The Battle of Wingina Gorge

Jandamarra aka “Pigeon” led one of the first rebellions of the Australian
Aboriginal people armed with firearms in Western Australia.

Jandamarra or Sandawarra, known as Pidgeon had been one of the best and most trusted police trackers in the West Kimberley.

When Jandamarra’s close friend, an English stockman named Bill Richardson, joined the police force in 1894, Jandamarra was employed as his native tracker at the police outpost in the abandoned Lillimooloora homestead. Unusually for the time, Jandamarra was treated as an equal and the pair gained a reputation as the “most outstanding” team in the police force at that time. However, one of Jandamarra’s captives had talked him into turning against the white man and convinced him that they could be driven from the North-West. So Jandamarra murdered his boss and friend, Constable Bill Richardson, as he slept.

Windjana Gorge on the Lennard River, sacred to the Bunuba people of the Kimberley District, is where on November 16, 1894, Pigeon’s band of 50 warriors fought 30 heavily armed Kimberley police to a standstill. Pigeon escaped without a major injury, but his uncle, Chief Ellemarra was killed. Image SLWA

By mid-1894, Pidgeon and a gang of native outlaws he had collected had armed themselves with guns taken from their dead victims. But the police were on the job too. Pidgeon and his gang were cornered in five caves in beautiful Wingina Gorge, and one by one they were killed or wounded. The wounded escaped from the caves through a blowhole, and Pidgeon was hidden by his mother in the Cave of Bats, a sacred spot in Tunnel Creek. One of the tributaries of the Lennard, Tunnel Creek had cut a tunnel 50 feet high,  and about the same distance wide at its greatest point, right through Napier Range. It is an awe-inspiring place, the home of bats and pythons. The creek which runs through it is infested with crocodiles. The Aboriginal people were in awe of Pigeon; they felt he had magical powers and could

“fly like a bird and disappear like a ghost”

They were convinced that he was immortal and that the only person who could kill him was an Aboriginal person with similar magical powers. Here in the caves Pidgeon recovered, while the police patrols intensified through the wet season and the other members of his gang were harried throughout the ranges. As the wet ended, he tried to lead other forays — but most were interrupted by patrols working on information from the many natives who now held tribal vendettas against the swashbuckling gang members. Surprised on the march to attack Fitzroy Crossing and loot wagons bringing arms and supplies for the new police station, Pidgeon and his men were trapped in a cave without an escape hole. But the resourceful outlaw dug his way through the wall into a waterhole through which the gang crawled to freedom, to scatter again into the hills. Pidgeon attempted to kill another white man soon afterwards.

Hunting alone with his woman, Cangamvara, he came upon an old prospector named Williams camped at the Fitzroy River. For diversion he pinned Williams thighs together with  a spear instead of shooting him immediately. Williams, who had been sleeping in his tent, let fly through the flap with his rifle, not expecting to hit anyone but hoping to frighten his attackers. The bullet glanced off Pidgeon’s skull and stunned him. The crazed outlaw spun around and crawled his way to cover, helped by the startled Cangamvara. He recovered to see Williams sitting up on his stretcher hacking away at the spear-shaft with a knife. He seized his rifle and aimed at Williams head — but the old greybeard picked his gun and fired again through the tent-flap, hitting Pidgeon on the head again. Even the unsuperstitious Pidgeon could stand no more of that. He beat a hasty retreat back to the hills. Williams was eventually found flyblown and nearly dead, but the tough old prospector recovered, to fossick another day.

Police activity increased towards the the middle of 1896 as a growing number of tribesmen holding blood vendettas against members of the Pidgeon gang informed patrols of their hideouts. One by one Pidgeon’s gang were being captured or killed in skirmishes with patrols and in fights among themselves. Even Pidgeon was not immune from blood vendetta as Marawon — the warrior whose wife Cangamvara should have been by tribal law — constantly informed the police of his hiding places and whereabouts. The most bitter blow early in 1897 was the capture of Cangamvara by Inspector Ord, who had taken charge of the patrols. In a last desperate bid to strike a crippling blow Pidgeon summoned the remnants of his gang for an attack on Jack Collins. Oscar Range station. He planned to kill the men there and with their rifles and ammunition, attack Fitzroy Crossing at a time when police patrols were widely scattered. Besides Jack Collins and Fred Edgar at the homestead, there were Alf Maynall, on a visit to buy stock, and a newly arrived stockman, Tom Jasper.

Jasper was to be the gang’s last victim.

Confident that no native could catch him sleeping, and that he could “lick a dozen Pidgeons,” Jasper refused to camp in the homestead and pitched his tent about 100 yards away. The overjoyed killers found him sound asleep as they noiselessly surrounded the homestead. Pidgeon wanted them to wait until the house was completely surrounded before killing Jasper. But the tribesmen were overcome by bloodlust and they crowded into the tent and slaughtered the sleeping stockman with bullet and spear. Alarmed, and guessing what had happened, the men in the homestead sent out a volley of fire, killing one outlaw and wounding another before the mob retreated to snipe from the hills.

A scene from Jandamarra’s War, a 2011 Australian television documentary filmed on location in the Kimberly, Western Australia.

By mid-morning both sides were exchanging long-range shots when Constable Plimer’s patrol, summoned from Fitzroy Crossing by a stockboy, dodged its way into the homestead. Warned by telegraph by Pilmer, Inspector Ord hurried to Oscar Range, capturing Pidgeon’s mother on the way. At the same time Plimer’s patrol crept out of the homestead to harry the gang among the rocks and spinifex where they hid until nightfall. Three more outlaws were wounded before Pilmer returned to the homestead, expecting a full scale attack in the darkness. When none came he and his patrol crept out about 3 am to get behind the gang’s position. But Pigeon had moved his men further back. As Pilmer moved to their camp a bullet shot into the ground behind him. Swinging his rifle round, he saw the silhouette of Pidgeon in the starlight on the crest above. Constable and ex tracker fired shot for shot before Pilmer, sidling to cover, took a charge of buckshot in the thigh. Most of it fortunately hit his revolver holster.

That was the gangs last stand. The patrol brought the camp under two fires. Demon was shot through the head just as he was aiming at  Pilmer, and Bangarra and Bunnamurra were killed before the crippled survivors scurried into the hills in too much haste and fear to cover their tracks. The patrols pressed hard on the tracks of the killers. For Pidgeon the end was in sight. Half-starved and desperate, he had only a fanatical desire to kill yet more whites as he hurried towards his ‘Cave of Bats’.

But even this refuge was guarded on both sides of Napier Range. It  was the combined patrols of Constables Buckland, Chisholm and Anderson which  overtook Pidgeon a bare 100 yards from the entrance to Tunnel Creek, where he was returning alone to seek once more the sanctuary of his cave. Limping and emaciated he ran towards the dark opening. But galloping horsemen cut him off and he scrambled up to the top of the range to disappear into a hole with pellets from one of the trackers shotgun in his back and a rifle bullet in the thigh.

He lay there in a pool of blood until night came. Then he crawled through subterranean passages to the one doghole the patrol had not found. He hobbled out into the starlight. When dawn came the trackers found his blood-spots on the rocks. Within 20 minutes they saw him ahead, dragging himself along with the aid of a stick and his rifle. A bullet answered their call to halt. Then another. Then, slowly, another. It was his last cartridge, and Pidgeon dropped, fatally wounded. The dying outlaw struggled to sit up as the trackers warily approached. He was cursing them and gasping out a challenge to give him more ammunition so that he could continue to fight. Sandamara, whom the whites called Pidgeon, was wounded 13 times in all, the killer who had terrorised the Kimberleys for nearly three years, was dead. He died next to the burial ground of his tribe, ‘The Cave of Bats’ and other smaller grottos by the mouth of  Tunnel Creek. Today, there are dozens of skeletons hidden on the ledges and in crevasses. Most of them have been scattered by wallabies and lizards. Any one of them could be Pidgeon’s.

There have been two books written about Jandamarra’s life – Ion Idriess’s Outlaws of the Leopold  and Long Live Sandawarra by Mudrooroo. There was also a documentary filmed by the ABC called – Jandamarra’s War.

Ion Idriess’s Outlaws of the Leopold