Prevailing ideas about love and romance are explored in story and song. Aboriginal laws on sex, marriage and adultery on Cape York Peninsula were traditionally strict but open to challenge. In the south-west, at Pormpuraaw, infatuation of women with men was seen as the result of the men ‘singing’ the women and was accepted as inevitable.[5] The virtues of faithfulness were praised but ‘sweethearts and extra-marital liaisons were celebrated in myth, ceremonies and increase rites’.[6] Forbidden love received especially devoted attention, while involving tragic consequences.
A traditional romance of illicit love was given a modern (1930s) telling in Ion Idriess’ story of the ‘runaways’.[7] Idriess and his mates assisted runaway lovers, even though they knew that the warriors chasing them were justified in the pursuit and the execution of the law-breakers, if they were caught.[8] The dangers and suffering that the young couple endured were, in this as in other literary romances, proof of the strength of their love. Forbidden love changes the world from how we are told it should be, but also confirms the rules.
Aboriginal myths and stories showed ‘old-time’ love and relationships, with their complex symbols of family and kin, food and environment. New possibilities in relationships needed new romances to describe them. Missionary and teacher George Taplin (1889-1979) said of some songs that the Ngarrindjeri of South Australia ‘will learn it with great appreciation if it seems to express some feelings which theirs does not’.[9] Christianity could offer a different marital ideal; Western culture had other romances, in fiction, films and songs.
Stories can disrupt the moral judgement of binaries of good and bad,[10] opening up other possibilities of how to live and love. History is adept at looking at the social and legal contexts of relationships but the existence of the romances themselves remain disruptive. It is the difference between a musical and a documentary; both forms tell a story about people and the world but in the musical the story is augmented by emotional outbursts of song.
Love disrupts our own storylines. We think we know what we want, how things are going to be, then all of a sudden we feel something we were not expecting. Gwen Molony, from Thursday Island, was an avid reader of romances.
When I was growing up y’know I read these love stories; the blond was the bad girl and the nice dark-haired girl she was the heroine.
I said ‘When I grow up I’m going to marry a tall dark-headed man with curly hair’. My hero, y’know.
I married a big blond Irishman![11]
So oral histories are like musicals; narratives are ‘disrupted’ by songs, poetry and emotion. Sometimes the speaker will literally break into song, or it may be a vignette; a story that sits outside the bigger story but nonetheless adds to it through feeling and colour and detail. The oral histories are also like songs; evocative and haunting. They can be incorporated into other histories but they remain an essentially different way of telling stories of the past.
This paper tells some of these stories at the points where romance runs through them, as marriage or its avoidance, as forbidden love, as songs.