John Brown GRIBBLE

GRIBBLE, JOHN BROWN (b. Redruth Cornwall, England, 1 Sept 1847, d. Sydney NSW, 3 June 1893). Missionary to Aborigines.

John Gribble arrived at Port Phillip from England in 1848 with his parents Benjamin Gribble and Mary (nee Brown). They settled in Geelong where John was educated and where he married Mary Ann Elizabeth Bulmer in 1867.

Converted at the age of 14, Gribble dedicated his life to preaching the gospel. He was first admitted into the ministry of the United Free Methodist Church in 1876, but soon joined the Congregational Union of Victoria, travelling as an itinerant preacher in northern Vic and southern NSW. He became the first resident minister in Jerilderie, and it was there that he had his legendary encounter with the bushranger, Ned Kelly, demanding and receiving back his stolen watch.

Gribble always showed interest in Aboriginal people, compassion for them in their suffering, and anger at the injustice meted out to them. He made friends with Daniel and Janet Matthews (q.v.), visiting their Maloga Mission on the Murray River. Determining to follow their example, he published his Plea for the Aborigines of NSW (1879). The following year, John and Mary Gribble opened their Warangesda Mission on the banks of the Murrumbidgee at Darlington Point.

The Gribbles initially funded the mission from their own meagre resources. Despite opposition from local landowners, they constructed the typical mission village —cottages for married couples, boys' and girls' huts, mission house, sheds and outbuildings. As the mission became known, Aboriginal people from throughout western NSW sought refuge there. In 1880, the Church of England bp of Goulburn, Mesac Thomas (q.v.), visited Warangesda and found that already many had become Christians. He baptised nineteen, decided to assist the mission, and made Gribble a stipendiary reader in the Anglican Church. Gribble was ordained deacon by Thomas (1881) and priest (1883). This support, together with an annual government subsidy of £90 relieved the situation, although the mission soon had over a hundred residents and was 'frequently reduced to the deepest poverty'. Nevertheless, Gribble wrote, 'God interposed for us in every season of want ... we have endeavoured, in season and out of season, to win them to him "who is able to save to the uttermost" and we rejoice in the knowledge that the gospel of Christ has proved itself to be the very power of God unto salvation, even in the case of those whom, so many regard as little more than animals'. Becoming unwell, Gribble took a long sea voyage to England in 1884 to recuperate and to write Black but Comely, his description of Aborigines and the Warangesda Mission, which he published in England with the assistance of the abp of Canterbury.

On returning, Gribble accepted an invitation from Bp Henry Parry to set up a mission in WA. Appointed to the Gascoyne River region, the Gribbles arrived in Carnarvon late in 1885. Gribble immediately set out on a long inspection of the region. He was appalled at the condition of Aboriginal people who were locked into a forced labour system which differed little from slavery. Returning to Carnarvon, he called his mission 'Galilee' and set about constructing buildings on the Gascoyne River about 4 km out of town. When an Aboriginal runaway sought refuge on the mission, Gribble found himself in immediate confrontation with the local pastoralists, telling the 'owners' that Aboriginal people were not slaves but free subjects of the Queen.

Public meetings were held in Carnarvon in which Gribble was attacked, and a petition sent to Perth calling for his withdrawal. Gribble went to Perth to defend himself before church dignitaries. He delivered a public lecture entitled 'Only a blackfellow, or the conditions and needs of our Aborigines', in which he strongly criticised the mistreatment of Aboriginal people at the hands of the pearlers and pastoralists. Back in Carnarvon he found himself ostracised and publicly vilified. After further public meetings, the newspaper the West Australian took up the pastoralists' cause, reporting on the situation and condemning Gribble. The northern pastoralists were influential supporters of the Church of England, and so in Feb 1886, the diocese of Perth's mission committee restricted Gribble to his mission.

In June 1886, Gribble made his boldest move, publishing his small book Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land. 'Even in Australia, under its sunny skies, deeds —the most dark and horrible in their nature —have been committed and are still being practised.' His details of atrocities in the north-west created a furore. The diocese withdrew Gribble's license. The West Australiandescribed Gribble as 'a lying, canting humbug'. Enraged, Gribble sued the newspaper. The Gribbles lived in dire poverty on the outskirts of Perth, awaiting the trial. In June 1887 Justices Onslow and Store found in favour of the newspaper. Penniless and unable to pay his legal costs, Gribble left WA a broken man.

Back in the east, despite the best efforts of sympathetic bishops, Gribble was never happy. After several parish appointments, he cashed in his life assurance policy and travelled north. In Queensland, Gribble selected a site not far from Cairns where he began once more to construct what was to become the Yarrabah Mission. There, within a few months, Gribble became seriously ill. Just before his death he wrote, 'I have given my life and substance to defend the blackman of Australia; I have walked hundreds of miles for his benefit and endured many hardships that I might serve him; I have sacrificed my worldly interests for his good but, oh, I don't regret it. Would that I had fifty lives that I might spend in such service.'

After calling on his son, Ernest Gribble (q.v.), to take over Yarrabah Mission, John Brown Gribble died on 3 June 1893. His funeral oration by Martin Simpson, an Aboriginal Christian, was based on the text Gribble himself had chosen for his first sermon on the Aborigines: 'Lift up thy prayer for the remnant that is left' (Isaiah 37:4). On his tombstone in Sydney's Waverley cemetery Gribble is called 'The Blackfellow’s Friend'. He was survived by his wife, four sons and five daughters.

Ten years later, the report of the Roth Royal Commission vindicated Gribble's criticisms of WA society. Commissioner W E Roth wrote to Mary Gribble saying that his findings exonerated her husband. While embarrassed church historians have generally suggested that Gribble was too impetuous, outspoken and illtempered, and that he might have achieved more by acting with more tact, diplomacy and self-restraint, this was not the measure of the man. 'If I am to work as a missionary', he wrote, 'it must be on lines of justice and right to the Aborigines of this land, in opposition to the injustice and wrong-doing of ... unprincipled white men. This is my decision and by it I stand or fall'. His friend and loyal supporter, Bp Mesac Thomas wrote, 'John Brown Gribble was ... a man of earnest piety but ... impetuous temperaments. Nevertheless we like him, for he has done good work'.

ADB 4; Ernest Gribble, Forty Years with the Aborigines (Sydney, 1930); Ernest Gribble, The Problem of the Australian Aboriginal (Sydney, 1932); Ernest Gribble, A Despised Race, the Vanishing Aboriginal of Australia (Sydney, 1933); John Harris, One Blood, 200 years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity: A Story of Hope (Sutherland, 1990)

JOHN HARRIS