Puertollano, Thomas (1869-1942)

 

 

Background

 

Thomas Puertollano was born in 1869 in Santa Cruz de Marindoque, son of Victoriano Puertollano and Barbara Pamfilo, grandchild of Gerson Puertollano and Turibia Vallumaris, both born in Santa Cruz. His father died early and Thomas came to Australia as a 22-year old in 1891 to work in the pearling industry and signed up with Captain Reddel and Filomeno Rodriguez.¹ It was just the time when the Catholic Church also arrived in the Kimberley, and revolutionary turmoil swelled the influx of Filipinos to northern Australia through the 1890s.

 

Both Rodriguez and Puertollano were deeply devoted to Catholicism. Filomeno (or Francis) Rodriguez was born of a Filipino mother and a Spanish father and supported the growing Filipino rebellion against Spanish rule. He had come to Broome from Thursday Island and with his Irish wife from Tipperary ran Broome’s finest watering hole, the Continental Hotel. The Rodriguez children became the first entries in Fr. Nicholas Emo’s baptismal register in Broome, and as a widower in 1921 Rodriguez wanted to join the Pallottine Society as a lay brother.

 

Thomas Puertollano worked in the pearling industry for about two years. In 1892 the Catholic Church acquired the Lombadina pastoral lease with the Jessie, which became the mission schooner, and Puertollano became its skipper. By the time Fr. Nicholas Emo [4] arrived in Broome in 1895 Puertollano was already in the ambit of the emerging Catholic mission. Pearler H.V. Howe mentioned that Thomas Puertollano made chicha (maize beer), and he refers to a Filipino/Aboriginal settlement at the back of the Central Hotel, and a ‘Manila camp’ including Puertollano and Catalino Torres and family near Hyman and Anderson boat builders who employed Puertollano and Torres.²

 

At Disaster Bay

 

When two of the Beagle Bay Trappist missionaries established a grange at Disaster Bay on 11 March 1897, Puertollano assisted them.³ It is possible that Puertollano accompanied these missionaries, although his daughter Theresa thought he was already established at Disaster Bay.

 

According to Theresa Puertollano her father ‘was well educated in his country and spoke English well’. He was a community leader of the Broome Filipinos living on a 99-year lease at Fishermen’s Bend outside Broome across Roebuck Bay, where they erected a church.⁴ Sandy Paddy at Beagle Bay also said: ‘The old church in Broome was built by Thomas Puertollano and his friends.’⁵ (The old church in Broome, Nuestra Señora de Paz (Our Lady of Peace) was at Dampier Terrace.) Theresa said the Filipinos were all tradesmen and carpenters and built a house for themselves at Disaster Bay and lived there for two or three years before the French Fathers arrived. Perhaps the Filipinos did erect a church at Fishermen’s Bend before they had a Catholic priest, and it is possible that a group of them went to Disaster Bay before the Trappists. Certainly McNab found Filipinos established in that area in 1884, and Durack refers to Malays at ‘Karamel’⁶ (Garamel or, in Bishop Gibney’s diary, Caromel – see Beagle Bay [5]).

 

However, as far as Puertollano is concerned the story as pieced together from other sources seems more likely - that Puertollano accompanied Fr. Jean-Marie Janny and Br. Narcisse Janne to Disaster Bay in 1897 to set up an outrigger mission on the 2,000 acre lease which Bishop Gibney had acquired in 1890. Durack writes:

 

Although small in stature Thomas brought to the task all the enthusiastic faith of his Filipino heritage and worked with tremendous energy under Trappist direction. ⁷

 

On 12 Feb 1898 Puertollano married Agnes Guilwil. H.V. Howe recalled that Agnes’ father ‘old Bryan’ was a ‘real character’.⁸ Durack writes that Puertollano

 

married a half-caste girl named Agnes O’Bryan whose Irish father had placed her with the missionaries at Beagle Bay, and the couple now wished to settle down on the land and raise a family. ⁹

 

Theresa Puertollano had a different story about the meeting of her parents. She said that her parents met at Bungadok, from where Puertollano and his Filipino compatriots were recruiting people to work at Disaster Bay.

 

At that time my mother was only a young one, fourteen or fifteen years old, she was with them, with her mob – my grandparents, I suppose – travelling around in the bush. That’s how he met my mother.’¹⁰

 

Agnes Puertollano’s first child was still-born at Disaster Bay, and her second died at Lombadina, but she raised a large family (including Philomena, Alphonse, Thomas, Maria, Theresa, and another boy). She played a dominant role in the Trappist presence at Disaster Bay. She hand-sewed the bridal dress for Marie Parambor at Disaster Bay and acted as godmother for 12 catechumens in 1899 and ‘became an outstanding member of the Catholic laity in the Kimberley’.¹¹ Thomas was godfather for the first Aboriginal Christians baptised in 1896 at Beagle Bay.¹² The couple became a pillar of support for the Catholics.

 

In 1900 the Trappists were recalled to France, but the Puertollanos remained at Disaster Bay. Durack writes that Puertollano engaged with the pearling fleet to help maintain the mission during this period.¹³ When Bishop Gibney, Dean Luigi Martelli, and Daisy Bates arrived in August/September 1900 to put things in order for the lease to be confirmed, they spent three days at Disaster Bay, where they found thriving gardens of sugar cane, tomatoes, cucumbers, sorghum, rice and arrowroot. The site had a ‘splendid well’ and a corrugated iron chapel, and a residence. Bates noted that the priest [Jean-Marie Janny] had long left and the stores had been left ‘unguarded’ for six months but had not been touched.¹⁴ (Presumably she meant ‘unguarded by Whites’). Bates also mentioned that Fr. Emo had been performing marriages between Filipino men and Aboriginal women at this place. Theresa Puertollano also thought that her parents were married at Disaster Bay, whereas Fr. Emo wrote in 1913 that he celebrated their marriage at the Beagle Bay church.¹⁵

 

After the German Pallottines had taken over the Kimberley mission leases from the French Trappists, Fr. Jean-Marie Janny returned to Disaster Bay, where the travelling inspector of Aborigines visited on 14 May 1901 and reported that the station was worked by Thomas and Agnes Puertollano, and 35 indigenous people were fed three times a day. ¹⁶

 

When exactly the Disaster Bay mission was given up is difficult to determine. Nailon thinks that Fr. Jean-Marie, Puertollano and the mission residents moved to Lombadina around 1902. However, she also has a letter written by Fr. Jean-Marie from Disaster Bay in October 1904.

 

Nailon shows that Fr. Emo arranged the move from Disaster Bay to Lombadina. Emo was in charge of the Kimberley missions during the hand-over period from the Trappists to the Pallottines, and in 1900 he asked the Puertollanos and Br. Narcisse to move to Lombadina, where Thomas was to manage the land. ¹⁷ (The Trappists had also acquired the Lombadina pastoral lease in 1892.) During this time Fr. Jean-Marie Janny and Fr. Emo had some very un-Trappist-like altercations, the former angered over the suppression of the Kimberley mission and the latter casting aspersions on the friendship between Fr. Jean-Marie and Br. Narcisse. Emo referred to Disaster Bay as Fr. Jean-Marie’s ‘little nest’ (see Beagle Bay [5]). No other reasons for the removal of the mission from Disaster Bay to Lombadina are supplied, and Fr. Jean-Marie Janny did not favour the move.

 

In October 1904 Fr. Jean-Marie wrote from Disaster Bay expressing regret that the cattle were being withdrawn from Disaster Bay. He did not approve of Thomas Puertollano establishing himself at Willie Bay (also on the east coast), but neither could Thomas stay at Pender Bay (referring either to Streeter and Male’s pearling station managed by David Bell until 1917 – or perhaps Harry Hunter’s camp before his move to Bulgin in around 1904). Janny thought it best if Puertollano stayed at Disaster Bay to care for the sick and the mission cattle ‘otherwise Disaster Bay mission is finished.’¹⁸ Since Thomas had left, the natives were no longer keen on doing the garden.¹⁹ This sounds as if Puertollano had left Disaster Bay and was looking for an alternative place to establish himself in 1904. According to Durack he was at Lumbingun.²⁰

 

Theresa Puertollano remembers the removal from Disaster Bay thus:

 

They lived there for about two or three years. And then French priests, the Trappist Fathers, they wanted to make a mission. So they came across my father and his Filipino people. So what did he do, he gave up his home, his house, and moved further along the coast. He gave that house up to the priests. He was well established. He had gardens and everything going. He just left it there for them. That’s what was told to me. By this time my mother and him were married.

 

They went north to Chili Creek and sunk a well but the water was brackish. They couldn’t go any further, my mother was pregnant with her second baby, the first had died. That well is still there, called Thomas Well.

 

And then he went further up north and he found this place, I don’t know what they called it then, it was only bush and he cleared it up with his Filipino people. And that’s where he started Lombadina [6]. ²¹

 

At Lombadina

 

According to Theresa her father was accompanied by a number of unmarried Filipino men who acknowledged him as their headman. The baby her mother was carrying also died. Her parents were at Lombadina for a few years and had four children before the Pallottine Fathers arrived (presumably Father Emo, in 1910).

 

There already was a lot of people there, Aboriginal people belong to that place in the bush and their community, and they all came to the place where my father was, to work for him. They made gardens and he had goats and he had cattle, he was well off.

 

At Lombadina Puertollano erected a substantial house and tended a 500-strong cattle herd as well as goats, pigs and poultry. He established a garden and sold produce to the lugger crews. It is possible that Puertollano’s move to Lombadina was related to his acquisition of its lease from the Pallottines – certainly by 1913 Puertollano owned a small lease at Chile Creek with a plantation and some cattle, and Durack writes that Puertollano purchased the Lombadina lease from the Pallottines (however there were at least two Lombadina leases with different lease numbers).

 

Fr. Jean-Marie Janny followed the Puertollanos to Lombadina (probably soon after his letter in October 1904) and stayed with them until he departed for the Trappist monastery of Maristella in Brazil in July 1906, so that the Puertollanos were again left at the Lombadina station with a number of Aboriginal people. ²² This means that the Puertollanos were the founders of Lombadina mission, facilitated by Nicholas Emo, who leaned strongly on the support of the Filipino Catholics in the Kimberley to gain access to the indigenous communities.

 

The mixing of Asians and Aboriginal people was precisely what the Chief Protector of Aborigines wanted to prevent. Prinsep declared Lombadina a government feeding station under the supervision of the Sunday Island mission run by Hadley and Hunter. They had sold the Lombadina lease to the Trappists in 1892, and received glowing praise by the Roth Report [7] in 1905. Harry Hunter and Frenchy d’Antoine supervised the government feeding depot, and in late 1907 Sydney Hadley, manager of Sunday School Mission, was appointed Protector of Aborigines.²³

 

More natives than ever flocked to the site [Lombadina] and Puertollano found that despite the free rations, his vegetables were constantly raided and his stock speared, while Hadley refused to impose any discipline whatever. For a time ill-feeling ran high, those in sympathy with Puertollano contending that a good family man, no matter what his nationality, had more right to control a government depot on his property than a white man who was known to cohabit with Aboriginal women.’²⁴

 

As miscegenation scandal began to engulf Hadley and Hunter,

 

the ration station [at Lombadina] was thereafter closed down and the natives grew more and more resentful of Puertollano for failing to provide for them on the government scale.²⁵

 

In 1910 the government asked the Pallottines to supervise Lombadina. The new Chief Protector Charles Frederick Gale had been impressed with Beagle Bay on a recent visit. Fr. Theodore Traub [8] led the Pallottine spearhead party from Beagle Bay to set up at Canary Creek in June 1910 but the building was washed away by a tidal wave and the mission lugger with stores was caught in a cyclone in November 1910.

 

At the same time Fr. Emo was embroiled in tension with the Benedictines at Drysdale River mission (see Emo [4]) and wanted to leave. Emo officially commenced to supervise Lombadina mission on 1^st January 1911 with a small government subsidy. Puertollano’s three-room house became Emo’s residence and Puertollano built a new home further west.

 

According to Emo, Puertollano served as captain of the mission schooner free of charge and assisted the crew of the HMS Fantome (which was surveying the coast between 1906 and 1914). He supplied meat and vegetable to pearlers, ‘assisted the constables of the district with horses’, and ‘helped Constable C. Daly of Derby’. (Derby Constable Cornelius John Daly had become the Trappist novice Br. Xavier – perhaps he re-joined the police after the Trappist withdrawal.)²⁶

 

Through 1913 and 1914 Emo was trying to assist Puertollano in gaining naturalization. At this time Puertollano was apparently running into red tape obstruction with his leases. He was applying for another lease of two small portions of land at Lombadina of about 30 acres each. The solicitor (acting for the Abbot of New Norcia on behalf of Puertollano) returned the application saying that pastoral lease 645/96 was held in the name of Thomas Puertollano, so the new application had to be in the same name (Puertollano had added his maternal surname of Pampelo to his signature). The application was made on the wrong form, under Section 55 (relating to residences), instead of Section 62 of the Lands Act (relating to pastoral properties), and the land selected did not conform to the legal requirements, being less than 100 acres, moreover the selected land was not running due north/south and east/west.²⁷

 

C.V. Howe said he could never understand why Puertollano had so much trouble with his lease – after all other Asians owned land in the Kimberley.²⁸ (The Travelling Inspector James Isdell had advised in 1908 against ‘granting allotments to Manilla men’²⁹.) Perhaps the new house that Puertollano built was not on his lease, and he tried to obtain title to the land on which his new premises were actually situated, which would explain the odd placement of the portions he requested.

 

On 5 November 1913 the first three Sisters of St. John of God arrived at Lombadina, and Puertollano gave them his home.³⁰ Actually according to Nailon, Puertollano’s new house now became the presbytery, so presumably the Sisters turned the three-roomed house formerly occupied by Emo into a convent.³¹ A commemorative pamphlet on the founding of Lombadina mission gives credit to the foundational work of Puertollano:

 

A Filipino goat farmer named Thomas Puertollano built a house or what may have been called a mansion in Lombadina, in which he hoped to spend the remainder of his days in comparative peace and comfort. In 1913 however, the Sisters from Beagle Bay came looking for a home in the wilderness of Lombadina. With true Catholic generosity, he offered his house as a convent and it was accepted.³²

 

Theresa Puertollano tells this from the perspective of her family, who had already given up their property at Disaster Bay:

 

Another Pallottine priest came, another Fathers wanted to start a mission around that place. They came across my father again. Then he had to give up his place. … he had to give it up to the Fathers and the Sisters and nuns, and he went to Broome. He already had three sons, three brothers I had, they were all born there except me, and another sister of mine, she died. Two girls and three boys were born there. So he had to take them all to Broome and he started a bakery.

 

Fr. Emo requested support from Bishop Torres, the Archbishop of Melbourne and the ‘Governor of Australia’, but Thomas Puertollano’s application for naturalization failed. Emo was trying to arrange the leases so that the Sisters were not on a lease held by Puertollano and argued that Puertollano required naturalization in order to be able to own boats and land. Perhaps Puertollano, now age 46, was hoping to re-enter the pearling industry. When Emo made out his will on 1 February 1915 he left his helmet, corselet, pump and sextant to Thomas Puertollano.³³

 

In March 1915 the schooner Alice was wrecked in the Lacepede Islands just off Lombadina. The San Salvador had been decommissioned but Puertollano used it for a daring rescue of the Timorese crew and captain James MacKenzie, employed by James Clarke who had sent a large fleet of pearling luggers from Queensland.³⁴ Theresa Puertollano recalled that thereafter ‘all those Koepangers came back to my father’s place with presents every season – salted fish, pearl-shell, mussel, whatever they had.’³⁵

 

25 April 1929

West Australian Mission Rescue.

FATHER DROSTE'S STORY.

The Rev. Father Droste, P.S.M., who is paying a visit to Europe, after 21 years with the aborigines at Beagle Bay Mission, was a recent guest of the Archbishop of Perth. He told the following moving story to a representative of the West Australian 'Record':

From Carnarvon to Wyndham (over 1000 miles) there is not a single boat (except pearling boats) that could come to the rescue of a boat shipwrecked along the coast. When in Lombadina Mission (10 miles south of Cape L'Eveque) in 1916, one morning in June, the lighthouse keeper of L'Eveque came and reported that very early on the same morning a whaleboat, with six men, arrived at the lighthouse, saying that their pearling schooner, Alice, had got shipwrecked the previous night, a little after sunset, and that the schooner sank in seven fathoms of water, and that 19 people were clinging to the mast; but they were entirely unable to say where the shipwreck happened. I called the six black crew (who knew the coast, from Broome to Drysdale Mission) of the Mission lugger, and asked them what they thought was the place the shipwreck could be. They all agreed that it could be no other place but 'Broo riff,' about 50 miles off Cape L'Eveque. On account of the tide running from Broo riff towards the lighthouse, it would be impossible, the crew declared, to row against the very strong tides, and so the whaleboat was carried away by the tide towards Cape L'Eveque. The Mission lugger was lying in a creek three miles away from the Mission, and the tide was out. All hands were called to help get the lugger ready to carry provisions, water, and firewood. In three hours the boat was ready for sailing, with a strong headwind and big sea against it. After two and a half days' sailing they found the shipwrecked men, still clinging to the mast, at the point of starvation and utterly exhausted, having been in that position for over 70 hours. There were two whites and 17 coloured crew. Had it not been for the Mission lugger and its brave black crew, all 19 men would have perished.

 

The Pallottines used this incident to defend Lombadina against threat of closure. With the death of Fr. Emo in March 1915 the new Chief Protector A. O. Neville withdrew the salary funding and per capita subsidy granted by his predecessor, and raised objections to Lombadina mission because its lease was held by Puertollano. An unsigned letter to a member of parliament in July 1915 neatly reflected Neville’s position. It argued that since Fr. Emo had died, Lombadina mission should be closed and its residents removed to Beagle Bay to ‘reduce the cost of the upkeep of Natives’. The writer alleged that the Lombadina mission was on

 

a pastoral lease owned by a Manilaman named Puertollano, who has a half-caste wife and some 300 or 400 head of cattle and who naturally gets the benefit of the native labour who are fed by the Government, whilst a poor struggling white man on the King’s Sound side is unable to get any Native assistance. ³⁶

 

Puertollano’s position at Lombadina was becoming untenable as Neville threatened legal action against Puertollano for ‘technically’ employing Aborigines without permit. The Puertollanos did not leave Lombadina as a result of the arrival of the Sisters, as many histories imply. Fr. Droste’s diary [9]shows that baby Thomas Puertollano was born on 14 December 1916 and baptised three days later at Lombadina.

 

Monkton Creagh, the brother of the Redemptorist Father who had been placed in charge of the German Pallottines in the Kimberley during wartime, purchased Puertollano’s Lombadina lease 827/98 at some time between late 1917 and July 1918 for £1,100. ³⁷ Puertollano sold 500 head of cattle to Pender Bay station and moved with his family to Broome to open a bakery. ³⁸ Nailon thinks he moved in 1918. C. V. Howe expressed genuine admiration for the way in which Puertollano was able to accumulate property to the value of £1,200 whereas the missionaries found it so difficult to make ends meet.³⁹

 

A Family Torn Apart

 

In Broome the Puertollanos continued to add to their tribe of five children with little Theresa. According to Howe their children were strikingly beautiful, particularly the eldest daughter Philomena (possibly named after Filomeno Rodriguez). Rodriguez, one of Puertollano’s first employers in Broome, was now an aging widower. Puertollano felt so indebted to him that he engaged Philomena to him in 1921, but the engagement was broken off because neither of the couple were interested. Rodriguez wanted to become a novice with the Pallottines. ⁴⁰

 

In the 1920s leprosy spread in the Kimberley and the women in Puertollano’s family – Agnes and her daughters Philomena, Maria and Theresa – all became afflicted. Theresa was sent to New Norcia for schooling in 1931 but fell ill and was sent back home. In December 1932 she was again sent back ill and diagnosed with leprosy, but she was not informed of her diagnosis. Bishop Raible drove her and her sister Mary, who had been working for Captain Gregory in Broome, to Beagle Bay. Sr. Brigid looked after Theresa and Mary at Beagle Bay for one and a half years - ‘It was lonely’. Eventually they were taken to Channel Island.

 

‘We had to be battened down for three or four days. We went down below in the cabin and they put the cover on us so no water could get in. We tossed and rolled for days.’⁴¹

 

A memorable dispatch of leprosy patients from Beagle Bay to Channel Island took place earlier in 1933. The 13-ton lugger Rolland was hired to take the Beagle Bay patients to Channel Island near Darwin. Durack describes the scene:

 

The leave-taking of the twelve who were packed on board was one of the most pathetic incidents in the mission’s history. The more advanced half-caste and part-Filipinos among them, hoping to encourage the terrified full-blood victims, made brave attempts to be merry, as though setting off on a holiday cruise. One had an accordion and played a jaunty air, but as the lugger pushed out to sea a high-pitched keening of tribal lament went up from both the ship and the shore, and even the captain, a hardened old sea-dog, could not restrain his emotion.⁴²

 

Gregory Howard, the accordion player in this group, described the overcrowded and wet conditions on board in a letter to Fr. Ernst Worms (5 August 1933), who took it to the Health Minister A. A. Coverley. Zucker thinks that this tipped off the Moseley Commission reporting in 1934. Others also objected to the treatment of patients on the leper transports. Theresa said that Uncle Jacky Hunter (brother of the woman who married her oldest brother Alphonse) was the pilot on the Miriam skippered by an Irish Captain (Pentheny or Pentany) who refused to accept the patients on board until they were unchained.⁴³ Durack relates an incident in Derby when a group of patients demanded to see their local protector to beg to be allowed to stay in their tribal territory. Their two spokesmen were kept in chains until the lugger arrived to take them to Channel Island.⁴⁴ Theresa:

 

‘We arrived in Channel Island. There were nearly 100 people on the Island. Matron Jenkins nursed us, there was only one; the doctor would come once a week. I was very sad when I realized what I was there for. I didn’t know until I arrived and seeing the other people and the other children. I had just turned 14.’⁴⁵

 

Teresa Puertollano at Nungula Nunga, 1995 Source: Regina Ganter

Agnes and Maria Puertollano both died at Channel Island. Theresa spent seven years there, and started to teach the younger children. In 1941 she was taken to the Derby leprosarium opened in 1937 and staffed with her beloved St. John of God Sisters, and Theresa became a teacher there. She also played the accordion, as there was much emphasis on music playing to ‘nimble the fingers’. During the 1942 air raids the Sisters, who had refused to evacuate by Qantas plane, hid in the bush with their patients and emergency supplies, assisted by Theresa and Philomena Puertollano, Stella Cox, and Cissie and Margaret Ishiguchi.⁴⁶

 

Thomas Puertollano, a long-standing supporter of the Kimberley missions, died at Beagle Bay in 1942, when the Broome population had been evacuated to Beagle Bay. According to Zucker he was buried was the night that Japanese planes were flying over Beagle Bay. ⁴⁷ According to Durack it was two weeks after the first attack (23 March 1942).⁴⁸ Puertollano Place in Broome and Thomas Well on Dampier Peninsula are named after him.

 

In 1994 Theresa, now completely blind, still lived at the former leprosarium, transformed into the Numbula Nunga old people’s home. Her small lounge room was dominated by an altar, with a large statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.