop’s marriage jumped the queue of New Norcia’s young men waiting for a bride, and may have been intended to improve his health, in accordance with Salvado’s policy of trying to relieve Aboriginal sickness by raising the spirits of those who were ill. If this was the plan, it worked. Monop died in 1913 or early 1914, at the age of seventy. Nangulan, aged seventeen at marriage, and a woman of exceptional determination, had been one of the first children born at New Norcia. Of the Tirarop section she was, according to Salvado’s understanding of Yuat marriage laws, an eligible partner for Monop. Their marriage proved childless and both eventually sought other partners, Monop having two children in the mid 1880s by a second wife, Sarah Upona.
The archive at New Norcia reveals how interleaved were the ways of life of the Spanish monks, the British farmer settlers of the region, and the various Aboriginal peoples at the mission. Salvado eventually decided that the culture at New Norcia was too complex to suit the purposes of Christian conversion, and attempted to purify the mission, but not before the experiment had gone a long way towards successfully combining the cultures of monks and Aborigines. Living at the mission under Salvado’s enlightened governance, Monop acquired the authority of an indigenous point of view plus a thorough education in western perspectives. Offered many alternatives in the multi-cultural contexts of his life he became multi-skilled. In the annals of New Norcia he was among the better shearers, a capable crop-farmer, carpenter, skilled horsebreaker, and reliable carter. In the mission’s cricket team, he was renowned for making a spectacular catch at a match against Perth. The settlers found him personable, therefore he went around the Victoria Plains with Father Martinelli in 1871 gathering signatures for a Catholic hermitage. Monop’s adult responsibilities within the Indigenous community are also indicated by the comings and goings recorded in the diaries and work-books of the mission. Time after time he escorted youths to the bush, presumably for initiation ceremonies. He participated in annual corroboree sessions near the mission. On several occasions he was deputed avenger or formal victim in death revenge ceremonies. Among the Aborigines he was a ringleader or respected counselor depending on the recorder’s point of view. Late in life, when Monop was living in the Aboriginal community at Port Welshpool in Perth, Bates saw him as a canny elder who exercised unusual powers.
The drawings solicited by Daisy Bates from Monop in 1907 are remarkably sure – the accomplishment not of a novice but of one who had had much practice. Bates first took notice of Monop as an artist in March 1907 when he was the producer of a corroboree performance at Port Welshpool. In 1867 he had been in the small group of New Norcia Aborigines who travelled to Perth intending to entertain H.R.H. Prince Alfred with a corroboree (the Prince did not call in at Perth). In 1907 the first, difficult task Monop performed in consultation with other elders was to choose a corroboree that had a sacred subject (as requested by Bates) yet did not contravene the privacy of any of the Aboriginal residents at Port Welshpool. He master-minded the construction of the stage, the manufacture of decorations, the painting of bodies and for the performance conducted the music and singing, choreographed the dancing and miming, and made dramatic use of lighting and other stage effects. In Monop’s cross-cultural experience the role of visual art in indigenous ceremony was equivalent to its role at the mission where art and music were integral to the high ceremony of the church.

Writers:

Eagle, Mary

Date written:

2008

Last updated:

2011